Weekend Baby all grown up and even better than Before Kids

THERE'S something about Friday that makes me want to bite myself in fits of unadulterated joy.

It's probably a "Pavlov's dog" approach – a conditioned response, even when there isn't actually a real carrot dangling at the end of a long, ludicrous working week.

I've been my own boss for years now.

I tell myself when it's weekend and, as long as I zip up deadlines smartly, I can take off whenever I damn well want to. It doesn't have to be on Friday at 5pm – and the fun ain't ending promptly at 8am Monday, either, unless I decide it does. So why does Friday mean as much to me now as it did then, when I wore mix-and-match suits from Truworths and clocked in with the rest of the corporate clique?

Theories hint at our need for rest and ritual, which is probably why They (I always wonder about Them – who chose Them to carve our world into time zones and such?) organised humans into productive drones, dedicated to squelching ourselves along the financial bottom line for the good of the company, the world and such. Since humans cannot be expected to squelch eternally, the weekend was invented.

I naturally buck the system, so I've tried to rebel against the archaic authoritarianism that dictates we work five days and rest for two. Says who? But for reasons mysteriously unclear, the system works.

As the sun sets on my Friday, which it has done more than 8000 times since birth, I cannot recall ever being sad about it. The "Weekend Baby!" has matured and stretched with me, mirroring what really mattered in my life four or five times every month, two days at a time.

Before kids (BK), it meant sleeping late. And BK, it meant more wine. It also had lots of people in it, and loud music, and dreadlocked okes who played guitar and braided your hair outside Tiko's in Central while Aggrapena made bacon and egg sarmies to take the edge off the vodka shooters.

It was pub-crawling and street-brawling and loo-hunting and losing your wallet. It was infinity on a plate, because it was payday and the world owed you a favour and a party.

Now, not so much. Now, it's even better, because I appreciate it more. Paradise is a 7am wake-up call rather than dawn and maybe a chai latte at the Coffee Café outside Spar, where Shelly the owner always makes you feel like a million bucks and nobody minds if you feed your toddler Flings just for an extra two minutes of catch-up.

It's not everybody's cup of tea, grown-up Fridays. But it's the weekend, baby, and it's all mine.