Everyone hates Monday, right? Start of the week, a return to the mouldy old weekly routine. "Oh God I have to go back to work again!" you cry into the bathroom mirror, clawing out your own eyeballs. Garfield hates Mondays. Garfield's hatred of Monday is proportionate to his love of lasagne, and he bloody loves that stuff.
Fuck Garfield, the fat ginger twat. He never did any good for anyone - he just lolls around like every other cat, rolling about on the floor and getting hair all over everything and shitting behind the TV so poor, lonely John has to scoop it up while he contemplates suicide.
And you - you're just as bad for having the same idea about Monday. Fair enough, it's hard to get up early again after the weekend and it's very nice having time off, but Monday just feels like A Day. You know which day doesn't? Sunday.
Sunday is the worst day of the week.
On Monday things are getting started again. Granted it's not necessarily things you care about or actively want to do, but it's things. People are around, shops are open (properly) and there is (theoretically) productive activity. Sunday is the death of the week. Shops don't work like they're supposed to, everything is on hold and the world doesn't feel right. Like you've put your boxers on the wrong way round and haven't noticed yet, you just feel a bit funny. Down there.
I know some of you are immediately formulating your furiously sweaty defence of Sunday and how it's not the same for everyone because lots of people work shifts. Their weekend may come in the middle of the week. A lot of people aren't employed at all and, in theory, Sunday is just like all the other days. NO. I've been in both those positions - unemployed and working shifts - and Sunday is always the same. Sunday feels different. Even on a bank holiday Sunday still feels distinctly...well, Sunday. I can't enjoy a Diet Coke on a Sunday. Because it's tainted.
Like all the best neuroses this one was embedded in me in childhood. Sunday was the day before it all started again - back to school, back to the drudgery of the routine, nose to the grindstone, face to the fan, knee to the telephone. Once that routine actually started, as I said, it was never as bad as the anticipation. But everyone kept emphasising it - "Back to school tomorrow a-hurr hurr hurr!" And people do it now, too! "Sunday today - back to work tomorrow!" Keep reminding me. Keep reminding yourself. Sunday is that horrible atmosphere of the dentist's waiting room stretched out over a whole day and everyone keeps telling you. Monday is (usually) the check-up not being as bad as you were expecting.
On top of this was having to spend most weekends at my grandparents' house in Llanllwni. For those of you not familiar with Llanllwni: it's a small collection of houses in the countryside, all quaintness and vines and outside toilets full of cobwebs. A little patch of life in the country designed by Aardman animation. A shitty Hobbiton. There are no shops in Llanllwni save for one post office that sells knock-off action figures and wet sandwiches. To a little kid growing up watching Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and other American cartoons where giant cities represented the ideal modern environment, existing in a place like Llanllwni represented living death. To be in this pantomime of British adorability was like a spit in the face of my selfish kid dreams.
Then you had to DO stuff, too. Friday night and all of Saturday were yours, but not Sunday. Sunday was the Secret Weekday.
When my gran was still pretending to be religious we had to go to church with her. My granddad didn't go, which meant she would drive despite not being able to. She had a license, she just didn't know how. She would take myself and my sister to church at 98 miles per hour through narrow country roads made entirely of blind corners. We'd sit in church; me, my sister, my gran and several corpses while the vicar bored himself with his own sermon about Jesus and lemmings or something before we would break the sound barrier to get back to their bungalow.
Back at their house we'd have Sunday dinner, which was infused with some kind of sedative that makes you feel like you're on the edge of falling into a coma for the rest of the day while you try and watch TV. And TV on a Sunday, at least back then, was awful. It was like the scheduling execs were trying to express how you felt through the medium of Keeping Up Appearances and Last of the Summer Wine - watching Onslow's pasty flesh ooze out of his vest and Clegg and Co build a fully functioning robot out of old paint tins and lightbulbs. And now, of course, we have Eastenders: The Movie. Whose bright idea was it to put 3 hours of the most depressing soap opera on British TV, with lots of chunky Londoners mumbling and punching nightclubs or whatever, on a Sunday? Because I'd like to shake his hand. Then pull his arm off. In your state of food-induced hypnosis you would watch it all. Soaking it up. Yum.
Once we were full to bursting with Sunday dinner and Sunday TV it was time to be driven home. Back to Carmarthen and (relative) civilisation. My gran would plate what was left of the dinner to take back to my mum, putting it on the floor of the car with another plate covering it and resting her feet on it while my granddad did the driving. Occasionally my gran's feet would slip and the sole of her shoe would dip into the mash, but she'd just put the plate back on top and not say anything. Their old car, held together with masking tape, bailer twine and hope, had a strong stink of petrol and oil, like it was bleeding internally, that would make your head throb and your stomach turn.
