Taking my son on his first Boys Trip

It started when I mentioned wanting to go to London.

 

For a few years in my early twenties I’d gone every time I’d accumulated enough for an overnight bus and a bed for a few nights. But life and finances and a back that won’t take the bus anymore had widened the gap between trips until, bar a few hours in the city on a caravan holiday in Kent the previous year, I couldn’t remember when I’d last been.

 

Mrs. M is pretty accommodating about these things, so with a little bit of negotiation (mainly involving the words: “Okay, but I get to go away with the girls as well”) I started pricing things. I was on my laptop one day when AJ wandered over.

 

“Where’s that?” he asked.

 

“London,” I said. “Remember, we were there last summer for the dinosaur museum.”

 

“Oh, yeah. Can we go again?”

 

I thought for a second. “Let’s talk to Mum.”

 

Time alone with AJ wouldn’t be totally unprecedented. By this stage, we’d had a few Boys’ Days Out – sometimes to give Mrs. M a break, sometimes just because. Father and son trips are a time-honoured tradition the world over.

 

“A whole weekend away with a four-year-old? Are you sure?” Mrs. M asked, when I finished telling her my plan. “I thought you wanted to go out, enjoy the nightlife.”

 

“I won’t miss it. Most of the stuff I want to do is during the day and kid-friendly. He’ll love it. We’ll love it.”

 

“Okay,” she said, still not convinced. “I still get to go away with the girls, though.”

 

 

And it was great. We took the ferry and train and got a short-let apartment near Borough Market. We went to the museums and monuments and the cinema. We ate sandwiches in Hyde Park, ice cream from a van next to the river and pizza in Leicester Square way past his bedtime. We saw the city from the London Eye and the cable cars.

 

It wasn’t without problems. My genius planning had us arriving in and leaving London at the peak commuting times, and if you don’t already know, an easily distracted four-year-old, a wonky-wheeled suitcase and the Northern Line at rush hour is not a fun combination.

 

I dramatically over-estimated his capacity for patience many time. I also learned that a shortcut through Soho raises questions I won’t be ready to answer for a good thirty or forty years.

 

A city break with a kid – even if I have been looked at like I’ve got two heads for doing it solo – is not the most outrageous thing in the world. I daresay at least one person reading this has been backpacking through southeast Asia with a toddler or pushed a Phil & Ted’s up a trail on the Grand Canyon.

 

 

As a bonding experience and a bit of ‘naughty’ fun, it’s priceless; he stays up late and we eat junk food and crack jokes. But it’s also so that I can show him something bigger. It lets me show him that beyond our three-bed semi there are a lot of different people and a living, ever-changing planet. Not a perfect one, but one worth seeing and living in and maybe even making their mark on it.

 

And it all starts with leaving the suburbs.