A brief mystery of time
Normal people currently don't know if it's a Tuesday or a Friday - a state of affairs which will undoubtedly last until at least the second week of January when things return to something like normal. That's my excuse, anyway... writes Peter Edgerton
Remember those teachers who'd send a piece of chalk whistling past your adolescent lug hole, simultaneously informing you that you 'don't know what ... day it is laddie', just because you'd decided to ponder about who Liverpool reserves might play at left back instead of the injured Brian Kettle rather than turn your limited attention span to the eminently pointless exercise of balancing a chemical equation which seemed quite alright as it was, thank you very much? Well, it turns out the teachers were right after all, at least in my case. I really don't know what day it is.
You nearly didn't get to read this article today (don't build people's hopes up – Ed.) simply because I completely lost track of the days of the week. It's all Eves and Boxings at this time of year and nobody seems to pay much attention to what the actual name of the day is at any given time, except for those who work in the public sector, obviously, as they studiously study how to maximise their next bank holiday so that with a couple of judiciously add-on leave days, it might last about six months.
Meanwhile back in the real world, normal people currently don't know if it's a Tuesday or a Friday - a state of affairs which will undoubtedly last until at least the second week of January when things return to something like normal. That's my excuse, anyway. There are a couple of possible reasons for this, the first being a kind of alcoholic haze continuum which grips even the generally abstemious at this time of year and doesn't let go until the last Christmas tree bauble has been popped back up into the loft. Let's gloss over that one for obvious reasons, and turn our attention to the fact that all the structures that generally offer a rhythm to our everyday existence are presently absent: work routines, normal sporting fixture times, the bin men (or whatever those chaps are called now) on their rounds, TV schedules – they've all gone for a Burton for a couple of weeks, leaving us no discernable pattern to cling to.
Under untold pressure (not really), I've managed to write the allotted number of words for this column in twenty-six minutes. It makes you wonder what we could do if the current don't-know-what-day-it-is chaos continued throughout the year – it might make us very last-minute but also very time efficient.
Anyway, must dash, so many things to do and tomorrow's Fraturday already.
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