Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe clinic ran smoothly this morning, which is the sort of thing I've learned not to comment on aloud lest it overhear me and take offence. Names arrived, were seen, moved on. The rhythm held. There's a quiet pleasure in a morning that simply does what it's meant to, asking nothing more dramatic of you than steady attention.
The paperwork was less obliging. A whole sheaf of deferment letters for the insurers today, the prohibitive sort — the cases where the answer is no, dressed up in the cautious, careful language these things require. There's an odd weight to writing them, even when they're entirely correct. You spend the morning being a sound clinician and the afternoon being a faintly apologetic one.
Idlan came in the afternoon for a dental appointment, which gave the day a pleasant domestic seam running through it. There's something steadying about your own child turning up in the middle of a working day — a small reminder that the rest of life carries on outside the building, sons and teeth and all.
And then, on the way home, the day produced its one genuine surprise. We bumped into the President of Timor-Leste — José Ramos-Horta, Nobel laureate, the actual man — who had come to visit the son of one of his staff, a patient in our ICU. It caused a certain amount of excitement, as these things tend to. You go about your week assuming it will hold no heads of state, and then it quietly does. He was gracious, the moment was brief, and we carried on home slightly more interesting people than we'd been that morning.
Dinner was at a new place, Dapor Mekda, where I had the nasi kerabu. I want to be fair about this, so I'll be precise: it was distinctly average. Not bad. Not memorable. The kind of meal that politely declines to make an impression in either direction and leaves you respecting its restraint. A nasi kerabu should be a small riot of blue rice and herbs and crisp things, and this one had clearly read the brief and decided to phone it in. Still — a new joint tried, a verdict reached. Not every outing needs to be a triumph. Some are simply research.
The evening settled into quiet, helped along by the knowledge that tomorrow is a holiday for Maal Hijrah. There's a particular ease to the night before a day off, when the usual low hum of preparation goes silent and you're permitted to simply stop. No alarm to set with any urgency, no schedule lying in wait.
So the year turns over, in its quieter way. A new year on a calendar that keeps its own gentle time, marked not with fireworks but with rest and reflection — which seems, on balance, the more sensible arrangement. Selamat Maal Hijrah. A good night to be still, to let the day's small collisions of the average and the unexpected settle, and to wish the new year well.