Putting The Holiday Back Into Bank Holiday

Putting the Holiday back into Bank Holiday

What did you get up to over the August Bank Holiday, anything good? Really? I’m not sure that’s legal, not in this country anyway! Still, I’m sure the fresh air did you good!

Seriously, what does a Bank Holiday mean these days? For many, it means a free day off that they don’t have to book three weeks in advance or mud wrestle the bosses ten tonne wife for. However, in modern day Britain, a Bank Holiday can mean just another day of thankless toil. It seems to be almost the norm nowadays, especially in the service industry, for public holidays becoming days employees need to book off if they don‘t wish to work. To put it another way, if you want to spend ages in traffic, only to end up at a flooded campsite before gradually sinking in the mud, on what would otherwise be a working day, you need to pre-arrange it.

There are a few advantages to this in that if you did work, you wouldn’t have to have to spend the rest of the week catching up with the work you didn’t do, you wouldn’t have to kill time trying to find something useful to do and you still have the extra day off to use at another time during the year.

Therefore, in some ways, anyone who falls into this category, is being done a favour. Personally, however, I think it is the thin end of the wedge. There are very few days in the year it seems that we can now look upon in any kind of “special” way. With the exception of Christmas Day, there doesn’t appear to be any public holiday where almost everywhere is closed. Big supermarkets and major chain stores are open, so smaller businesses open in a bid to keep up. I guess they all assume that with no work to go to, we’ll all be so bored that we’ll go shopping.

Obviously there are many essential services that need to be operational. After all, we wouldn’t want to hear, after injuring precious parts of our anatomy in a freak drawer slamming incident, “Thank you for calling 999, the office is now closed, please call again ……….”

That being said, I’m sure we could all live without being able to buy a loaf of bread for twenty-four hours.

As published in the 14th September edition of "The Kemptown Rag"

What a lot of weather we're having!"

As Summer’s go, we’re not exactly having a good one are we?

In many ways I don’t care, as weeks of sunshine leave me longing for autumn. This is partly because, as a nation, I don’t think we’re geared for too much hot weather. The average workplace tends to have either no air conditioning at all or it’s the kind that smells like something has died somewhere in the system and rumbles louder than a Ford Mustang on tick-over. Personally, I would much rather open a window, but I fear that’s a “health and safety no-no” these days.

As well as often unbearable Summer working conditions, there is also only so much bare flesh that I can deal with. As soon as there is some watery April sun, almost everyone starts to strip off, to the point where I think we should have some kind of dress code. Why is it that in Summer, some people go everywhere dressed for a day at the beach? Do these people not have mirrors?

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t like to push a trolley around a supermarket amongst a mass of flip-flopping, scantily clad beach goers who seem to have forgotten that they can be seen. It has nothing to do with a person’s appearance or how gorgeous they think they look, although many look atrocious, it has more to do with the fact that it is actually quite cold outside and they look daft. It would help if they took their sunglasses off indoors too.

As published in the August 31st edition of "The Kemptown Rag"