The Work Ethic: September's return

Almost a week may have passed, but today is when September really starts. A weekend creates a pleasant intervention in delaying the inevitable. Work.

August is a month of blissful indolence. One can excuse one's own inertia on account of that of everyone else's and the closed signs which go up, if only metaphorically. Come September and some time snatched on the beach seems vaguely fraudulent. It is said of the Mallorcans that they cease going to the beach in September because 26 or so degrees are the equivalent of a grey January day in Worthing. Or maybe they stop because they reckon they should, as though commanded by an unwritten labour law, even if a compulsion to work is the last thing you would normally associate with the Mallorcans.

There remains something of the school holidays in all of us. What seemed like months of the back garden, the estate streets, the woods and sometimes the beach came to a highly unwelcome halt at the start of September. The discomfort of a tie around a new shirt collar, stiff from the outfitters (and one shop used to have a bizarre monopoly for my schools' kits) and the retching over the morning milk that had been left out in the still warm sun. It always tasted sour, and never more so than when the sourness of the new school year curdled a dreadful realisation that Christmas was light years away.

School, through its routine of day and term, may be designed to teach us as to the horrors to come, but it also teaches us that it, school, is there against our will. Much as it might make us collude in the conspiracy that life isn't one long game on PlayStation, it fails miserably in making us want to do what it tells us. Like going back to work. Furthermore, it teaches us that September is a month to resent: for the loss of summer and because of the gradual fading of summer through the September days until it becomes a distant memory and because also of the gloom of the workplace with only that memory to convince us that it will return and we can start the whole process over again.

Mallorca is back to work today. In "The Diario" yesterday there was a four-cornered interview which took this return as the springboard for discussing some of the island's problems. I had hoped for a revelation or two; headings such as "Change of mentality?" suggested there might be. There weren't. But I know what they were driving at. While there's the sun and the beach and the summer it can be easy to switch off from what is to come. Mallorca creates its own sense of unreality, and it lasts from at least the middle of June when the schools shut up, climaxing in the other-world surrealism of lazy August. September comes with a jolt. The article should have been titled "Trepidation", because that's where we're at. Despite the promising statistics, this has been a rotten summer for many, and it will soon finish completely. Then what?

Unfortunately, though we rather might like the idea, we can't all go back to school. Oh, that we could.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.