On the solitary birthday city-break
In my late thirties, I had the romantic aspiration that on my fortieth birthday, my soulmate would take me to Venice, where I had not yet been. When forty hit, I was involved with a man (I wasn’t allowed to call it a relationship and truly it wasn’t) who prided himself on ‘not spoiling women’. Around the time of my birthday, we ate out at a cheap pub with a two-for-one meal deal. When the bill came, he spontaneously paid the whole amount, declaring this a gesture towards my impending decade-change.
I celebrated my actual fortieth at a Turkish restaurant with a group of female friends.
A few years later, I finally went to Venice, on my own. A Tokyo friend was teaching Japanese literature for a term at the Università Ca’Foscari, so I bought a cheap flight (this was pre-COVID) and booked myself a hotel in Dorsoduro, away from the main tourist areas.
Another friend, who’d done a Contiki tour of Europe years previously, to get all the necessary sightseeing out of the way before settling to work in London, warned me that the canals were ‘full of rubbish’. She didn’t want me, with all my romantic notions, to be horribly disappointed.
I didn’t expect Venice to be pristine, and I wasn’t disappointed. Yes, it’s shabby, because it’s old and over-loved, but it’s also fantastical and unique, an out-of-time, liminal city suspended precariously between land and sea, under threat from high waters and slowly sinking. Venice is already on the way to being a museum rather than a living city, a historical Disneyland, its continued existence enabled by fabulously expensive feats of engineering. After various plans to limit numbers, including turnstiles, a horrendous notion, this year day trippers will have to pay a five-euro tax and show a QR code on demand.
My friend was busy teaching, and I mostly wandered about on my own. I didn’t mind not sharing Venice. I did not miss the static of someone else’s discontent, boredom, impatience; the insistent pull of a competing will. Around the corner from my hotel was the palazzo where Henry James’ friend, the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, had fallen, or thrown herself, from her window to her death at the age of 53. To be in Venice as a solitary middle-aged woman with no romantic notions seemed a fine and healthy state of affairs.
(What would old Henry have made of turnstiles and the QR code?)
I haven’t organised a birthday gathering since my 40th. When another birthday recently swung around, in the endless, mostly sunless Scottish winter, I booked myself a flight and hotel package to Málaga.
Despite its location in Andalusia, the most conventionally romantic part of Spain (bullfights, flamenco, dark-eyed maidens with flowers in their hair), Málaga itself is not regarded as ‘romantic’. For many years, it’s simply been the gateway to the Costa del Sol for sun-starved Northern Europeans. But the secret is now out, with travel supplements and bloggers trumpeting the art scene, the food scene, the shopping. As major postcard European city-break destinations—Prague, Amsterdam, Barcelona and, of course, Venice—push back against mass tourism and crack down on Airbnb, smaller cities are duly ‘discovered’ and publicised.
Logistically, Málaga was easy. I arrived on an afternoon flight. The train from the airport to Málaga-Centro-Alameda station took all of 20 minutes and cost only two euros. From the station, it was a 10-minute walk to my modest hotel, down a boulevard lined with kiosks selling fresh-cut flowers. The sheer abundance suggested that buying flowers was unexceptional rather than luxurious. The stallholders were chatting with each other and with customers as they emptied their buckets and packed up for the day.
In the UK, cut flowers are sold either in supermarkets or in artisanal florist shops pitched at the sort of people who regard £100 scented candles as a normal lifestyle accoutrement rather than part of the ‘self-care’ racket. I felt that I had arrived in a better place.
As an organised traveller, I always have a guidebook, which more adventurous and spontaneous travellers despise. I’m also a compulsive walker; I’ll wander around a city, in circles, back and forth, familiarising myself, bookmarking shops and cafes, only referring to the map when I completely lose my bearings or if a cityscape becomes suddenly insalubrious, semi-industrial or populated only by men who stand on street corners and stare at passing women.
I walked and walked. I went up the Alcazaba and looked out over the sea.
It was 20 degrees and sunny. To a Glaswegian, this is reason for joy (and taps aff) in high summer, let alone in winter.
I went to a flamenco show at 5:30 in the afternoon because the evenings were mostly dark and rainy. After all, it was winter. There was no one to scold me for my un-Spanish schedule. I dined on two tapas and a glass of wine at whatever time I liked, which was never at 10pm.
I caught a bus to the old tobacco factory, the Tabacalera, to visit the Museo Ruso, a politically fraught decision in this historical moment. Because of the sanctions, the original collection had been shipped back to St Petersburg and a private collector had stepped in and offered their collection. The stylish building was beautifully uncrowded. Among the documents and artefacts were some postcards between the last Tsar and his brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail. I could just make out, in ink that had faded to brown, the sign-off, tvoi Niki (your Nicky). That kind of minute, personal detail always gives me a time-travel shiver. Handwriting is personal, like clothing. (For me, the grease-mark left by Nelson’s hair—wig?—on the back of his ‘Trafalgar’ coat at the National Naval Museum at Greenwich was just as disturbing as the bullet hole.)
For a moment I was peering over Tsar Nicholas’s shoulder. Behind me but in front of the Tsar was the impending, unimaginable slaughter of his family in a remote basement. The knowledge weighed on me as I squinted, through the glass case, at the pale, elegant Cyrillic script.
Simply because it was right next door to the Museo Ruso, I also visited the Museo del Automóvil ya la Moda. I have zero interest in cars, but I was impressed by the grandeur of old prestige models, which were styled and sized like carriages, magnificent status-signalling monsters with no thought given to environmental impact, fuel economy, safety or city parking. Each car was flanked by a mannequin wearing period-appropriate couture. The truth of capitalism: money generates a kind of beauty that only a few can afford. The exhibition stopped in the 1960s, when even luxury cars became ugly.
I waited half an hour for the return bus back into town. A middle-aged woman and her elderly mother were also waiting. They spoke to me in Spanish—as a short brunette, I was not conspicuously foreign—and we had a very basic conversation, assisted by my high-school French and Duolingo Italian and Spanish, which I combine freely. I gathered that the bus was delayed because of a manifestación. A shrug, as if a protest were merely part of the weather, rather than social disorder to be beaten back by police and by ever-tighter legislation.
My only obligatory visitation was to the Museo Picasso. I appreciate that the man is a 20th-century genius and, God knows, I’ve tried to like his work, but the truth is, I don’t. I preferred the colourful costumbrismo scenes in the Museo Carmen Thyssen: flower-filled courtyards and city squares, women in vibrant shawls.
What does it say about me that I prefer realism to abstraction? These paintings are now considered sentimental and kitsch. In the art world, kitsch is only acceptable if it’s knowing and deliberate, like Jeff Koons. It cannot be sincere.
Málaga, for me, lacked the ethereal melancholy of Venice, but this was no bad thing. The people were cheerful and laid back. In certain tourist hot-zones, the locals are irredeemably soured by tourists, whom they regard with contempt, even antagonistically. A city regarded as one of the world’s most beautiful—no names here—is also famous for being the rudest and most unfriendly. The Malagueños were relaxed and friendly, even chatty (also a Glaswegian attribute). My lack of Spanish didn’t bother them, and I wasn’t shamed for trying.
Sidebar: while being chatty and laid back, the Malagueños did not share the Glaswegian attitude to dugs. I was shocked by this notice in an otherwise friendly cafe.
An establishment that excluded the four-legged citizens of Glasgow would not be popular.
Victorian travellers, who lacked our modern distaste for sentimentality, took back prints of dashing matadors on horseback courting dark-haired maidens through grille windows to add to the walls of their overstuffed parlours. I bought a few postcards, but none of that particular scene. I may have kitsch tastes but, as I’ve mentioned already, I’m no romantic.
Unlike poor Constance Fenimore Woolson, I was not compelled, in my solitary mid-life travels, to hurl myself out a window. When my time in Málaga was up, I simply caught the train back to the airport, armed with a rechargeable Renfe ticket, dragging my wheelie case behind me. The sheer prosaic efficiency of modern life buffers against poetic melancholy.
My Easyjet flight landed in Glasgow just before Storm Isha hit. From the plane window, as I waited to disembark, I saw other planes struggle to take off, rocking from side to side, and felt slightly smug to have landed in such good time.
Two days later, I came down with my first-ever bout of COVID.
Picture credits: José García Ramos, Andalusians at the Country Inn; Courting Spanish Style © Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza.