Mayday! Mayday! It's May Day tomorrow

Tomorrow being May Day, we suggest you take your Sunday seriously. While the practice of celebrating International Workers' Day - by not working - was chosen by the communists and socialists in 1889 in Paris, there is no reason why others shouldn't also mark it. After all, capitalists also do work, the only difference being that they tend to see the word 'labour', rather illogically, as being a bit back-breaking, while work is, well, work. In any case, in many cultures - at least in the northern hemisphere - the first day of May is considered as the first day of summer. With temperatures being what they are in far too many parts of working India, we may choose to stick to the workers' angle since we're already in the thick of summer.

For those who think that work is dangerous - as opposed to it being dangerous in some lines of work - there's always the pleasure in shouting 'Mayday! Mayday!' But it would be wise to know that this international distress call has nothing to do with May Day. It was conjured up in the early 1920s by the officer-in-charge of radio at Croydon Airport, functional between the world wars, as an anglicised and phonetic equivalent of the French 'm'aidez' - help me. If we weren't on chhutti tomorrow as resting workers, we would have called that effort a bad job done to confuse people about May Day.