The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
How I learnt to be selfish on a holiday away from my family
More and more women are travelling solo as a release after the pandemic, says Kate Bussmann
Ihave barely been in Paris five minutes when a fellow solo traveller strikes up a conversation. “You made that look easy,” he says from behind me in the queue to buy Métro tickets. An older man, American, he seems panicked, so I smile, show him how to work the machine, then leave him to do the rest. Five minutes later, he appears beside me on the platform, picking up the conversation where he left off. On the train, I smile again, more tightly, and bury myself in a book. He gets off at the same stop, ascends the same escalator, exits onto the same street. By now, I am not so much alarmed as irritated: I have come a long way to get some time to myself, and yet people just want to chat. I wish him luck, then dive into a shop with my wheelie suitcase and hide behind a wall, feeling ridiculous.
But, frankly, I don’t have time to spare a stranger’s feelings – I’m here for just 48 hours. My mission is to regain the ability to form coherent, uninterrupted thoughts, and seek stimulation for a brain which, in the worst of the pandemic, atrophied in a stew of perpetual worry and rolling apocalyptic news, and now just feels starved. In other words, I want to escape: to see a lot of paintings, eat a lot of baguettes, drink a lot of hot chocolate, and clock up several thousand steps in the most beautiful city in the world.
As soon as I booked this trip – in fact, as soon as I began mulling the idea out loud – it became evident that I was far from alone in my desperation for alone time. Friends and colleagues’ eyes either widened in envy or gleamed conspiratorially as they revealed the solo trips they had booked, too: a reading holiday on a Portuguese sunbed; a weekend shopping and wandering the streets of
Bath; a snatched 18-hour break at a boutique hotel in Kent. These were all women, all in ostensibly happy relationships, with children or one on the way, no one seeing the trip as anything more than a time-limited flirtation with childfree singlehood. Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter we are not. The point, perhaps, is to ensure that we don’t end up like her, a woman who has reached the very end of her tether.
Even before Covid, surveys were showing a surge in interest in solo travel, with one agency reporting that 85 per cent of those booking were female, and on average aged 41-47. Many of those were recently divorced, perhaps following in the footsteps of Cheryl Strayed (whose epic, 1,100-mile hike became Wild, a bestselling book and film), trying to “find themselves”. But my marriage isn’t in trouble, and nor is that the case for any of the other coupled people I know who are also taking solo trips: we just need time and space on our own. Because despite the fact that these past two years have taught us the importance of other people – that quarantine and lockdowns are damaging to our souls in every way imaginable – we also need autonomy. I’m tired of continually taking other people into consideration – whether to stay in this gallery a little longer, whether to try that café for lunch. And now that normal life has resumed, where our knuckles have regained their colour after holding on so tight for so long, I and so many women I know have been feeling a desperate, urgent need to be selfish.
For me, that meant a city packed to the gills with culture, infinite shops and markets to browse, and a thriving café culture for whenever my feet got tired.
A colleague suggested booking into one of the new brand of live-work hotels in a fashionable outer arrondissement, so there would be communal spaces where I could meet strangers; I booked the opposite, a discreet hotel in the very centre of town, the chic new Madame Rêve, where I can choose to slip in and out with minimal conversation, and drink red wine alone in its impossibly glamorous bar. As it is
Staying in this cool arrondissement, I am surrounded by people, and perfectly anonymous
located in the newly cool first arrondissement, I’m within easy walking distance of the Louvre and hot new gallery the Bourse, as well as the absurdly beautiful Samaritaine department store; I am surrounded by people, and perfectly anonymous.
It is bliss. But it’s also a very particular experience, being a woman on your own away from home. People want to chat, and assume you do, too. They genuinely do look at your ring finger, trying to figure you out. They put slippers on both sides of the bed, one pair man-sized, one smaller, just in case, and raise their eyebrows in surprise when you say that it’s just a table for one. They very slightly tilt their heads in sympathy at your solitude, but I’m so obviously happy that the tilt disappears, confusion flashing across their faces instead.
There are downsides. You quickly realise that meals will race by, even three courses – without conversation to delay it, you will have to put down your fork every so often, or you’ll be in and out in a flash. You’ll get through your book faster than expected; backups, even for short stays, are essential. Booking a room for one is, of course, more expensive, but, cost-wise, everything else remains the same: a Eurostar ticket, a guided tour at the Musée d’Orsay, a latte with a perfect praline pecan tart at Yann Couvreur, in the Marais. In fact, the only thing that cost more than it might, had I been planning a trip for two, was that Eurostar ticket. I spent so long wondering whether I should go, leaving my husband to deal with all the bedtimes and the packed lunches, that it nearly doubled in price.
Because this is the thing: the reason why I finally felt able to do this now, and not at any other point in those extremely stressful two years, is that the pressures and fears have finally receded. Unlike the majority of couples, in which housework and homeschool fell heavily into the lap of the female party (one survey in lockdown showed that mothers were only able to do a single hour of uninterrupted work for every three hours done by fathers), ours is a more equal partnership, albeit one in which I work part“But… time and thus take on more of the duties on my days off. But while my husband doesn’t feel guilty booking a walking holiday with other men – most of them also fathers of school-age kids – I feel an ancient, outdated sense of duty, of invisible apron strings tying me to an oven that, in fact, we make equal use of. Friends and colleagues tell me they feel that pull, too, and just as much guilt.
But it was so, so worth it, even when you factor in the irritation of Covid tests and passenger locator forms: the moment the tickets landed in my inbox, my husband remarked that he hadn’t seen me this happy in ages, and the buzz lasted long after my return. In fact, I’m already plotting my next solo trip.
So, do what I have done: carpe diem. Let someone else do the drop-offs and pick-ups. Hit pause. Stop doom-scrolling; the news will still be there when you get back, and so will the unvanquishable to-do list, inbox and mountain of laundry. Book a train, a flight, a camper van. Pack a stack of books and something chic for the dinners you’ll have alone, and your cosiest, ugliest pyjamas to curl up in afterwards. Do it for yourself. Do it for your sanity, for your relationship and your family. And don’t, whatever you do, apologise.