That Sunday feeling

The problem with weekends is that they are just too short. Well I say that, when I was a WFH mum weekends really only stood out in so much as I could hand over some of my everyday tasks to Mr FDMTG, which was nice, but it was hardly the break that I had come to understand a weekend to mean.

This is a hangover from my school days, when the weekend was the most exciting time of the week. Saturday night was the night for discos, snogging, bar hopping and generally getting into trouble. Hmm, thinking about this perhaps it is no bad thing that my weekends are a touch more sedate than they were in my teenage years.

One particularly riotous escapade occurred when my friend and I decided to put our somewhat shaky command of maths to work on the finances of our weekend drinking. We came up with the bright idea that rather than cough up a few quid per drink in the local den of vice, we should instead buy direct from the supplier (in this case an off licence of dubious repute) and drink our tipple of choice straight from the bottle.

I remember buying the vodka, the first few slugs and then nothing more until I woke up in a hospital bed the next morning, feeling as if I had been run over by several buses and then come down with the world's most earth shattering case of food poisoning.

To make matters even worse I was meant to be staying at my friend's house, with her delightfully straight-laced parents that weekend. On that bleak Sunday morning I returned to the pastel haven that was their home and was promptly shoved into the guest bedroom to puke my way to repentance, until they could return this 'bad influence' back to her own louche parents, never to be invited to lead their daughter astray again.

Tales like this might make you wonder why I recall my school day weekends with such fondness but, mercifully for my liver, such excesses were not the norm. Instead weekends were a blur of dancing at neon lit clubs to 90s dance music. I can't hear Sash Encore Une Fois without instantly being transported to flinging my hands above my head, on a packed dance floor, fuggy with cigarette smoke as me and my gay best friend did our best to pretend that we really were part of the cool crowd.

There was the painfully pretentious bar where we would sip over priced cocktails - the livid green, banana-flavoured Pisang Orange was a firm favourite - as we bitchily ripped apart the other clientele. The cafe where all the ex-pat brats (I grew up in Brussels) would meet to flirt, kiss, drink and fuel interschool feuds. Then there was the crazy few weeks I dated a seriously cute Columbian bar tender, who turned out to have a sideline in dealing something a whole lot stronger than Stella Artois.

The problem with those Saturday nights was that they were always followed by Sunday afternoons, when you suddenly realised that you hadn't even glanced at your homework and you had to be up inhumanly early the next morning with everything ready to  hand in. It is a lifelong trait of mine to leave everything to the last minute, so Sunday evenings were characterised by frantically cramming some project that should have taken two weeks to compete into a couple of hours.

That sinking feeling of impending doom stayed with me throughout all of my years of education and employment. But as a freelance mummy working from home that Sunday feeling hasn't troubled me for a long while.

That is until now, when going back to work reminded me with a jolt just how short weekends are and how futile it is to spend all day Sunday wishing that it wasn't Monday tomorrow.

Perhaps that's why this post from The Daily Mash, which suggests we could all  have a six day weekend if we stopped dicking around at work, made me laugh out loud. After just a few short weeks back in an office I am reminded once again that if we spent less time in meetings talking about work and more time actually,  you know, doing it, the concept of a six-day weekend could easily become a reality. I might just go and set up a Change.org petition to campaign in favour of this, after all Cameron can't ignore the fact that me and all my Facebook pals agree, can  he?