This isn’t a travel blog. It’s a fashion blog. Or at least, I like to pretend (to myself, more than anyone else) that it’s a fashion blog. Yet somehow, it’s getting a travel post before a fashion post. Which is especially curious given that I’ve only left St Andrews on four occasions in the past 9 months. And that I’ve never been to the place this blog post is about. In fact, I’ve never even been close to it. Yet here we are. Life is full of surprises, I suppose.
I think it’s probably worth conceding that no, this isn’t really a travel post at all, given that it’s… really not about travel. My “food posts” aren’t about food, though. They’re about me, and so, too, is this “travel post”. This blog is, after all, merely a vehicle for my ego. Plus ça change.
But for the time being, let’s forget all that. All this talk of blog posts is getting very meta, and I really don’t have a mind for philosophy, at least not when I’m as (regretfully) sober and (joyfully) solitary as I am at present. Instead, let’s turn our minds elsewhere. Let’s float on a mental jet stream across the Channel and down to the Iberian Peninsula. We almost overshoot it; we spend a little time in a holding pattern (to avoid our thoughts getting crossed with anyone else’s); and, after a slightly bumpy landing – I could do with a bit more practice – we arrive in Lisbon.
Frankly, I don’t know a lot about Lisbon, and I’m resolute in my commitment to avoid doing even a little bit of research for this blog. If I misuse a word because I was too photosynthesised to look it up, I simply have to hope that’s part of the charm. In reality, I am endlessly pedantic; as Cirque du Chic, I am correct only when luck intervenes on my behalf.
I do know that Lisbon has trams, though, at least in my imagination – perhaps informed by some pictures I’ve seen, though they’ve since sunk to the darkest recesses of my mind, and are now hidden under mountains of Taylor Swift trivia and thoughts about Pringles – they resemble the streetcars of San Francisco, rather than taking the British approach of poorly imitating the monorail from The Incredibles. I think I know that it also has a thriving startup culture. Most importantly, I know that I want to pack my bags, and move there forever.
You may well say that I don’t have nearly enough information to make such a commitment – even just the mental commitment of wanting to move there, let alone the commitment of making the fundamentally life-altering decision to actually do it. And you’d be right. The morsels of information I have about Lisbon comprise a truly tiny portion of what I “know” about it. The rest is just imagination. I suppose that’s always the way of these things. Reality rarely lives up to our imagination, which is why it’s best to procrastinate as long as possible, so that you maximise time spent in anticipation, and minimise the time spent in the inevitable period of disappointment which follows.
In my imagination, Lisbon is beautiful and perfect in the way that only an imagined place can be. Blesséd are the few who love the towns in which they live; the rest of us are condemned to fall for places we’ve imagined. At best, we can love the “manic pixie dream girl” of places – somewhere that’s prohibitively expensive or distant to visit regularly, or for any real length of time, and which thus never loses its lustre. I know I started the post by pointing out that this wasn’t a travel blog, but I’m about to prove it: I don’t think that you should travel in a way which reveals the “true nature” of a place – not at all. Places should be viewed from afar and through frosted glass, in order to preserve your imagination as much as possible. Certainly, you should try and eat like a local, but you certainly shouldn’t try and live like one. If you visit Lisbon, don’t take the streetcar from your BnB into the CBD every day, and spend your days programming to develop the “Uber of napkin delivery” or some other such disruptive startup idea. Tourism is an art which has been honed over thousands of years; travelling to live like a local would be to spit on the legacies of all those who have, quite literally, gone before you.
So, I shall probably never visit Lisbon. When Gatsby saw the green light up close, his count of enchanted objects diminished by one. At present, I have an entire city in my count of enchanted objects. The ability to love something with such depth from so far away is a gift to be cherished, not squandered. If I ever do visit Lisbon, my trip shall be short, and I shall be drunk for as much of it as possible, preferably on white wine from local vineyards. It’s a hardship I must endure, for the good of the city. After all, if I lose my love for Lisbon, Lisbon will have lost an admirer, and my conscience couldn’t cope, if I were to do that to one I love so much.