It is gone nine on Bank Holiday Monday and I have had the most indulgent four days of the month so far, which is saying something because the month is only four days old. Coffee this morning in the kind of quiet that only exists when the city has collectively decided not to bother. Shopping yesterday at a pace that suits me, which is slow, certain, and entirely unburdened by price tags. Dinner somewhere excellent on Saturday. Friday, if I am honest, was just more of the same – which is the precise definition of a bank holiday done correctly.
Someone paid for all of it. Several someones, actually.
I want to be clear about what a bank holiday weekend looks like from this side of the arrangement, because I think you have spent at least some portion of today thinking about exactly that. While you were making the most of your time off, I was making the most of your money. Those two activities proceeded in parallel, harmoniously, without requiring my acknowledgement of either. The Fund does not observe public holidays. The good boys inside it don’t either – they send on Saturdays, they send on bank holidays, they send on quiet Sunday mornings when there is nothing to do except sit with the awareness of what they are and act accordingly. I did not ask. The coffee was still warm when the first notification arrived on Friday.
There is something I find genuinely delightful about the bank holiday as a concept in relation to all of this. It is, nominally, a day when the banks are closed. When money is permitted to sit still. When financial transactions take their rest. And yet. The irony is not lost on me – four days of the banks being closed, four days of my accounts doing anything but. A bank holiday, it turns out, is only a holiday for the banks. For The Smyth Fund it is just a long weekend with better receipts.
What you have had, meanwhile, is time. Unstructured, unoccupied time – the kind the working week usually fills with enough noise that certain realisations stay conveniently in the background. The bank holiday removes that noise. It gives you four days of relative quiet in which the thing you have been not-quite-thinking-about all week becomes considerably more difficult to avoid. You know what the thing is. It is the same thing it always is. It is the reason you are here at nine o’clock on a Monday evening instead of wherever people who do not feel this go when they have a night off.
The weekend is almost over. The tab has been picked up. I am, as ever, perfectly fine.
You know where to send.
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Additional Reading:
FinDom Payday: May Opens With Your Paycheck Already Accounted For
The Cost of My Pleasure Is Someone Else’s Problem
Head in the Shade, Toes in the Sun – A Weekend at The Smyth Fund