A Trim Between Downpours

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA new week, and for once it turned up looking its best. Proper sunshine, the kind that makes the morning feel as if someone had gone to some trouble over it. Mondays don’t usually make that much effort, and I wasn’t going to argue with this one.

The good start carried on. Nothing went wrong early, nobody needed anything urgently, and for an hour or two everything stayed where it had been left. It’s an odd thing to be grateful for, but after enough weeks that start by falling over, a Monday that simply walks in counts for something.

The corridors felt fuller as well. Colleagues were back from meetings overseas, still a bit jet-lagged, with the odd souvenir and the usual reports about conference coffee. A place sounds different when its people are back. Conversations pick up where they stopped, and the building feels like itself again.

The afternoon split my attention in two. A meeting was running in the background, and I listened in between patients, picking it up and putting it down again as the day allowed. It’s an awkward way to follow anything, like reading a book one paragraph at a time with the pages shuffled. Still, I caught the gist, and these days the gist is often all anyone takes away, even when they’ve been in the room the whole time.

Then the weather remembered where it was. The morning’s sunshine had been a loan, and by late afternoon the sky took it back, all at once and with interest. Heavy rain, the kind that bounces off the road and floods the drains in minutes. Traffic did what traffic does round here when it rains: stopped, more or less, and stayed stopped. Wipers going, brake lights everywhere, and the satnav’s arrival time getting later the longer I sat there. There’s nothing to do in that kind of jam except accept it, and I eventually did.

Then out to Lucky Garden for a haircut, which had been on the list long enough to stop being an errand and become a need. A barber’s chair is one of the last places where nobody expects anything of you. You sit, you’re draped in a cape, and for twenty minutes the only decision left is how short. The rain kept going outside while the scissors did their work inside, and I didn’t mind which of them took longer.

I came out lighter around the ears and noticeably tidier. The streets were still wet and shining under the lights.

So the week started in sunshine and ended its first day in a downpour, with a lot of brake lights in between. It wasn’t an eventful Monday, but it had a shape to it: colleagues back, a meeting heard in pieces, and a haircut I’d been putting off for weeks.