NEXT week I face a five-day working week – and I’m not looking forward to it.

Of course most full-time jobs involve five days of work and two days off, and they’ve been the norm for me throughout my working life. But it’s a month since I have had to endure one.

I happened to have days off on April 4 and 25. Good Friday and Easter Monday shortened the two weeks in between by one day.

And the early May bank holiday created another four-day week. So I’ve been rather spoilt of late. I imagine the week commencing May 9 is going to feel like a very long one.

Then just as I’m becoming accustomed to five-day weeks again there will be the celebrations for the Queen’s platinum jubilee, bringing more days off. And I’m hoping for two weeks’ holiday in July.

This might all make me sound rather work-shy, and I hope I’m not – or at least no more so than most people. But what I am looking forward to is the time when the standard working week becomes four days long and the standard weekend is three days of rest.

It is bound to happen eventually. And when it comes, the idea that their forebears used to work five days out of every seven will fill younger generations with horror.

After all, for centuries we used to work six-day weeks, with only one day off. No-one would or should accept that today.

Like many conventions, the six-day working week evolved from religion, and the concept of the Sabbath, a day devoted to God instead of work. Christians have long marked it on Sunday, though in the Jewish tradition it runs from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, and in the Muslim world it varies from country to country.

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Trade unions began to campaign for an extra day off on Saturdays during the 19th century and kinder employers agreed. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the word 'weekend' to 1879.

But as technology advances, shouldn’t we all be allowing ourselves less time working?

I don’t know anybody who hand-washes clothes these days. Self-defrosting fridges, non-iron shirts and pre-grated cheese are mainstream. And life’s too short for washing dishes by hand.

What was the point of any of these inventions if not to give us more free time?

In recent years there has been a greater focus on when we work, how child care can be accommodated, how ill health due to stress can be reduced, and where the right work-life balance lies.

Working from home and hybrid working as a result of Covid have led more employers and employees alike to consider alternatives to the nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday routine.

And a four-day week would cut carbon emissions sharply, as has been found in other places where it has been tried.

Not everybody would want to work less if it also meant earning less, but it is worth bearing in mind the well-known observations that money can’t buy you happiness and the best things in life are free.

If you were 'born to shop' you might be troubled by it. But other people may find it easier to do the things that really bring us happiness but which we are forever complaining we haven’t got time for, whether it’s looking after children, spending time with friends and family, volunteering, taking more exercise or learning a skill or language we always wanted to learn. We may end up happier.

Years ago, I mentioned how the much-deplored 'three-day week' during the tail end of Edward Heath’s premiership sounded rather appealing to me. Someone denounced this opinion as lefty rubbish – though 'rubbish' wasn’t quite the word he used.

His reaction only convinced me that the idea was a good one. All social advances meet with the same sort of angry opposition, and it soon blows over.

When the national minimum wage was introduced, the Tories claimed that it would destroy jobs. But it didn’t – and now no Conservative government would dare abolish it.

No doubt it was 'lefty rubbish' once to some to stop sending children down mines or up chimneys. Giving women the vote certainly had its opponents.

So it will be when the three-day weekend is put forward by an enlightened government of the future. There’ll be howls of opposition.

But once it happens we won’t hear from its opponents again.

And you won’t have to be a lefty to support it. It was an American businessman, publisher and staunch Republican Malcolm Forbes who once said: “No-one ever dies wishing they’d spent more time at the office.”

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