Bank holidays. Bah humbug and all that other unmitigated shit

Why is it that I dread bank holidays? Especially at this time of the year when they come with appalling frequency. It can't be that the road to Sainsburys is full of other people, that Marks and Spencer's is awash with daffodils. I hate daffodils. Bloody pathetic. All they need is a good wind and down they go.
Our expectations are huge.  And now the government thinks we should all get on our bikes. Well all I can say is you try getting to St John's chapel on a bank holiday Sunday without knocking some daft bugger off his bike because there are three or four them in line around a bend. There should be a law against it.
And they want us to start walking. When did we stop walking?  I certainly didn't.
Living on your own is hell at bank holidays. Actually it's hell all the time. Why do you think I drink so much but bank holidays are the worst.
Christmas is six weeks of people sending you cards with pictures of their grandchildren you have never met and in my case hope never to meet. Buying presents for people who don't need anything but don't want a share in a goat. Worrying whether the car will slide into another, hoping for snow which does not turn to dirty slush too quickly and whether the heating will go off in January.
January is that most awful of months when we have no bank holiday and people don't drink and don't eat and become even more miserable than they were when they were stuffing themselves with Thorntons and cheap champagne behind the kitchen door because Auntie Mary was regaling them with stories of how good things used to be.
Dry turkey and tv cooks showing you how it should be done,
New Year? Who thought that was a good idea. Let's really cook our livers. And the cost, dear God. Do you remember that saying 'it can't be Christmas. I haven't finished paying for last year's.'
Easter then is upon us. We've got through Valentine's Day without socking somebody in the chops because they have someone else to hold, Mother's Day without saying yet again to our children 'please don't buy me anything' and now we have Easter.
Deep breaths everybody. I have gastric flu. I have spent my weekend watching Inspector Lynley patronising his female partner and playing Angry Birds, Star Wars. I was supposed to go and visit my children. Left to themselves they can't get through it without throwing peanut butter at one another. I wish I had somebody to throw peanut butter at. No, actually amend that. I don't.  I keep telling my daughter how other people fight. One of my aunties used to throw whole dinner services at my uncle.Another aunt threw a frying pan at my dad. I don't think it was on a bank holiday but it probably was. I used to fall out spectacularly with my husband on Christmas Day because he liked shooting the following day and I thought it should be family.
May should be stay in bed month. It's full of bank holidays. By then I shall be taking the road more or less travelled by every bloody cyclist in creation up the dale and there I will hide in my caravan and read on my balcony and ignore everybody and drink lovely wine and read great big books that I can't see past and that nobody can see me over my sun glasses and my foul temper and my hopefully soon to be finished novel. That's the thing really. I have worked. I have got myself together and put my characters into awful situations. They even have to face bank holidays but those days, in 1820, people didn't have holidays really and they didn't have decent medicine, or good housing for the most. They had poverty and no contraception and no good education.
So there, I feel much better now and will go back to Inspector Lynley and on the way I will turn on my little laptop and kill a few pigs and I will open the bottle of champagne in my fridge and be glad for all my blessings. Wishing you all a very happy Easter.