Monday musing
Grandad October 6th, 2008
When I was a kid, I hated Mondays.
Monday was washday. My mother would fire up the gas boiler in the annex to the house and pile the weeks washing in. Mountains of steaming sheets and shirts. I still remember the smell to this day.
Monday was also reheat day. The Sunday dinner was always reheated for Monday, or served cold.
Then of course, Monday was the start of the school week. It was the day I remembered all the homework I was supposed to have done over the weekend. I used to work out which teacher gave the severest punishment and try to do his homework in about five minutes flat. It’s not easy doing four foolscap pages of an essay in five minutes. It take slightly longer than five minutes to do fifteen calculus problems, when you’re not too sure how calculus works. Five minutes to translate a chapter of Latin? Forget it! The bastards always gave us a ton of homework for the weekend. Monday was always the day I fell ill with a temperature [the old thermometer held against the light bulb trick] or a stomach ache. My mother never believed me though and I was always thrown out the door.
When I started work, Mondays weren’t too bad. The panic had gone out of the moment as the only homework I had to do was my Travel and Subsistence claims. They were easy enough. Think of a number between two hundred and three hundred. Double it. Add a random number. Multiply by four, and that’s my mileage for the previous week. The forms were a pain in the arse to fill in though.
Then there was the girl in the office who seemed to spend the weekend watching all the programmes on television that I hated. She would get very excited about them, and as none of us liked the programmes, she would have to give us a blow by blow and line by line account of each programme so that we would know what we missed. If I hated Big Brother and Friends before, I despised them after that.
Then I retired.
I like Mondays now.
I like every day of the week now, and as Monday is a day in the week, there is no reason not to like it.
I used to look forward to Fridays, but I don’t any more. All the days are as good as each other, and frankly I wouldn’t know what day of the week it was if it weren’t for my watch. I often have to refer to that to see if it’s Tuesday or Saturday. I like that. I’m not regulated any more. A calendar or a clock doesn’t dictate my life. As long as I remember which day to put the bin out, I couldn’t give a shit.
Am I the only person who likes Mondays?
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