I miss the visual energy of running away. How the seasons shift from slate grey to rosy bloom, and that everyday my legs soared with matter. Beauty requires strength in Lisbon. You have to graft, pound and dance every time you leave the house. There were plenty of dull, creeping afternoons and equally languid evenings, but life felt more tangible that I didn’t seem to care. Its a more romantic place to live quite frankly. Life is good when you can read books in the sun after dark.
Watching the city turning on a light bulb at a time, I got lost on a bus diversion in a blue spectral wasteland. Some grungy Italian boy was dragging his body weight in a suitcase. Are you stopping at Bow Road? Are you stopping at Bow at all? Judging by his muted response, lost boys weren’t the driver’s concern.
As the passengers drifted one-by-one into the night, I arrived back at my latest residence, a baby boomer investment tower in Bow Quarter. Where I desperately find myself wanting to leave, but unwilling to pay for a deposit elsewhere. Make the wrong move in the London renting market, and you can find yourself boxed in at times. In my case quite literally.
When you share a place with randoms, there are lots of dynamics in place, and they only come to the surface once it’s too late. Superficially the flat is plush and modern, but that’s where the attraction ends. There is a corporate sadness from the moment you step inside, whether it’s the generic showroom decor, untouched cooking utensils to the complete absence of human love and sentimentality.
No photos, no books, no records, and certainly no magnets on the fridge.
The landlord stockpiles vitamin tablets and fake tan in the kitchen. The fridge has virtually no food beyond a few eggs, and the dishwasher is stuffed full of plastic bags. He doesn’t adhere to any recycling principles, and no visitors are allowed without his consent. Also sharing the apartment is his slow-witted nephew, who daily consumes protein milkshakes and microwaved paellas for breakfast. He vainly struts down the corridor like a Ken doll and sleeps in the living room when he’s supposed to be at college.
They watch Sky News and Hollywood movies without paying the faintest attention to events or the storyline. Like the pills and fitness supplements they consume, the television is a substitute void to help them get through the day. My relationship with them veers from bewildered diplomacy to barely concealed agitation. The landlord is a decent, caring man who would never harm anyone, but he addresses me like his paella-munching nephew, and this unintended condescension is sending me to the exit door.
One suspects I will be on the move again in July.
‘You see that? She accused me of overcharging her by 50p’, said the portly kebab owner to the diamond geezer behind the counter. ‘What do you expect mate? Her son was riding a stolen bike.’ Cue guffawing laughter as we drifted into the night, walking home in the midst of a tropical heatwave. One that only becomes bearable after dark, where teenagers not much older than the artful dodger loiter around outside; pulling wheelies and grinding onto kerbs.
There’s a wild and jagged energy around here. You can feel something stirring in the air for everyone is scavenging for scraps, as the night clouds form like white whales swimming across the sea.
I’m moving again.
Ten plastic crates are neatly stacked against the wall.
It’s a retrospective bank of words. I have read most of them, but many take up space awaiting their turn.
I wonder what trans-humans would think if they were to uncover my possessions in 300 years time.
Locked away in a forgotten concrete basement.
Crushed by layers, layers and layers of time.
Carlito gets up around midday and spends most afternoons curled up in his hoodie watching Shakira videos on his phone. I often wonder what he does for a living or why he moved here. While he lies on the living room sofa nursing a diabetic coma from excess coca cola consumption, I suspect he expends most of his energy at the in-drawn breath of dark somewhere in Soho or Vauxhall.
I barely spoke to him during my brief tenure at Bow Towers. Having made the wrong move on returning from Lisbon, I made little effort to ingratiate myself into the flat dynamic.
At times it felt sectioned inside an old folks’ home such were the prudish rituals of Carlito’s live-in-uncle. With my resentment brewing, I made a vow of silence to get me through the remaining weeks.
Living in his mouse box drenched in cheap aftershave and wires, I never got a chance to say goodbye to Carlito. But before I set off for pastures new, I bumped into him in the lift as we floated towards the asylum. It’s been hot recently, its been very hot indeed and after lamely bringing up my inability to sleep, we began chatting as our lives overlapped in this babel of frustrated wills.
Carrying my second large water bottle of the day, I enthusiastically approved of his fitness routine, and with the sun acting like an inferno, we chirped like finches on a telephone wire; discussing free weights, crunches, running and health-related neuroses.
