Awal Muharram - The Midweek Lull

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA break in the middle of the week, which is the rarest and most civilised of luxuries. The trouble was the rain — a soft, insistent morning downpour of exactly the kind that turns the bed into an argument you're destined to lose. There is no more persuasive case for staying put than the sound of rain on glass before you've quite woken up. I lost the argument briefly, then got up anyway, as one does.

The ward round went ahead as usual, rain or no rain. The work doesn't observe public holidays of the heart, and the round has its own rhythm regardless of how reluctant its participants might feel. By the time it was done, the day had decided to behave, and I went to meet the afternoon properly.

Lunch was at TRX — Amazonas, which delivers every time and did so again. There's a confidence to a place that simply knows what it is and does it well, no fuss, no reinvention. You sit down, you eat properly, you leave content. After a damp start, it was exactly the right kind of indulgence.

Anita went off to inspect the new Mercedes F1 outfit, which tells you everything about where her attentions have wandered lately. She's back into the racing — properly back, the way one returns to an old enthusiasm and wonders why they ever left. I find there's something quite charming about watching someone rediscover a thing they love. The sport itself I can take or leave, but the renewed enthusiasm beside me is its own pleasant company.

Then, the film. Disclosure Day — Spielberg's return to the skies, the great man back among the lights and the wonder some fifty years on. I wanted to love it. I'd built a small cathedral of expectation around it. And it was, in the end, fine. Not the best of his work, not by a distance. There were moments where the old magic flickered, and rather more moments where it didn't. A perfectly decent way to spend a couple of hours, which from Spielberg feels faintly like an underachievement. You don't go to him for perfectly decent. Still — even his middling efforts have a craft to them that most directors would gladly claim as a peak.

The day closed with a haircut at Lucky Garden, that small reliable ritual that makes you feel marginally more put together than you did an hour earlier. There's a quiet satisfaction in it — the same chair, the same business, the brief sense of having tidied a loose end of yourself.

And now the evening winds down towards an absurd appointment: England playing at four in the morning. I'd like to say I'll have the discipline to sleep through it and catch the result over breakfast like a sensible adult. I'd like to say that. We'll see which version of me wins the argument when the alarm comes round — though I suspect, as with the rain this morning, I already know how it ends.