I do like Mondays. I never used to – who does? – but just recently I’ve found a way. It’s been quite a journey. School Mondays were bloody awful. I can still feel the abrasion, mental and physical, of the school uniform. It was always freshly laundered on a Monday, something I not only took for granted but also disliked. Urgh, the brutal stiffness of the material after the softness of the weekend. Misery.
For a year of my life, and only a year, I did proper work, for my dad’s scaffolding company. God, the Monday mood was terrible. For me, the edge was taken off by the knowledge that this was but a gap year, not my full-time life. My workmates didn’t have the comfort of this endpoint. Handsworth, midwinter, dark, freezing and wet with a week’s worth of scaffolding to erect and dismantle. Despondence reigned.
At university, Mondays were neither good nor bad, just another day of hardly any lectures and more reading than I could ever come close to doing – of books I could often make neither head nor tail of.
Then I got into journalism, broadcasting, and still Mondays meant little, but now because Mondays were just as thrilling as every other day. Life was good. To my consternation, and that of many others too, I found myself presenting radio and television programmes. At first it was terrifying. Once I had settled into the work, it was usually fulfilling and rarely boring. I ended up working six days a week, sometimes seven. On Sunday evenings I presented Match of the Day 2. I got in the habit of signing off with, “That’s it from us. Have a bearable week at work” – on the assumption that the prospect of Monday morning wasn’t held with much relish by those watching. For me, still living the dream, Mondays mattered not.
It never felt like Philip Larkin’s toad work was squatting on my life. But still – as nobody said back then – it was a lot. Pressure ratcheted up with my profile, and things started going wrong. Grappling up the greasy pole of ambition was enervating, but not half as knackering as clinging on for dear life when the slide began. Still, there was joy mixed in with the humiliation when I was biffed from the breakfast TV show I was presenting, to be left with just – just! – football matches and tournaments to work on. My diary cleared. I was covering not much more than a match a week, leaving lots of time to be a better parent, a better person. I would do charity work and write my first novel. I would enjoy life more, now I had more time to enjoy it.
As it turned out, I just got miserable beyond measure. Too much time on my hands. And even more when I got the boot from the football gig as well. For two days a week, on Radio 5 Live, I started presenting radio programmes again, which was wonderful. The rest of the time I scrabbled about for work, either being madly busy filming something or, more often, having nothing much to do. Mondays meant nothing.
Two days’ work in seven, apart from the financial implications, aren’t enough to earn you the right to enjoy the other five. Then I got this column, which was great, for me if not for you. So that was Wednesdays spoken for. But three guaranteed days’ work in seven still wasn’t enough for my sanity. I didn’t realise this until I got another gig, on Radio 4 on Saturday mornings. So that’s now four proper days’ work in seven. Days working outnumber days not. OK, it’s not scaffolding, but it is structure. I didn’t realise how much I needed it. Perhaps humans are designed to operate this way; perhaps it’s just me.
At last I have a routine again. Work Wednesday to Saturday, and come Sunday I’m knackered. And come Monday I’m in heaven because I can do pretty much the square root of sod all and, for the first time in a long time, not feel bad about it. Oh, how I love Mondays now.
• Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist
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