Please click the photo above to play the daily videoWoke still rather blue. Not dramatically so — nothing that would trouble anyone looking at me — but the low weather from earlier in the week hadn't quite moved on. It was still there at the edges of the morning, the way a headache sometimes lingers as a rumour of itself.
London again, mostly. I've established by now that this is simply what my head does at this point in the year, and knowing the mechanism doesn't seem to switch it off. Some part of me has been packing a bag for weeks and keeps wandering into the hall to find it isn't there. I'd like to report a mature reckoning with this. In truth I just kept thinking about the particular grey of a Marylebone afternoon and being mildly annoyed at myself for it.
And Irfan goes in a fortnight, give or take, which is the other thing circling. It doesn't help that the number keeps sounding the same however many days pass — two weeks has a way of remaining two weeks right up until it's three days. I'm not making a production of it. He's going where he's meant to go and everyone concerned is quite sensible about the whole business. But there's a countdown running somewhere behind the ordinary hours, and it makes you notice things you'd otherwise walk past. Him in the kitchen. The particular noise of him coming in.
So it was a slow start, and I decided not to fight it. Might as well. There is a certain wisdom in recognising the days when your own resistance is the most expensive thing on offer. The morning went at whatever pace it fancied and I followed along behind it, and the world declined to collapse in the meantime.
In the evening Anita and I went to the Gardens for dinner. Nothing planned or particularly considered — just the two of us getting out of the house, which turns out to be a more reliable treatment than anything I could have engineered. The Gardens does its usual thing: polished, calm, a bit hushed, everyone moving at the speed of people who have decided the evening is not urgent. We ate, we talked about not very much, and the not very much was the point.
I've noticed this often enough now to trust it. A flat mood rarely survives a proper meal and decent company. It doesn't get argued away — it just finds itself with nowhere to sit. By the time we were heading back, the thing that had been sitting on my chest since morning had thinned out considerably, without anyone having addressed it directly.
Home, and a bit of television, which neither of us watched with full attention. Then bed, at an entirely reasonable hour.
The blue hasn't gone, exactly. It's more that I've stopped giving it a seat at the table. And there are two weeks yet, which is either not very long at all or perfectly adequate, depending on how you decide to look at it.
I'm choosing adequate. For tonight, at least.