We should all be allowed to take our days off as and when we like

Had a good bank holiday, did you? Enjoyed the extra day off, revelled gloriously in the prospect of a short fourday week ahead? For your sake, I hope you weren’t like me who, not for the first time, only realised it was a three-day extravaganza late on the Friday afternoon beforehand. That’s what happens in a household with two freelancers and a child too young yet to keep its parents in good order.

Also not for the first time, I wished for an end to this nonsense. Not just of mandatory bank holidays (which do nothing but peremptorily interrupt all sorts of things that would be better left uninterrupted, such as money transfers, ongoing rows with service providers, and house sales) but of arbitrary divisions and designations of time altogether.

Because, why not abolish the week itself ?

The traditional five-days-work-two-days-off is not immutable. In fact, it is only a relatively recent invention. As that flawless chronicle of social history Downton

Abbey obliquely noted when it had Dowager Countess Dame Maggie Smith ask “What is a weekend?”, two days off on a Saturday and Sunday was a consequence of the pressure to standardise the leisure hours that had been yielded by the Industrial Revolution. You need everyone to be working and resting according to a uniform schedule if you are to arrange a steady supply of coals from Newcastle to London or fish from Billingsgate to places where there are no fish without the technology to fine tune things as you go.

But the traditional model is already under pressure. We live increasingly in a knowledge – rather than fish ‘n’ coal-based – economy, and our work and leisure times have begun to bleed into each other accordingly, aided by the rise of machines that keep us in constant touch with our colleagues and ever-supervisable by our bosses. What is a weekend? remains a valid question, but for entirely different reasons.

We don’t need specific days off any more. Everyone’s got a different day of worship, or more likely none at all, so Sundays are no longer sacred. Saturdays are only important to people who care about kicky-ball games and need the weekly boost of agreeing with other kicky-ball watchers that the referee’s a dick. There’s Amazon 24-7 instead of the need to converge on the village with the biggest common to buy our ells of worsted and comfits for children who have beaten the infant mortality rates on a universal market day.

But we do need time off. And in a world in which uniform schedules feel increasingly outmoded ( just think of the tales of horror we shall have to tell the generations raised on Netflix – “There was a time, my darlings, when you could only watch one episode a week! And if you missed it – that was that! Time was a shackle, angels, a shackle like no other!”), we should all be allowed to take our days of rest as and when we need them.

We no longer need to synch our calendars to lunar phases, tidal rhythms or the whims of caesars and 16thcentury popes but to Google+. “I’m working the Shakespeare week” you tell everyone (two days off in the middle, like the interval in a play when it all stops, you have an ice cream and are briefly happy before it all starts up again) and plan lunch/shopping/kicky-ball practice with all those who are doing likewise.

What is a weekend? Whatever you need it to be.