We'd arrive home ill and sweaty and sleepy from the car journey, whereupon it would be time to do the homework that had been skillfully put off all week. The rest of the evening would be spent struggling over maths problems that I probably still wouldn't be able to do now and removing all the vowels from a sentence, thereby translating it into Welsh. Then it was bed early, despite having gotten up just before midday, and spending three hours trying really hard to go to sleep. In even younger years the arrival home was worse as it would mean going to bed when it was still light outside, seeing blue bleed through the curtains and hearing older kids playing football enthusiastically in the car park at the back of the house, taunting me with their laughter.
Moving into my early teens these trips stopped but new horrors emerged to take their place in the form of an alcohol-sponge stepfather who insisted on visiting his mum, with all of us in tow, every Sunday in Ammanford. Ammanford of all places. Again, for those of you who don't know, Ammanford is...there's nowhere for me to really compare it to. It's like an old people's home exploded and then a town grew from the rubble. No one under 70 has ever lived in Ammanford, people born there are born elderly. It's like the worst of the broken soviet towns that hope abandoned in the darkest years of the communist regime. Ammanford is the closest thing to a literal Hell on earth that Wales has. People don't even go there to die, they go there to pause time and be perpetually old, abandoning all memories of their youth and the outside world until time finally ceases and the universe collapses in on itself.
For a while I had to go to this forsaken, evil place and sit in an old lady's living room as she struggled to remember who any of us were and a clock ticked with dull regularity in the sickly, cake-smelling silence every Sunday. She had an ugly little dog that looked like a mop and barked like someone trying to start a lawnmower in a sewer. It was steeped in the kind of feeling that would inspire great poet to write their opus before taking their own life.
As I got older these obligations fell by the wayside, but the feelings that they created seem to have been etched into my brain forever. Now, every Sunday, it's as if I'm mentally going through all of them again and again. Even when I lived in a flat right in the very centre of Cardiff, living the aforementioned selfish kid dream, I felt like I did back in that bungalow in Llanllwni every Sunday, anticipating the smell of Matey bubblebath. Or I'd be back in Ammanford where everything is poisoned by a spiritual decay that eats away at who you are and turns you into one of Them. The Shamblers and the Moaners.
As a result, I can't get my mind wrapped around the way people can just deal with Sunday. They'll happily have a kip in a chair or go to the beach, have a pub lunch, visit relatives. They'll talk and laugh and be normal. Maybe they'll go for a picnic, ignoring the palpable sense of impending doom. I can't do it. This is too much what I imagine the Apocalypse would feel like. All I can do is sit and stew and try to distract myself. It's like being ten again and trying to play Earthworm Jim 2 and not cry over the loss of all my hope. God help me if I ever have anything to be legitimately depressed about.
Last of the Summer Wine may have been finally cancelled after nine decades on the air, but it lives on in my scarred psyche. Until Monday.
Fuck Garfield, the fat ginger twat. He never did any good for anyone - he just lolls around like every other cat, rolling about on the floor and getting hair all over everything and shitting behind the TV so poor, lonely John has to scoop it up while he contemplates suicide.
And you - you're just as bad for having the same idea about Monday. Fair enough, it's hard to get up early again after the weekend and it's very nice having time off, but Monday just feels like A Day. You know which day doesn't? Sunday.
Sunday is the worst day of the week.
On Monday things are getting started again. Granted it's not necessarily things you care about or actively want to do, but it's things. People are around, shops are open (properly) and there is (theoretically) productive activity. Sunday is the death of the week. Shops don't work like they're supposed to, everything is on hold and the world doesn't feel right. Like you've put your boxers on the wrong way round and haven't noticed yet, you just feel a bit funny. Down there.
I know some of you are immediately formulating your furiously sweaty defence of Sunday and how it's not the same for everyone because lots of people work shifts. Their weekend may come in the middle of the week. A lot of people aren't employed at all and, in theory, Sunday is just like all the other days. NO. I've been in both those positions - unemployed and working shifts - and Sunday is always the same. Sunday feels different. Even on a bank holiday Sunday still feels distinctly...well, Sunday. I can't enjoy a Diet Coke on a Sunday. Because it's tainted.
Like all the best neuroses this one was embedded in me in childhood. Sunday was the day before it all started again - back to school, back to the drudgery of the routine, nose to the grindstone, face to the fan, knee to the telephone. Once that routine actually started, as I said, it was never as bad as the anticipation. But everyone kept emphasising it - "Back to school tomorrow a-hurr hurr hurr!" And people do it now, too! "Sunday today - back to work tomorrow!" Keep reminding me. Keep reminding yourself. Sunday is that horrible atmosphere of the dentist's waiting room stretched out over a whole day and everyone keeps telling you. Monday is (usually) the check-up not being as bad as you were expecting.
On top of this was having to spend most weekends at my grandparents' house in Llanllwni. For those of you not familiar with Llanllwni: it's a small collection of houses in the countryside, all quaintness and vines and outside toilets full of cobwebs. A little patch of life in the country designed by Aardman animation. A shitty Hobbiton. There are no shops in Llanllwni save for one post office that sells knock-off action figures and wet sandwiches. To a little kid growing up watching Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and other American cartoons where giant cities represented the ideal modern environment, existing in a place like Llanllwni represented living death. To be in this pantomime of British adorability was like a spit in the face of my selfish kid dreams.
