The Reward for Resting Well

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoBack to work, then — but I returned to it the way you return to anything after a proper rest: a little reluctant, a little restored, and quietly grateful that yesterday happened at all. There's a particular contentment in having spent a day off well. It pays out the next morning like interest.

The first business of the day was, admittedly, conducted at four in the morning. England played Croatia at that ungodly hour, and against my better judgement I was awake for it. They won, which made the lost sleep feel like a sound investment rather than a foolish one — though I'll confess the line between the two is dangerously thin at that time of night. By the second half I was less a supporter than a man simply too far in to turn back. It paid off. It doesn't always.

The ward round came and went with the usual rhythm, and then it was off to Sentul for teaching — that part of the work I genuinely look forward to, the chance to hand something on, to watch a concept land behind someone else's eyes. There's a quiet pleasure in it that the rest of the day rarely matches. You spend so much of your time solving problems that the act of simply explaining one feels almost restful by comparison.

Back to Subang for lunch, and then another meeting with the pharma people — the kind of appointment that arranges itself into your afternoon whether you've made room for it or not. These meetings have their own choreography by now, familiar enough that I could probably conduct one in my sleep, which after the four a.m. start was nearly a literal possibility.

But the day, kindly, was a short one. Done early, home by half five — an hour so civilised I scarcely knew what to do with it. There's something faintly disorienting about arriving home while the light is still generous, the evening still ahead of you and entirely unspent. We had an early dinner, the unhurried sort, and the whole thing felt like a small act of rebellion against the usual order of things.

Anita, meanwhile, had spent her day at the KL International Motor Show with Razak, returning full of it. The new Prelude had caught her eye — Honda's old coupe, back after the better part of two decades away, reborn as something sleeker and quieter and electrified. I find there's a particular pleasure in watching a name you'd half forgotten reappear, dusted off and reimagined for a different age. She described it with the enthusiasm of someone who has decided, without quite saying so, that she'd rather like to sit in one.

So the week resumed without protest. A short day, an early dinner, a head still half-full of football and lecture notes and Anita's revived motoring ambitions. Not every working day needs to be a long campaign. Some, mercifully, just let you home in time to enjoy the evening — and you take those gladly, without asking why.