Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe morning did not ease me in. It simply opened the door and pointed.
I’m still keeping a colleague’s seat warm, and today the seat came with a queue. There’s a certain kind of busy that doesn’t announce itself with drama. It just accumulates. One thing, then another, then a third that turns out to be two things standing very close together.
A few new arrivals to sort. Each one a small story with missing pages, and the job, as ever, is to find the pages. Ask the right question. Then ask it again, slightly differently, because the first answer was true but not quite useful.
I like this part, if I’m honest. I don’t always like it at the time.
Somewhere around late morning there’s a moment where the list stops growing and starts shrinking. You don’t notice it happen. You only notice, looking back, that you’ve stopped glancing at the clock with dread and started glancing at it with mild curiosity. Lunch became a real possibility rather than a rumour.
Then the afternoon. Lighter. Almost polite.
It’s strange how a lighter afternoon after a heavy morning doesn’t feel like rest. It feels like the slow deflation of a balloon nobody has bothered to tie off. The adrenaline goes first. Then the posture. Then, quite suddenly, the will to form complete sentences.
By the time everything was done, properly done, the kind of done where you can walk out without a nagging thought trailing behind you like a loose shoelace, I was tired.
Not dramatically tired. Not heroically tired. Just the honest, unglamorous tiredness of a day that asked for a bit more than usual and got it.
The drive home was uneventful. I’m grateful for uneventful. It’s underrated.
And then, the reward I’d been quietly promising myself all day: football.
I’d let the weekend’s matches pile up, unwatched, like letters you mean to open. There’s an odd discipline involved in avoiding scores. You become a fugitive from information. You scroll past certain headlines with your eyes half-closed. You change the subject when someone at the table starts with “Did you see…”
I saw nothing. Heard nothing. Arrived on the sofa pure.
Watching a match a day or two late is its own small pleasure. The tension is real, even though it’s already history, which is a slightly ridiculous thing to admit. You lean forward at a corner. You mutter at a referee who made his decision forty-eight hours ago and has long since gone home.
None of it matters, of course. That’s rather the point.
After a day spent sorting out things that do matter, there’s something restoring about ninety minutes of things that don’t. Men in bright shirts running about with tremendous seriousness. Crowds singing songs I only half know. The ball doing what it pleases.
I didn’t make it through every match. The eyelids had their own views.
But enough. Enough to feel the weekend had been reclaimed, a little late, like a parcel collected from the neighbour.
Tomorrow, the borrowed chair again. Tonight, the sofa wins.