There is much in my life over which I have little control. At the moment it is the message: “It’s almost the mid of the week…” which opens my Tuesday phone; on Thursday: “It’s nearly the weekend…” finds its way to my screen. What I now know, but have no control over, is that tomorrow’s “the weekend’s here!” will ignite my Friday. If I can just hang on another day, life will once again become worth living.
But not for everyone. “I don’t want the weekend to come” was an essay from a high school teenager of how the playful and carefree days that had come at the end of her primary school week had given way to the anxieties of what plans she had for the weekend and whether, come Monday morning, she or her phone would be telling others of the amazing and wild things which had happened. Not having such stories might put her in line for more lonely weekends; fabricating them just added to her anxiety. She didn’t envy the story-tellers – she didn’t believe quarter of what they said – only wished she could be brave enough to state that nothing much had happened: she had just stayed at home and caught up on sleep.
The cultural weight weekends carry stems from the idea that what is done during the week, commonly known as work, is unnatural, stressful and frustrating. Having been subjected to these conditions, you are entitled to a weekend release; and the fact that only two days have been set aside for this, but five for work, means weekends must be lived carpe diem.
It is ironic that as the importance of the weekend as a means of surviving the week has grown, the length of that week has lessened. Six hundred years BCE, Judaism laid down the law that the seventh day was to be a rest from all labour. The Romans went one better: it was only on the eighth day that school children had a break and workers came from the fields. But the French Revolution was the new broom to sweep very, very clean: nine days of work allowed for a rest on the tenth. The determination to remove all religious or traditional connotations from calendars and adopt one based on the decimal system might have been strong in science but not in sense. It was abandoned a dozen years later.
What was more revolutionary and long-lasting than the French calendar was the entry into the Oxford English Dictionary of the word “weekend”, the use of which was first documented in a magazine of 1879. Published in the north of England, it reflected the fact that the pattern of the working week was undergoing change. So that workers could begin their week properly refreshed and sober, one factory gave them the choice of knocking off at 2 p.m. on Saturday; if any wished to complete a full day’s work he or she was free to do so, but no overtime time would be paid. No record is available of those who stayed behind on the factory floor.
In both England and the United States, the leading industrial nations in the early twentieth century, an increase in real per capita income led to the six-day working week falling away. No loss in productivity and profits was evident and there was a strong opinion that the two days of rest for the workers meant better application to the task when they returned to the job on Monday. Legislation followed and in 1929 an American union demanded and gained the official five-day working week. Since then there has been a global move towards the standardisation of working hours per week, the general number now being forty in total; weekend days may differ in accordance with the religious practices of different countries, but a two-day time off work is the norm.
Intelligent life from beyond our planet, were it to decide to make a call, would be puzzled by the logic of calendar definitions. How, it might ask, can a week be defined as “a period of seven days”, but the weekend, the end of the week, comes after only five days have passed? If mathematics has any universal understanding, 7 = 5 will not make sense to your alien-in-the-space.
Apart from shortcomings in the application of logic, the behaviour of the many humans who belong to the TGIF club might amaze these visitors. Trying their hardest to have five days pass as quickly as possible for the sake of reaching the weekend’s two days would seem a poor return for one’s investment in life. Another behaviour likely to make an alien harbour suspicion is how the arrival of a weekend suddenly energises those who, on Thursday, claim third-degree burnout.
But something sinister is lurking…something which might drain the lifeblood of weekends, leaving us enfeebled and unhappy. There is talk of four-day week, even a three-day one. What will become of a weekend? Soon there will be no such thing! This, on top of working from home, is decimating the TGIF clubs around the world. It must not be allowed to go any further. Unless life begins on a Friday and ends on a Monday morning, I’m out of here.
Illustration: unsplash.com – sincerely-media-Vj
A perking up of my spirit still occurs come Friday, even though I last worked at a job with regular hours, and five consecutive working days a week, over twenty years ago. Since then, Saturday and Sunday have made little difference to me in practice. (However, I have church services to look forward to on Sundays, which makes Sundays special for me).
And despite more than two decades having passed since Mondays mattered, I still feel rather low on a Monday morning.
In Britain, a number of companies are trialling four day working weeks. This experiment runs counter to the philosophy of our new Prime Minister and her ineffable government, whose view is that we the peasantry should work without let, until we either find a handy ditch and die in it, or we drop in our traces. What an outrage it is that the state should have to spend so much on state pensions for the elderly! (This is why in Britain the age at which you qualify for your state pension keeps being put back. I have friends who began to receive their state pension when they turned 65; I had to wait until I turned 66 before I began to receive my state pension; youngsters today will probably have to wait until they’re 75 – unless – as is probable – they do the decent thing, and spare the state the expense of pension pay outs by dying in their traces).