Alone, or With Someone
I go alone almost always, and I have written this whole site from that assumption without examining it much. Having tested the alternative a fair number of times, the picture is more mixed than I expected.
What is better with someone
Long walks, unambiguously. A four hour walk alone is meditative for the first ninety minutes and then becomes a long time inside your own head. With one other person it stays good for the whole distance.
Cemeteries, which surprised me. I have written elsewhere that the setting produces unusually honest conversation, and that has held up. Something about a slow pace, no destination, and a place that quietly frames the scale of things.
Off season day trips, where the practical business of a shut cafe and a wrong turn is much better shared than endured.
Anywhere slightly intimidating on a first visit. The chapel, the private atrium, the campus you are not sure you may enter. The second person halves the awkwardness of not knowing whether you are allowed.
What is ruined by it
Reading rooms and libraries, obviously and completely. Two people in a silent room either whisper, which is worse than talking, or sit in silence, which is a strange thing to travel somewhere to do together.
The early morning. This is the one I feel most strongly about. The whole quality of a city at five is that you are unaccompanied in it, and a second person converts it into a shared activity with a story attached. I have done it twice and both times it was pleasant and both times it was not the thing.
Small gardens and churchyards, mostly because of the four person rule. Two of you in a space with one bench means you have taken the whole place.
The one that goes either way
Museums and cinemas, and the variable is entirely who it is.
With someone who is content to separate and meet later, a gallery is better shared, because the twenty minutes afterwards comparing what you each stopped at is genuinely worth having. With someone who moves through at your shoulder, it becomes a negotiation about pace and you see nothing.
The cinema is the same. Four hours with someone who does not want to talk about the film for the first ten minutes after, versus someone who starts in the foyer. Both are reasonable ways to be. Only one of them preserves what the two dark hours produced.
Telling people in advance
The practical fix for most of this, and it took me embarrassingly long to try.
Saying at the start that I want to walk without talking for a bit sounds absurd in prospect and is completely unremarkable in practice. Everybody I have said it to has just said fine. The version where you do not say it and then get quieter and quieter is the one that causes problems.
The same applies to naming the etiquette before arriving somewhere unfamiliar. Explaining the cemetery rules on the way in removes the discomfort almost entirely, and not explaining them means spending the visit managing someone else uncertainty.
What I have settled on
Alone for anything under an hour and anything indoors. Company for the long walks and the day trips.
That split has held for about two years and has the useful property that the two categories do not compete. The weekly hour is solitary and small, the occasional day out is shared and long, and neither one is a compromised version of the other.
Children
A category of its own and I am not the right person to write about it at length, having none.
What I can say from observation is that almost nothing on this site works with children except the long walks and the off season day trips, and those work extremely well. The seaside town in February with a child appears, from what I have watched, to be a substantially better experience than the same town in August.
The reading rooms, the chapels, the small gardens and the early mornings are all built on a kind of stillness that it is unfair to ask of a child and unpleasant to enforce.
The dog question
Similar and slightly different. A dog transforms the early morning park from a solitary activity into a purposeful one, and everybody I know who does this daily does it because of a dog.
It also makes you legible. A person standing alone in a park at six in the morning is slightly odd. A person standing alone in a park at six in the morning with a dog is a dog walker, and nobody looks twice. That legibility is worth something, particularly for anyone who would otherwise feel conspicuous.
What a dog rules out is everything indoors and most of the enclosed spaces, so it is a genuine trade rather than a straightforward gain.
Meeting the same strangers
The middle ground between alone and with someone, and the one I have come to value most.
The regulars at the bakery, the dog walkers on the park circuit, the man who is always first into the reading room. I know none of their names and have had perhaps forty seconds of conversation with any of them across three years.
It is a very low grade form of society and it turns out to be the exact amount I want before nine in the morning. Enough to be somewhere with other people in it, not enough to be an appointment.
