The Great British Bank Holiday

Rather than spending the entire weekend cramming my sweaty, tired body into cars and trains and onto beaches alongside the unwashed masses in pursuit of "a good time", I have spent most of the Bank Holiday following the other great British tradition: that of staying at home and making a half-hearted attempt to tackle the mountain of outstanding domestic chores.

Inept amateur DIY is, of course, the canonical leisure activity for the Bank Holiday Brit; but I didn't even get that far. Instead I did four clothes washes (black, white, brown, and pink); sorted through piles of paperwork (about a quarter of which made it into the filing cabinet, while the other three-quarters was mercifully resigned to the circular file); tidied the bedroom (hence vast quantities of clothes washing); organised vast piles of clothes (and small piles of books) to sell or give away; and tidied various other bits of house in a somewhat desultory fashion.

And the worst of it is that even though the Useful Things I did today were mostly a method of distracting myself from feelings of guilt for failing to get to London to see monkeyhands, barnacle and the JunkList crowd ... yes, despite that, I found myself thinking that the day's endeavours had been productive. This, then, is progress: the endless process of sifting and cataloguing the past. The grains of sand. And the only future I can see is the inevitable continuation of the present.