There are a lot of things I feel resentful about having to do alone – pay my bills, change lightbulbs, decide what hoover to buy, make my own tea every single morning – but going on holiday is not one of them. I've realised – after a holiday on my own, yes – that this is one of my life’s greatest, most delicious pleasures. I just spent three nights in Porto, not nearly long enough but also somehow perfect, the first time since 2019 I’ve been away somewhere that wasn’t in Britain or Ireland and the first time I've done it solo since 2018, when I went to Malaga for a few days the day after my 39th birthday. It’s true that often the world does not feel practically designed for solo travellers – there’s nobody to watch your bag while you go to the toilet in the airport, as a woman on your own you might get ignored or overlooked when trying to get the attention of someone in a hotel or bar (Amy Key articulates all this brilliantly in Arrangements in Blue)– but none of this bothered me much this time, I didn’t care, it didn’t matter, I was on holiday.
When I was in Malaga in 2018 I was reading Normal People by Sally Rooney. I read it alone in a bar drinking sherry and eating cheese. I read it sitting on a bench on the seafront eating ham and bread from the market and then I finished it on my last day over coffee in El Pimpi and had a little cry. In December 2017, alone on holiday in Vietnam and recovering from a horrendous bout of gastroenteritis, I sat in my hotel room in Hoi An and devoured Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and then The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (At a conference last week we discussed bell hooks and the healing and liberatory qualities of theory - that Maggie Nelson book was a classic example for me at a fairly low period of my life) Technically, I could have been doing that reading anywhere, but I was doing it in those places, somewhere new and different, on my holiday, unbothered by a boyfriend asking what we were going to do that day or worrying if I was being a bad travel companion for my friend, and it felt lovely. This kind of absorption is not easily achievable when you’re just sitting in the place where you live, worrying about work in the morning. On this trip I had Jilly Cooper’s Appassionata, a fun, silly little romp about the personalities and debauched antics of the Rutminster Symphony Orchestra. I got the bus out to the beach and read it drinking a glass of three euro wine on the seafront, occasionally looking out at a perfectly blue Atlantic ocean and a perfectly blue sky.
Not to romanticise Europe or anything, but those few days in Porto made me realise how much I needed to get off the miserable island of Britain. England, Scotland and Wales contain many places of great beauty and interest, yes, but there’s often something pinched and mean-spirited about the touristy spots, not to mention the fact that you’re at risk of getting caught in a fucking gale at any moment. It’s so nice to be away somewhere where people aren’t ripping you off or telling you you’re not allowed to sit at that table or forgetting your tap water – and where the sun shines on your face! Porto ticked all of those boxes; a delightful city full of places selling excellent cheap local wine and good food and people not being hostile and/ or overly officious, just sort of nice.
In 2022, when getting over a period of depression, I spent a lot of time consciously trying only to do things which felt okay (I was unemployed at the time). Does this feel okay? I’d ask myself when I was reading a book/ watching a film/ going for a walk. If the answer was no, if it was stressing me out or making me feel weird or inadequate, I’d stop – no big deal, it doesn’t matter – and do something else. There was a bit of this in my first 24 hours in Porto and it scared me: what if I've gone to all this effort and expense and at the end of it I still feel anxious? The weeks before going away had for various reasons been hectic and emotionally and physically exhausting and I needed to relax! Relaxation doesn’t work like that , of course. The hotel was gorgeous, the breakfast was lush, the Porto streets were charming, all the ingredients for a perfectly curated holiday Instagram post were all laid out before me. But somehow at first I couldn’t quite connect, no matter how many times I said to myself Look how nice this is! On my first day I hadn’t made any plans and couldn’t decide whether to do a walking tour or a boat tour or just sit in a café and read and I became terrified that this indecision would sink me into a state of miserable hopeless defeat.
So there was a lot of does this feel okay? chat inside my head. On my first morning I was woken at about 5am by a hectic dawn chorus of sparrows in the trees outside my hotel room. This was the first sleep of my holiday, I didn’t want to be awake, the birds were insanely loud, what if I couldn’t get back to sleep. I halted this stupid spiral somehow and gave myself a quiet little talking to: How nice to be woken by birdsong. I closed my eyes and listened, leaning into it. My hotel had the perfectly civilised practice of serving breakfast all day. Even if I didn’t get back to sleep, there was no rush. It felt okay. I fell asleep for another 4 hours. There was a bit more of this back and forth in my brain; on that first day I finally resolved on doing a walking tour but by the end of it I was hot and ratty and I remembered something important: I do not like organised fun. Being on holiday is a great thing and you do have to surrender yourself to the unavoidably lame reality of being a tourist; that said, I felt infantilised by the tour. It was too structured, I didn’t like following the guide around and having to politely laugh at his jokes. Others in my group clearly loved it but to me it did not quite feel okay. I had planned to do a winery tour the next day but struck it off my list. No more tours!
The morning before I went to the beach I stared at tiles in the Banco de Materiais, a total wonder of a place, a kind of warehouse storing tiles and other ceramic features that have been retrieved from crumbling buildings in the city. Tourists and other people are free to come and wander around it and while I was there I had a brief chat with the woman working behind the desk who explained that it was a free service for local residents who were able to use the ‘bank’ if they needed to restore the facades on their homes and there was a matching feature in the repository. I was completely charmed by this civic communalism and commitment to the preservation of beautiful ceramics and spent as long as I could in the place, walking up and down the aisles that stored and displayed the individual tiles. There were many different styles there, 16th/ 17th century Moorish designs, which were lush, but my favourite were the plainer modernist ones from the 20th century. There was one tile in particular, mustard yellow with a kind of knotted abstract design in relief on the surface, that I kept on coming back to. It was so nice. I took a little picture. I breathed in. Absorption again.