Back to Earth

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere's a particular gear-change that happens on the first day back after a holiday. The body is present, the mind mostly so, but somewhere in between there's a faint drag — like driving with the handbrake half on. You remember how to do everything; you just remember it slightly slower than usual.

Clinic was busier than expected, which is often the way after a break. The appointments stack up while you're away, patients accumulate like unread emails, and the whole thing spills well past lunchtime. There's no easing back in gently. The day simply starts at full pace and expects you to keep up.

By two o'clock, I was in a virtual meeting with the Asia Pacific Leukaemia Consortium, which on any other afternoon might have commanded my full attention. Today, though, the tank was running on fumes. I sat through it with the particular brand of tired concentration where you're technically following the discussion but couldn't reliably summarise it five minutes later. The spirit was willing. The eyelids had other ideas.

The rest of the afternoon was given over to paperwork — the administrative backlog that builds quietly during any absence, waiting patiently for your return like a loyal but deeply tedious pet. I worked through it steadily enough, but the clock seemed to move with deliberate slowness, each completed form immediately replaced by another.

Home after six, which felt late for a Friday. An early dinner, nothing elaborate, just fuel. The kind of meal where function wins comfortably over form.

The evening, though — the evening delivered. We sat down for the season finale of For All Mankind, and it did not disappoint. There's something bittersweet about reaching the end of a season you've been genuinely invested in. You want the resolution, but you don't want the watching to stop. The finale landed well — satisfying without being neat, conclusive without closing every door. And the good news is there's another season coming, which softens the blow considerably. Even better, a new spin-off series has been announced — Star City — which suggests the universe they've built isn't finished expanding. More of that world is hard to argue with.

It's a funny thing, finishing a long day of work that drains you and then finding energy you didn't know you had for a television programme. Perhaps that's what good storytelling does — it borrows from a different reserve entirely. The one that clinic and consortium meetings can't touch.

The weekend starts tomorrow. The holiday may be over, but at least the week had the decency to be short.