People talk frequently about that Sunday night sinking feeling, school/work tomorrow, the end of time to yourself to do fun things like see friends and lie in bed. The mild panic when you know that you haven’t left enough time to do your homework for school or work and the tinge of resentfulness that reality must impinge so soon.

I understand those feelings, I had them when I was at school and uni and for lots of the jobs I’ve had. Mainly because I hadn’t done my homework and I wasn’t too fond of my job. However, now I really like Monday’s, they are my favourite day of the week, work is always busy so it goes quickly and I enjoy my job and my colleagues so going into work never feels like a chore. Don’t get me wrong, when that alarm goes off I reset ALOT and wish I could stay in bed, I’m not entirely mental!

My ‘Sunday feeling’ has always arrived as dusk falls on the late summer evenings, on any day of the week, including Friday!! it makes me entirely and inexplicably maudlin and I just don’t know why. I spent a lot of my youth thinking that everyone else was having the best time ever at weekends and in the evenings, going to all those parties(what parties?) that I hadn’t been invited to, I always believed that the ‘fun’ was happening somewhere else to someone else, then as I got older I imagined all those ‘fun’ people now gathered for big raucous Sunday roasts in gastropubs, drinking red wine and reading the papers together. I know that does happen as I have actually attended a few. But I have forever felt a little on the outside of these social calendar things, no idea why. Probably because I never got invited to all the ‘fun’.

I know some of this stems back to to my childhood (excuse my while I just hop onto the Doctors couch). I would have sleep overs at schools friends houses, their nice big houses with their nice big families and their parents who were still married and then I’d get the tube home to the tiny basement flat where me and my mum lived, in a slightly salubrious part of West London. Ironically enough it is now virtually impossible to buy  property where I was brought up unless you are exceptionally well off, who knew Portobello Road would become so popular??

I often walked home from the station at dusk past the gorgeous big houses in Elgin Crescent and Blenheim Crescent where they rarely pulled their curtains across and I could see families watching TV, having supper and interacting in lovely kitchens that took up their whole basement, all bathed in a lovely lamplight glow. Richard Curtis had nothing on my halcyon view of how families in Notting Hill lived. I bet they had carpets and central heating and everything!

I know things are never what they appear to be, those families I watched in their basement kitchens weren’t always happy, and I have no issues regarding how I was brought up, I think my mum did a sterling job but its human nature to covet things. I now own a nice house of my very own and I have nice things, and I know other people aren’t having all the ‘fun’ with out me but I still get that maudlin feeling at dusk and I accept it is probably because the end of the day can often seem like an ending of something more significant, a time to consider  and reflect if we have done all the things we should have or could have during that day, and in the light of such an assessment I rarely feel like I am winning. The summer evenings draw in slowly meaning that that period of self assessment is prolonged, maybe thats why it feels so much more pronounced in the summer?