The Day Gets Away, Kindly

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoWhat a difference a night makes. After yesterday’s enforced rest, I woke properly restored, with the stomach back on speaking terms and enough energy to make the morning feel like a fresh start instead of a continuation. I hadn’t realised how flat I’d been running until the tank was full again. Rest is annoying that way: it only proves its point afterwards.

That was just as well, because the day didn’t hang about. It went by in a blur, one of those stretches where you look up for what feels like the first time and find the afternoon has nearly gone. It was busy, steadily and constantly so, but the good sort, where being occupied stops you counting the hours. It would have been a much harder day twenty-four hours earlier. Today it was simply full.

When the working day ended, the evening’s main job began. I chaired a medical talk after hours, with the speaker joining from Taiwan. Remote talks have a small drama of their own. There’s the moment of waiting to see whether the connection will hold, the slight lag between a question and its answer, and the odd intimacy of a face on a screen speaking to a room on the other side of the sea. It held, thankfully. The speaker was clear and generous with time, and the room stayed with it all the way through, which is all a chair can really ask for. My part was mostly introductions, steering, and making sure questions arrived in some sensible order. It’s quiet work, and you only notice it when it goes wrong.

Dinner came afterwards, and I’ll be honest: it was average. Not bad, just forgettable. The sort of meal that does its job and leaves no impression, apart from a mild sense that it could have tried a little harder.

But the evening wasn’t really about the food, and that was what saved it. It was Eileen’s birthday. She’s our pharmacist, and one of those colleagues whose steadiness you rely on long before you think to thank her for it. So we celebrated her: a cake, a song sung with more warmth than tune, and the particular kind of laughter that only happens among people who spend their days working together. An average dinner turned into a good evening because of the people at the table and the reason we were there.

Celebrating someone you work alongside every day is a fine thing. Those relationships mostly run on deadlines and requests and quick exchanges in corridors. Stopping for one evening to make a fuss of somebody puts the human part back in, and reminds everyone that a team is people before it’s a set of roles.

So the energy came back, the day ran away with itself, the speaker in Taiwan stayed connected, and dinner was forgettable but a birthday wasn’t. A long day, a good one, and I was glad to be well enough to enjoy all of it.

Happy birthday, Eileen.