The Three day Weekend Manifesto
You may have heard of ‘The People’s Manifesto’ when it toured the UK and featured on Radio 4 a year or so ago. It was a great show based around the concept of people submitting ideas to improve life in the UK, the best ones being chosen and added to a manifesto which would then be presented to the government. No rioting involved whatsoever.
Among serious suggestions for a maximum wage or comedy ones like renaming Slough as Lower Eton, one of the most popular requests to come out of the show was to create a compulsory 3 day weekend in the UK; something every single person in this country can agree on, even the insane people who still drink Bovril or voluntarily holiday in Bognor Regis.
A three day weekend would be the solution to all of our problem. How many times have you found yourself having to eat in to your precious Sunday morning lie-in with a depressing slog around Ikea in search of one ridiculously ornate light bulb?
It seems like half of my weekends are usually spent hungover and bemoaning the fact that I've ‘wasted’ the weekend, because of course if I wasn’t cowering under my duvet with a Berocca I would be out doing something productive and useful, like…going back to the pub.
Three days would allow us that extra grace to party to our heart’s content on Friday and Saturday, chilling on Sunday whilst allowing for Monday to be used for more sensible things - just like Craig David promised us. It’s only fair – we work long hours, most of us for low pay and with most of Europe already jammy enough to get Friday afternoon off to spend with their families, it’s just plain unfair.
It just makes sense to rediscover that Great British ingenuity and have a whole extra day added to our weekends – take that, Brussels!
3 day weekend ‘Bonus Day’ activities could include:
- Finding ridiculously good looking, ornate lightbulbs
- Reading the Wikipedia List of Sandwiches
- Making omelettes
- Researching the careers of child actors from 90's films
The only problem is, as pointed out during ‘The People’s Manifesto’ show that I attended; why stop at 3 days? Once we get that, surely the next step is petitioning for a 4 day weekend? Cheers erupted around the room when this was mentioned, but not from my corner of the room. The weekend would be a majority shareholder. The week inverted, the stock market would crash, Domino's mid week deals would be stuck in a Tuesday/Wednesday molten cheese purgatory.
A four day weekend would mean that instead of balancing our recreation with time to relax, we’d instead end up finding ways to fill that extra day, then expecting a five day weekend, then six…we’d slide in to a Caligula-esque world of hedonism, depravity and shenanigans. We’d make Greece look industrious.
We’d never get anything done; there would be no week for it to be the ‘end’ of, nay, it would be the end of sense and decency as we know it. To bludgeon a line from ‘Home Alone’; we’d become what the French call ‘Les Incompetents’. Now there's a child actor that doesn't need an extensive imdb session.
4 Day weekend activities could include:
- Investigating, planning and initiating your own principality, akin to Sealand
- Setting up your own meth lab in the image of Walter White
- Contributing rogue submissions to the Wikipedia List of Sandwiches
- Supergluing glasses to tables in pubs
- Recreating the experience of being locked in a cell for 4 days by the DEA.
In fact, screw it, let’s just keep the weekend to the small but perfectly formed two days; I don’t think I could handle the consequences of anything more and I definitely don’t want to be holed up in a cell, well not least without a duvet and some Berocca.
Image: Chris Corwin
