The Ordinary Week, Reasserting Itself

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoAnd just like that, the holidays folded themselves away and the ordinary week returned, unbothered by my brief taste of leisure. Back to work, then, with an early start — and the seasoned certainty that the first clinic after a long weekend would be heaving. People save up their ailments over a holiday the way one saves up laundry, and present them all at once. I was not wrong. The clinic overspilled, the list grew longer than the morning could decently hold, and the afternoon absorbed the overflow with weary good grace.

The traffic, too, seems to have remembered its old habits. It has been thickening by the day, the roads reclaiming their familiar congestion now that the city is back at its desk. There is a grim sort of reunion in sitting once more in a queue of brake lights, watching the minutes go and the distance not.

The real drama of the day, however, unfolded elsewhere entirely. Mak and Julia had stationed themselves at Zehn, locked in the modern gladiatorial contest known as the BTS ticket scramble — two determined people, several devices between them, refreshing pages and willing the servers not to crumble. I have witnessed military operations planned with less intensity. The queues, by all accounts, were brutal, the kind that test both patience and broadband.

In the end, it was my account, of all things, that came good. Four tickets, secured against the odds, which I learned of via a flurry of messages bordering on the triumphant. So it is settled: we will be at Bukit Jalil on the thirteenth of December, somewhere among the masses, doing whatever it is one does at these things. I make no claims to expertise in the matter. But there is something rather lovely about being swept into someone else's joy, and Julia and Mak's delight was infectious enough that I find myself genuinely looking forward to it, expertise or not.

The rest of the day did what working days do — it filled itself, quietly and completely, until I looked up and found it nearly gone. I reached home late, though mercifully in time for dinner, which is the small daily negotiation between work and the table that I do not always win. To sit down with the household at the end of a long one, the food warm and the conversation undemanding, is a reward out of proportion to its simplicity.

Now, an early night beckons, and I intend to heed it. The first proper week back has only just begun, and there is no sense pretending otherwise. The clinic will be full again tomorrow, the traffic will not improve, and the patients will keep arriving as patients do. But there are also concert tickets sitting somewhere in an inbox, a small promise of December tucked away against the long ordinary stretch between now and then.

For tonight, that is more than enough. Lights off, and a sensible bedtime, earned.