A friend reminisces about the manner in which she and her husband conducted the early months of their courtship.
Work-hard, play-hard City types, at their every encounter he would whisk her away to a different thrilling location – Paris, Reykjavik, Barcelona, New York; week after week of relentless, truncated globetrotting.
There is a prelapsarian, pre-recessionary air to this narrative, recalling a world before banks toppled, and collective wings were clipped. However, in extreme form it also expresses a truth about one’s flighty, flight-hopping single period: days of wine and roses, and interminable airport queues.
For the minibreak has become an erotic rite of passage, loosening the package holiday’s grasp upon the collective consciousness, and permanently sprucing up the dirty weekend.
The first many of us became aware of the terminology was on the pages of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, where the eponymous heroine yearns for said excursion as a token of commitment. She is also rewarded with copious amounts of intercourse. Both come with the territory.
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As, alas, do bouts of cystitis, airports some 90km from the city from which they take their name, and the discovery that one’s hotel room would appear to have been constructed out of the pack part of a flat-pack.
A rower I know put his hand through such a “wall” when steadying himself in a moment of passion. Yet ardour of this intensity is rare. Human perversity being what it is, when required to behave amorously, said amour is likely to go Missing in Action.
For, in contradiction of the fight-or-flight principle, the minibreak gives us flight and fight: from the traditional easyJet spat to the internecine booze dispute. A tender stay in Verona was blighted by the “Amarone effect”, whereby one sniff of the barmaid’s apron would transform me and my then beloved into homicidal loons – not for nothing is said vino Hannibal Lecter’s tipple of choice.
Yet, no amount of alcohol could inspire me to match the prove-you-love-me-or-I’ll-wail histrionics of one fellow traveller, from whose memory destinations across Europe have had to be redeemed; or obliterate my guilt regarding the chap who turned up with tickets for that very evening, the very evening I had planned to quash things.
As a friend who boycotts all conjoined roving maintains, “The one thing life has taught me is that silences that were companionable in Fulham may become interminable in Florence.”
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Even where disaster is averted, the etiquette of such forays can be excruciating. According to a survey by match.com, a third of men worry they will run out of things to say, a fifth of women about being scrutinised first thing; snoring and flatulence being shared paranoias.
Our grandparents tended to confine such mortifications to their wedding nights, when the situation was a fait accompli. Instead, we engage in a sweaty-palmed audition process conducted amid the contingencies of lost luggage and the unwelcome revelations of a shared bathroom.
What is more, the couple themselves will not be the only judges. For, while romance may be the mission’s ostensible purpose, it harbours a series of no less pressing public motives.
For a start, however short the geographical distance travelled, Ms Jones was right – the minibreak symbolises a journey into coupledom, or, at least, tentative mutual toe-dipping. Both parties are signalling a degree of investment: emotional, financial, and the no lesser currency of time.
It also conveniently demonstrates what terribly busy lives its participants lead – far too hectic to devote more than 48 hours to the pursuit of love and leisure. The more micro the holiday, the more coruscating we are to believe the existence. Where our forebears symbolised their status in a ponderous Grand Tour, so we signal success with the brevity of our break.
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According to figures from Visa Europe, a third of Britons now hold off planning a traditional two-week summer sojourn in favour of multiple, shorter, ad hoc trips. Almost 85 per cent of those polled declared their intention of taking between one and five brief escapes last year.
Where once tourists were holidaymakers, so today they are minibreakers, just as boutique hotels replaced boarding houses, and the boulevards of Europe usurped the seaside town. An image sent from a mobile by MMS rather than a postcard will be the wanderers’ dispatch – its subtext that fleeting freedom may be had for the price of a couple of Ryanair tickets.
And yet for our children’s and grandchildren’s generations – carbon-cautious, eco-schooled – the weekend jaunt abroad may come to seem as much of an anachronism as a fortnight in Skegness. And they will shake incredulous heads over an era in which our collective attention deficit disorder aspired to span the globe.
For 52 weekend breaks for 2010, visit timesonline.co.uk/breaks
Four magical minibreaks
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Fancy somewhere different? Try these newest hotspots
Beirut
Follow the Hay Festival east this spring to Beirut39, which from April 15-18 will bring together 39 of the most interesting Arab writers under the age of 39. For unabashed luxury stay at Le Gray and head straight for the roof – Bar ThreeSixty has knockout views of the Mediterranean and Mount Lebanon.
Or try the sleek Four Seasons, which has also just opened – Beirut is undoubtedly having another moment. Four-night stays at Le Gray start at £996pp including flights and transfers (0845 6182200; abercrombiekent.co.uk).
Metz
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This pretty Lorraine town tests the Guggenheim effect when the Pompidou Centre opens its first regional outpost on May 9. Its opening exhibition will collate Matisse’s last self-portrait and works by Picasso and Braque in an undulating, Japanese-designed building that’s half giant Chinese hat, half forest grotto. Three-night breaks start at £349pp, including return rail travel and B&B at the three-star Du Theatre Hotel, with Real Holidays (020-7359 3938; realholidays.co.uk).
Abu Dhabi
Ferrari World Abu Dhabi, the world’s largest indoor theme park, opens later this year with racing simulators, driving and racing schools, a Ferrari museum and a suitably speedy rollercoaster employing replica Ferrari F1 cars. Wasted on the kids, surely? Stay at the gleaming new Yas hotel, which opens fully in March, overlooking Abu Dhabi’s Formula One racetrack. Three nights cost £669pp with Premier Holidays, including flights with Etihad Airways, between June 1 and September 9 (0844 4937542; premierholidays.co.uk).
Akureyri
New direct flights from the UK this summer will open up Iceland’s capital of the North, bathed in 24-hour daylight from May to August. What to do when it never gets dark? Have dinner at Akureyri’s finest, Fridrik V – chef Fridrik Valur Karlsson trained at the River Caf? – then stride out among the volcanic wonders of the Askja caldera. A four-night fly-drive with Discover the World starts at £847pp including flights, with return leg going via Reykjavik (01737 218800; discover-the-world.co.uk).