It was at the insistence of the local tourist industry that Bulgaria had a six-day holiday from Friday May 1 until Wednesday May 6. They persuaded the Cabinet, so the official line went, that the days off would boost domestic tourism, especially in these times when cash flow has dehydrated to drought conditions.

Initially, the Cabinet had declined to declare a holiday from Labour Day until St George’s Day, in spite of the precedent it set last year. Bulgarians should not be shirking, ministers decided, but rather labouring mightily.

Those of us who wonder what it is that several ministers actually spend their days doing, given that their only achievements are consistent failures to achieve anything, were mildly amused at this call for an unrelenting work ethic.

So the party line changed, and what initially had been condemned as indolence instead became an economic stimulus plan, with an echo of the workers’ paradise, with no small dash of patriotism thrown in.

We were assured, from official sources, that hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians took the opportunity to visit places of historical noteworthiness. I am not bothering to give the precise figure of visitors simply because I do not believe that it is precise. As is customary for Bulgarian statistics (and almost any other kind of number) there is no real indication of the methodology by which it was arrived at, apart from a suspicion that for a moment on May 6, somewhere there was an official thumb slightly wet at the end.

Take one instance: Pamporovo, so said a statement reported toward the end of the special holiday, was full to bursting with tourists. We were there on Monday, and this was anything but true. Our hotel was less than half full, the parking areas of other hotels were scarcely in use; construction sites amid the devastation that they had caused to surrounding mountain forests were at a standstill, not in all cases because of the holidays. A staffer at our hotel told us that local hopes for jobs had been dashed because of layoffs as projects were frozen, to say nothing of dreams of work as serving and other hotel staff having come to naught.

Admittedly, forecasts ahead of the six-day weekend that there would be bad weather countrywide did not help, and seemed – and this is purely anecdotal, no more scientific than the twaddle that emanates from Official Bulgaria – to have discouraged a number of people from travelling.

It is not as if there was no evidence of travel. We did, but only because we are subsidised by having a house in Plovdiv, a getaway from Sofia and that was our base from a roam around the Rhodopes. In the streets of Plovdiv, I heard a woman say that a television media report that no one had travelled was not true, because Plovdiv certainly was empty. Everyone had gone to Greece, she said.

(It would, of course, be mischievous to suggest that if Bulgaria’s Cabinet believes that declaring a six-day holiday will boost domestic tourism, it should for the same period decree the closing down of all border points with Turkey and Greece. In any case, I would never suggest such a thing, given all that I hear about the superiority of service in those two neighbouring countries. Sometimes experience, skill and competence should go unpunished.)

Let’s leave aside the claptrap that one hears from Bulgarian Government bodies and from most of the Bulgarian media. Here are two facts. First, there will be a different Cabinet by May next year. Second, it will be some years before the period between May 1 and May 6 again could be made into a very long weekend, given the days that they will fall on in the next few years, so a decision about whether to declare an extended holiday may not arise again for some time.

Third, and while this is not a fact I am willing to bet that it will become one, no one will ever come up with a trustworthy calculation about the actual benefit to Bulgarian domestic tourism from the May 1 to 6 2009 holiday, against the loss of productivity in all sectors of the economy (and the notion that everyone "works in" some Saturdays to make up for the holiday is patently a myth to anyone who has been in Sofia’s business districts on these supposed "working days").

Coming back into Sofia on the evening of May 5 (yes, I was at work on May 6) I got my first sight of the socialists’ election poster, depicting Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev in hard hat sharing grins with a group of Workers. The upper case is there for a reason, because all concerned look rather self-conscious about the whole thing.

The slogan on the billboard exhorts one to vote for the Bulgarian Socialist Party "for a stronger economy". I first saw this poster outside the building that in future will be the headquarters of the National Revenue Agency, the same building that is at the centre of controversy about how the project came to be awarded to the construction company that is to complete it, said to be close to the coalition Cabinet partner the Movement for Rights and Freedoms; the same NRA that has admitted that it lacks the capacity to collect all the revenue due to the state.

But then, for many politicians, from most if not all parties, the real earnings that matter are not earnings for the economy or the national coffers, but votes, and – would it be too cynical to suggest? the opportunities that those votes, in turn, offer. In itself, that could be a reason to give everyone a special holiday, because even if it did little of significance for tourism and may have shin-kicked the economy as a whole, it may be worth a vote or two.