Please click the photo above to play the daily videoRare thing, a properly good day outside — the sort with actual blue in the sky rather than the usual negotiated truce with the clouds — and naturally the day's plans involved being indoors for most of it. There's a particular comedy to that, spending a fine afternoon under fluorescent lighting while the weather does its best work entirely unwitnessed. Still, it wasn't wasted exactly, just redirected.
The morning opened with rounds and, threaded through them, an update on a lymphoma case worth the extra attention it got — the kind of detail that's easy to file away as routine until you remember it's precisely the sort of thing that shouldn't be treated routinely. Worth the pause, in other words, even on a day with other places to be.
Those other places turned out to be KL Hilton, which hosted lunch and dinner both, and did rather well by both — good enough that "the food was good" undersells it slightly, though it's the kind of understatement a day like this earns. The event itself ran the full stretch between those two meals, and earned its keep too: a proper spread of regional speakers, one dialling in from Saudi with the sort of composure that makes video calls across time zones look easier than they are. Sat with Jerome for most of it, which always makes the long stretches more bearable — company has a way of shortening even a full-day programme.
By the time dinner wrapped things up, the day had already delivered more than its share, so there wasn't much guilt in switching gears entirely for the evening — off to watch Manchester United open their season against Hull, optimism intact, the way it always is before kickoff, however unreliable that optimism has proven in seasons past.
It did not go well. Two-nil, and not the sort of two-nil that leaves room for creative interpretation — just a straightforward beating on opening day, the kind that sets an unwelcome tone before the season's even found its feet. Disappointing barely covers it, though there's a certain grim tradition to United fans starting the year disappointed; at least the ritual's consistent, even when the football isn't.
So: a day that gave generously in the morning and afternoon, and took a fair bit back by evening. Good conversation, good food, a talk worth attending — and then ninety minutes that undid a fair chunk of the goodwill. Balance, of a sort. Just not the kind you'd choose.