A Fortnight, Give or Take

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoWoke still rather blue. Not dramatically so — nothing that would trouble anyone looking at me — but the low weather from earlier in the week hadn't quite moved on. It was still there at the edges of the morning, the way a headache sometimes lingers as a rumour of itself.

London again, mostly. I've established by now that this is simply what my head does at this point in the year, and knowing the mechanism doesn't seem to switch it off. Some part of me has been packing a bag for weeks and keeps wandering into the hall to find it isn't there. I'd like to report a mature reckoning with this. In truth I just kept thinking about the particular grey of a Marylebone afternoon and being mildly annoyed at myself for it.

And Irfan goes in a fortnight, give or take, which is the other thing circling. It doesn't help that the number keeps sounding the same however many days pass — two weeks has a way of remaining two weeks right up until it's three days. I'm not making a production of it. He's going where he's meant to go and everyone concerned is quite sensible about the whole business. But there's a countdown running somewhere behind the ordinary hours, and it makes you notice things you'd otherwise walk past. Him in the kitchen. The particular noise of him coming in.

So it was a slow start, and I decided not to fight it. Might as well. There is a certain wisdom in recognising the days when your own resistance is the most expensive thing on offer. The morning went at whatever pace it fancied and I followed along behind it, and the world declined to collapse in the meantime.

In the evening Anita and I went to the Gardens for dinner. Nothing planned or particularly considered — just the two of us getting out of the house, which turns out to be a more reliable treatment than anything I could have engineered. The Gardens does its usual thing: polished, calm, a bit hushed, everyone moving at the speed of people who have decided the evening is not urgent. We ate, we talked about not very much, and the not very much was the point.

I've noticed this often enough now to trust it. A flat mood rarely survives a proper meal and decent company. It doesn't get argued away — it just finds itself with nowhere to sit. By the time we were heading back, the thing that had been sitting on my chest since morning had thinned out considerably, without anyone having addressed it directly.

Home, and a bit of television, which neither of us watched with full attention. Then bed, at an entirely reasonable hour.

The blue hasn't gone, exactly. It's more that I've stopped giving it a seat at the table. And there are two weeks yet, which is either not very long at all or perfectly adequate, depending on how you decide to look at it.

I'm choosing adequate. For tonight, at least.

Nothing on the List

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA quiet start, and for once nothing waiting at the other end of it to make the quiet feel like borrowed time. Nothing on the list today. No appointments to be kept to, no morning that needed to be met at speed. Just an ordinary Thursday with the pressure taken out of it.

So the morning went slowly, and I let it. There's a version of me that would have filled the space with something — a project, an errand, some improving activity — but that version has been quietly retired over the years and I don't miss him much. I drank my coffee at the pace coffee is meant to be drunk at, which is to say not while doing three other things.

The rest of the day was paperwork, which I've complained about before and will complain about again, but I'll admit that paperwork on a day with no list is a different creature entirely. It stops being the thing squeezed into the gaps and becomes simply the thing. You can actually get through it. Forms, signatures, the slow accumulation of small administrative debts being settled one by one. Unglamorous, absolutely, but there's a modest pleasure in watching a pile go down rather than sideways.

It rained through most of it. Not the dramatic sort — no thunder making announcements — just a steady grey persistence outside the window, the kind that turns the light in a room soft and makes indoor work feel almost virtuous. Rain is very good company for admin. It removes any lingering suspicion that you're missing out on something.

Home by five, which felt almost illicit. There's a particular quality to arriving somewhere before the day has properly loosened its grip — the house still in its afternoon mood, the evening not yet arranged into its usual shape. I had time, and no plan for it, which is the best combination available.

So I finished the second season of The Gentlemen. And it was great television, genuinely. It has no interest in being important, which these days counts as a mercy — everyone is very well dressed, the plotting is preposterous and knows it, and every conversation is conducted as though the participants have all read the same manual on menace. Ritchie has always understood that style is a substance of sorts, if you commit to it hard enough. The country house continues to be the finest performer in the cast.

There's a small, ridiculous sadness in finishing a season. Not enough to dwell on, but you close the laptop and there's a beat where the evening has to reorganise itself around the absence. I'll find something else. There's always something else.

And that was it. A day with very little in it and nothing missing from it, which are two quite different things that occasionally coincide. Rain outside, paper cleared, home early, good television.

Some days are just well-behaved. Best not to interrogate them too closely.

The View Was the Best Thing on the Menu

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoAnita's birthday, and it began, as the good ones do, with someone else doing the work. A friend arrived with breakfast — unannounced in the nicest sense, the sort of gesture that can't be reciprocated so much as passed along later. There's real generosity in feeding someone on their birthday before the day has had a chance to make demands of them. The house smelled like a small occasion by half past eight.

Then I went to work, as usual, which is the unromantic part of birthdays that fall on weekdays. The world declines to observe them. I left her surrounded by the early wave of gifts and made my way in with the mild guilt of a man who knows the better party is happening in his absence.

By all accounts the gifts kept coming. Gifts galore, in fact — the sort of steady arrival that turns a living room into a modest depot by mid-afternoon. She has a gift for being loved, Anita, and days like this simply make the evidence visible. I got updates throughout, each one photographed with the enthusiasm of someone genuinely surprised, which after all these years I still find rather lovely.

The afternoon turned wet. Rain, properly, for hours — the kind that arrives without negotiation and settles in, turning the roads into something to be endured rather than driven. I'd braced myself for a long crawl home and, against all reasonable expectation, got away early and beat the worst of it. Small mercies, and on a birthday, mercies count double.

