♥ I Like Mondays

Mondays get bad press; Monday is after all the day that signals, for most people, a return to the quotidian grind.  When it was first released I used to listen mindlessly to the Boomtown Rats number one hit, penned by Bob Geldof, ‘I don’t like Mondays’ and it was only the oft-repeated refrain ‘I don’t like Mondays’ that impinged on my consciousness, so I wrongly assumed the song was about Geldof”s dislike of the first day of the week.

It is only in recent years that I discovered that the song deals with a massacre at an elementary school and that ‘I don’t like Mondays’ was what the sixteen year old perpetrator said in reply to a reporter’s question ‘Tell me why?’  I have long admired Bob Geldof for his passionate commitment to Africa and his efforts to alleviate  hunger and poverty in that continent; when I finally listened properly to the lyrics of ‘I don’t like Monday’ I discovered a newfound respect for his ability to use language.  As a way of telegraphing a catastrophic meltdown the phrase ‘the silicon chip inside her head was switched to overload’ would I think be difficult to match.

I actually like Mondays.  For me each Monday is like a mini New Year’s Eve a chance to make some resolutions; to decide either to do or not to do. For months now I have thought I don’t get enough exercise, Pilates yoga and the odd walk don’t add up to much when viewed on an aerobic scale.  For months I have thought I should go for a weekly swim.  For months I have found reasons not to go for said swim: I have just washed my hair, too much chlorine in the pool, it’s too cold…

So this Monday, I am declaring I will go swimming this week.  I feel that writing as I do into the ether yet knowing that someone I know might read this and may ask me about my swim could be just be the impetus I need to haul myself swimming-pool-ward.