Trust Me...

Mini-Br eakPacking

Trust me, I’ve been there BY ZOE WILLIAMS

remember mini-breaking in my mid-twenties: I’d leave work, stop for a moment at Victoria station, buy a toothbrush, some undies and a puzzle magazine (okay, the puzzle magazine bit isn’t quite true) and away I’d go. So maybe I was underdressed – actually not so much underdressed as under-clean (I know I know, I was young) by the third day – but it all seemed pretty simple. And yes, hopefully I’ve changed slightly in the intervening years, since I really think spending your winter-coat money on booze and just pretending not to feel the cold is ill-becoming when in one’s thirties, but the great British mini-break has changed more than I have.

For a start, the weather is more changeable. Even the most die-hard enviro-refusenik will admit this. There might yet be no sign of the actual warming part of global, nor even a consistent cooling with the end of the Gulf Stream and all that, but it’s wetter, and at weirder times. You could well be laughed out of a country house hotel for arriving without a cagoule in June. You have to take wellies everywhere, even if you’re going somewhere that used to have a law against mud, like the Edinburgh Festival (in August).

All those places where you used to be able to get away with looking like a tramp – Glastonbury, I mean – Kate Moss now goes to, and even if you haven’t quite got the figure for a waistcoat and hotpants, you still can’t just wrap yourself in a tent during the day and get on with your psychoactive drugs.

Partly I blame urban regeneration: when I go to Sheffield or Leeds, I do so expecting ear-ruining 90s house music and young women dressed in bikinis in November. But now they’re so posh, it’s like fetching up in Bonn on the eve of an EU conference, with luggage full of feather boas and flashing deely-boppers. Also I blame the internet – it’s an information-superhighway paradox that the naffest, most downmarket places in the country have the best websites, so you turn up with your very fanciest pants and everyone within a 10-mile radius has to decide whether to mug you, deride you or – heck – both.

Conversely, you can book into the poshest place in the country – places so posh that famous posh political scandals happened in your very bed – and the website just has a picture of the telephone table and makes it look like a friendly detention centre.

The term “spa”, meanwhile, again thanks to the internet (everybody wants to come up as everyone’s first Google hit – even if they’re actually a shooting range rather than spa) I think is so over-used that you can arrive with nothing in your luggage but a fluffy dressing gown and find there are no rooms you’re allowed to go into without a tiara or a letter of recommendation from someone in the army!

It’s getting so that you have to just throw your arms up and pack everything you own.Which, given that the whole point of a break is that you get a weekend off deciding what to wear, sort of defeats the point.

Still, better to pack prepared rather than end up the embarrassed girl in the corner. And in any case I love my mini-breaks too much to miss out.