But for all our friendly fitness talk, he seemed somewhat lost to me, like a child hidden in a cupboard in a far away land. I still have no idea what he does for a living or why he moved here to be with his uncle. As like a finch on a wire, it’s all the better to be seen and heard, and fly away as fast as you can.
Earlier this year, I moved to Lisbon for a spring sojourn because I’m no longer bound by geography to earn a living. From living in the Tuscan hills to the Atlantic Ocean, I romanticise and decay with indecision, but transport my mind and body to beautiful places.
It was sheer chance that led me to spend time with Gabriela. Like many associations in the modern era, I contacted her long before we first met. With life now reduced to a game of cards, I found myself chatting to an introverted soul; one who took esoteric selfies and expressed bizarre reactionary views.
We chatted intermittently in the weeks before I left London. I forget that at times – my early characterisation of a moody intellectual unable to fit in. Her grainy self-portraits complemented this narrative. From the comfort of my phone, I found myself forming judgements on the little messages hidden inside each picture.
For there were peculiarities with Gabriela long before I moved to Portugal. Such as why did a beautiful, well-educated Jewish-Brazilian girl have no friends in the city? It might be innately sexist of me, but I always assume that women have more friends than men.
“You don’t know me. I’m a horrible person,” she told me one evening long after we first met. I have always remembered the brutality of those words – the mean-spirited emptiness.
During that conversation, I encouraged her to download the Meetup’s app so she could meet like-minded people. From coding courses to gluten free spaghetti lessons – you can find a group for it.
“You need to go every day, every week for people to remember you…it’s easier to make friends that way”, I implored to her on What’s App.
It was an all too regular topic of conversation looking back. Gabriela eventually found one that she liked – an open mic night – and I hope she still goes.
After arriving in Lisbon and meeting her in a Restauradores coffee shop, I met a surprisingly upbeat girl (who could never get to the grips with my Scottish accent) who wanted to see music and lights.
With her Bambi chestnut eyes and effervescent glamour, Gabriela’s phone should have been singing with social invites. It made no sense to me why she spent most of her life on her own.
Only for reasons I could never fully understand, she had a childish hostility to Portuguese people, who didn’t like her because she was Brazilian, or they ‘were all stupid’. Then you had the simplistic admiration for Donald Trump and negative social attitudes that would inevitably upset a young urban crowd if she ever publicly expressed them.
I often wondered if her strange views proved to be a barrier in making new friends – it must be lonely and isolating if your outlook on life does not confer to a common consensus.
Gabriela’s Jewish faith was enormously important to her, and she regularly attended the city’s two synagogues until she unwisely got involved with two senior members, whom only had lust in their hearts.
She also used to talk about the SS commander Adolf Eichmann’s biography almost every time I saw her. It sounded like a depressing exercise to me, but as a secular Scottish man with no religious heritage, I could never emotionally gauge in her tribal sense of persecution.
If nothing else, Gabriela had the courage of her convictions and would openly criticise something she didn’t like without hesitation.
With insomnia causing her to stay awake until 4 am and her days regularly starting long after midday, Gabriela lived a largely solitary life in libraries and restaurants. She had moved to Portugal to study Edward Hopper as part of an opaque PHD project and previously graduated as a psychologist in Brazil.
But I noticed she never expressed any love or admiration for the American painter, let alone any other artist or art form. That troubled me. I quickly developed an uneasy feeling there were other forces in play when it came to her studies.
As I shifted my belongings across the city from the Alfama district to the cobbled buzzy romance of Santa Catarina, I would randomly meet up with Gabriela about once a week. Like many people in Portugal going out for drinks was not part of her vocabulary – she abstained from alcohol most nights.
Over plates of steamed cod and grilled chicken, we regularly spoke about her desire for friends and the nocturnal sleepiness of Lisbon. She loved the city’s soul grooves but found it immensely boring. Surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, there’s a isolationist romance about living in Portugal’s capital – it feels far removed from the rest of Europe.
Unable to leave country unless she goes back to Brazil, her loneliness was further compounded by her academic isolation. Gabriela had no peers, colleagues or even classes to attend as part of her library-based studies.
