The Sun-Herald

I'll fly solo, thanks

As an activity best embarked upon alone, travelling's not as obvious a pick as, say, shaving your legs, eyebrow plucking or listening to Korean boy bands. But it should be.

As I write this in the sealed tranquility of a Hong Kong hotel room, many things are enjoyable: the clean sheets, a bed the size of a cruise ship, the bowl of chocolates that is ceaselessly replenished no matter how many times a day I empty it. But the best part? I am utterly alone in a big city that isn't home.
This is work, but I love solo holidays too. I've always maintained that a 'get away from it all' escape is no such thing unless you leave the boyfriend, husband, kids, friends, entourage, whatever behind - because they're a major part of the All you're supposed to be getting away from.
It's always been this way. While everyone else was wagging school to gather and smoke, I was jumping on buses and riding them to wherever they went, by myself. I wasn't running away - I was always home for tea. I just liked being alone and in motion and somewhere different. It provided an intoxicating mix of purpose, secrecy, freedom and rebellion.
It's no coincidence that the places I recall in the most vivid detail are those I have visited alone. As a solitary traveller, you engage with your surroundings so much more; you're a sponge for every scrap of information, alive to the sights, sounds, smells and conversations around you. You look harder, see things as they are and not through the prism of whichever relationship you might have brought with you. With someone else along for the ride, your destination becomes forever the place where you argued or fell in love or proposed or partied. It's a backdrop.
Of course that has its own charms - I've had unforgettable romantic holidays (although I probably won't be having any more once my boyfriend reads this) and fantastic family gatherings in foreign climes. But travel for travel's sake is best as a solitary pursuit.
I know that memories of places I experienced alone have a special depth and clarity because there was no-one else there to put a layer between me and the adventure.
In company and with a shared itinerary, I wouldn't have absorbed every corner of Istanbul's Topkapi Palace, lingered on a beach on Oahu's North Shore long enough for a seal to clamber out of the ocean and flop down nearby or retraced my steps several times in Mongkok earlier today just to inhale a particularly weird aroma. Nor would I have spent one whole, glorious morning just gazing up at the towering kahili (those Hawaiian ceremonial staffs which look like mammoth feather dusters) in their room at Honolulu's Bishop's Museum as group after group passed by because there was something about them that just rooted me to the spot. Solo leisure travel can be that sort of aimless, stream-of-consciousness travel: just wandering and watching.
I have friends who've been married for over a decade but still take holidays separately. "We need space from each other," she says. 'But we want to do something active with the space. Besides, we argue when we travel."
Which is another crucial reason to travel alone. Find a couple who've travelled together and you'll find people who will forever associate some harmless, distant landmark with gruesome scenes. I have one friend for whom the Eiffel Tower is permanently out of bounds. She had the argument which led directly to her last divorce right underneath the world's most romantic erection.
Travel is considered useful as a great test of a relationship, and I just can't see the logic in that. I've always thought it best not to test things that seem to be surviving perfectly adequately without being tested. And if the relationship's wobbly already, you'd have to be mad to take the show on the road. That's like dragging a dying man out of bed and forcing him to do your shopping to see if it makes him feel better.
For a female, solo travel is still an empowering, liberating act. And with the travel industry finally understanding that girls are on the move and on their own, the whole experience has become more rewarding. More companies are shedding the single room supplement and designing trips just for solo women.
Sure, every now and then you become a target for the local lothario but at least he's usually a pest with an interesting accent. And one of my frequent solo-travelling buddies swears by sudden, loud barking as an effective deterrent in any country. (Haven't tried it - let me know how it goes if you do.)
I believe solo travel has safety advantages, too. You're more vigilant when you're alone. When you're with others you can slip easily into complacency and carelessness. So far (touching the wood of the hotel room desk) I've only lost valuables when I've had someone else with me.
I've talked to more people and met more new friends on this last trip than I ever would have if I'd imported my own company. I've enjoyed what every solo traveller loves most; the freedom of being known by absolutely no-one, then deciding who you want to meet and for how long.
Every solo trip is a little reinvention. You're a blank slate each time. It's also a new romance; an encounter between you and a place you haven't met yet, or maybe one you've flirted with or even loved before. Either way, three's a crowd.

• by Amy Cooper at 11:15 PM
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Just good friends, or Facebook Official?

The other week I asked after an acquaintance's long-term boyfriend and she told me they'd split up. "It was on Facebook," she added, a trifle accusatorily.

