The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul

I love Douglas Adams. I am still in mourning for Douglas Adams and all the books he never had the chance to write.

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you’ve taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.   – DNA –  Life, the Universe and Everything

As much as I love everything he has ever done and the effect his humour had on my life, I have never really experienced his Sunday afternoon darkness.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For me, there is a strange timewarp that takes Sunday afternoons from 4pm residual deadline guilt directly to 10pm should be in bed guilt.

What happened to that weekend?  Surely I should have achieved more than I did?

It is currently 9.55 and I am in the grip of a number of specific and non-specific guilt and anxiety states.

Residual Deadline Guilt
– The guilt felt by any ex-student who spent years leaving all homework and assignments until Sunday night.  Every Sunday I still experience a strange nagging sensation that there is a paper I should have written by now.

Generalised Grown-up Homeowner Guilt
– The Generalised guilt felt by ‘grown-ups’ who feel they should have down more housework/gardening/mending/anything other than watching TV.

Expectant Monday-itis
– The dawning realisation that tomorrow is Monday. No more sleep-ins, no more tracksuits, the real world is knocking and there is only so much sleep allowed. Stay up late and squeeze out every last second or head to bed early and have a good night’s sleep?

 

I am going to take my non-Catholic guilt off to bed in preparation for yet another Monday and leave you with these internet quoted (so they must be true) words of Douglas Adams:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Couldn’t agree more.