She did have flatmates in her Graca-based apartment, but they provided no companionship at all. Identifying that everyone needs peers as friends, I once suggested that she got bar job or something. “My father would be ashamed of me,” she stridently told me. “He’s not paying me to work in a restaurant, but to expand and explore my mind”.
I half-suspected her documentary filmmaker father, whom she loved deeply and cited frequently, may have been an overdue influence on her academic career. As I never once detected any ambition from her to teach or write about American realism after she graduated. It didn’t seem to matter either way to be honest.
She seemed trapped in her father’s image, a loving daughter exercising his benevolent wishes in a fairy tale land, forever dining alone like one of Hopper’s paintings.
I last saw Gabriela walking around the Pantheon complex in the Graca neighbourhood, which I belatedly moved too in April. She said she would miss me at the time, but randomly unfollowed me on Instagram a month later.
It must be obvious by now that we had nothing in common. I’m not even sure if she even liked me, but in the absence of like-minded friends, we filled the celestial emptiness together. Sitting amongst the city’s jacaranda trees and art nouveau kiosks, just waiting for something to happen.
From my cold, solitary desk in Glasgow’s West End to pink orchids and boho lighting in Hackney Downs, a fuse can blow up anything. With my router frazzled by the surge, I remembered a time gone by in the dear green place. How I used to steal Wi-Fi just to maintain my faint connection with the outside world. There were no moving pictures for company back then. No escape into make-believe worlds.
Just words.
That place was so lonesome and cold looking back. I used to wear a jacket under my duvet just to keep warm.
On departing Dalston Junction last Saturday, I mismanaged my packing so badly I alighted the Eurostar on the station master’s whistle. My violent, sweating omnishambles of a departure saw my finest cotton’s stuffed into Sainsbury’s bags and an elderly Australian couple trampled upon at the platform.
Any romantic notion I had of travelling across Europe by rail evaporated at passport control. I could barely breathe for stress and fatigue. Everything had gone smoothly until that point – freelance tasks, new clothes, storage, doctor appointments, dentist bills, direct debits, and craft beer goodbyes.
My packing mismanagement aside, I loved my continental train journey and miles and miles of leg room. Going on a first-class time machine through spicy red forests you feel part of something bigger; no longer marooned by shoals of mackerel, herring and cod. Moving over land is the best way to travel if you have time to spare.
Before I arrived at St Pancras, I had been on standby in an AirBnB flat with bourgeois professionals I can barely remember. I have no patience for fake relationships nowadays. London is like Zurich with arts and entertainment; terminally transactional with its rising rents and contactless pubs, the glittering skyline throws down light onto the roadbed below.
With Dalston now a distant din, I will keep moving forward until I am forced to come back for the bread. Now deep into the orange fall, the spectre of Soviet socialism is all around me. In the face of strangers and city lights, I zigzag past the Berlin Wall everyday and have frequently gone the wrong way since my arrival.
I have no idea how I managed to get this far.
Every night I see them howling like wolves underneath the railway bridge, forming cross-legged circles and wailing drunken invectives into the Spree. Their brutish chants always put me on edge after dark. My body trembles with fear as I walk past them – the unfamiliarity of foreign darkness.
It’s now almost eight o’clock, and I’ve not eaten anything since noon. I rarely have proper meals unless I have company. I usually forget what I’ve eaten within hours of consuming it. Is that just me? The Balkanisation of fast food has ensured that kebab shops are nearly everywhere. I try to avoid them for undefined health reasons.
I’m on tour this autumn as my constellations live on the European mainland. With technology as my oracle, I feel compelled to move to stay relevant. To remain interesting. When I walk around I am reminded of how malleable my feelings are and how affected they are by my environment.
I’m currently staying in Friedrichshain which is like Manchester in the early 1980s – a vast concrete resistance against nature. It’s a former Soviet ideological frontier with an aesthetic brutality to match.
As I frequent local bars and cafes, you notice a riotous absence of decorum in places. From gracing red velvet bars filled with smoke to watching vagrants open tins on the street – the social mores are looser, traffic faster and spirits cheaper.
Seeing cigarette packets in grocery stores again is like a cinematic throwback. It forces you to reset your mind to a different time period entirely. Their gruesome packaging feels like another era entirely, but it was only a few years ago that the UK government banned tobacco advertising in shops.
