Friday Night and Saturday Morning

It's been quite an exhausting week.  With four early mornings, three late nights, two of them following a continuous day on the road, and one night tormented by some kind of allergy - I notice the rape is in flower - I was glad yesterday evening to settle down briefly at Beaconsfield Services.  After eating my Carvery Express (the healthier alternative to KFC, only marginally more expensive, and far less messy on the fingers!), I cradled my coffee and examined the world as it bustled to and fro all around me.

There's one in every week, and I've lost count of the times I've noticed something intangibly 'special' about them.  At last I've grasped the nettle of trying to set down in words that special whatever-it-is about Friday afternoons.  I use that term with some elasticity, of course, because there is great variety in the times at which people leave off ... something I regularly have to take note of if I want to make a successful delivery!  But whether it's lunchtime, or 3.30, 6.0 or - as in my case yesterday - 9.35, that point of stopping work at the end of the week has a special quality.  It has the power to make the transition, in the words of the ubiquitous Mars Bar advert, from the world of work to the world of rest-and-play.

I grew up in a world where, to my young eye, there seemed to be little distinction between these three phases of life for the working man.  After 'proper work' was over more jobs could easily be found at home.  The garden would need attention, or something had to be done in the shed; there was coal to be brought in for the fire, or wood to chop.  With luck there might be an hour or so to look through the newspaper, or watch TV, but it was likely that this pleasure would be overtaken by sleep in the armchair.

And then came the end of the week.  In my father's case it was Saturday lunchtime, for the normal working week of forty-eight hours couldn't be fitted into five days.  I well remember the glow that seemed to fill the house once lunch - on the table immediately upon his homecoming ... just like the evening meal during the week - had been eaten.  At the age of about eight or nine, I would follow him to the bathroom and watch the progress of the weekly shave, marvelling that he could wield that razor (with its blade that I was expressly told not to touch because it was so sharp) up and down his throat with such carefree abandon.  Now, many years later, I make just the same moves with the same nonchalance.

I was looking forward to my weekly walk with him into the town, perhaps to stand on the market place while he chatted to some friend or other, maybe to make some small purchase from one of the shops, but almost inevitably to finish up at the football ground, where I was infused with an interest that had stayed latent until about four or five years ago when I suddenly felt a Saturday 'tickle' to rekindle it again.  If we happened to arrive after half-time we could get in free, because the man at the ticket stall would have shut his window.  Otherwise I think it was 6d for adults and 3d for children.  I was more interested to see who else was there that I might know than to watch the game, but there was a feeling of excitement nonetheless, and the homeward journey would always be paused at the market stall to buy some chips to take home for tea.

Diss Town played in the Norfolk & Suffolk League in those days; for the the bigger and better teams there was the Eastern Counties League, and for the smaller ones the East Anglian League.  After I ceased to be interested in the world of football, the two smaller of these leagues merged to become the Anglian Combination of today, with its many divisions and reserve divisions, of which only the premier division figures at step 7 in the national pyramid.  Diss by then had moved up to the Eastern Counties League, where now they seem to flit between the premier and first divisions.

When I moved into the world of work, I began to see a different format to Friday afternoons, but all with that same 'glow'.  Wherever I've worked, there has been a particular atmosphere that surrounds people leaving behind their workplace behind them.  I carry with me an image - partly real, partly an imagined stereotype - of men and women, young and old, streaming from a factory gate to rows of back-to-back houses, or walking in ones and twos down a country lane to a solitary row of cottages or post-First World War 'homes for heroes', each one looking forward to time with their family or friends, and to whatever the weekend holds, be it routine or special.

For a lot of my time I've been fortunate to work where or when the economy was strong, and there seem always to have been calls for people willing to work overtime on Saturdays.  As an office-worker, I was rarely called to do so myself, but sometimes it was nice to go in at the weekend to catch up on something, and on such occasions the feel of the place was totally different. At one factory, I would often see on a Monday morning that men from last week's evening shift, working normally from 2.0 till 10.0, sometimes with overtime each night until midnight Monday to Thursday, had left off at 10.0 on Friday only to arrived again at 7.0 on the Saturday morning for another five or six hours.  I was filled with a mixture of admiration for their stamina, and sheer wonder at their home life.  Looking back now, though, I realise that, with small children preventing their wives from taking up paid employment, the extra hours, along with the shift work itself, would have made such a difference to a young family.

In the history of mankind, the weekend has occupied only a tiny place; but for those of us who have enjoyed the privilege of this break from constant work for an employer or at a business, it has become precious.  It feels an unalienable right, and I think it does us good from time to time to reflect on what a great benefit it represents in the lives of us all.