And so it was. In fact, if I'd have checked my news feeds (the streaming updates on what your Facebook friends are doing day and night) two days earlier I could have seen the news breaking live online. My friend's relationship status on her profile had changed from 'in a relationship' to 'it's complicated,' to 'single.' Such is the way of the digital world.
It has its advantages. Those who were more vigilant than I about monitoring their friend's life online would have been in the know before they next saw her, so they could have avoided embarrassing her by mentioning it in public.
It's one of Facebook's spookier functions: a sort of online Woman's Day, not of celebrity lives and relationships, but those of your friends (or at least the ones who broadcast them in detail, and it's amazing how many do). It's created a bewildering etiquette minefield tricky even for the generation born with a mouse in their hand, and downright confounding for Gen X pen and paper babies like me.
Here's what happened next: a fortnight after the split, my friend's ex changed his Facebook status again, to "in a relationship." Not only did he appear to have found a new woman with unseemly haste, he'd also made her 'Facebook Official.' This appalled my buddy. "It's publicly humiliating," she said.
'Facebook Official,' you see, is the new barometer for commitment. It's the digital equivalent of ID bracelets, rings or other conspicous love tokens. You're going steady, you switch your status. It sounds trivial and foolish and takes me back to high school, but once again, it's amazing how many people old enough to know better are embracing this electronic romantic etiquette.
I had lunch with a thirty-something friend this week. She's a free-wheeling single who's happily dating a couple of men, and in no hurry for commitment. To her horror, after she'd dated a man twice last month he changed his Facebook status to 'in a relationship.' He also asked her to update hers likewise. She ran so fast she left a dust trail. "Weird and clingy," she scoffed.
I asked her why she felt the need to broadcast her status at all, as it's purely voluntary - you can include as much or as little information about yourself as you like and simply ignore the six relationship categories ('married,' 'engaged,' 'single,' 'in a relationship,' 'it's complicated,' and 'in an open relationship.'). "I want people on Facebook to know I'm single - I'll meet more men that way," she said. Fair point - and it's reflected these days in offline life, too. You can buy cute accessories such as the Singelringen to advertise your single status and attract playmates.
Similarly, it's enticing to share the glow of new romance by giving jewellery, sending flowers - or telling the world via Facebook by displaying the funky little heart that illustrates the 'in a relationship,' status.
There's a quaint and rather touching formality to it all and in times when ambiguity rules the mating game it brings a refreshing dose of clarity to the confusion, a way of knowing where you stand. But as my buddy's experiences - and the endless dating dilemmas crowding the pages of online agony aunts - show, it's a whole new world of potential trouble.
The instant nature of the online world means that in a rush of hormone-induced euphoria you can press a button and risk losing your credibility, mystique, power and even your partner at one keystroke. While no-one but the two of you witnesses the rejected ring or the binned bouquet, a Facebook status let-down, which potientially 28 million people can see, is brutally public.
I think for fun there should be a 'just good friends' category as well as the current six but there's another even better one. It's that brief but intriguing phrase used by celebrities when pestered about their love lives by nosy journalists like me. It's far more suggestive and elegant than ignoring the whole subject or opting for the rather neurotic 'it's complicated.' It hints at a world of mysterious fun that's just too precious - or perhaps too scandalous - to share:
'it's private.'

• by Amy Cooper at 07:18 PM
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Still hoping for a happy ending

My friend is having her hens party tonight, which seems a rather reckless act of optimism in times when the marriage institution is more fragile than a film star's ego. Even Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, that dour poster couple for earnest celebrity commitment, have called it quits. And the warring Warnes continue their very public campaign to turn marriage into a black comedy enjoyed only by voyeurs with an insatiable taste for schadenfreude.

So here I sit, surrounded by the paraphernalia of hens' fun: lollies, cardboard masks, plastic toys, and things that squeak, all - some more convincingly than others - shaped like men's nether regions.
Right now, I'm trying to decide whether or not to adorn a veil with Colt Men Nude Playing Cards. Perhaps The Colt Men, photographed circa 1982 and demonstrating 54 ways with the male anatomy, might be too much over a yum cha dinner. There are pensive ones, studying their assets intently as if they're a particularly tricky brainteaser puzzle, and proud ones, displaying their wares like prizewinning Easter show produce. The pack's joker, a man with a red singlet and hair like Barbra Streisand's, is doing something implausible with an Akubra hat.
I gaze at the assembled tat. Shouldn't we have grown out of this by now? We're in our thirties after all, and it shows in the evening's mix of luxury and cheap hi-jinks (there's a nice dinner and we're having foot massages afterwards, then the cocktails start and the silly hats come out). It was the same at the last hens I attended, where I was responsible for sourcing the stripper. I picked one because his stage name, 'Mr Strip', sounded more sophisticated than the alternatives - 'Nautiboyz' and 'Ladeekillas'. There's no greater proof you're grown up than finding yourself searching for the thinking woman's stripper.*
Back in our early twenties, hens' nights were simple; we'd guzzle cocktails in all the shades of the rainbow until, as if someone had cried: 'Unleash the dogs of war!' it was time to descend upon Sequins nightclub like a horde of spike-heeled barbarians with coloured tongues. It was long ago. Even the Colt Men were contemporary then.
A hens' celebration at 20 was an embarkation point for a new life. The bride was no virgin, but she'd never lived with the man and her marriage was a genuine rite of passage. Tonight's hen like most of us, has taken her time to settle down. There have been other long-term relationships and she lives with her partner already. Nothing about her life will really change. So why are we wiser, older women still partying with Plastic Peckers and Dicky Sipping Straws? I study the Colt Men, spread over my desk like a priapic tarot, but they're too busy defying the laws of nature to offer insights.
Maybe it's about feminism. Hens' parties are only a few decades old and before that, marking the end of unwed freedom was considered a man's concern. Women just collected tea towels and felt grateful. These days, with statistics showing men are happier than women when married, you could argue that if anyone needs to sow some final wild oats to mourn the end of an era, it's the bride.
It's more than that, though. The real reason for all this paraphernalia is that we're still believers.Tonight's hen wants her marriage to be forever and so do we. Even in our wiser, warier thirties, we love a happy ending. And if the best way to show it is by brandishing naughty drink straws, guzzling cocktails and making a nuisance of ourselves in bars, then we'll do it with gusto. This is a traditional hens' night and the bride shall wear a veil. But perhaps without the Colt Men.

* In an unfortunate denouement, Mr Strip turned out to be an apocalypse preacher who, after his routine, cornered one of the hens, told her the end was nigh and that he was the prophet sent to warn the faithful. I had to discreetly remove him - policeman's helmet, thong and all.

• by Amy Cooper at 06:39 PM
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