Alone in Edinburgh

Marek cancelled on the Wednesday. His message was two lines long and mentioned a shift he couldn't get out of. The flights were on Friday, and the hostel had already taken the money without a refund.

Nils spent that evening deciding. He had never travelled alone, and he had always assumed that he wouldn't enjoy it. If he stayed at home, though, he would lose the money and spend four days being annoyed.

He flew on Friday morning. The bus from the airport took forty minutes, and the first thing he noticed about Edinburgh was that the streets go up. The second thing was the weather, which changed three times before lunch.

The hostel was on the third floor above a bookshop, up a stone staircase that smelled of rain. He had a bunk by the window in a room for six. Nobody spoke to him, and he spoke to nobody.

The first afternoon was the worst. He walked up to the castle, looked at it for eleven minutes, and had nobody to say anything to. He took a photograph and then realised that he didn't want to send it to Marek.

He ate dinner far too early because he didn't know what else to do with the evening. The woman at the next table asked him whether he was here for work, and he said no, for four days, on his own.

Saying it out loud changed something. On Saturday he went into the museum at ten and stayed until two, which he would never have done with company. He looked at one room of old machines for half an hour.

That was the discovery of the trip: his own pace. He stopped when he wanted, he skipped what bored him, and he ate at strange hours. Nobody had to be asked, and nobody had to be persuaded.

On Sunday he climbed the hill above the city in a fine drizzle. Halfway up he passed an older man who said that the view would be better in twenty minutes, because the cloud was moving east.

The man was right. Nils sat on a wet rock for half an hour and watched the whole city come out from under the grey: the old streets, the roofs, the harbour in the distance and a thin line of sea behind it.

He had expected to feel lonely up there, and he did not. He thought about the difference between being alone and being lonely, and decided that he had spent years mixing the two up.

That evening he talked to two strangers in the hostel kitchen for an hour, mostly about trains. He wasn't especially confident, and it didn't matter, because neither of them was either.

He flew home on Monday evening with wet shoes and a notebook he had actually used. Marek asked how it had been, and Nils said that it had been good, and heard how flat that sounded.

Some things don't travel back well. In February he booked four days somewhere else, again on his own, and this time he didn't ask anybody first.