The Friday Bank Holiday that is known as Good Friday is upon us. I’m not celebrating it for the holy day that it’s become latterly. I’m celebrating it because of the pagan festival it was originally. Actually, because I don’t get holiday pay, I’m not celebrating it at all!
It is a time of chocolate and lounging around and lazing in front of the television and consuming by the bucket-load repeated programmes on television, and other activities that are the worst best in British culture.
How feckless we have become. What a shocking illustration of lazy ne’er-do-wells we have made ourselves in to. It really is very shameful.
Many decades ago the male youth of this country would, on a Bank Holiday, spend ages cleaning and polishing their motor-scooters, cars or motorbikes. Then they would painstakingly dress in their Sunday Best.
Meanwhile their wives, girlfriends or casual female acquaintances would likewise dress carefully in their smartest chic attire. And in their glorious smartness and with their carefully bouffanted and coiffured hair they would look so beautiful.
And then the boys, in full and fine regalia and Sunday Very Best suits and shirts and ties, and the girls, in their deliciously constructed beauty would jump on their motor scooters, motorbikes or any other form of transport they could find and drive down to Southend-on-Sea for the day.
Or Brighton.
And there they would spend many a happy hour cruising the streets, admiring each other’s forms of transport before partaking of the local alcohol. For several hours.
The day would inevitably begin to be brought to a close with all parties taking a leisurely stroll along the promenade before the Grand Finale.
The highlight of the day, the final event, a mass brawl involving flick-knives, bike-chains, broken bottles and even, for the horticulturally-minded, various garden implements would usually take place in the form of running battles between the various factions.
Sometimes these pitched battles would last for hours.
But a few days later most of these participants would be back at work, wearing their cuts, scars and slings like some kind of badge of honour.
And look at us now.
Pampered, television-watching, chavs drugged with the opiate of the masses. Mao got that right at least.
I really don’t know if this is good progress or not.
Speak for yourself, I’m spending this holiday in a whirl of spring-cleaning productiveness and essay writing :p
I do the wrping clean at this time every year…yeay me!
For the past four weeks I have had a resident plumber in the house redoing my en suite and my bathroom. I said to him last night as he was finishing that I hoped he’d have a good Easter break and I’d see him next week. He stood there and said, I’m coming tomorrow and am planning to do a full days work! As I sit here now, he is tiling the bathroom wall!
I was so shocked that he was going to work today, that when he told me, I mumbled, stuttered and looked like a bumbling fool for a few minutes.
Given the chance, I too would be out cleaning and polishing my motorbike in preparation for a day’s outing to the seaside, for tea and a punch-up.
But it’s raining.