Jul 25 - In Defence Of Sunday Evenings
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
It’s been two or three Sundays now that I’ve been in town at seven or eight in the evening and thought to myself, “wow, this is really pleasant”. It’s a known fact that a good golden hour is better than a thousand not-golden hours, Confucius said it…maybe.
Sundays get a bad rap. Weekends are a rollercoaster of highs and lows, your highs being Friday after work, when everybody’s psyched to get trollied, and Saturday evening when you go out for dinner; and your lows are Saturday morning when your head is pounding and Sunday from midday onwards, when you’re thinking of having to wake up at seven in the morning the next day to put up with a whole other week of work. But it doesn’t have to be like that. In Gibraltar, unfortunately, it seems there are only a few times a week where you are spoilt for choice on things to do after six in the evening, and a Sunday really isn’t one of them. But I’m not sure where we got that. Just across the border and elsewhere Sundays are to be enjoyed; terrazas are heaving with people into the night as people are squeezing every drop of enjoyment out of the weekend. In fact, it’s common for most bars, cafe’s and restaurants to have Mondays as their day of rest, rather than Sundays, which makes me doubt my original assumption about places in Gibraltar, that it had something to do with religion; but you know, Spain being the most religious country, it didn’t make sense. But I’ve spent too many Sunday evenings in the fetal position on the couch, close to tears and it’s time to make a change.
Evenings in general are to be enjoyed. In Gibraltar by seven o’clock latest everybody’s making their way home, whilst elsewhere people are either leaving the house at that time or are still out from work. In Italy they do this thing called aperitivo, where bars and cafes offer some free nibbles with the purchase of a drink, which means you have a beer or two, snack on something and then maybe you get some dinner later or just skip the meal altogether. And there is nothing better than a good aperitivo in the evening, especially when the sun is setting, and everything is golden, and you’re done working for the day. Here we miss out on that whole socialising situation, we go straight home and spend the rest of the day in the company of people who are just as bored, or even worse, alone. I try to enjoy my evenings, at least once a week I meet friends after work for a couple of drinks, and provided it doesn’t get out of hand (which it sometimes does) it’s refreshing the next morning to know that you spent a few hours winding down, rather than going from the stress of the office to the stress of preparing dinner and the rest of the week ahead and going to bed with all that knocking about it your head.
And when it comes to winding down there’s possibly not a better time than Sunday evening. After the whole week, after the weekend, you wind down and get ready for the new week. Sundays are the perfect time to meet up with friends and go for a quiet drink, or a nice meal, and now in the summer there’s nothing better than a terrace BBQ on a Sunday. Get some food in you, a couple of drinks, socialise, and wake up on the Monday ready to take on the week. And don’t worry about going to bed a little past your usual bed time on the Sunday, because the extra hours you slept on Saturday and Sunday morning make up for it. Give it a go and see what you think, we might be able to change the way we all think, and learn to appreciate Sunday evenings a little more, ending the week on a high rather than a low.
{fcomment}
