It's the end of the holidays....

Bath, and I am sure Britain as a whole, felt a bit like the passenger pick-up point outside Bristol Airport this week.

I was there on Tuesday night picking up my daughter and three of her friends who had just come back from ‘Costa Del Nightclub’ after a week-long break which I prayed was nothing like The Inbetweeners Movie.

All four of them were in very good spirits on the night – but many other people I saw clearly weren’t. For while I was waiting for the dancing queens to return, I looked at the faces of other people who had arrived back in the UK, saw them staring out bleakly at the driving rain and high winds and felt their pain. They looked brown – but browned-off.

That sense of disappointment is, I suspect, how a lot of other people felt this week as we all collectively realised that the holiday summer season was now well and truly over. And if we did need reminding, what better, crueller symbol could there have been than the clouds opening and pouring down on those poor youngsters trundling back to school for the new term earlier in the week.

Wimbledon? A lifetime ago.

The best thing about having a holiday is not only the event itself but the anticipation of it so, conversely, the worst is actually coming back and waiting at that pick-up point knowing that the party is over for a while at least.In the office this week, for example, it was the first time for more weeks that I can remember that most of the team were back at their desks. But it was also noticeable that as and when people returned from their breaks, one of the first things many started to do was to think about the next one.

Holiday forms were filled in, calendars stared at and people started counting how many days they had left from their allocation. And that is amongst a bunch of people who by and large love their work – I can’t help wondering how much tougher PHB (my newly-invented Post Holiday Blues) is for those for whom every work day is a virtual trial.

Of course people will always say that they don’t get enough time off but the reality is Britain is actually not bad in terms of its annual holiday allowance. Most people in the UK are allowed a total of around 33 days off including Bank Holidays which is, on the downside, somewhat less than countries such as Brazil, France and Russia which all pip the 40 mark. However, spare a thought for countries such as China and Singapore, which only get in the 20s and even more so, perhaps surprisingly, for the USA where 15 days is the average holiday with a few Bank Holidays thrown in. And worse still, pity our poor old Canadian friends who get only ten statutory days off plus nine public holidays. Imagine those bleak Canadian faces at the pick-up point in airports in Toronto and Vancouver . . .

Ah well holidays over – what’s next? Why, we have Christmas to look forward to now of course. Pass the travel brochures. Quick.

Miserable? Nah, I'm just suffering from jet lag!

How are you feeling today? A bit fluey perhaps? A bit down? Or perhaps just totally out of sorts?

If the answer to any (or all) of those questions is “yes” then fear not.

For welcome to the life of the average January-hating Briton who has returned to work, school or college this week after what seemed like a gloriously long break.

Before “back-to-work-Tuesday” many people had probably spent the best part of two weeks waking up (probably later than normal) and immediately asking themselves two key questions: “what day is it?” and “am I at work today?”

For many in the caring professions or in retail the answer to the latter is just as likely to be “yes” as “no” but for millions of other people, the reality that holidays don’t go on forever hit really hard on Tuesday morning when their vile alarm clock sprung back into life. And even those of us who love our job or have, indeed, been in at times over the holidays, will have looked at that alarm with contempt.

So I’m delighted to say that I now have a scientific term to deal with the fact that dragging myself out of bed on Tuesday was as difficult as looking enthusiastic about four-day-old turkey. Apparently those of us who had to go back to work this week and have found it harder than normal are suffering from something called “social jet lag”. This term has been coined to describe the impact on our bodies of having to readjust after spending a couple of weeks going to bed later, getting up later, drinking more, eating more and often wallowing in the pleasure of doing very little.

Social jet lag, which would have hit most people by about 3pm on day one of the big return, apparently can have the effect of leaving people with indigestion, headache, clumsiness, fatigue and irritability. If that sounds like you then rejoice: you’re not a miserable old goat, you’ve just got jet lag. Hoorah!

Of course, not everyone was able to enjoy the “back-to-work-Tuesday- social-jet-lag-phenomenon”. For it seems that nearly two million people on the day never got out of bed at all due to the cold/flu/man flu (see previous blog!!!!!) which has struck so many people this year. For all of them, the social jet lag joy is still to come and just to make them feel even better there is a rumour of more snow. Yes, back-to-work-next-week-types, even if you can finally get out the bed, you might not be able to get out of the drive.

So, in the interests of trying to cheer people up as they face this short but still rather tricky week, I found by literally minutes of research that among the cures for the January blues, back-to-work- Tuesday feelings and social jet lag are to remember that most people feel the same, many have spent too much in the sales, plenty have hidden the scales and nearly all are already wistfully counting the days until their next holiday.

The only thing that did depress me a little from my extensive research into cheering everyone up was a quote from someone who said “the reality is, come February, most people are back in the swing of things”.

February? That seems an awful long way away. It kind of makes you want to go right back to bed.