Mondays: A Good Way To Send 1/7th Of Your Life?

Bob Geldof - you either love him or hate him. Whatever you think of him, I bet he has touched you in some way at some time.

He touched me this morning as the Flying Pig's back wheels failed miserably to cope with the ice on a potent downhill s-bend on top of the moor. Having narrowly avoided slamming into the wall (which is becoming an all too regular occurrence) I found myself singing, off key, the Boomtown Rats 1979 number one hit, 'I Don't Like Mondays'.

"Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
I wanna shoo-oo-woo-woo-woo-oot the whole day down."

It was good therapy as my heart raced well over the normal 70-100 beats per minute. As I had the driver's side window open, I noticed the sheep close to the road acknowledged the the ruination of a good song by stampeding in the opposite direction, regardless of the danger of heading towards a bog.

I'll tell you why I don't like this particular Monday. It's because the weekend had been so amazingly good with fun, jokes, laughter, generous friends and wife and family time. Like 99% of the population, getting back into the humdrum of the working week can be found to be a traumatic affair.

But it could be worse.

Near misses aside, the general mood on the school run was genial. Sunday's local derby football match had ended in the perfect result - Sunderland 1 Newcastle United 1, meaning that there were few black clouds lurking above the heads of the passengers. As the support is split down the middle, a win for either team results in one tribe being in a rotten temper.

"Yeah, I saw the match," said one of the drivers who was in a much better humour than he was on Friday evening.

"On Sky?" I asked.

"No on a Swedish channel, and before you ask, it's not the sort of channel you think."

That set the scene for a Monday morning with an international flavour. On the school run one of the schoolchildren was unusually not at her stop.

"She's gone to Australia," said one of the other children. "And she's gone for three weeks, lucky devil."

The Eastern European child looked angry as he stood in a gateway.

"You are late," he growled in his habitual Eastern European directness. "It's a quarter to nine." I bowed my head in momentary shame.

As we neared the school drop off zone, I thought I heard one child call out my name.

"No I didn't," he said when I answered back. "Have you lost an earring?"

"I haven't. I don't wear earrings," I replied in puzzlement.

"No not EARRINGS, I said have you lost your HEARING?"

This is quite normal on the Flying Pig. It is a noisy bus and often it is impossible to hear what people are saying. One driver hates it so much that he refuses to drive it without wearing headphones.

It might explain why I've had times where angry passengers have had to walk several hundred yards as a result of missing there stop....but that is another story.