And The Air Is Warm

Although his conclusion is wrong, Simon Jenkins writes:

I blame the British class system.

Yesterday’s August bank holiday was the coldest on record, with an average 30mm of rain. Carnivals in Notting Hill and elsewhere were drenched. Snow fell in Scotland. It was reportedly warmer in Siberia.

On my Welsh beach, hardy souls in puffer jackets and scarves walked their dogs while children bleakly trailed buckets and spades across sodden wastes. Cafes echoed to huddled masses cursing staycation publicists.

Britons are expected to take their holidays in August, weeks after the warmer and sunnier June/July period, because it once suited agricultural practice.

It was related to reaping and fruit-picking, to the movement of migrant labour and the start of the shooting and stalking seasons.

When ordinary people began being able to flee for a week to the Mediterranean, the authorities did not react by moving bank holidays from the start of August back into real summer.

In 1964 they pandered to the domestic tourist industry and moved it later, to the end of the month. By then, days are shortening, temperatures falling and rainfall rising.

Records show that roughly half these later bank holidays have been wet, cold or otherwise miserable. Blazing sunshine is rare. The change was a cruel mistake.

British holidays are bedevilled by a simple fact. Those that fix them holiday abroad. They can pay to chase the sun, afford private cottages or take their leisure when they choose.

But time moves on. Over a third of employees now work on bank holidays in service industries.

The concept of a single “day off” is an anachronism. Bank holidays should stop and an individual’s time off be folded into a general holiday entitlement.

This annual festival of misery should end.

At the very least, the powers that be should allow Britons a break when the sun is high and the air is warm. That is not the end of August.

In Britain, with our pointless celebrations of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday, public holidays do not apply to people who are too public in anything other than the schooling sense of the word.

Nowhere else on earth is like that, because everywhere else has proper holidays, celebrating specific things that really matter. Keep Christmas and Easter. And New Year (or Heathmas, as it sometimes called), if you must, although the Epiphany would be better.

Bring back the real Whit Monday, making an even stronger case for abolishing Heathmas by also having abolished Wilsontide, and making it easier to get on with reading and teaching Philip Larkin without having to explain what the title of his best collection means.

Get rid of all of the others and replace them with Saint George's Day, Saint Andrew's Day, Saint David's Day and Saint Patrick's Day. A heavy concentration in this Islands' incomparable Spring and early Summer. 

Something distinctive about each of them: Guinness, leeks, haggis, whatever, although I admit that it is difficult to think what the English one might be.

A self-interested basis for popular Unionism in perpetuity.

One on 30th November, before which nothing related to Christmas would intrude, just as it does not before Thanksgiving in the United States.

And no excuse for making the common people work on these days anyway because, after all, they do not really mean anything. Each of these really would mean something.