A Day Without Clinic

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere is a persistent myth, chiefly held by people who do not do the work, that a day without clinic is a day at leisure. I am here to report, once again, that it is nothing of the sort. The clinic may have been absent, but the day filled its place with the brisk efficiency of nature abhorring a vacuum. By mid-morning I was already several commitments deep, with no obvious bottom to the list.

The centrepiece was a podcast recording with the Max Family, alongside my friend Dr Razak — a man whose company makes most things more bearable, recording sessions included. It went well, by which I mean the conversation found its rhythm early and rolled along without the usual stilted patches. There is a particular pleasure in talking with someone you genuinely like in front of a microphone; the audience rather fades, and you are simply two people enjoying the thread of it.

The trouble was that I had, with characteristic optimism, scheduled another meeting much earlier than the recording could decently accommodate. So we were obliged to stop midstream — that slightly graceless moment where a good flow is paused on the promise of being resumed, like leaving a film at the interval. I made my apologies, made my exit, and went to honour the prior claim on my time. The recording will keep. Conversations of that sort usually pick up where they left off, even after a gap.

By the time the last of it was done, the tank was running low. There is a specific tiredness that comes not from any single exertion but from the sheer accumulation of obligations, each modest on its own, formidable in aggregate. I had earned my fatigue honestly, which is at least some consolation.

I made it home before sunset, which felt like a small triumph after the recent run of late returns. There is something restorative about arriving while the light still holds, the day not yet surrendered to the evening. The flat was warm and unhurried, and I let myself decompress into it.

Idlan was full of his university doings, eager to recount his presentations from the day before. He is, by every sign, thoroughly enjoying his programme — and there is a particular gladness in watching that. The enthusiasm of someone in the thick of their studies, before the world has had a chance to dampen it, is a tonic. He talked, we listened, and I found my own tiredness quietly easing in the face of his momentum. To see him relish the thing he has set out to do is worth more than I could easily put into words.

So the day closed as a good one, if a busy one. Plenty done, a recording half-finished and a friend's company enjoyed, a meeting honoured, home before dark, and a young man's eagerness to round it off. Not every full day leaves you depleted. Some, the better ones, leave you tired in a way that feels rather like contentment.