Are you enjoying the bank holiday weekend? Me neither. I got a good five minutes extra before my four-year-old came in and woke me up anyway. But you know you're onto a loser when the best thing you can say about a day is that it's going to be slightly shorter than normal. Or, conversely, that it's going to take slightly longer than it usually does to realise how cold and miserable it is outside.

I won't say I'm disappointed. That would imply I have some expectation of the bank holiday actually being fun. In fact, I'm halfway to being pleased. At least there have been no disasters so far. Last time, I woke up on Saturday to see water oozing through a new brown stain in my bedroom ceiling and the realisation that I'd have to wait until Tuesday before I could call anyone in to do something about it. The time before that, I tried to do some DIY – and I don't even need to finish that sentence, because it's such a painful bank holiday cliche. (Let's just say it took a lot of Polyfilla and some creative use of cardboard to get rid of the hole.)

The truth is that bank holidays are part of the ever-tightening vortex of contemporary misery. At their heart is a tormenting paradox. You spend most of your time at work daydreaming about the good things you might do and see, if only you weren't trapped behind your desk. But then, when you are finally set free, so too are all your fellow countrymen and women. Whichever castle, beach, museum, shop, film, restaurant, pub, or (and here in itself is an unpleasant joke) summer fete you thought you might visit is guaranteed to be inaccessible.

Worse still, the people overcrowding the so-called attraction will be feeling just as miserable as you and, therefore, being British, drinking with ever increasing urgency. Small wonder that so many people end their bank holiday being seen in A&E. Or rather, waiting to be seen in A&E, because our hospitals too become even more hopelessly overrun.

In fact, while I'm correcting myself, I realise that the previous paragraph is based on the false assumption that you might manage to get anywhere at all, when, as everyone knows, the chances of getting stuck in a traffic jam on a bank holiday are even higher than those of torrential rainfall. It's as if the things exist just to remind us all that we live on a cold and overcrowded island where nothing works properly.

In short, bank holidays are crap. Even so, I'd hate to give you the impression that I'm against people getting time off work. I'm a realist, not a killjoy. I'm all for people being allowed out of the office once in a while. Or, at least, I would be, if they weren't released all at once. Surely it would be better to legislate that everyone should be allowed a few days extra holiday a year, to take at their leisure? (And I use the word "leisure" emphatically.) Imagine how useful it would be to be able to have an extra day to play with so that you can go shopping on a Wednesday once in a while. Or to extend your summer break. Or to go to the seaside on a day when there's actually enough room to lay down a towel …

What's that? Oh yes. I see. I'm being hopelessly naive. A system like that would actually improve our lives. It'll never happen.

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