Waiters hover, eager to scoop up my plate. Their greeting wasn’t exactly warm; when I asked for a table for one, a mix of worry, panic and a little pity rolled across the maitre-d’s face.
I’ve had to fight not to be hidden away next to the lavatories. My fellow diners are at best quizzical and at worst observe me balefully. It’s been a lovely day of museums, moseying and an afternoon film (the ultimate luxury), and I am not about to have this snottiness - the unspoken restaurant fascism that dinner is for two, four, eight, not one - cloud my evening.
Single diners are expected to restrict themselves to fast food, pizza, take-out noodles, grab and run sandwiches. Why should they want to sit down, have a cosmo, or glass of champagne, or Mojito or - wey hey - all of the above, eat at a leisurely pace, and watch the world go by? Where’s the fun in that?
I am a single traveller. I am not looking for love, or getting over lost love. I am single, happily so, and I love travelling alone. This seems to attract occasional bafflement. My friends want to know why I don’t want to travel with them.
“You’re on your own? Why?” some Americans asked me in Costa Rica. Their askance expressions implied that I must be a serial killer or disturbed or smell really bad. It’s hard when the only answer you can think of is, “Because I like to”. There’s really no answer: it’s as pointless a question as if I asked a couple why they travelled together. They just do.
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“Don’t you miss someone to talk about the day’s events?” is a perennial query. Well, no. I have a wonderful time on my own, beetling about cities especially, unencumbered by nippy arguments about what to see today, who’s got the map, “Shall we stop for lunch?”
“My feet are hurting, I need to go back to the hotel”. Travel alone and you travel without all the hassles and compromises attendant on travelling with others. You are your own master. Go somewhere far away, like Buenos Aires (check out the Eva Per?n museum), and this can be testing, but within 24 hours - “walking” a new place really helps - you’ll have a manageable grip on it.
Once in Paris, I left the hotel early in the morning - no dullsville waiting for anyone else to get themselves together - and headed out. I didn’t have a firm itinerary, but ended up at some fun art galleries (a Parisian friend had pointed me to those), then to the Eiffel Tower (which I always avoided thinking it’s ridiculously uncool to sightsee) and because it was such a lovely day I lay down and listened to the world bubble, in many, many languages, around me.
A stroll back towards the Marais led me to my favourite caf?, at the bottom of rue Tiquetonne, and then an impromptu shop for T-shirts for that night’s dancing (went to a bar, met a guy, he told me about this place, a basement, and some fabulously silly, energetic disco).
Travel alone and you will have adventures. If you want it you may even have sex: one weird rule of singledom is that you always get more attention/action on holiday. You will meet people. If safety is a concern, or if you feel lonely as you might sporadically do, check in with friends every day by text or a call.
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Worried about not speaking the same language? On Euro mini-breaks in places such as Berlin or Barcelona or Madrid or Lisbon you can more than scrape through. If you’re a newbie to travelling singly, perhaps go somewhere where you have a pal or acquaintance who can be an anchor.
But be brave. When evening approaches, even the most iron will might falter - staying in seems easier as the sounds of groups echo on the streets outside - but no, this is your night. Off to a restaurant, the cooler the better. Do not be fobbed off with that rubbish table. Bars and clubs can be thorny.
Find one, using a guide or the Internet, that sounds like your thing and go when it’s busy but not mobbed and be confident. Radiate an approximation of ease (a gin and tonic might help) and interesting people will start circling. If you need a prop take a paper, never a book - that’s just a little bit Jane Eyre and sad.
Where to go? New York, San Francisco, Sydney, Buenos Aires: great single people’s cities, full of life and naughtiness; Paris, Berlin: lovely for a lost 48 hours - always unpredictable carousels of lazying, drinking, gallery-ing and dancing. You know things have turned out right, absolutely right, when you are smiling like a lunatic discovering a place for the first time.
For me it was Madrid last year. I fell utterly for the park next to the Prado, the little tapas bars, the tangles of streets - and always the incidental chatter with strangers, including the lovely guys I met in a bar who directed me to this club. It wasn’t in any of the guidebooks. Felt ridiculously smug to have found it.
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Met my first gay Russian. Danced like a banshee, whipping up a storm, then out, zingingly happy, into the early morning.