Earlier this year Datamonitor claimed that 12 million European workers are asking for a cut in salary or seeking to work fewer hours because they're too stressed. And two million have quit the rat race entirely.

The report cites exposure to the internet, emails and mobile phones as factors in increasing stress levels, as they all mean that it is increasingly difficult to escape work.

Meanwhile, IT analyst Meta Group has warned in its annual look at global IT staff trends that 70 per cent of IT managers are worried that their staff are approaching burnout due to their work loads.

Three years of downturn mean that the IT professionals left in work are doing the jobs of more than one vanished colleague, and there's no end in sight to the job freeze.

As well as these recent factors, we Brits are doing particularly badly in the general holiday stakes anyway. The TUC has estimated that 2.8 million UK employees work as usual on Good Friday instead of taking the day off.

Did you know that there's nothing in UK law guaranteeing UK workers the right to take a national Bank Holiday, or to get paid if they do? There's similarly no rule saying that any employee will get paid extra for working a national holiday.

We are also the only European Union country that lets employers get away with counting our eight official bank holidays as part of the four weeks minimum paid annual leave they have to give staff under the UK Working Time Directive.

The UK is also bottom of the European league table when it comes to holiday time. The European annual leave average is 33 days - the UK's is only 20, with Austrian workers getting 38 days off before bank holidays, of which they get no less than 13.

UK and Dutch employees get the lowest amount of bank holidays in the European Union, a mere eight, compared to 11 in France.

What the hell's going on here? Seems like the worst possible thing to be in Europe is a British knowledge or IT worker, as we get poor conditions, work silly hours, and get hardly any time off for recuperation.

Hang on ... I'm writing this on a Bank Holiday. Maybe we just like working this hard, or are too dumb to stop.