In my twenties, air travel became illogically affordable. It was easy to buy return flights to Spain or Poland or Italy for the cost of a new pair of jeans. I took one or two trips a year – short holidays in European cities like Turin, Bratislava and Paris with friends. But the glamour I thought would break out of me, like a fascinating fossil concealed within a drab stone, didn’t seem to arrive. I still felt timid in the places I was in. Insecure and unsophisticated. I’d always be travelling on the cheap, eating emphatically beige meals in my hostel bedroom, drinking so much I’d come home feeling poisoned. I did get things from these experiences though – I became enamoured with the details of places. A spectacularly huge light fitting in the foyer of a run-down communist-era hotel in Bratislava, which looked like a retro schooling aid that would be used to illustrate atomic particles. A meal in Turin, at the point where hunger turns to derangement, of mashed potato and a slice of margarita pizza. The only things my friend and I could decipher on the menu. But I itched for the kind of travel I thought went hand in hand with romantic love. I wanted the staged photos at sunset, every cliché – hot tubs, candlelit dinners, a personal infinity pool, to suddenly look chic in a wide-brimmed straw hat. I thought this type of holiday was my natural next step. I thought that sort of romance was my natural next step. A progression beyond one-night stands, beyond the constraints of my earliest relationship, where I at first lived at home, then later had a student’s budget where even a romantic meal out was unlikely. I ached for the status of relationship that a luxurious holiday would make obvious. In my imaginings I was going to have epic day sex in a white-washed hotel room with the breeze billowing the curtains, sleep with a book over my face next to a pool, carefully adjust the straps of my swimwear to even out a tan. A man who loved me close by with sunscreen or a fresh cocktail. In these holidays, worries, self-consciousness, would fly away, easy as shaking a tablecloth free of crumbs. But this has never happened; in fact, the entirety of my sexual encounters have been in England, something that feels humiliating, as though my sex life has been hopelessly provincial.