The joy of going solo

Managing other people’s expectations takes the joy out of pretty much any excursion. Most things are better enjoyed alone. This hit me many years ago when I decided to risk a bullfight in Las Ventas in Madrid. My grandfather wasn’t long dead, and had been a fan of la corrida; I felt that this was something I wanted to do alone, lest whoever I was with think I’m a total sicko.

I’ve since become less cautious about admitting how much I like going solo. Without the pressure of having to think about whether everyone else is having fun, you can immerse yourself fully in whatever new experience it is, and not be subjected to conversational post mortems either.  

Exhibitions alone are obviously preferable: the pain of dealing with well-meaning but facile commentary from friends who feel the need to comment, generally uncritically, is a soul-crushing buzzkill. Gigs alone are good too. I’ve learnt the hard way (as have far too many of my friends) that one can drive those one holds dearest to a concert, but they won’t necessarily share the love. Several still haven’t forgiven me for an Electric Prunes gig back in 2002.  

I feel similarly about travelling alone. As a naturally highly neurotic mother, it’s liberating not having to worry if one’s uniquely precious offspring is at risk of exposing themselves to contagion in a foreign setting. And while nobody who knows me actually believes this, I’m actively relaxed on a solo holiday. It’s a twist on the classic conundrum of what happens when a tree falls in a forest: if there’s nobody there to see you’re not obsessively checking the beds for bed bugs, perhaps you scoured the mattress all night?   

But by far my favourite act of solitary cultural activity is going to the cinema alone. There are few greater pleasures than the indulgence of a matinee showing of a ponderous foreign film with a glass of chardonnay. I used to think there was something mateless, even a little furtive and grubby about it, but two events bolstered my resolve to sit these things out alone.  

The first was dragging my poor father to a Pedro Almodovar double bill. In a fit of youthful arrogance about 20 years ago, I felt that it was somehow blinkered of him not to have risked any of Almodovar’s high campery and melodramatic vibrancy before (I assumed he was fearful that the director’s homosexuality were somehow visually contagious). And never one not to do things to excess, I thought a double bill seemed a good place to start. High stakes if the virgin Almodovar viewer’s favourite film is The Third Man, closely followed by High Noon. And if you’ve never seen Talk to Her, I can now assure you it’s not a gentle introduction for an elderly reactionary, beginning as it does with a man walking in and out and reclining on the walls of a giant, inflatable fanny. I’m not sure how long the scene lasts, but aeons of agony are all I can recall when I think of the trip. That and how quickly my father necked his drink.  

The second event was when I persuaded my newly acquired husband to come and see a screening of Fanny and Alexander. Such was the heady rush of early marital romance and his ignorance of Bergman, he mucked in. But when a few weeks later I suggested another cinema trip, he asked me how long it was, whether there were subtitles, and if there’d be a car chase this time. Reader, I’d already married him. I like to think I might know a sufficient number of clerics who could have wrangled an annulment, but I failed to see the warning signs, and am now committed to a life of cinematic onanism. 

I make an exception to these solo cinema jaunts for one person only, and that’s my remarkable and favourite cousin. For a mother of five gazing into the gaping maw of middle-age who sits on the local parish council, she has a surprisingly high threshold for what she can endure cinematically, as I learned when she didn’t flinch during the hotel room scene involving a real-time jacking-off over a hostess trolley of mille-feuilles in Toni Erdmann. She was even keen to join me for all seven hours of Sátántangó. Though I don’t think she’s enthusiastic about bullfights.