Sarongs, Soup and a Curly-Haired Labubu

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoI woke with the back I'd earned. The couch had done its worst overnight and presented the bill first thing, which is the way of these things — you don't feel the damage while it's happening, only afterwards, when standing upright becomes a negotiation rather than a reflex.

A shower at the lounge sorted out the worst of it, or at least made me feel considerably more like a person and less like something that had been folded and stored badly. Then ward rounds, which the morning required regardless of what my spine had to say about it.

The good news came reasonably early. Anita was seen by her specialist and sent home — a quick, unremarkable review, which is exactly what you want a review to be. There's a particular relief in a discharge that arrives without qualification or a list of conditions attached. After that I had breakfast with a senior colleague before heading off, and there's something civilising about a proper sit-down breakfast after a night that didn't really involve sleep. Conversation, coffee, and the slow return of a normal rhythm.

Home, then, and straight into a nap that I'd like to describe as optional but wasn't. Brief, deep, and entirely necessary. I emerged from it slightly confused about the time, which is the hallmark of a good one.

Out again for lunch, dictated entirely by the invalid's preferences — vegetable soup, which is the food of someone whose stomach has recently been through something and isn't ready to hear any ambitious suggestions. Sensible, restrained, and exactly right. Recovery has its own menu.

Then, having survived a hospital stay, she decided what the day really needed was a Labubu. Specifically the curly-haired ones, which apparently are their own category and not to be confused with the other sort. I've long since learned that the correct response here is not to ask questions but to drive. A stop at the pharmacy afterwards rounded out the errands, and the day quietly became one of those where nothing on the list was planned twenty-four hours earlier.

The original plan had been rather different. Malaysia Day was meant to involve going out shooting with friends — Projek Keretapi Sarong, which is one of the better traditions we've invented: a trainful of people in sarongs, moving through the city with a kind of good-humoured absurdity that photographs beautifully and needs no explaining to anyone who's seen it. I'd have enjoyed it. Some years you get to be in the middle of the thing; other years the day has other plans for you, and you let it.

So we went home instead. The new season of Reacher had turned up at precisely the right moment — a show that asks nothing of you beyond sitting still, which is all I had to offer — and the evening stayed quiet from there.

Not the Malaysia Day I'd pencilled in. But she's home, the soup was good, the Labubu has curly hair, and I slept in an actual bed. Given how the previous day had gone, I'll take it.