The drawer pulls up her drawbridge

I always think Sundays throw a kind of magisterial rank on the weekday. Just by being there they can give entire weeks good press. On a good day Sundays have the power to give life a sweet sheen, maybe by virtue of the fact the rat-race is being held back for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and is somehow anaesthetised. Sundays, bringing it all back home, leave the artist tired, yet you know she will find a way of inching back to her piece on the wall again, for at least two hours, and probably before midnight, taking down the newspapers used to conceal and protect the piece, and only after the children have finally and unwillingly fallen asleep. Sundays are also, I guess, the busiest day for galleries large and small, though in this city mostly large, as hoards of people, tourists often, file sheepishly into the institutions of the great and the good, staring at each other as much as at the art, with limp hands on moving escalators, neat money-bags round large waists, city atlases clasped in tight hands, and eyes forever peering into the unfamiliar distance. Like now, Sundays are also a time for reflection and correction - even the way news is reported on Sundays offers a more considered take on the world, as if everything has a second chance, and because Sunday opinion permeates into the actual news telling, readers can often come away with as much philosophy in their heads as information, which may be a good thing. Sundays are also for lovers, thankfully, as the world withdraws from the often young getting to know each other, and the unfamiliarity of their tenderness is allowed at last to prosper. Sundays are for veiled windows and veiled widows, as solitary figures hunch their rheumatic backs up increasingly steep steps to respective churches. Sundays are for visiting the infirm in infirmaries, gardeners in gardens, prisoners in prisons, and larks in parks. Sundays are for children to wonder why grown-ups are happy just hanging out, when the children want to do things, go places, see people, engage. (Sundays are also for careers to be placed on hold while energy levels are topped up.) Sundays are for catching up on reading, self-examination, deep thinking. Sundays for some are for drinking, drugs, self-loathing. Sundays are for recovering. Sundays are for boy footballers and girl swimmers. Sundays are for the weak and sometimes picked upon not to fear the five-day state. Sundays are for visited graves and crouched memories, for leaving bouquets or running fingers across headstones. Sundays are for tipping a son's bike upside down and oiling the chain. Sundays are for the five-times table. Sundays are for quiet moments, thinking how great it would be to do this project or that. Sundays are for blogs to trawl with a kind of abandon. Sundays, I just wish, were not also days when people die unnecessarily, are bombed, starved, tortured, or taken away. (Sundays have a lot to answer for but at least they try.)