Oh no, not again. Another sodding bank holiday. Don’t get me wrong. I like a day off as much as the next person. But there is something about bank holidays that just feels outdated.

For a start they’re a bit like buses: you wait all winter for one and then four come along at once.

It seems only yesterday that we were all enjoying a hot four-day Easter weekend. Do we really need another one so soon — and again on the 27th?

Sarah Vine discusses the frequency of bank holidays throughout Spring and how shops use the dates as opportunities to boost sales (file image)

There were talks of shifting today’s holiday to somewhere more useful like October — first mooted in 2010 by the Coalition government in the days when ministers had time to think about anything other than Brexit. But that seems to have come to nothing.

Then there’s the kind of collective madness they seem to engender. If it’s not rushing to B&Q to spend three days hammering things together, it’s getting drunk, setting fire to hamburgers and, weather permitting, giving yourself third-degree sunburn.

But mainly its the fact that the whole concept of the bank holiday makes no sense in the 24-hour digital nightmare that is the modern world.

Bank holidays are like buses: you wait all winter for one and then four come along at once

They belong to a slower age, one where communities were close knit, where the majority of work was of a physical nature, where we lived to a much greater degree according to the rhythm of the seasons.

In that context, several Spring holidays in a row makes sense, as does the one at the end of August, timed for Harvest. Coming together for a communal day of rest and celebration still had some kind of genuine meaning. Now it’s just another opportunity for a half-price DFS sofa sale.