"A day off," I hear you all cry.

Well, yes, obviously that is, in exact terms, what a bank holiday is. But what more do we get out of it except for maybe a few more cheeky social shandies on a Sunday afternoon?

I tried to go shopping on my Monday. Having recently bought my first house, Homebase is becoming more essential than Asda for me, so along I popped to the Riverside Retail Park. I spent about 20 minutes in the shop and then an hour trying to get out of the car park. I was mistified, and still am more to the point, as to why the car park jammed up quite so emphatically, or why everyone wanted to leave at exactly the same time ... or was it just that everyone goes there on a bank holiday because it's some kind of unwritten law and it's a nightmare to get out of all day?

And then the weather couldn't decide what it wanted to do - one minute blue sky, the very next minute a heavy hail storm, then rain, then sunshine, then rain - which in turn made it impossible for me to decide what else I wanted to do with my precious day. So I ended up doing what I reckon almost everybody else did: sat around reading the paper, watching Jeremy Kyle and generally clock-watching as my precious day drained away before my very eyes.

D on't get me wrong, I appreciate time off work just as much as the next man. We spend five days out of seven as it is so an extra day off is more welcome than not. But doesn't it just offset the workload and make Tuesday twice as busy? Chances are, by now, you've completely forgotten how rested and relaxed you felt on Monday night and are now counting the hours until 5pm Friday rolls around.

Because that's all a bank holiday does for you. It cons you into getting even more chilled out than your average weekend and then smacks you in the face like a wet badger come Tuesday morning when you realise the workload hasn't reduced in line with the short week. So you get double the stress and twice the misery of a Monday rolled into one!

Alternatively, you worked like a demon badger over the previous week in order to make your Tuesday lighter and needed the extra day off just to get back to your normal stress level.

So if someone can tell me what more a bank holiday gives me, other than time to recover from a naughty little hangover, then I'd be happy to hear from them.