Alfred Muggins’ Easter Holiday by Alfred N.Muggins

31/3/24 (6/4/24)

The Easter holidays approached.

“What holiday?” asked Alfred Muggins desperately!

     As it approached his intention of writing about Easter and trying to make sense of the troubled world around him fell by the wayside, smashed upon the altar of WORK! He was working double what he worked a year ago! Through the whole holiday weekend, he must be one of the very few who had no holiday at all. It wasn’t fair! 

     He worked out that while other colleagues had a day off here and a day off there. Some even had two days off or more. While he did have some slack days, none of them were actual days off! He didn’t even have a weekend off, certainly not a weekend at the weekend! But he did not even have a weekend in the week off, so to speak. How had it come to this? He was working on all sections of every day. Morning, lunch, tea and evening!

    He realized that he really was an even bigger mug than he had thought he was. He just knew that if he asked for a break right now he would not be likely to get it, because there were not enough workers left in his section of community care. Many workers had jumped ship, some to other employments, and others into sheltered accommodation so they could be retained by their company. The community care section contracts had been allotted for a change of provider. His company had lost the tender for the contract, so for nine months , or at least 6 months they had been living, and working, under black clouds of uncertainty. Social Services, whose bright idea it was, were not even gracious enough to tell them who had won the contract and who might then be their next service provider company, who were duty bound to employ them. Not even the clients knew. Even they were still in the dark!

    So he was left with a larger workload than he was used to, and little flexible cover if he wished to ask for a holiday or some time off. So that was the end of his Easter reflections. Only now, at the bitter end of a long Easter Sunday ‘double shift’ was he carving the time out for a small period of reflection and writing. And he was carving it out of his sleep time again, because it was already time for bed, if he was to get up refreshed and having dreamed overnight, for the next day’s workload.

     As he wrote, he realized that Time, (his greatest enemy) had slipped already into the 1^st of April, April Fool’s Day, and he knew that without a doubt, he Alfred Muggins, was quite definitely the Fool this year. It was time to go downstairs and check the animals’ welfare, to eat his final ‘last supper’ of the night, and to get to bed as soon as possible so he might visit the land of dreams sufficiently to restore him for tomorrow. Thankfully he was not overbusy tomorrow, although there were a few lunch calls and tea calls, as well as one call in the morning, and one in the evening.

To add insult to injury, while Christ still resided with the dead in his tomb, before rising once more to a gloomier than usual Easter Sunday morning, in a Holy Land long since freed from the Roman boot of the Caesars, but now subject to a new colonization by his erstwhile ancestors, the Jews, who had largely spent many years wandering lands afar, to finally return and once again reconquer the land of their forefathers (and mothers! As they were Jewish!) They were apparently putting the final touches to this longstanding plan by destroying the refugee camps in the old land of the Philistines, taking a fair proportion of the inhabitants with them into Sheol? (Perhaps it could be seen (or justified?) as a form of counter kidnapping in the process! Christ would have an uphill task trying to persuade these angry hate filled soldiers to hold out their olive branches to an oppressed people caught without much care in the crossfire of New Israel’s retribution, to desist. It seemed today that the laws of Moses transcended the new covenant of Christ’s forgiveness once again! But weren’t they even breaking the Laws of Moses, or some of them?