Andrew Dubber     

I took my wife on a bit of a mystery weekend away. Entirely a romantic gesture. The fact that there was a jazz gig involved was purely incidental.

Jazz band at Matt and Phreds Jazz Club

Bobbie and I hadn’t been away together just by ourselves for a while, so we made arrangements for Jake involving friends, junk food and computer games, and I took Bobbie away for the night in Manchester.

She hadn’t been to Manchester before, and didn’t know that’s where we were going until we were pretty much on the train. I’d booked a hotel deal at LastMinute.com (Tip: go for the ‘mystery hotels’ for the best deals), which meant that the hotel room was less than a third of their usual rate.

It wasn’t bad either — the Thistle Hotel, right in the centre of town.

I considered Bristol as another option (somewhere else fairly close that I really like, but that Bobbie hasn’t visited yet). That can be next time.

After a relaxed 90-minute train journey (have I mentioned how much I love train travel?) in which we just kind of chatted and caught up with each other’s lives, we arrived, and walked the two blocks to the hotel, where we dumped our stuff and freshened up.

I offered to take Bobbie out for a drink, and knew exactly where I was going. We headed to Matt & Phreds jazz club on Tib Street, where they have live jazz every night of the week. We grabbed a table and enjoyed the atmosphere, the music, the really great service… and we even sampled a couple of cocktails.

In the morning, we had a leisurely breakfast (again, we did a deal that made the full English breakfast less than half the price) and then decided to do a spot of window shopping.

We bought Jake a few badges — he likes badges — and then wandered around for a few hours looking at expensive kitchen appliances we don’t need and really interesting coffee table books we don’t have a coffee table for.

Once we’d had our fill of Manchester, and had accidentally become trapped in a seemingly infinite shopping mall (it was horrible!), we made our way back to the train station.

The ride home was spent with our iPods on, and our noses in books. We’d talked more in the past 24 hours than we usually manage in a whole weekend, and so we only interrupted each other to point at interesting things out the train window as they went by.

When we arrived home, Jake was fine, of course — hadn’t missed us at all — and was just heading out to the village with his friend Ethan for a coffee and a toastie when we got home. Jake had spent his parent-less time doing a bit of work on his blog, which is looking pretty good at the moment, but mostly he’d just hung out, played the guitar and killed monsters. He even did the couple of chores we’d asked him to take care of. Good boy…

Today, Jake and Bobbie have gone to Music Live, a massive musical instrument and music technology expo at the National Exhibition Centre. It’s Jake’s second visit, after having been on Friday with his Music class from school. The amount of brochures, stickers, posters, free guitar picks and badges you can come home with makes just the one trip insufficient unless you bring a wheelie suitcase.

I had a couple of free passes, but truckloads of work to catch up with this afternoon.

While it’s not really Bobbie’s thing, it’s good that the two of them are going together. It’s something that Jake’s really into, and it usually defaults to me to share his enthusiasm about things that make loud noises. I think they’ll have fun.

Either side of that, I’ve been helping him with his Wuthering Heights essay (due tomorrow). I think Jake’s starting to realise that when he asks for my help with homework assignments, I focus on making his work better, not making his workload easier, which would be his preference.

He’s still got a few hours of work to do on that. That’ll be our evening. Jake will be writing, and I’ll be ‘coaching’ from the sidelines.

Not a bad weekend. If only there wasn’t this oppressive pile of paper in my in-tray and massive backlog of emails to deal with. First things first, though, right?

Tagged: Travel