Did you have a good bank holiday? Taking your jacket off as your computer loads, you consider it. Did you? Have you ever? A sudden fizz of memory, 12-years-old and skimming over the brook on a rope swing before trundling home for a crumpet. That was good. The thrill of waking up on a Monday morning without your regular doom, a short break from clambering around the hierarchy of Year 7, of the hourly reminder you are no longer clever. That was a good bank holiday, when you were a child and it was an unwrapped gift. But time passes.
For a large wedge of your life, a bank holiday was a sort of makeshift rehab centre, where you would lie quite still watching Poirot while the tide of a hangover splashed at your throat. It was possible back then to quantify shame in pints and hours, and a bank holiday was part of a well-rehearsed schedule of boredom, shots, toast and regret, a bookend to the 9-5 weeks of data input and light harassment.
You’d begin your “holiday” with the weekend’s eyeliner smeared across your face like an old-time chimney sweep, showering only once you’d swallowed a pint of Diet Coke in small, Calpol-sized helpings while muttering aphorisms about hate. If this day was a glass it would be half full and smudged from the dishwasher, memories from the night before of pretending you’d meant to fall over, and trying to bond with the toilet attendant. You’d retch into your hands. This was before “loungewear”, of course, so you were forced to dress in an outfit of your own design, including the XL pyjama trousers from the period you got Atkins wrong, and a cerise fleece the plumber left behind. And then to Poirot, served best with toast, lovely Poirot, that clever little sausage, a man designed in Belgium to rescue the hungover and the weak. Was that a good bank holiday? It served a function.
Are you allowed to admit you dread bank holidays today? It doesn’t sound good, is all I’m saying. It sounds like you hate your kids. Which is not the story you want to tell about your life, with its modest lawn and old cat, and family so adorable you got a second phone just to hold all the photos. If it helps, Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement that Labour would create four more bank holidays was met with a groan of apathy that suggests others share your dread. Because you do dread them, you do yearn now for the spa-like calm of work, where you are allowed to have a cup of tea whenever you fancy, and talk to adults about things like Isis without cheerily pretending everything is going to be OK. Bank holiday Mondays go on forever. They are the Filo pastry of Mondays, 1,000 very thin days layered on top of each other to give the rough appearance of one single day. Also, fattening, what with all that time so close to the fridge.
There’ll be one comedian in your life who thinks it would be a really normal and achievable idea to drive to a seaside town, forgetting that it was taken over by racists in the mid-2000s. And 1,000 hours later, there you’ll be, sullenly eavesdropping on a couple at a service station while you tend to a seasonal latte and wait for everybody to come back from the toilet. “You’ve just got to buy the bullet,” the woman says, with force. “Is that the phrase?” the man replies. “Yes, so you’re invested, and can’t back out.” It’s the memory of this that gets you through the hour spent cleaning sick from the backseat of your hire car and the afternoon sheltering from the rain in a games arcade that is also a marijuana shop, and the funny dance you have to do to encourage your child to use the big girl’s toilet. This is a holiday only in that all the structures you’d carefully erected to make life run smoothly have deflated, airless lilos, like memories of actual holidays, where you read a book and laughed about sex. Free time, it turns out, is very expensive.
The journey home is sodden and infinite, and once again involves vomit. And the week ahead promises to be anxious because you will have to fit in an extra day’s work, and you lie in bed with a candyfloss headache wishing you were a different kind of person, one who could “live” in the “moment”, but what really is a moment, when you think about it? What is living? Did you remember to take the wet clothes out of the washing machine? Are you allowed to have the heating on in May? Did you have a good bank holiday? This might take some time.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman