City break

Three or four nights in a city you have not walked yet. You land, drop your bag, and are out of the door within twenty minutes, because the light is good and there is a market closing at five.

Your days have a shape. One big thing in the morning, a museum or a cathedral or a hill with a view. Then you wander a neighbourhood without a plan, stopping for coffee wherever the chairs look right. Lunch is late and long. Afternoons are for bookshops, side streets and the gallery you only heard about yesterday. Evenings are a small restaurant someone local named, followed by a bar with no sign on the door. You fall asleep tired, happy and already planning tomorrow's route.

You plan the frame and leave the middle loose. You book the train, the bed and one dinner you are excited about. Everything else lives on a map full of saved pins, colour-coded, which you will deny is a spreadsheet.

You pack light: one good outfit, comfortable shoes that look smarter than they are, a tote for the bookshop, a jacket that copes with rain. Everything fits in a bag you can carry up four flights of stairs. You download the transport map before you go, and you know roughly how to say thank you in the local language. You check the opening hours of the one museum that matters, because it is always closed on Mondays and you are not making that mistake twice.

One friend who also reads the menu. Someone who will walk all day without complaining and who is as happy in a gallery as in a bar. Someone who does not need every meal to be a production, but understands why this one does.

You are a great solo traveller too. A city alone suits you: you go at your own pace, eat at the counter and talk to whoever is next to you. The person who will not work is the one who wants to stay in the hotel, or who needs to see everything on a list. You like company who are curious and flexible, who will happily take a wrong turn with you, and who are game for a late dinner on a Tuesday.

A week at an all-inclusive resort with a wristband and a buffet. Same pool, same lounger, same view every day. By day three you would be inventing reasons to get a bus into town.

You would also struggle with a tour group on a strict timetable, where someone holds a flag and you have twelve minutes at the cathedral. Long stretches of nothing make you restless. A cottage in the middle of nowhere with no shop for ten miles sounds lovely in theory, and in practice you would have walked to the nearest town by lunchtime on the first day. You need streets, people and things to look at. Without them, you are not resting. You are waiting.

Pick one neighbourhood and stay there rather than in the centre. Use it as your base, get to know its bakery and its corner bar, and you will see the city as people who live there see it.

Leave one afternoon completely empty. No pins, no plan, just walking. Those are the hours you will remember. Book one splurge meal and one ordinary one somewhere tiny, and compare them. Go somewhere slightly out of season, when the queues are shorter and the city is more itself. Then keep a little notebook: what you ate, what you saw, the name of the bookshop. When you go back, and you will, it will be like visiting an old friend.