I always find Bank Holidays such hard work (From Preston and Leyland Citizen)

I always find Bank Holidays such hard work

2:52pm Tuesday 5th May 2009

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I can’t decide whether I love or hate Bank Holidays. Obviously it is great having the day off work.

The bad part is that everyone else has the day off too.

On most A-roads traffic grinds to a halt – if you fancy a day at the seaside and a stress-free journey to the coast you have to be prepared to pack the children into the car at 4am and set off home at 1am.

If you want to leave the car at home and use buses and trains, you’ve got to work around a much-reduced service.

Local attractions such as stately homes and fun parks aren’t much fun, with nine-hour queues for an ice cream and a four-hour wait for a go on the playground slide.

So, having dismissed plans of a day out, you decide to use the time usefully and pop to the supermarket. Sadly, you discover that half the population have thought along the same lines and are milling about in the aisles looking thoroughly miserable.

The problem with Bank Holidays is that if you haven’t organised something such as a long weekend away, you can end up wasting hours wondering what to do.

Although great in principle, Bank Holidays can be quite depressing. We always look forward to them, but when they arrive, unless you have something arranged, a long weekend away or a trip to see friends, you can spend half the time sitting around drinking tea, while wondering what to do, and the other half braving the crowds and doing something just for the sake of it. It is easy to end up thinking ‘What a waste of an extra day’s holiday.’ Even the pleasure of sitting in the garden on Bank Holiday is marred by the sound of the hundreds of people who spend every break boosting the coffers of B&Q, before trying out their new turbo-charged hedge trimmers and rotary tree loppers.

And pity anyone who lives near a pub with a beer garden, because every Bank Holiday families seem to congregate in them for the entire long weekend, the adults seemingly oblivious to the children, who mill about for hours in baking hot sun eating endless packets of crisps.

By far the best thing about having Monday off is being able to stay up later the night before, watch TV – quite often there are decent films or dramas on Sundays, but never on Saturdays, which doesn’t make sense to me – and have a lie in.

They make Sundays, with that ‘back-to-work tomorrow’ feeling, more bearable.

But Monday then replaces Sunday as the depressing day before work.

On balance I’m giving Bank Holidays the thumbs down.

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