How I Came To Terms With The Tyranny Of The Weekend: A Lazy Man's Perspective.

Au contraire...

It’s raining outside, and I'm glad. It’s that deciduous summer rain peculiar to Britain, thrown casually from passing clouds which could care less for the feelings of holidaymakers. You’ll have heard it pounding the roof of your tent or caravan, or seen it streaming down the window of the seafront café or amusement arcade. If you’re eleven years old it’s bank holiday ruining weather, trapping you indoors and stealing the fag-end of the summer holiday. If you’re a chap in your forties however, maybe feeling a bit lazy, sitting on your arse and all you need to make you the happiest of men is a film in any genre where you might find David Niven, then the rain is excellent news, it means no one can reasonably expect you to set foot past the front door. I’m not talking chronic laziness you understand, of the Channel 4 documentary “Fetch mama’s stick” type, just an acute 48 hour attack of velcro buttock.

There are dark forces working against you if it refuses to rain on a

Would David Niven have attended Zumba?

weekend such as this. An unwritten British rule that sunshine must not be wasted. To do so feels like a minor sin, as though you’re giving away a little bit of your soul. You have to find something, anything to do outside, no matter if you want to or not. It’s a tyranny.

A similar tyranny is the feeling nagging at the back of your mind that you might not have done enough. You might not have put enough effort in to satisfy the inevitable post hoc discussion when you get back to work. “What did you get up to at the weekend?” is rapidly becoming one of the most intimidating questions a man like myself of simple, quiet tastes can face. A thrill runs through me as of cold war East Berlin and the demand of “Papers!”

I’m usually taken more by surprise by the question than I should be. Initially my mind goes blank and I imagine I look confused, startled. I can’t remember what I did. The pause stretches. The polite smile on the questioner’s face starts to look brittle as they begin to wonder if they are talking to an imbecile. “Why is he so reluctant?” they’re thinking, “is he covering something up? A murder, maybe, perhaps this Ukraine business is his fault.” Eventually I do remember, but then is it enough? Do I lead an interesting enough life to satisfy this person? Have they had a more interesting time than me and if so does this mean they have in some way “won”? There is the other side of the coin to consider, as well. What if I've had too interesting a weekend? What if I flew to Rome for lunch, or spent my time racing cars against high class call girls? Should I make some self-deprecating joke about it in case I’m judged harshly as a try-too-hard?

In all likelihood I won’t have done these things. Most of my weekends sound pretty pedestrian in these conversations as is the case, I suspect, with the majority of people who have exceeded their vodka and clubbing years. This, in fact, is my issue. I considered doing more exciting things in order to spice up these Monday morning exchanges, but realised in time that I would be rolling over and submitting to oppression by a minority. I chose instead a path of honest, passive resistance. These days I answer truthfully and with pride. “I read a book on marketing psychology,” I say, my expression adding: “No, no reason, I thought it might be interesting”. Sometimes I might say “I was out with friends,” and I hope my open, honest smile conveys the rest of the message, to the effect of: “we talked about interesting stuff and laughed our arses off, without feeling the need to do so whilst water skiing or learning to play Ghanaian death drums in a community centre”.

I like to flatter myself I’m not completely boring, but I also think I have the right to the occasional dull weekend without the tacit implication that I’m wasting my life. I’m not wasting it, I’m doing stuff I like, which might just be drinking tea and watching an entire run of an American cop show, or learning all the internet has to offer on the formation of metals in collapsing suns (did you know all the iron in the universe is formed in a particular twenty second window in the life of a star?) or even just spending some time with

A "fat bike" for when
just cycling somewhere
isn't enough.

my friends, perhaps in a restaurant that isn’t owned by a TV chef.

I realise of course that all this is (probably) all in my head and just my personal paranoia. When it comes down to it, it’s a trivial opener, designed to say one of two things, either:

Hello. I’d like to converse with you for no other reason than to enjoy a few moments of greeting, as we’re a social species and it’s the sort of thing we do. I have no particular information to pass to you and no need of anything specific from you. I have nothing prepared so I’ll just slot this in to give us a bit of thinking time while the chat gets going.

Or alternatively:

Hello, I hate you. I’ve always hated you. For me, you’re one of the downsides of turning up here every day, but since this isn’t the last day of working here for either of us I feel telling you would bring these issues to the surface, creating needless bad feeling which we would then have to live with until one of us resigns or works out a way of murdering the other without getting caught. Further, I might, God forbid, need something from you at some point and the worse these situations are, the more degrading it will be for me to get on my knees and beg.

Either way, I suppose it’s just a useful cliché, a harmless little mental shortcut we can trot out and play our parts in while we settle more comfortably into the exchange. It could always be the case of course that the questioner genuinely cares and is honestly interested to find out just which of my riveting pastimes I may have been engaged in.

If this weekend tyranny is, at least in part, coming from my own head, I should think about what I’m trying to tell myself. Perhaps I am dull. I might be so boring that I’m embarrassed to tell myself and have to project my opinion onto others in the hope that I take my hint and liven myself up. Maybe I do want to do stuff that I don’t want to do. I suppose I have to consider the possibility that I’m over thinking the issue.

Lastly, on the subject of perspective, to anyone who may unaccountably be reading this in a refugee camp, or a bombed out school far from my armchair and is politely thinking “Yes, I can see how these problems would bring you such great suffering, tell me again about the clean water you use to make tea”, I can only apologise.

                                     
                                                                                                                            AA