Metro 165

Next Monday is Spring Bank Holiday, where we get a paid day off for no real good reason. We’re all grateful for these handful of leisure days that the government grant us, but we deserve more.

I’m working on a book idea called “You Need Never Work Again” in which I attempt to find a valid reason to make every day of the year a Bank Holiday. I need only create 366 feast days and we can all sit with our feet up the whole year round and drink ourselves into oblivion. I see no downside to this

They need to have a strong argument to convince employers that they can’t force you to come in; maybe religious or cultural significance or association with some indisputably great person.
18th July is easy, it’s Nelson Mandela’s birthday – what boss is going to argue that his life isn’t worth a day of reflection? 5th December is the anniversary of his death. If they’ve given you his birthday off then they’re going to look pretty despicable if they don’t let you mourn his demise. But humanity hasn’t thrown up many worthy candidates: it’s basically Mandela and Jesus. Try taking today off because it’s the birthday of Tina Hobley from Holby City. You can argue she’s deserved it because her name is nearly an anagram of her most famous show.  But I don’t see anyone buying it. You might have more luck saying you wish to honour of the death of Pope John XXI, the only Portuguese Pope. But your employer would be narked off that you’d already taken the day off for the first 20 Pope Johns, especially when he finds out there was no Pope John XX. This is like when you tried to take the day off school for a grandparent’s funeral for the fifth time.

I’d go for saying you can’t work on May 20th because it’s World Metrology Day and you feel very strongly that it’s important today as it was in 1875 to celebrate the worldwide uniformity of the metre.
So far I’ve really only come up with one really good extra day off and you’ll have to wait a while – It’s St Scholastica’s Day on February 10th.

St Scholastica is the patron saint  of convulsive children, nuns and storms. Her patronage also extends to being “against rain,” which seems a bit shortsighted to me.

On St Scholastica’s Day in 1354 some posh students were drinking in the Swyndlestock Tavern in Oxford and accused the landlord of serving them “indifferent wine”. The regular non-University punters of the establishment took exception to their attitude and the argument escalated into a full-blown riot. The townsfolk  beat and killed the Gownsfolk and ransacked their colleges for three glorious days before order was restored.

Nowadays, thanks to political correctness gone mad, attacking students is against the law, EXCEPT on St Scholastica’s Day when all decent, hard-working people are allowed to absent themselves from their place of labour and search out University students. If they discover any they must playfully batter them round the head with twigs, branches or iron bars, but the beating MUST STOP once the student is dead. The only place where students can seek sanctuary from is within the confines of their library. Most of them would rather die. But with the students out the way, the rest of us can stay in the pub with our feet up drinking indifferent wine to our heart’s content. Sweet!

I hope I can get the book out soon, but the more days I take off, the harder it is to complete.