TODAY is one of the those days when the whole town wakes up with a collective headache.

I like bank holidays as much as the next man, but the trouble is you just end up working harder than you would otherwise when you get back, to make up for the time lost.

It seems great to have a four day week until you realise that each of those four days ends up being 12 hours long.

And this month is of course just about the worst, it has been absolutely chock full of bank holidays so by now everyone is feeling wrung out with them.

I have an alternative solution and that is for us to lump all the bank holidays together in one.

This would entitle everyone to an extra week's holiday to be taken at leisure throughout the year.

It could of course all be worse. We could be Americans.

I understand from people who have been to those strange shores that the Yanks are only entitled to two weeks off per year. Some of them don't even take this.

This sounds odd, how then are so many of them able to spend so long each year cluttering up our Tubes and buses?

Given a choice of places to live I think I would choose India, where I understand that when one faith has a holiday every other faith has the day off.

This seems to me very sensible.

It is wholly unfair of us to expect others to observe the same old bank holidays as always and I think it is about time we added some more.

Particularly useful would be an extra day or two around the dark days of February and November.

The only other alternative to this severe rationing of bank holidays seems to be to join the Civil Service.

My elder brother is one of these curious creatures and seems to spend half his days celebrating one royal occasion or another.

If one of the Queen's corgis has a birthday that seems reason enough for the entire Civil Service to thrown down their gold-tipped fountain pens and head to the south of France.

It is hard enough bankrolling these people without thinking of them sunning themselves on the beach when you are stumbling back to your desk.

Well, if it good enough for the likes of them, it is certainly good enough for the rest of us.

I personally detest royalty and everything about them, but I think it would be narrow-minded of me to allow this prejudice to get in the way of another day off work.