Monday Rounding Into Shape

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere's a particular kind of quiet that comes with a Monday after a Friday that had, by all accounts, gone somewhere. The bags still hadn't quite settled back into their usual corners, and neither had I, but the sun outside made a decent case for optimism before I'd even had my coffee.

Traffic, for once, seemed to have read the room. Smooth going in, no theatrics at the junctions, no one testing the structural integrity of their horn. I took it as a good omen, the kind you don't trust entirely but accept gratefully anyway.

New face at the department this week, a medical student assigned to shadow for the next few days. There's something faintly recalibrating about having someone new watching how you do things — not scrutiny exactly, more a gentle reminder that habits formed over years still need explaining from scratch to someone encountering them for the first time. I did my best to make the mundane sound purposeful, which is, I suspect, most of teaching.

The morning itself belonged to paperwork, in the fullest and least glamorous sense. Forms begetting forms, signatures chasing signatures, the sort of administrative undergrowth that never quite gets cleared, only temporarily beaten back. I made what progress I could, occasionally glancing up to see whether my shadow for the week was suitably unimpressed by the glamour of it all.

Afternoon brought clinic, and with it, new patients — always a slightly different register of concentration required, meeting people for the first time, piecing together a picture rather than continuing one already sketched out. There's a rhythm to it, an unhurried sort of attentiveness, and by the time the last one had gone, the light outside had shifted into that softer, more forgiving late-afternoon gold.

I managed, against the usual odds, to get home before sunset — a small victory that felt disproportionately satisfying, the way minor wins often do when they arrive at the end of a long first day back. By then I was thoroughly starving, in the specific way that only a day spent mostly indoors and mostly on your feet can produce. Dinner didn't stand much of a chance; it was gone before I'd properly registered enjoying it, which I suppose is its own kind of compliment.

No grand plans for the evening. Just the practical business of winding down — the day settling into memory rather than lingering in the room. An early night beckoned, and for once I didn't argue with it. Mondays have a way of asking rather a lot upfront, on the promise that the rest of the week will behave itself in return. We'll see.

Tomorrow, no doubt, will bring its own version of paperwork. Tonight, though, belongs to sleep.