On Friday, just back from a 10-day vacation in Greece, I woke to the Today programme and the alarming news that the TUC is calling for more bank holidays. At least three more, they urged, pointing out that Britons enjoy fewer bank holidays than continentals do, and that even workaholic Americans have 10 bank holidays - two more than us.
Ugh... I groaned all the way to the office. Don't these people know what a bank holiday - and let's be honest, any holiday - does to you? Most Britons do. According to research published by the Post Office this week, nearly half of UK holiday-makers would rather work the bank holiday weekend - and almost a quarter would opt to leave friends and family behind and take off alone.
Meanwhile, the French have released a study showing that Saturdays and Sundays are the riskiest days of the week for fatal heart attacks among men. Sacré Dieu! It would seem that all that DIY, being stuck in traffic jams, and making conversation with your better half cranks up the stress level to a degree that leaves you longing for Monday's memo from the boss.
On either side of the Channel, Homo Ludens is a thing of the past. Holidays - and bank holidays more so than others - expose us as work-centred bores ill-equipped for fun. We've been turned by our schooling, and later our work, into tunnel-visioned specialists who can only really talk about, and show an interest in, our area of expertise. During a few days' break, we may play a few games of tennis, read a Nick Hornby, even take in a music festival, complete with bouzouki-strumming men in traditional dress; but our hinterland can stretch no further. Outside work we're out of our depth. Try sitting around a taverna table with a group of friends: the hack talks to the hackette, the wannabe MP schmoozes the MP, the banker talks to the entrepreneur. Everyone is perfectly pleasant, and there's a few minutes' concerted effort to gossip about absent friends, but the only thing you all end up sharing, really, is the bottle of ouzo - and the hangover the morning after.
Blame this social autism on our demographics. More single households and more splintered families mean that we have grown unaccustomed to co-operation. When you don't need to accommodate someone's failings (from his toothpaste track in the washbasin to her pathological shyness); when you need never learn to smooth ruffled feathers after a marital squabble, or to ingratiate yourself with an in-law; making connections becomes possible only at work, where the pecking order and the joint goal force collaboration upon colleagues. In fact, for the increasing number of child-free adults, the office is now the only place where they are responsible for, and accountable to, anyone else.
But if the workplace tells us who requires what of whom, the limbo of bank holidays provides us with no such structure, and we sad creatures bump into one another like dodgem cars run amok, bruising egos and denting ids as fights break over the washing-up, choice of bedrooms and restaurant bills.
And that's once we've reached our destination. Just getting there - covertly browsing the net for special Ryanair fares during our lunch hour, arguing over which tourist top spot would suit everyone's needs, choking with road rage on the way to Heathrow hell - tests relationships, sanity and our bank manager. Under any other normal circumstances we would read these road blocks for what they are: a deterrent to the whole sorry business. But when it comes to the bank holiday, we suspend rational thought, and turn a blind eye to truth, consequences and congestion.
Why? It's all to do with that peculiar British sense of modesty. Being branded a show-off spells social suicide, being seen as a braggart is humiliating beyond belief. Yet the same people who regard talk of their income as vulgar and allusions to their Oxbridge first as crassness itself, turn into Michael Winner when asked 'and what did YOU do for your bank hols?'
As they boast about exotic sites, secret hotels and undiscovered beaches, the bank holiday bores regard their hols as the one competition it is safe to engage in. Here is a golden opportunity to prove their success without recourse to obvious one-upmanship. Here is a way of hinting at wealth, family happiness and personal well-being - and rubbing your poor dysfunctional nose in their good fortune - without seeming to do so.
You can accuse someone of smugness if they tell you that their bonus has forced them into tax exile, or that their teenage daughter insists on spending her holidays en famille ; but if they tell you about how they brought the whole family to a quaint little hotel in Marrakech, where the children bonded while scouring the medina for snake charmers and the parents took long drives through the Atlas mountains, you can only gnash your teeth in envy, because this is not showing off, this is investing in quality time.
Awe-struck, we listen to their memories of good fun and great laughs, trying to understand by what mysterious alchemy these creatures have transformed the most trying time into a blissful break. What's their secret? If only we'd memorised those poems at school, or continued the couch sessions with the analyst, or kept up the squash we were getting quite good at... perhaps, then, time off wouldn't weigh down on us as heavy as an undigested curry.
But as it is, we have to put up with the knowledge that those happy, well-adjusted bank holiday bores will prove their superiority eight times a year while the rest of us grit our teeth and bear those excruciating parentheses in our real life. And whistle to work come Tuesday morning.
•Cristina Odone is deputy editor of the New Statesman
