Saint Monday

Описание: Reflecting on the pointlessness of much of my job, I finally quit to go part-time. And then I was re-reading Tom Hodgkinson's marvellous 'How To Be Idle' and came across this description of the phenomenon of 'St Monday':

"But there was a time when skiving was practised openly and with pride, as the little-known phenomenon of Saint Monday demonstrates. Saint Monday, as we learn from historians such as EP Thompson and Douglas Reid, was a tradition of institutionalised skiving. It is first mentioned in the 17th century, persisted through the 18th and gradually withered and died in the 19th, destroyed by industry. It essentially consisted of an extension of the sabbath into Monday. Instead of working, shoemakers, silk-stocking makers and weavers preferred to spend Monday knocking back ales at the tavern or watching bare-knuckle fights and cockfights...

"The key feature of Saint Monday was that, unlike modern institutions such as 'duvet days', where supposedly enlightened companies munificently bestow free time on their employees, Saintt Monday was a bottom-up initiative; it was taken by the workers, it was self-constituted, often against the will of the employers.

"Saint Monday could exist in part because those who followed the custom had not been infected by the modern-day desire to accumulate possessions. Therefore they did not see the need to earn cash beyond what subsistence required."

Billy Bragg has a song called "St Monday" on his album 'England, Half English' on the same topic, but I wanted Saint Monday to actually come to life as a character, so I wrote this. Hope you enjoy it!