I’d heard the expression before, but not grasped its meaning.
Then, last week, it was explained to me, albeit accidentally, while I was in one of my favourite environments, a coffee shop.
As I was sitting at my table, cwtshing my extra-skinny, ultra-healthy latte, and munching on my bacon and egg panini with extra butter, two well-dressed men, aged (I would guess) in their early 30s, parked their rears at an adjacent table.
I paid little attention to their conversation at first (who said, “That’s not like you, Phil!”?) as I was engrossed in one of the free newspapers the coffee shop supplies to customers to read while cradling a cappuccino or musing over a macchiato.
That might sound generous of Reg the proprietor, but they’re never that day’s newspapers. In fact, they’re usually a week old. I think he gets them from the chip shop next door.
Anyway, my engrossment was curtailed when I heard one of the men at the adjacent table (remember them?), using the expression I’ve been talking about. Which is . . . “Duvet Day”.
One chap had asked the other what he was doing the following Monday and his friend said, “Oh, I’m having a Duvet Day!”
Fortunately for me, and those of you for whom the expression is only vaguely familiar, his pal was puzzled and asked him to explain.
Well, you could have blown me down with a feather (if that’s your idea of a good time) when he said, “It means I won’t go into work, will probably stay in bed until lunchtime and won’t lose any pay. It’s a ‘thing’ these days!”
What?
As Frankie Howerd put it, “Never has my flabber been so gasted!”
With unemployment so high, particularly among those aged 16 to 24, it’s now a ‘thing’ to take a day off when you feel like it, stay in bed and expect to get paid for it?
Call me old-fashioned, but shouldn’t the glib expression ‘Duvet Day’ be renamed, using the word it replaced, to the much more honest ‘Skivers Day’?
Another bacon and egg panini, please, Reg!