Sunday, bloody Sunday

Okay, it's been a while. I've been trying to come up with something funny and/or profound to write about for some while now, and not really managed either. Still, before anyone else points it out, that’s not stopped me before. The title of this entry, incidentally, is an Alan Partridge reference. It’s not me that’s missed the significance of the U2 song, that was all Partridge’s doing.

Anyway, today is Sunday. Sunday has always been a bit of a strange day. Despite being, obviously, part of the weekend, it’s always seemed the poor relation to Saturday. I guess there are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, when it’s Saturday you still have another day of the weekend to look forward to (albeit one that’s not quite as nice) and none of that impending doom of going back to work the next day - or perhaps I should say school, as that seems to be where this sense of Sunday dread originated from. Secondly, and more importantly in my eyes, Sunday was always a fairly boring day in comparison with Saturday when I was growing up - because nothing was ever open on Sunday. But here we are, in 2009, and all that has changed. 24 hour supermarkets, out of town shopping centres, restaurants serving something other than “Sunday Lunch”…we’ve got it all. That is, until 4 p.m., when everything inexplicably closes down.

One of the many features of a Sunday is invariably that you have a lie in (despite, in my case, the best efforts of my neighbours who for reasons best known to themselves gave their 4 year old grandchild some sort of trumpet or horn this morning then sent her outside to blow it repeatedly), get up later than normal and so everything is a bit behind for the rest of the day. As a result, it’s a very nasty shock to the system when you find yourself trying to go in somewhere for coffee or a bit of retail therapy, and it’s closed, or closing. Admittedly, I suppose, it’s a lot better than it used to be when nothing opened at all on a Sunday, but it’s still very annoying, and only serves to extend that horrible Sunday evening feeling, where the weekend is pretty much over and you’re left to contemplate the week ahead - with nothing but the Antiques Roadshow, Heartbeat (the TV show set in the 1960s, which has lasted for longer than the 1960s did) and similarly depressing Sunday night TV to distract you. It would be nicer if you could remain in denail for a bit longer by doing something characteristically 'weekendy' - even if it was just going round the shops for another hour or two. It almost makes me feel I should be doing some last minute homework.

Today should actually have panned out differently. The plan was to get up early and do a car boot sale, but BBC weather insisted it was going to rain heavily today, so this plan was shelved yesterday evening. When I awoke to bright sunshine streaming through my window (not to mention a pile of boxes STILL cluttering up my spare room), I was not best pleased.

I had my first car boot sale experience a couple of months ago. For those that know me, it goes without saying that I never would have gone to such an event as a buyer, and even going as a seller really didn’t appeal. For a start, I can never understand the reason for them having to start so early. Surely the people who get there at 6 a.m. to rummage through your stuff would be just as able to do it at a more civilised hour. The only explanation I can see for it is that it gives you more of the day left over to figure out what you’re going to do with the stuff you’ve not sold, go to the tip (but not the charity shop because it’s probably closed) and spend most of your proceeds in the pub trying to compensate for the horror of the whole thing.

In actual fact, the experience was not as horrendous as it could have been. There was a rather odd man next to us telling us all about his lounge - he has a lovers’ table, apparently (a glass table with male and female bodies ‘intertwined’ beneath it), and it’s surrounded by lava lamps - which makes it sound like he lives in the set of a particularly bad 70s porno, but aside from that, it was fairly stress free and actually quite entertaining from a people-watching point of view. Some of the people were scary, mind. There seemed to be an awful lot of people wearing camouflage gear, and at one point we wondered if they knew something we didn’t. Happily, we came away unscathed, with no need for any sort of army-issue equipment, so I don’t think we missed anything. Iwould have felt more at home if I'd been wearing one of those fleeces with wolves on, though.

Car boot sale part 2 has been rescheduled for a few weeks’ time - and this time I have the obligatory sandwich toaster and fondue set to sell. I am sure that after that I will be able to regale you further with tales of odd people arguing over 20 pence and just the absolute bizarreness of what some people will actually pay money for. Now, can I interest anyone in a Bryan Adams ‘cassingle’?