Monday, May 04, 2009

Workers' Holiday


The albañiles working on the road outside had their on Mayday celebration on Saturday 2nd. Building sites all around the neighbourhood were decorated with crosses, balloons and ribbons and their resident trabjadores gathered to have a little tipple and let off some fireworks.

There wasn't a May Bank Holiday in the UK until the early 70s as this date was up to then generally associated with revolting plebs and missile launchers trundling through Red Square.

For this very reason the High Master decided that his boys were too posh to partake in such proletarian merrymaking, and for the first few annual instances of the new holiday insisted that we all come into school as usual.

This didn't go down at all well with many of the parents who — employed in the main by less august and discriminating institutions — tended to resent having to spend a summer bank holiday without their children. For others of course, this must have been a bit of a godsend...

1 comment:

Mark said...

Count me as a dissenter from these humanist 'holidays'. Whether it was the Socialists' idea, or misguided Christians' understanding of 'social justice', all this self-adulation makes me sick.

Read Josef Pieper's 'Culture of Leisure' for an idea of what leisure should be.