A Monday in Reasonable Repair

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere is a particular flavour of Monday that announces itself before you've even reached the kettle. Not despair, exactly — more a low administrative hum, the sound of a week clearing its throat. The World Cup hasn't helped. The group stage is finally done, all forty-eight teams whittled into the knockouts, and there's a faint sense of mourning when a tournament stops being a sprawling banquet and becomes a series of duels. No more obscure mid-afternoon fixtures to half-follow. Just the serious business of teams going home for good.

So Monday morning arrived with the blues attached, the way a parking ticket arrives tucked under a wiper — quietly, and entirely as predicted.

The cure, as it usually is, was simply getting on with things. I'd braced for a morning of friction and instead found a surprising number of small matters resolving themselves before they could become large ones. Emails answered. Loose ends tied off with the quiet satisfaction of a man crossing items from a list he'd been avoiding. There's an underrated pleasure in a morning that behaves — no dramas, no surprises, just a steady tidying of the desk and the mind in roughly equal measure.

Clinic, too, ran smoothly, which is never something to take for granted. A colleague is away on holiday, somewhere no doubt with better weather and fewer obligations, which meant I was covering the gaps. Covering for someone away is a curious arrangement — you inherit their afternoon without their familiarity with it, like driving a borrowed car with the seat in someone else's position. But it held together. The day moved at the right pace, and by the end of it nothing had toppled over.

By evening the blues had thinned out, the way they tend to once the day has actually been lived rather than merely anticipated. Dinner was at Mont Kiara — a steakhouse called Casa Rosa, a name that promises rather more romance than a Monday usually delivers. The steak was decent. Not transcendent, not a story I'll be retelling for years, but properly cooked and quietly satisfying, which on a Monday is exactly the correct ambition. One does not need a Monday steak to change one's life. One needs it to be good, and to arrive without incident.

The real seasoning, of course, was the company. Good company has a way of rescuing an ordinary meal and elevating an already pleasant one, and this fell firmly into the latter. Conversation that wandered comfortably, no agenda, the kind of evening that doesn't try to be anything in particular and is all the better for it.

I came home with the week feeling considerably less daunting than it had at breakfast. Monday, it turns out, was in reasonable repair after all — sorted out, covered, fed, and seen off without complaint. Which is, on reflection, about as much as one can ask of a Monday.