What day is it?

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere." John Wyndham.

This Saturday is not very much like a Saturday. There is an air of the Dead Sunday about it: sullen skies; oppressive silence; lack of people and that air of weary lassitude which characterises the resentment of a myth inspired day of rest. But Saturday it is. I know because yesterday was Friday.

You get into a different mind set when it’s Sunday. A lazy waking followed by morning mouth cup of coffee and an interminable internal debate about how (sometimes why) to wash yourself. Should it, one asks oneself, be bath, or rinse, or shower? Deep questions. This can sometimes take you up to lunchtime and beyond.

However: it’s Saturday. And that is completely different. But it is a Saturday which links the day after tomorrow to a Bank Holiday Monday. So, on the points rating system of how much credit to give individual days it changes its character. A Saturday before a Bank Holiday Monday is more akin to a Free Friday (a very high points score) because whatever you do today, however excessive you might be, you’ve got a day to recover and you still won’t have to go to work on the next day.

It also makes next week a Short Week: so if you get into the mindset that the day when you start work in the week is a Monday, you will be a day out throughout the week because you’ll be thinking that the Tuesday you start work again is a Monday, and the Wednesday is a Tuesday and so on until it’s suddenly the end of the week on a Thursday which is actually a Friday. If you see what I mean.

The whole of today has had that repressed feeling as if it was trying to be something else. Perhaps it’s to do with the weather which is humid and trying to make its mind up about whether to rain or not. It tried a few tentative drops and then couldn’t be bothered to make anything of it.

It is my personal belief that the weather is trying to force me to water the plants even though we have been promised rain tomorrow.

I do not have the strength of will to deny unsuspecting water-wanters their little drink. But I also know (in the scheme of things) that watering the plants tonight will ensure rain tomorrow.

For those people who value fine weather during a Bank Holiday weekend, I apologise.