Then you had to DO stuff, too. Friday night and all of Saturday were yours, but not Sunday. Sunday was the Secret Weekday.
When my gran was still pretending to be religious we had to go to church with her. My granddad didn't go, which meant she would drive despite not being able to. She had a license, she just didn't know how. She would take myself and my sister to church at 98 miles per hour through narrow country roads made entirely of blind corners. We'd sit in church; me, my sister, my gran and several corpses while the vicar bored himself with his own sermon about Jesus and lemmings or something before we would break the sound barrier to get back to their bungalow.
Back at their house we'd have Sunday dinner, which was infused with some kind of sedative that makes you feel like you're on the edge of falling into a coma for the rest of the day while you try and watch TV. And TV on a Sunday, at least back then, was awful. It was like the scheduling execs were trying to express how you felt through the medium of Keeping Up Appearances and Last of the Summer Wine - watching Onslow's pasty flesh ooze out of his vest and Clegg and Co build a fully functioning robot out of old paint tins and lightbulbs. And now, of course, we have Eastenders: The Movie. Whose bright idea was it to put 3 hours of the most depressing soap opera on British TV, with lots of chunky Londoners mumbling and punching nightclubs or whatever, on a Sunday? Because I'd like to shake his hand. Then pull his arm off. In your state of food-induced hypnosis you would watch it all. Soaking it up. Yum.
Once we were full to bursting with Sunday dinner and Sunday TV it was time to be driven home. Back to Carmarthen and (relative) civilisation. My gran would plate what was left of the dinner to take back to my mum, putting it on the floor of the car with another plate covering it and resting her feet on it while my granddad did the driving. Occasionally my gran's feet would slip and the sole of her shoe would dip into the mash, but she'd just put the plate back on top and not say anything. Their old car, held together with masking tape, bailer twine and hope, had a strong stink of petrol and oil, like it was bleeding internally, that would make your head throb and your stomach turn.
We'd arrive home ill and sweaty and sleepy from the car journey, whereupon it would be time to do the homework that had been skillfully put off all week. The rest of the evening would be spent struggling over maths problems that I probably still wouldn't be able to do now and removing all the vowels from a sentence, thereby translating it into Welsh. Then it was bed early, despite having gotten up just before midday, and spending three hours trying really hard to go to sleep. In even younger years the arrival home was worse as it would mean going to bed when it was still light outside, seeing blue bleed through the curtains and hearing older kids playing football enthusiastically in the car park at the back of the house, taunting me with their laughter.
Moving into my early teens these trips stopped but new horrors emerged to take their place in the form of an alcohol-sponge stepfather who insisted on visiting his mum, with all of us in tow, every Sunday in Ammanford. Ammanford of all places. Again, for those of you who don't know, Ammanford is...there's nowhere for me to really compare it to. It's like an old people's home exploded and then a town grew from the rubble. No one under 70 has ever lived in Ammanford, people born there are born elderly. It's like the worst of the broken soviet towns that hope abandoned in the darkest years of the communist regime. Ammanford is the closest thing to a literal Hell on earth that Wales has. People don't even go there to die, they go there to pause time and be perpetually old, abandoning all memories of their youth and the outside world until time finally ceases and the universe collapses in on itself.
For a while I had to go to this forsaken, evil place and sit in an old lady's living room as she struggled to remember who any of us were and a clock ticked with dull regularity in the sickly, cake-smelling silence every Sunday. She had an ugly little dog that looked like a mop and barked like someone trying to start a lawnmower in a sewer. It was steeped in the kind of feeling that would inspire great poet to write their opus before taking their own life.
As I got older these obligations fell by the wayside, but the feelings that they created seem to have been etched into my brain forever. Now, every Sunday, it's as if I'm mentally going through all of them again and again. Even when I lived in a flat right in the very centre of Cardiff, living the aforementioned selfish kid dream, I felt like I did back in that bungalow in Llanllwni every Sunday, anticipating the smell of Matey bubblebath. Or I'd be back in Ammanford where everything is poisoned by a spiritual decay that eats away at who you are and turns you into one of Them. The Shamblers and the Moaners.
As a result, I can't get my mind wrapped around the way people can just deal with Sunday. They'll happily have a kip in a chair or go to the beach, have a pub lunch, visit relatives. They'll talk and laugh and be normal. Maybe they'll go for a picnic, ignoring the palpable sense of impending doom. I can't do it. This is too much what I imagine the Apocalypse would feel like. All I can do is sit and stew and try to distract myself. It's like being ten again and trying to play Earthworm Jim 2 and not cry over the loss of all my hope. God help me if I ever have anything to be legitimately depressed about.
Last of the Summer Wine may have been finally cancelled after nine decades on the air, but it lives on in my scarred psyche. Until Monday.
niobe:
I have this Monday off. and you are right, Monday's aren't as bad as Sunday's.
crackerman:
The feeling is just there, it's just part of the day like a horrible appendage.