Am I really going to let my six-year-old daughter choose our next weekend break? “Dad, can I choose where we go on our next holiday?”. This feels like a trap. In my head, I’m weighing up encouraging her enthusiasm for exploring the world.
At the same time, I’m not sure I’m ready to sign over a holiday to the same girl who was recently furious that I wouldn’t let her wear her pyjama top to school as a coat. “Where would you like to go?”. I’m deliberately cagey, negotiating with a six-year-old is fraught with danger.
“Belfast”. I did not see that coming. I was sold immediately.
I’d never been to , and it wasn’t really a place that I’d considered visiting. Firstly, my perspective of Belfast was shaped by UK news reports in the late 1980s about the troubles - and that view was long overdue an update. Secondly, Belfast is right there.
It’s part of the UK and so it seemed familiar and felt like I could go whenever. But, given my daughter Emilie’s interest and the fact she’s currently learning about the Titanic at school, it appeared that the time was..
.now! I’m still trying to decide whether agreeing so readily was good or bad parenting. Either way, I had agreed, and so we set about working out when we’d go and what we’d do.
We were fortunate with timings: the half-term holiday wasn’t far away and we had an extra day off school on the Friday before. This meant we could get away before the school holiday tax kicked in on the flights (not an .