Do the sensible thing this bank holiday: stay at home

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/25/stay-at-home-this-bank-holiday

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Generally the thought of a bank holiday is a happy one. It’s a get-out-of-jail-free card, a 12-hour pass away from the daily grind where we don’t have to vacate the pub early on Sunday, which leaves us with the idea, however erroneous, that we’ve somehow got one over on The Man. Of course what this actually means is that we go back to work with a hangover on Tuesday rather than Monday, which does precisely nothing for our mood, knowing as we do that we’ve just wasted a free day off.

But the August bank holiday always feels different. It is uniquely boring. Everyone is frazzled, either from the culmination of six weeks of holiday fatigue engendered by trying to keep the kids occupied for 42 days straight, or from malingering in a half-empty office while the boss expects you to work twice as hard to cover for the term-time only staff.

The last thing anyone really wants to do is pack up the car, the kids and the dog and drive to that delightful spot by the coast you’ve recently read about in a Sunday supplement that says it’s the ideal place to go on a bank holiday. And perhaps it would be, except it takes twice as long to get there because everybody else has had the same idea, so you spend an additional three hours pointlessly gunning the engine in a five-mile queue on the M5 while cursing your other half for even suggesting that it would be lovely to do something as a family because, you know, it’s the last bank holiday before Christmas.

Of course when you get there it will be raining, and then you discover that the writer of the piece in the supplement was being economical with the truth. But you’re stuck there now, it would take too long to go somewhere else and you can’t face spending the rest of the day at home with the kids, who are now moaning that it’s cold, it’s wet and they’re very, very bored. Perhaps, to get out of the rain you will duck into a quaint tearoom decorated with “vintage” sepia pictures of local beauty spots, and spend a king’s ransom on a pot of stewed tea and rock-hard scones served with a minuscule pot of jam that’s never been near a strawberry and a dish of runny, yellowing cream. It’s pointless trying to chat, you’ll never hear yourselves over the roar of the other customers jostling each other at the too-close tables and rustling their garish cagoules. Quietly seething and bored out of your mind, you wonder if it’s time to go home yet.

If this family-themed August bank holiday nightmare doesn’t appeal to you and, frankly, there’s no reason why it should, perhaps you’d rather take a short romantic break abroad? Best to leave early for the airport though. The roads will be jammed with people trying to get to some idyll they’ve read about in the Sunday papers, but with luck you just might make your flight, assuming of course there are any flights and they haven’t all been cancelled because of a long-running industrial dispute or Icelandic volcano. Squeezed into the tiny aircraft seats, sweating, stressed and argumentative, you think about how much all of this has cost and wish you’d just stayed at home.

The August bank holiday is both a giant, boring, stressful full stop and a relief; the summer holidays are over and we can all stop pretending that they’ve been even vaguely enjoyable. I for one cannot wait for the chilly onset of autumn.