No, it’s not dead, it’s just resting.
Anyway, I took that time off in order to decide what the best way to proceed would be. Should I write prose, should I write politics, should I write the general nonsense commentary of the everyday life, should I do a meta-blogging blog, should it be a therapy blog, should I open it up, should I keep it private. Taking time off hasn’t really helped though and I haven’t made up my mind about the character of the blog.
So I’ll just lean to the everyday for a while and see where it takes me. That is today: Bank Holiday.
When I first met the term Bank Holiday, I was looking for temporary work. The ad was something like ‘personnel for bank holidays’ and I assumed that this was a post for work at a bank, during the holidays. Apparently the Bank of England at some point had the power to regulate when people would work and when they would rest and they even managed to make an Act about this. This may have functioned as a way to maintain the country secular, still it makes me think about how money-ruled it has always been. Having the national bank decide when you work or not- how more about money could this be? What I am interested here how calling it ‘Bank Hodiday’ decontextualises the event. The reference to the idea behind the free day ceases to exist, like for example the International Workers day-1st of May. There is no official, national celebration for the Labour 1st of May in the UK today, it’s not on the News or the media, people don’t go to Marx’s grave to leave red carnations or read a poem about the dead workers who struggled for the 8-hour day. Now, this is not a Marxist blog (at least not yet) but it does attempt to spell out an argument or two from time to time. And that is that capitalism and rituals have a complex relationship- they may have been used to fortify nationalism and community feelings as in E. Durkheim and Anderson, by giving a shared sense of history. In the case of un-named Bank Holidays however, de-ritualisation shifts the attention to being paid whilst not working, and so, to spending. Rituals of course may offer more opportunities for spending, there are after all the peripheral small markets that emerge for the occasion, to sell flowers or remembrance artifacts. But it is the concept of the Holiday that changes, and its coincidence with general consuming.