Dinner was at Anjum, up at KLCC. And here I must be honest, because a diary that only records the good bits isn't worth keeping: it was overrated. Not bad — nothing arrived that offended anyone — but it had that particular quality of a place trading rather more on its address than on its kitchen. Middle Eastern flavours, all correctly assembled, none of them insisting on themselves. You find yourself saying "this is nice" in the tone people use when they mean "this is fine."

The view, though. The view was tremendous. The towers doing their nightly performance, the park below all lit up and green, the whole city arranging itself obligingly outside the window. There's a reason the room is designed to face outward. I'd go back for the view and eat beforehand, which I appreciate is not the review the restaurant is hoping for.

But the company was the point, and the company was excellent. We stayed on longer than we meant to, which is my favourite kind of staying on.

There was a slight drizzle when we came out, barely worth the name, and it had given up by the time we reached the car. The afternoon's downpour had left the air washed and cool, that brief window when the city smells clean.

Home, and we chilled until late. No agenda, no winding-down ritual, just a room with the two of us in it and no particular reason to end the day.

A good birthday. She earned it.

Wall Lights and Other Small Victories

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe morning began quietly, which is always a slightly suspicious gift when you know what's coming after it. A full list waiting, and an hour or so beforehand that belonged entirely to me. So I made coffee and, for reasons I couldn't entirely justify at the time, decided that this was the moment to sort out the wall lights.

They'd been sulking for a while. Nothing dramatic — one of them had developed the habit of coming on only when it felt appreciated — and I'd been walking past them for weeks with the vague intention of doing something about it. There is a particular satisfaction in fixing a small domestic thing before eight in the morning. It's not a meaningful achievement by any reasonable measure, but it sets a tone. The lights now behave. I stood there for a moment admiring them the way one admires a dog that has finally learned to sit.

Then the morning proper arrived and went at full tilt, as expected. Busy in the good way — the sort where you look up and discover that two hours have gone somewhere without informing you.

Lunch was with the pharma people, at Amici, just across the road. Italian, and rather good, which does a lot of quiet work in these situations. There's an art to a working lunch: everyone knows what it is, nobody pretends otherwise, and the food is left to do the diplomacy. We got through the business over pasta without anyone having to force enthusiasm, which I count as a success on both sides. I've sat through enough of these to appreciate the ones where the conversation is genuinely useful and the bread is warm.

The afternoon was paperwork. I won't dress it up. It is what it is — a steady procession of forms and signatures and things requiring attention that will never thank you for it. There's a rhythm to it if you surrender to it early enough, and I did, and it passed.

Home earlier than usual, because of a haircut. Which sounds like a small thing and is a small thing, but I always come out feeling faintly reorganised, as though a bit of admin has been done on my head as well as on my desk. The barber and I have long since arrived at a comfortable arrangement where neither of us feels the need to make conversation, and I've come to value that more than I expected to.

Dinner in front of an episode of The Gentlemen. Guy Ritchie doing what Guy Ritchie does — everyone speaking in fully-formed paragraphs, violence arriving politely, and a country house being treated as a character. Great fun, and undemanding in exactly the right way after a day of forms.

Idlan was out with friends, so the house had that particular hush to it. Not empty — Anita was here, dinner happened, the evening carried on as evenings do — just quieter. You notice the absence of someone before you notice anything else about the room.

A good day, in the end. And the lights work.

Usually, We'd Be in London by Now

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA new week arrived this morning with all the ceremony of a bin lorry — noisy, inevitable, and not especially interested in whether I was ready for it. I wasn't, particularly. Mondays rarely ask permission.

There's a particular flatness that comes at this point in the year, and I know exactly where it comes from. Normally, by now, we'd be in London. Cool air with a bit of an edge to it, the light going amber by late afternoon, that specific pleasure of walking somewhere without a plan and ending up in a bookshop you didn't mean to enter. The body seems to keep its own calendar, quite independent of the one on the wall, and mine has been quietly flicking through pages and looking up expectantly. Nothing doing this year. So the mood sat a bit low, not dramatically, just a background hum, like a fridge you only notice when you're trying to think.

Irfan is still here, at least. Two more weeks before he goes. That's the sort of thing you tell yourself is plenty of time, and it is, right up until it isn't. I've learned not to make too much of the countdown — nobody enjoys being treated as a departure lounge — so I mostly just note it privately and try to make sure the ordinary days between now and then are decent ones. There's something to be said for the last stretch before someone leaves. It's rarely the grand farewell dinner you remember. It's the two of you in the kitchen at an odd hour, agreeing that the kettle is taking its time.

Work was slow today. Not slow in the sense of dragging, but slow in the way a river is slow — moving steadily, going somewhere, unhurried about the whole business. Days like that are underrated. Nothing arrived that needed to be solved in the next five minutes, and so things got done properly rather than merely quickly. I got through what needed getting through. No heroics. No fires. Just a sequence of tasks that agreed to be finished in the order I attempted them, which is more courtesy than one usually gets.

And yet by the end of it I was thoroughly done in. That's the odd arithmetic of a gentle day: you'd think the tiredness would scale with the drama, but it doesn't. Steady effort has its own weight, and it settles on you all at once somewhere around the drive home, when the podcast you've been half-listening to finishes and you realise you couldn't summarise a word of it.

So, an early night. No principled stand on wellness, no elaborate wind-down. Just an honest assessment of my own capacity, which had run out somewhat before the evening had. Bed, at an hour I'd have found faintly embarrassing twenty years ago and now regard as one of life's quieter luxuries.

London will still be there next year. Tonight, a pillow will do.