Don’t get stressed, but savour Sunday

I won’t pretend to be a medical man but apparently this is a recognised syndrome characterised by a mild sense of depression about the week ahead.

And according to the experts it begins half way through Sunday afternoon and continues into the evening.

Now I can quite accept that if your name is Murray and your place of work this weekend was on the southern outskirts of London, you had good reason to be a little more than mildly miffed at about that hour.

I’ll even own up to a budding case of angst myself, seeing as I was stuck in a stationary queue of traffic on the M4 without so much as a sucky sweet to help while away the wait.

But as many as four out of 10 adults reckon that their Sunday nights are full of dread and anxiety, and it’s nothing to do with the awful telly that we’re expected to put up with as the weekend draws to a close.

Hotel chain Premier Inn carried out the research, presumably in a bid to encourage people to flit off for weekends in budget hotels somewhere close to a dual carriageway or retail park – mmm, so romantic.

And their survey said that Britons spend Monday to Friday looking forward to the weekend but on average start worrying about going back to work almost eight hours before the weekend technically ends.

Some people reckon they have a really bad case of the blues – one in 10 of us start getting depressed at 10am on a Sunday. Come on, that’s before the Archers omnibus has started, and certainly before many of us have even got up.

I’ve had a think about it, and it’s all a load of cobblers – I apologise for using complicated terminology here.

Many people polled blamed the onset of Sunday blues on the fact that they are bored.

Almost half of those questioned – and presumably we’re talking about the minority of people who still have a steady job to occupy their week days, and who aren’t involved either in some sort of shift work or unpaid overtime which creeps far beyond the traditional nine to five – said that they would not feel so down on a Sunday evening if they had more to do at weekends. Like flit off for weekends in budget boxes near retail parks, we must assume.

And almost three quarters of people said that they often do not leave their house at all on a Sunday, while nearly half confessed they rarely speak to anyone on the phone either.

More than a quarter say Sunday is the dullest day because it is full of chores. And get this, one in five complain that weekends just seem shorter and less satisfying after being treated to an extended break over the Queen’s Jubilee. Diddums!

I’ve always stood by my old mum’s maxim when I complained about having nothing to do: Only boring people are bored.

And let’s face it, if all you have got to get worked up about on a Sunday afternoon is the fact that you’ve got to get up in the morning and go to work, you should be counting your blessings rather than bleating to that nice Premier Inns researcher about how unfair life is.