Monday morning in my house is usually pretty standard.

The house has been trashed over the weekend by a standard trail of visitors, waifs and strays.

School homework still needs to be finished, uniforms have to be located; usually from within forgotten PE bags. The fridge is empty but the washing basket is full. A dog needs to be walked, three children need to be fed, dressed and ferried and then the relaxing drive to Oxford to start the proper work of the day.

This morning, a hamster had to be (unsuccessfully) located and consequentially middle child had to be consoled from his devastation at loss of said hamster. Every week that goes by, I vow to be more organised next week.

It’s not because I work or I’m too busy; I would hazard a guess I’d be exactly the same with all the time in the world. It’s a pressure thing. Last minute deadlines work much better. Forward planning is not my thing. If I have two weeks to do a job, it will get done in the last 20 minutes. Life is too much of a joyful distraction to action stuff with time to spare.

Last Monday, it was a different story. Only on the previous Friday, did I register the Bank Holiday Monday. Unusually for us, this meant that my knack of scheduling something for every free five minute window of the waking day, had left us with a ‘free’day. Actually, now I think of it, there’s a good chance my husband deliberately hid this bank holiday fact from me to procure a 24-hour period without entertaining a million people or spending hours in the car driving to and from a must-see attraction.

More astonishingly, the sun was shining and despite nursing vague hangovers from the previous night’s frivolities with friends, the day stretched before us with limitless potential.

I couldn’t help myself and within minutes, an itinerary was bashed out and there can be fewer quintessentially English places to provide an overview of a middle class bank holiday than Henley-on-Thames.

The smallest sniff of sun brings out the Boden gang in their droves. The beautiful river Thames is suddenly nose to tail with motorboats, many driven by silver surfers who sold companies and gave their boats ironic names like ‘Easy Life’, or ‘Who’s laughing now?’ For those who don’t fall into that category; there are the boats you can rent by the hour, which are usually full of families so risk adverse that the boat ends up looking like a enormous floating orange life jacket. Incidentally, we’ve had many happy hours on these boats trying in vain to break the speed limit on the river and always without any hint of life jacket health and safety.

The children’s playground is crammed full of Oscar’s and Jemima’s and every second person is sporting either Joules stripes or a garish Boden print.

The red chino brigade are out in force and the town must be almost eaten out of organic ice cream and skinny mochachocca frappachinos.

This Monday was the town’s May fair, and a proper English affair it was too.

After cycling through muddy fields to get there and dressed in our finest football strips; we spent a lovely couple of hours betting on ferret racing and trying to explain to the kids exactly what the deal is with morris dancers.

Cycling home I realised that try as I might to resist the pull of the smug middle classes, the force is strong and at some point, I’m just going to have to admit that I enjoy this stuff.

The day was finished off well after calling in on some of our very best local friends who thankfully saw the funny side when after an hour with no noise whatsoever from the six children; we discovered them spray painting graffiti on a back wall of their house.

After much hilarity caused by the misplacement of the last letters of their favourite football team, our lovely friends seemed thankfully quite at peace with the notion that their house now sported the neon pink slogan ‘We love arse..’ Nothing that can’t be rectified on both counts. The perfect antidote to affluent bank holidays in the home counties.