Loving the moon does not mean loving Monday, the day named after it. Far from bathing all in silver light, the day seems bleak and dark, whatever the season, weather or region, because it is conventionally the first day of the working week for nineto-fivers. So Guinness World Records ‘officially’ marked Monday as the ‘worst day of the week’ and received overwhelming support. Not that everything is terrible about Monday. According to an old rhyme, Monday’s child is ‘fair of face’ and obviously destined to be a winner; it is Wednesday’s child who is ‘full of woe’. Yet if Guinness were to be followed, the woebegone face should belong to Monday, closer to Shakespeare’s whining schoolboy, ‘creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school’. Wednesday is a bit odd too — not quite the middle of the week with the hope of the second half coming up but plunged deep in the greyness of routine.

Monday blues are so perverse as to spill backwards, burdening Sunday evenings with the heaviness of the week to come. The weekend can never be perfect because its delights are haunted by the spectre of a dawning Monday. The day’s metaphorical shadow is perhaps better projected in the other rhyme, in which Solomon Grundy — a name with quite a Grinchy feeling — was born on a Monday. Nowhere is it explained whether Solomon’s week-bound life — he was christened on a Tuesday, married on a Wednesday and so on till he was buried on a Sunday — was meant to be literal or the result of an amazing series of coincidences, but the brevity of the rhyme bathes his life in gloom. It is no wonder therefore that Solomon Grundy is resurrected in DC Comics as a villain and an anti-hero: he is, to put it politely, an evolved zombie. Which is exactly the way people feel when going back to office on Monday.

The support garnered by the Guinness assessment suggests that the power of Monday persists even after the growing popularity of the workfrom-home system. In a way, working from home should have turned every day into a Monday, since working hours are no longer confined to a nine-tofive routine, each day being filled with the bleakness of the unpredictable. Neither are weekends sacrosanct. The time and energy saved by the bar on travelling to work are poured into online meetings and harder deadlines in pursuit of the Holy Grail of greater productivity. So the spirit of Monday may feel a little hurt at still being nominated as the worst day of the week. Besides, there are other weekends too — Friday, for example, or even Wednesday. It might claim that this undeserved prejudice is specific to Western-style set-ups, Saturday or Thursday can be equally hateful wherever they begin the week. But it doesn’t work. Monday is loaded with the reluctance of the working person’s sense of monotony; nothing can take that away.