Shell Shocked.

Am wondering if weekends will be different when I start work. I mean, they are so tiring when you grow up. Starts with the the school sports run, then there's the trip to the shops to get in essentials for the week coming, then you've got to feed the blighters and put them to bed. When all that's done the dishes are waiting in one huge pile.

As they get a bit older, if you are lucky, they may drop the sports in favour of much cooler things like gigs and parties. Then you are only required to taxi said adolescent to venues. Of course this has benefits. You may well score and get some other, unwitting parent to let them stay the night. The need for reciprocity does put a dampener on that one though.

Then when they've left home you look forward to weekends as a thing of great beauty. At least you do until you realise that actually you just have to go further to do all the things you did before. Worse still, the bones are beginning to ache and you don't find it so easy to get up in the mornings any more. Add a two hour drive into the mix with your partner snoring beside you as you drive home and you wonder just exactly where the idea of the ideal weekend originated. You begin to long for Monday and a rest.

Weekends were much more fun when I was a kid. After school finished and the homework was done the TV boomed out the words "It's Friday, it's 5 o'clock and it's Crackerjack!" That announcement heralded the beginning of the weekend. There would be a treat for tea on the Friday, hockey on the Saturday morning, tomato soup and plain bread for lunch, badminton in the afternoon, a can of bitter lemon from Safeway's if I had enough pocket money, then supper and a movie when I got home...

Maybe that's where the illusion came from.

Hmmm. Enjoy!