Cheese, and the Long Memory of Physiotherapy
Monday, June 22, 2026 at 9:15PM 
Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe morning arrived bright and unbothered, the sort of Monday sun that flatters everything it touches and asks nothing in return. I met it with breakfast — a substantial one, the kind that suggests either ambition or denial. My body, meanwhile, had its own commentary to offer. Two days on from physio, the right shoulder has settled into that peculiar afterglow physiotherapists call progress and the rest of us call being slightly worse than before. I moved through the early hours like a man freshly assembled from instructions he hadn't quite read, every joint stiff and faintly resentful, the muscles still litigating Saturday's session.
Rounds, mercifully, were gentle. There are days when the ward seems to conspire against you, and there are days like this — orderly, unhurried, the kind that lets you actually look at people rather than merely process them. Not too busy. I've learned not to say that out loud near anyone superstitious, but it held. We moved through it without incident, and I had the rare luxury of arriving at lunch neither late nor frayed.
Lunch was with the pharma lot — pleasant, well-fed, the usual choreography of small talk and slightly oversized portions. These occasions have a rhythm to them now, a sort of cordial theatre, and I've made peace with my role in it. The food was good. The company was easy. One asks little more of a working lunch.
The afternoon clinic, against all reasonable expectation, matched the morning's restraint. Light. Almost suspiciously so. I kept waiting for the day to reveal its trick, the queue that doubles, the complication that unravels an hour — but it never came. By mid-afternoon I found myself, improbably, finished early, blinking at the unfamiliar gift of unspent time.
And there was a literal gift too. One of my patients, with the quiet generosity that still catches me off guard, sent me home with cheese. Not a token wedge, either — a proper haul, enough to give a man pause and a fridge a structural challenge. Idlan, who treats cheese the way some people treat religion, received the news with something close to reverence. He has theories about cheese. He shared several. I let him.
The evening folded itself around the World Cup, which is currently sprawled across North America in all its expanded, slightly bewildering glory — forty-eight teams, three countries, and a fixture list that mostly unfolds while we're asleep out here. So it's catching-up rather than live drama: highlights consumed after the fact, results half-known before the footage rolls, the small melancholy of watching a goal you've already been spoiled on. Still, there's a comfort in it. The tournament hums along in the background like a long, familiar song, and I let it carry the last of the day.
A light day. Stiff in the shoulders, heavy with cheese, asking very little of me. I'll take it.