It’s like walking past a demolished site in London and instantly forgetting what had lain there beforehand. Cultural norms can vanish just as quickly.
It then dawned on me that Britain isn’t so liberal after all. You get cleared out of pubs at 11 pm with bells and brooms. Public drinking is tolerated but frowned upon, and in some cities, it’s prohibited by law. If you drink outside of licensed areas, then you are usually condemned to the margins of society.
With the spectre of Brexit looming, I welcome the licentiousness of Berlin and the ugliness of its Soviet zone. For all the grunting noises under the bridge, it feels strangely safer here too. Less on edge than London. For some reason, I always end up living in a vibrant dystopia.
Sitting on the Straßenbahn, I saw The Joker fade into the night. I did not sway from her bloody grin. Her lush cake wound made my night actually. Halloween’s comic orgy of sex, demons and fairies lightens the mood as the year freezes to a close.
Arriving in a misty haze at Pisa international, I took my coach seat and felt a renewed love for nature. With steam rolling off the fields, I remembered being driven around Aberdeenshire as a child, watching herons and buzzards roam in a far harsher playground. Simple moments stirs memories as fresh as the soil. An earthly reminder of who you used to be and what you have become.
Florence marked a departure point for me last year. I gave up everything and nothing to live here last October. It’s an uneasy feeling to leave home without a key. Unsure of who you might meet or anyone at all. It’s a weightless feeling I guess – you are finally free of routine.
Settling into the finest apartment of my adult life, I was astonished by the timeless perfection of its medieval palaces and gardens. Just going to the supermarket and pouring over the sweet variety of fruits, herbs and vegetables became a daily highlight. I can’t cook to save myself, but fresh Italian ingredients made it almost fanciful.
Walking around Florence city centre is like entering a children’s picture book. You have to adjust to the Duomo’s scale and size for context. Brunelleschi’s snowy mountain dominates the Arno valley for miles – a majestic beacon of engineering that has glittered for over 500 years. The terracotta temple lends a secular prestige to your visit. Gods of engineering and science designed and constructed this through their wits and determination alone.
Settling into my Oltrarno home, I became fascinated at how Florentines still make things with their hands. Unlike the gated walls of their stately homes, the city’s workshops brim with creativity in full transparent glow. From boutique chairs to bird cages, an artist is sweating in paint and sawdust on almost every side street.
I loved the bookbinding and cartographer shops, many of them so expensive they only have to sell one item every three days to survive. Via Tornabuoni is famous for its opulent displays of garments, watches and leather shoes. No one remotely normal can afford to buy anything here, but it’s another tribute to the city’s self-confidence.
Such is Florence’s timelessness, there is a melancholy in returning this year, and everything is the same. It feels like a parallel universe in that respect. I exist in multiple dimensions through my work and metaphysical friendships, and this epilogue feels uncannily familiar. Like I never really left, but the romantic fable has shifted, and I can’t reclaim the optimism of before.
I have been focusing more on nature than art or food this time. I took the bus to the Fiesole, a scenic hillside village near Florence, and felt like a schoolboy walking amongst the vineyards and forests. Almost like I had stepped into an Italian mirror of my Scottish childhood.
Seduced by November sunshine, I walked for miles to neighbouring Tuscan hamlets with my smartphone operating as a map. It felt glorious for the few hours it lasted. For we travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to get lost.
During my daytime crossings over the Arno, I often wondered what lay beyond Fiesole’s green hills. Even more so when I ran along the riverbed at lunchtimes, pushing my body harder and faster than any inner-city slog, where my thighs would tremble like jelly on the final bend home.
Oltrano is no longer my place anymore. I am currently staying in a small townhouse outside the town walls, and it was never going to be the same. On coming back you remember how little there is to do after sunset, and the seclusion of people’s lives becomes more apparent every day.
Florence’s walls are too grand to be emotionally available. The city if nothing else is a fortress. You can visit as many times as you like, but you’ll never belong in the garden.
“I don’t like Sliema, the roads are dirty, and the food isn’t so good”, my blonde Italian hairdresser told me. She had set up a salon with her Bologna-born sister here a few years ago. I popped in after buying moisturiser from a pharmacy and a shaver plug at the ironmongers. “In Italy, you are taxed 75% to set up a business. Here it’s much cheaper, and we get to practice our English.”
