Treat yourself as you’d feed a dog – indulgently, and when it’s least expected

Don’t follow the herd – there’s more joy drinking rosé in January, going to Venice in November, having a boozy lunch in February…

A survey from the States reveals that a big burst of exercise at the weekend is as good as spreading the activity across the week. The findings are pretty conclusive, based on tracking the activity of 350,000 people over a 10-year period (they do big portions in America, right?). And it’s bad news for the weekend, because the weekend was getting pretty full already.
The conventional week looks like this: you work, which involves going to work, doing work and coming back from work, or getting kids to and from school and after a bit of telly trying to squeeze in some sleep until the dross starts again next morning. And as the song goes: “Everybody’s working for the weekend.”
So as we look to the weekends, this one, and the ones that follow, the invites come and go between friends, coffees, drinks, lunches, dinners, gardening, hunting, watching sport, weekends away, friends to stay, visits to and from relatives, weddings, parties… And now we have to cram in exercise – a whole week’s worth – so that we can stay alive to do all the work stuff that starts again on Monday. 
Which means the diary pressure on the weekend looks insurmountable. Especially as that weekend burst needs to be around 75 minutes, which is an hour and 15 minutes, when you could have done a shop, or squeezed in a boozy lunch. Or watched a quarter of Oppenheimer. In other words it’s basically not feasible, unless of course you’re languishing in the joyful world of being retired, single or child-free.
The weekend is full. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Indeed, I strongly advise that you become an awkward refusenik like me. Work, kids, sleep and other dastardly preoccupations aside, I like to treat the fun stuff in the way that you should feed a Labrador. In other words: at times when it is least expected, or at least not at times when it is expected; call it the Lab Rule.
Dog experts will tell you that it is healthy for a dog to be fed at different times of the day as it’s better for their digestion and metabolism. Thus the advice is that rather than always feed our dog Cyrus (@cyrusthehound) his one daily meal at lunchtime, it’s better to change it around a bit. 
Although this can lead to chaos as, while he is very lovable, he is also an excellent liar (you can feed him and then a few minutes later he’ll give someone else a very convincing look that not only has he not been fed today, but that he wasn’t fed yesterday either).
Thus it is, for example, with a good lunch. The clichéd thing to do would be to meet a pal for a long, boozy lunch at the weekend; or, if you’re a desperate and sad soul, sometime around Christmas.
But the Lab Rule determines that a fun boozy lunch with an old friend should happen on a wet Tuesday in February, not saved for a nice weekend in the spring.
The Lab Rule also suggests that you should drink a glass of rosé in January, go to Venice in November, join a random church service, picnic indoors and – one of my favourites (which is so regular it might fall foul of the Lab Rule) – watch the news on Nigeria’s Channels 24.
But be aware that the Lab Rule does require steel and resilience. And you cannot selfishly upset the rest of the weekly timetable because of it. That would be called alcoholism.
So when you go nuts at lunch on a Tuesday you must still be on time and on parade for the dross of Wednesday morning. And if you’re in a relationship and only one half of it applies the Lab Rule, it will cause difficulty. Because, for example, as you got squiffy with a bunch of nutters on Thursday night, you won’t feel like going to that well-behaved rural dinner party on the Friday.
Followers of the Lab Rule would be wise not to accept invitations on a Saturday night because they’ll be exhausted and just want to stay in and watch telly. But if you need an excuse to deflect a constant flurry of such invites simply say that you can’t do Saturday night because you’ll be on your Peloton. Which, in my case, is true. Mix it up, embrace the Lab Rule or, as Virgil put it: “Audentis fortuna juvat”.