Issue #29: How to slow down and savour the good things

'I need a routine that is baggy enough to live in,' writes Matt Haig. This is how I'm pulling back the reins on my London lifestyle, as I return from Lisbon.

This little guy knows the right pace to navigate Lisbon’s slippery floor tiles.

Slow down, you move too fast/You’ve got to make the morning last, begins one of my favourite songs by Simon & Garfunkel. The next line, ‘Kicking down the cobblestones’, may refer to the paving of New York’s Queensboro Bridge, but it reminds me of Lisbon’s polished calçada floor tiles. When I first came here, the tiles & I had a love-hate relationship. While pretty and laid down by skilled craftspeople, they’re also perilous – quite literally forcing you to walk more slowly. That’s a lesson I learnt the hard way, literally, slipping over twice one rainy November day.

That requisite slowness came to characterise my Lisbon lifestyle. ‘Before we go in, I have to warn you about something,’ I told my cousin Sam, who was visiting from London last weekend, as we waited outside the tiny, family-run restaurant I’d booked for dinner, our table delayed for 20 minutes while the previous occupants sipped dessert wine. ‘Nothing about this meal is going to happen quickly.’

‘Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.’ - Søren Kierkegaard

At first, it drove me crazy. Amazon doesn’t deliver here. Amazon! Traffic gets redirected at random, seemingly at the whim of the municipal authorities. It’s so rare to see someone wearing ‘the latest trend’ that, honestly, I have no idea what the latest trends are anymore. A supermarket queue can easily last 15 minutes, as Sam experienced en-route to the restaurant, during a would-be simple errand to buy the Colgate he’d forgotten to pack. There is a constant friction between getting what, or where, you want.

But then, when you slow down, here’s the magic that you get instead.