Oh, not that usual thing about school / work dread - though that is often an overriding feeling of Sundays, but another kind of feeling. Not really sure what it is. Actually, wasn't even thinking about it until I wrote 'something about Sundays' - and I only wrote that because I wanted a starting point for this piece, and I couldn't think of anything else to write.
There is something about Sundays though, isn't there? It's not just that school / work dread equation, this Sunday-something is still evident when one doesn't have anything to do the next day - as I shall find out next Sunday when I have the following week off.
I suppose Sundays were different when I was growing up back in the eighties. No shops used to open on Sundays, apart from newsagents, and they would all close by lunchtime, 1:00pm at the latest. Then there would be those long stretched out afternoons. Trips into town centres would be surreal journeys through an oddly post apocalyptic landscape. Streets empty of people, and if it were summer, bright with hot sun, town centres would feel even stranger. More often than not, I would spend Sundays at home, in my bedroom, a drift of computer games and comics and arguments with my sister...
Sundays are not the same now. In town centres there is no difference between a Sunday and the day before, or the day following, -streets packed with shoppers and all shops open as normal... except perhaps for the larger supermarkets that all seem to close about 4:00pm. There is still something, almost indefinably different about Sundays though, particularly if you're away from the town centre, a feeling of suspension, a strange drifting in a kind of dreary comfort.
Took a walk with Em today through the northern suburbs of Brighton to the Sussex Downs, well, the edges of them anyway. Semi-detached houses, tidy bungalows, and hidden fragments of fields and strips of wood hidden between locked-gate schools and recreation ground football games all seemed oddly... well, not deserted... but changed. Altered. Everything felt like Sunday, as if the very essence of Sunday had suffused and possessed everything. We came to a bowling green that in the sunny haze seemed something slipped from a dream, people walking their dogs, looping round the field more than once, the same people, the same dogs passing by, and just beyond the trees, the sound of the ring road that circles Brighton...
Something about Sundays like I said, but Sunday is almost over now (a programme on the television about 1970s police work; 'a proper hard man, and he doesn't scare easy...') and I really must go to bed. That's the last thing about Sundays though isn't it? No matter how tired you are, no matter what rubbish is on the television, you put off going to bed to make the weekend last as long as possible... but by the time that morning comes, and you're about to enter work, -or school- the weekend, and the just-dead Sunday always seem an impossible amount of time to go, and the weekend to come, well, that feels as impossible as Christmas to a child at the end of the summer holidays.
Maybe I'll stay awake just an hour longer...
