It was a bank holiday Monday, and I was unsure whether to go out or not. My usual rule about this sort of thing is to decline such frivolous behaviour, as the amount of other people with similar thoughts of going out at the same time normally make the day more miserable than enjoyable.
This is because that almost everyone nurturing an idea of going out on a bank holiday fall into the trap of thinking that nobody else will be considering going out this time. Not after the last bank holiday Monday, they think, when most of the population got stuck on a motorway for hours and hours. Or trapped in a train carriage because the signals decided not to work, and then ended up waiting hours and hours for the engineer who was needed to fix the broken signals to finish sitting for hours and hours in a motorway queue trying to get to the signals.
Nobody would be so daft as to go out again this bank holiday, surely. But they do. Every single time.
But this bank holiday Monday, I had a plan. I would get up early. And not only that, I would get up early and arrive at my chosen destination as soon as it opened, at 10am. Now I know that 10am is not normally classed as early, but 10am in bank holiday hours is around about the equivalent of 5am in normal working-day hours. So it felt a little wrong to be up and about at that inhospitable mid-morning hour. My chosen destination: National Trust’s Westbury Court Garden in Gloucestershire.
Anthony Phillips 