It's the weekly cry of all 'corporate slaves'. "Thank G-d it's Friday". Even on Thursday millions of people, except shop clerks and utilities workers, foresee their weekend emancipation. As the sign on one office wall read, "If you don't believe in the resurrection of the dead, you should see this place at 4.59 p.m. on Friday".

Someone who taught with me in years past said at lunchtime on the last class day of the week, "It's half past Friday". It wasn't that he didn't value the educational process. We were, in fact, like Socrates, energised by the daily dialogue with our students. It was just that we all felt that the late hours of Friday were more than a time of the week. They were a season of the soul.

During my time in Britain I learned to think of Friday as POETS Day. Whatever Milton, Pope, Shelley or Tennyson might have thought of the acronym, the allusion was to the desire to "P--- (push?) off early; tomorrow's Saturday". The anticipated freedom often progressed, as the weekend wore on, into drunkenness and disorderly conduct. One reason why Muslim immigrants resist melding with Western society may be their rejection of the use of alcohol that has become so much a part of our leisure and entertainment. Englishmen and Scots in general, even their police as depicted in current crime fiction, are characterised by continual boozing. After the daily post-duty 'happy hours' comes serious off-duty weekend drinking.

"Saturday morning - just me and my friend" ran the old 70s song. Things done then would be remembered "long after Saturday's gone". That is, if they could be remembered after all the partying. Moralists used to say drink was the curse of the working class. Many of my colleagues seemed to think that work was the curse of the drinking class. One need not be a tee-totaller to see that, except in a very few cases, excessive alcohol use and productivity are in direct disproportion. "Moderation in all things" declines when Liquor 'Control' Board advertising equates alcohol with hospitality and while the police fail to monitor boisterous young drunks who roister in residential streets at 2 a.m.

Although the weekend, a 20th Century invention, has been the subject of song writers, no single day of the week except Sunday (e.g. "O day of rest and gladness" or "On this day, the first of days") has been so celebrated. There is, of course, the doggerel of nursery rhymes. Most native anglophones know the claim that "Monday's child is fair of face", that those born on other days have other woes or virtues and that "Friday's child is loving and giving". And there is the old story of Solomon Grundy.

To abbreviate it, he "took ill on Thursday, was worse on Friday, died on Saturday, was buried on Sunday. And that was the end of Solomon Grundy".

Perhaps one must have an Anglo-Saxon background to be familiar with any of the above. In that regard I am reminded of a friend who was born in one of my favourite parts of Germany. One day when we were trading jokes I told him about a physician whose 'surgery' was next door to a pub.

A temperate fellow, he would stop in each day after his appointments to chat over a walnut daiquiri. The bar tender always had it ready for him at the usual time.

One day the medic entered, sat down, sipped his drink and noticed that it was not his usual drink. Temporarily out of walnut oil, the bar man said, "No, that's a hickory daiquiri, Doc". I waited for either a laugh or a groan from my friend. Instead, he said, "So, what's the joke?". The rhyme about the mouse that ran up the clock and its "hickory dickory dock" ending was not among his childhood memories.

That may be another aspect of the problem of multicultural assimilation.

Thinking about the Friday nights I have known brings to mind one that was spent in Montréal at the home of my late friend, Rabbi Leonard Poller. For him and his family it was the beginning of the Sabbath. I sat, a guest, at their table. His wife, Priscilla, lit and blessed the candles. Len took up a small loaf of bread that lay before him covered by an embroidered cloth. He gave thanks, broke the bread, ate a portion and then passed it to the others.

They, too, broke from it and ate. The meal followed. I was taken back to the beginnings of the Eucharist that I attended with a family of several hundred people every Sunday morning. That mass did not include a full meal but the act of thanksgiving and the sense of community were the same.

Midway through the Sabbath eve meal the doorbell rang. A Montreal Gazette delivery boy was collecting from house to house.

We heard Leonard say, "Remember that you should not come to this house on Friday night. Come right after school on Friday or on any other evening. We are Jews and our Sabbath has begun". Then he closed the door and returned without comment to the table. It was a statement of faith, a polite declaration of "otherness" and a reason for the youngster to think about what we now call "reasonable accommodation" of multifaith differences.

Is it to be regretted that many families, even those who regularly eat an occasional meal together, have no real day of freedom from what William Wordsworth called "the getting and spending" that "lay waste our powers"?

Weekend exhaustion is the reason many dread the return of Monday. For seniors who now either live alone the weekend, once a time of family togetherness, inspires no thoughts of "TGIF".

The longing for Friday and the freedom it brings points to a basic human need. The weekly workless day for all (Shabbat), so threatened now by 24/7 commercialism, was a major Hebrew contribution to civilisation.

The Russian-born philosopher, Asher Ginzberg, thought Sabbath observance to be more important than the creation of the State of Israel. "Jews do not keep the Sabbath", he said. "It is the Sabbath that has kept the Jews".