Another Day’s Holiday? Please, Give Me a Break

According to a poll, the vast majority of people questioned

as they struggled back to work last week thought

that England should have followed Scotland’s lead and

made Tuesday a bank holiday.

Two things strike me as odd here. First, that anyone

could be bothered to undertake such research and,

second, that anyone in their right mind could think that

the Christmas break was in some way too short.

I took ten days off and by 11 o’clock on the first morning

I had drunk fourteen cups of coffee, read all the

newspapers and the Guardian and then . . . and then what?

By lunchtime I was so bored that I decided to hang a

few pictures. So I found a hammer, and later a man came

to replaster the bits of wall I had demolished. Then I

tried to fix the electric gates, which work only when

there’s an omega in the month. So I went down the

drive with a spanner, and later another man came to put

them back together again.

I was just about to start on the Aga, which had broken

down on Christmas Eve, as they do, when my wife took

me on one side by my earlobe and explained that builders

do not, on the whole, spend their spare time writing, so

writers should not build on their days off. It’s expensive

and it can be dangerous, she said.

She’s right. We have these lights in the dining room

which are supposed to project stars onto the table below.

It has never really bothered me that the light seeps out

of the sides so the stars are invisible; but when you are

bored, this is exactly the sort of thing that gets on your

nerves.

So I bought some gaffer tape and suddenly my life had

a purpose. There was something to do.

Mercifully, Christmas intervened before I could do

any more damage, but then it went away again and once

more I found myself staring at the day through the wrong

end of a pair of binoculars. Each morning, bed and the

blessed relief of unconsciousness seemed so far away.

I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips

to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow

missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000

excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to

buy a footstool.

I took the entire family to the sort of gifty-wifty shop

where the smell of pot-pourri is so pungent that it makes

you go cross-eyed. Even though the children were lying

on the floor gagging, I still spent hours deliberately

choosing a footstool that was too small and the wrong

colour so that I could waste some more time taking it

back.

The next day, still gently redolent of Delia Smith’s

knicker drawer, I decided to buy the wrong sort of

antique filing cabinet. But after the footstool debacle my

wife said no. So it seemed appropriate that I should

develop some kind of illness. This is a good idea when

you are at a loose end because everything, up to and

including herpes, is better than being bored.