WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALMini-breaks

Mmmm. Got lovely new mini-break brochure: Pride of Britain: Leading Country House Hotels of the British Isles. Marvellous. Going through all the pages one by one imagining Daniel and me being alternately sexual and romantic in all the bedrooms and dining-rooms.Bridget Jones’s Diary

Last weekend my husband and I went on a mini-break to Majorca. Two weeks before this we spent a long weekend in Whitby, with friends. Earlier this summer I attended a two-day hen weekend in Manchester, and next week my husband is off on a three-day mid-week break to Valencia for the famous annual tomato-throwing (sounds like most dinner times with my two-year-old, but apparently this is special). I’m hoping to fit in a visit to Sitges before the end of September. And back in March we spent our anniversary night in the Cotswolds.

A round-up of our friends’ weekend breaks over the past few months yields the following list of destinations: Nice, Budapest, Ibiza, Malaga, Rome, Port Merrion, Dublin (twice), Newcastle (stag weekend), another Cotswolds trip, Istanbul, Florence, Henlow Grange, Morocco, Amsterdam, Alghero and Padstow. Do not be fooled. We do not hang around with a particularly privileged set. This extensive weekend travel has become the new middle-class dream. Apparently, like Ms Jones, we have all become obsessed with mini-breaks. Trying to get a few people together for a nice weekend lunch in the pub or something cooked from the Lawson oeuvre is like trying to arrange a world peace summit: no one is available at less than two months’ notice.

I’ve been wondering if it was always like this, or if the combination of cost-cutting airlines and Internet travel booking have made weekend breaks such a big part of our lives. The genius of lastminute, Expedia, Opodo et al.com is the ability they afford you to sit at your desk on a grey winter morning, giving the impression of diligent activity while actually pricing up hotels and flights to Fuerteventura.