A flaky friend and a ticketing mix-up sent actor and author Brendan Cowell to Portugal’s colourful capital.

I’ve got this mate and I don’t really know what he does. When I lived with him on Edgware Road in London he had a safe in his bedroom and three pairs of identical crocodile-skin boots and he’d often rush out of the living room to take heated phone calls on different phones. We smashed pints together and talked nonsense and we loved music so when we saw that Bon Iver had announced a European tour we thought, “Whoa, let’s jump on it.” We jumped too late. My mate was somewhere in Russia when I told him the London show was sold out and he advised me to look on Gumtree or eBay for tickets. “Money is no issue,” he said. “Just get two up the front.”

I’m not great on a webpage but after some surfing, I found a couple of tickets and bought them on my already aching Aussie credit card. They were expensive but they were standing room. They also both had “LBN” written on them, which I thought meant “London”. It wasn’t until the day loomed that I realised I’d failed to buy two tickets to the London concert on the one night but had instead bought two single tickets on consecutive nights for shows in Lisbon. Which is not London. It’s the hilly, castle-y capital city of Portugal. LBN, not LDN.

Suddenly my friend wasn’t so keen – something about having to “sadly stay in Estonia for business” – so there I was, lumped with $1000’s worth of single tickets to two separate, identical shows in a city I didn’t live in. Recently heartbroken, deeply unemployed and with the despairingly low London clouds thickening and blackening for winter, I thought, “Oh, what the hell”, and booked a Dodgy Air flight out of Luton at 4.46am.

While all the houses in London seem to be designed by the same architect, Lisbon’s houses are full of personality, each with tiles on the façades and its own flourish of pastel colours and floral patterning. Clothing dries proudly in the wind on lines strung between the buildings, flapping above your head as you climb another perilously steep hill with trams shuddering past carrying locals and travellers to squares and churches beyond. It’s all truly bonkers and at night every restaurant turns into a blues bar, which was great considering I always pack a harmonica.

Waking from my second stirring night of Justin Vernon’s falsetto, I stepped out of my quite raw accommodation and followed the map to town. After a lunch of fried fish, eggs, onion and salt – still one of the most enjoyable dishes I’ve ever eaten and apparently the only real thing on any menu in Lisbon – I crossed the Tagus River by bridge and climbed up the hill to the São Jorge Castle. Extraordinary.

When I left England I was officially the saddest, brokest, loneliest man in the world but three days later, I returned reborn. Lisbon, one of the oldest cities in the world, had stolen my heart.