She charged me fifteen Euros for my haircut and recommended a new conditioner for my scalp. I promised to return before I depart next week. On visiting Malta in a nomadic capacity, I can converse in English without feeling embarrassed like I do in mainland Europe.
The Maltese are bi-lingual from childhood, and many can speak Italian due to the island’s proximity to Sicily. It didn’t declare independence from the UK until 1964, so the Commonwealth’s influence is profound, and going on routine errands here is disconcertingly easy.
With I-gaming companies flocking to Malta for tax breaks, Sliema has become a magnet for Brits, Scandis and Eastern Europeans, with the pouting Russian diaspora not far behind. The Maltese weather is splendid like a dream, and that’s one reason why so many people are choosing to live here.
Sometimes it feels like a 1980s English town, one juxtaposed alongside baroque churches and honey-coloured streets. During my first few days, I didn’t leave the area, and it felt peculiar seeing British high street brands again: Topshop, Clarks, Mothercare, Daily Mirrors, Twirl chocolate bars, and Sky Sports pubs serving pale ale.
Everything feels so easy here you forget how far you’ve travelled. That by coming here to live here, albeit only briefly, you are an agent of social and financial change – whether you like it or not.
Unlike the historic Maltese capital, this giant wall of construction is only a chain store away from Kentish Town. Cement mixers are continually stirring outside demolished nineteenth-century homes. Locals tell me their rents are soaring well above average salaries. For global capitalism is transitory and predatory. It monetises every square inch with impunity.
Some of these new builds are just shy of a million Euros, but despite them offering picture-perfect views of Valletta, they all look the same on the ground. It’s almost like we’ve given up on creating something magical of our own.
Across the bay in the romantic fortress, where Jesus, Mary and Queen Victoria lay encrusted in honeycomb lime, there is a far greater concentration of religion and art – not to mention imperial military might. I go for daily walks along the moon-cracked shore just so that I can take in the skyline. It’s astonishing something so beautiful has survived the torments of time.
Only then do I forget where I’m from – and you need to forget.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
I think about my plastic crates sitting in a warehouse in north London. How solemn and lonely they must be. A well organised skip that longs to be on display. Not trapped behind a steel door in the rain.
Listening to the rattling grooves of the trams outside, I occupy a shared space with a graffiti artist, DJ and television producer. Three amigos with curly black hair. Spinning tunes and spilled wine until their hearts run out of beats.
I gave Litizia a cash deposit a few weeks ago before she went to Rome for Easter. She is a fashion photographer who divides her time between the Eternal City, Milan and Berlin.
I have a fickle fascination with interior design. I am drawn to aesthetics and the stories they tell. Her studio is the perfect size with Caravaggio and Don McCullers books nestling beside drift wood, pot plants, and a black vinyl record full of stars.
Virgin leaves are singing in the courtyard as the first wasp of the year tries to get in. She has Renaissance angels guarding the kitchen door. Her sofa is ruby rouge like a kiss.
I water her plants every day as I promised. Sometimes I wonder how I would decorate my own studio. Would I measure up on aesthetic grounds? As it’s time for me to go now.
I can hear the artist rattling her key.
We drove towards Montefegatesi through virgin forests in western Tuscany one spring morning. A lonely cyclist was struggling along the swirling gradients, and songbirds were in full voice. Meanwhile, in the thicket hills, a forester was cutting down his favourite crop. I wasn’t aware of the village’s existence until today. It was just somewhere green on the map I cannot pronounce.
Since I can’t live outside the colony, I was astonished by its hilltop isolation – that it can survive without the phantom economy of tourism. The Tuscan village exists in defiance of the great acceleration. I wondered how difficult it must be to obtain the essentials over winter. It takes hours to get anywhere.
I lowered my northern head as we entered a tiny Catholic chapel – a bucolic cave that once married souls in black and white. Three rows each for bride and groom. It was a reminder of the smallness of our lives – that we are just passing through. We walked along its medieval slabs as two specks in an ossified landscape. One that doesn’t need to change as there’s nothing left for us to do.
Carrying satellites in our pockets and with sunshine on our cheeks, we departed into the electric green sea.
