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I’ve a love/hate relationship with bank holidays in Scotland.

Simply put, they’re just a bit different from England: An extra one on the 2nd January is well known. There’s also something different with the August bank holiday. It’s at the start of August, not the end. There was some half-baked November holiday for St Andrews day, that nobody observes. There’s a full list on wikipedia if you’re interested.

So far so good.

There are also a few more regional holidays up here than I ever observed in England. At times Scotland feels more like Germany, which has plenty of regional public holidays (as well as fascinating customs, in Dusseldorf, of “Möhnen” (generally any female old enough to hold a pair of scissors, brazenly cutting of mens’ ties during Carnival). I’d written a few years back about Glasgow fair, early in July.

The thing is, absolutely nobody I know really observes the Scottish ones, other than public sector employees. Ironic given banks weren’t public sector, at least until recently. There’s that little quirk corrected at least.

The private sector largely has to respond to economic demand, and national companies have to have standards – it’d be mad to disregard orders because of a local holiday most people don’t observe, or have one entire office shutting down when the rest of the company is open. Certainly almost all of my clients are based down south, and I can’t really down tools on a bank holiday, when they’re expecting me to work. One of my clients, an international company, has gone a step further to add bank holidays to staffs holiday allowance, so people have flexibility.

I suppose with a nationalist government up here, it’s highly unlikely we’ll see any standardisation of holidays across the UK. Perhaps there is something nice about having a day off when lots of people are working. Perhaps the idea of national holidays is just altogether antiquated, and we should all just get on with our lives and stop worrying. Or don’t we have enough of them right now?

Anyway, this Monday is the English August Bank Holiday, and it’s a day off that neither Frances or I had realised was coming up, so it’s a bit of a treat. So right now, I’m liking Bank Holidays.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 9:55 am and is filed under Thoughts, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.