Sunday is shite

Sunday is shite.

Sunday is shite because you have to go to work on a Monday. When you're a child it's shite because you have to go back to school on a Monday. Children also have to do homework on a Sunday, and go to Mass.

Sunday is shite.

It has a particular feel, does a Sunday. Quiet, and silent and grey, as Morrissey rightly sang. TV is shite, with boring, mediocre programmes., like fucking "Heartbeat". 

The streets are quiet and hushed on a Sunday. Everything is tempered with a low lying dread that prevents the full enjoyment of what should be another day to yourself. Even in the summer, the daylight seems weaker and more autumnal.

The Presbyterians had the right idea. Chain the fucking swings in the playpark on a Sunday! At least you were under no illusions that this was anything other than a dreadful day. But now you can kid yourself by going shopping, and eating out, and going to a pub (in reality, the only sensible solution). It's still fucking Sunday though. Even when you pretend it isn't, it still is. Everything suffused with unique, inexplicable Sunday silence.

Your soul protests against the Sunday, but nothing can beat the bastard. He'll roll round every week, and take you into the next 7 days the same as the week before.

I remember one Sunday going with my friend Ronan to buy cider. We were in somewhere in Basse-Normandie, coming back from a weekend in a wee place called Tourouvre. We were heading back to his student flat in Tours, and on the way out of the village where we had stayed, we stopped at a farm to buy cider (there was a sign on a tree outside that said "Cider for sale"). It was class, the farmer invited us to have dinner with him, in a wee small house, and we had loads of cider, and calvados and pommeau. It was a great meal, really lovely, and the whole event was such good craic. Yet when I stepped out of the house, and looked around, the Sundayness of it hit me like a cloud of steam. And I wondered, why do I feel like this? There is no work tomorrow, no school, no demands, no time, no anything to make me feel like this. And I couldn't answer. 

But now I know why. 

Sundays are lonely.