Sacré-Cœur, Ouro Preto, Cascais

A sexlessly molested mermaid abides the fondlings of tourists in Copenhagen. (No luck integrating something rotten, try harder.) Mint tea, falafel. Secondhand bookshop in Wexford, Ireland where I buy Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Sea scrapes the shore and carves esoteric ramblings into little American kids’ sandcastles in Barcelona that, when spoken aloud, probably sound quite like El primer abre del bosc by Blaumat. That scene in Peep Show where they go to a rotating sushi bar and Jeremy loses it completely—that, in Edinburgh.

I go to Basilique du Sacré-Cœur when I’m fifteen and they’re playing a jangly guitar cover version of Wonderwall (People Places Things) in mock-British accents. Non-rhotic meets, I don’t know, parce que c’est, in a devastating consonant car crash that leaves no survivors. Globalisation has gone too far—it’s probably for the best if none of that ever happened again, not in Continental Europe. Diseases should be an internal matter, crawling around our guts, not theirs. This is my first solo-ish holiday (that is to say, sans my parents, and it’s a school trip, ackchually…) and Paris dizzies me, I can’t eat at all. I'm lost on the top of the Eiffel Tower and accidentally wander into a fancy restaurant, all schmooze and upcharge, that correctly judges me for the rainbow-jumper-miniskirt schoolgirl that I am. All things considered, the rest of the trip goes swimmingly, we eat slightly dry croissants, egg salad, have our pencil cases containing scissors confiscated by security guards, etc., the hallmarks of an altogether good, 7.5/10 trip. I’m a little bit in love with a friend the entire time but the CITY OF LOVE self-cannibalises, chewing out long stretches of sex shops for spotty teenagers to laugh at.

The same year I go to London and develop (obsessive) compulsions regarding the exact same thing: sex. Avoiding tangents, this puts into perspective the next seven years of my whole pseudo-screwed-up-ascetic-starving-nun deal, though arguably ugliness and social ineptidude have their roles to play in that too. Wembley is clean and tennis-y, a bit like Wimbledon, and I like how the UK stuffs all its best and worst stuff in one city so tourists can gamble on the worst (or best) holiday of their lives. Manchester and Liverpool and Cardiff produce similar, but not the same, effects.

I go to France again at the end of a weird time in my life, funeral-esque. You’d think nothing really changes but that’s just a frequency illusion—gaps in knowledge and experience lead to extreme fear, distrust, and that kind of nicotine you stick to your gumline. Everything in Marais reminds me of something. People do their strange routines in front of me, ‘everyday life’, and I’m the obvious foreigner who is mimed at, blinked at, used to skip the barrier at the metro station, but in France these things don’t overwhelm so much as make you laugh. I’m not Jane Birkin. I’m not even Jane Doe.

The crux of going to Brazil is that once you’ve been, you automatically gain a million life points and lose another million social points by being the boring person who can’t shut up about having been to Brazil. My name is Josephine and this is my TRUTH, OK?! Belo Horizonte mid-winter is still cloyingly warm at times and the breakfast canteen is full of monkeys that want to steal your carrot cake and bread. In terms of tacky plastic chairs and light, unimposing music, Brazil has plenty, but also imposing music, exhaustingly strong drinks, and stained-glass windows, that too. Ouro Preto, a post-colonial outpost in Minas Gerais, is nestled in the womb of distinctly Brazilian mountains, lush and green, but has a dry, yellow, vintage look to it also. Churches stretch their necks. A man scams me in a market.

Madrid is another story. Torrential rain and zero appetite. I spent more time being sick than any other holiday. The week before I left, I was having Final Destination-style dreams about dying, there were crows at the train station, a dead sheep on the tracks, 2666 mentions a plane crash at Madrid Barajas…

(For whatever reason, I still can’t speak Spanish.)

Valencia, rain again. Any allure of Spain for me is, OFFICIALLY SPEAKING, dead. I’m not trying to paint the country with a single brush and by no means should this be taken in a xenophobic manner but the only way I would ever go to Spain again is if I were dragged by my hair, preferably kicking and screaming. Not really. Probably not. Walking the same streets in flat, unoriginal autumn weather and drinking hazelnut coffee lacks inspiration, provides dread, etc. I spend four months living as a fourth-floor certified-nut-job ascetic-cum-alcoholic failure and the next four months afterwards atoning for my fuck-ups. The point is clear: never do anything ever, or else you’ll regret it.

Nobody’s saying Lisbon is the CITY OF LOVE, not even the Portuguese, but European capitals, hot or cold, West or East, all have a rock-hard exterior and soft centre that, in some sense, resembles love, or at least a version of it. You suck on it enough, there’s probably a small bar that epitomises the very concept of love in our modern era but you’re too much of a dumb foreigner to find it. Even if you did, your Portuguese is passable at best, and when the barman speaks that jumbled-bass-ackwards old-person language that’s barely human, let alone Latinate, you have to accept your fate and drink bog-standard bottled Sagres. None of this really adds up because I just buy beer in the supermarket and let the condensation on the exterior of the bottle melt the receipts at the bottom of my bag into papier-mâché—plus, in so much as my opinion barely matters, even to myself, romanticism is never a worthwhile endeavour when applied to inanimate objects or cities. I’m very British about this and find any kind of jingoistic Rule Britannia remnants to be continental, ergo unpleasant. Motherland-fatherland-the-boat’s-a-chick stuff is schlocky at best. Cascais, not for its antique buildings or unique outer-city counter-culture, is romantic, in the same way bad guitar covers of Oasis are. Cheesy, laughable German tourists wander around sunburnt and speaking their barbaric Rammstein language. Bad chips, seagulls, scaldingly hot sand, tourist Saw traps where they make you chew off your own leg for a Portugal-themed bikini. In any case, Albufeira must be the satiricial romantic’s Mecca.

As with everything I write, none of this means anything and it’s all 100% fictional and didn’t happen to me, especially not getting rained on or scammed or throwing up abroad, because I was born so perfect they scheduled me in on an exact date.