A reader asks whether slow travel is just a luxury for people with time

A reader wrote to me last week with a question I have been circling ever since, because it has a sharp point to it and the point is aimed squarely at me. She asked, more or less: it is easy for you to bang on about slow travel and wrong turnings and the hour before arrival, but some of us have two days and a job to get back to, so is the whole thing not just a luxury for people with time?

It is a fair hit, and I want to answer it properly rather than wriggle out of it.

The first thing I would say is that she is right about the obvious part. If slow travel means a month of trains with no timetable, then yes, that is a luxury, and I am not going to insult anyone by pretending otherwise. Time off is not handed out evenly. I have had long stretches of it, and I know exactly how lucky that made me.

But I think she has let me define the word, and I define it badly in my own columns, so this is my fault rather than hers. When I write about slowness I do not actually mean length. I mean attention. The two get muddled because the easiest way to buy attention is with time, but time is not the only currency the thing will accept.

Here is what I mean. Years ago I had one free afternoon in a city I will almost certainly never see again, and every guide told me to sprint between four famous sights and tick them off. Instead I picked one cafe near the station, the ordinary kind with a laminated menu and a television nobody was watching, and I stayed in it for three hours. I ordered the thing the two old men beside me had ordered, which turned out to be a bowl of noodles with a boiled egg cut in half and a chilli paste that very nearly took the roof off my mouth. I learned more about that place from three hours in one unremarkable cafe than I would have from four monuments at a jog, and the afternoon cost me nothing but the decision to stop moving.

So my answer to the reader is this. You do not need a month. You need to give up the idea that a short trip ought to be an efficient one. Efficiency is for getting to work. A trip run on the logic of work will feel like work, and you will come home needing a holiday from your holiday, which is the most common complaint I hear and quietly the saddest.

With two days, do less. Pick the one street and walk the length of it twice, once in daylight and once after dark, because they are two different streets. Eat where you have to point at what somebody else is already having. Be early for one thing, miss another thing entirely, and do not mourn it. Sit somewhere with no view at all and watch the place simply be itself, which it only does once it has stopped performing for visitors, usually around the middle of the afternoon when the visitors have all gone off to the famous sights.

Slowness is not the number of days. It is the refusal to treat a place as a list. You can refuse a list in a single afternoon. I have done it between two trains, in the forty minutes everyone else spent being annoyed about the delay, and those forty minutes are the only part of that entire journey I can still describe to you now.

I never did make the connecting train. I rarely do. It remains, after all these years, the best travel decision I keep on accidentally making.

Slowness can also mean stepping a few metres sideways, and Skip the Crowd shows the quiet place beside every famous sight that the queue walks straight past.