A modern Sunday makes me long for the dull days of yore

It is Monday morning, and across the land people are easing themselves into the working week with the first coffee of the day and the polite enquiry: “How was your weekend?” Useful though it is, there is a certain imprecision to the portmanteau term, “weekend”. You don’t have to be a fully fledged synaesthetic to feel that Saturdays and Sundays are quite different in colour, texture, momentum and mood. Saturday night might be feverish, or all right for fighting; Sundays may be easy, bloody or spent in the park with George – depending on whether your tastes run to Lionel Richie, U2 or Stephen Sondheim. But the two days resemble each other about as closely as Monday and Friday.

Or so I have always thought. But perhaps the distinction is becoming blurred. When the photographer Matt Writtle left Britain to live abroad in the late Nineties, he felt that Saturdays and Sundays were different creatures, with Sunday still retaining its distinctive character as a day of rest and religious observance. When he returned four years later, he noticed a change so marked that it inspired him to undertake a photographic pilgrimage, roaming the country to discover what people get up to on the erstwhile day of rest. The resulting book, Sunday: A Portrait of 21st Century England, records a dozen very different occupations, from playing cricket to queuing at Ikea.

Several of Writtle’s subjects sound wistful about the dwindling of the sabbath into yet another day of chores and shopping: “With Sunday not being a quiet day, maybe we’ve lost the ability to be alone with ourselves,” says Lutfi Radwan, a Muslim chicken farmer, echoing Pascal’s aphorism, that all human misery has a single cause: an inability to sit quietly alone in a room.

The decline of the ability to be still is one of the 21st century’s most poignant losses, but you don’t have to search very far to find alternative views, trenchantly expressed. The 19th-century Symbolist poet, Jules Laforgue, wrote a cycle of poems that anatomised the enervating ritual of a bourgeois Sunday: Mass, the family meal, the obligatory afternoon stroll.

“The sky rains pointlessly, unmoved,” begins a characteristically gloomy example from a series titled Dimanches (Sundays), describing a boardingschool girl who breaks free from a crocodile of her fellow pupils as the bells ring out for Vespers, only to fling herself into the river from sheer ennui.

Meanwhile, Friedrich Nietzsche saw the dull sanctity of the British sabbath as an ingenious form of brainwashing: “It was a stroke of genius on the part of the English instinct to spend Sundays in tedium with a te deum so that the English people would unconsciously lust for their week- and workdays,” he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil.

Neither Laforgue nor Nietzsche is inclined to admit that there can be something strangely alluring about tedium. My childhood Sundays followed an unvarying weekly pattern of church, sherry with the grandparents, then lunch – a monthly rotation of roast lamb/beef/pork/ chicken. After which the grown-ups would go to sleep, leaving me alone to explore the featureless expanse of Sunday afternoon.

Now, with every minute of every day accounted for, and always more to do than time in which to do it, that Sunday te deum seems in retrospect more like a song of freedom than a dirge of dullness.