Eleven Against Ten, and Still

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA new week, and it arrived the way most of them do — without ceremony, and without waiting to see whether anyone was ready for it. Slow start, and unapologetically so. There are Mondays that demand to be met head-on and Mondays that are best approached at a gentle walking pace, and this one had clearly decided which sort it wanted to be before I'd even got up.

It didn't help that the night before had ended badly. The derby. City down to ten men, an hour or so to play, and United still contrived to lose it. There's losing, and then there's losing with a numerical advantage, which is a rather more specialised discipline and one we seem to have been quietly training for. I've long since stopped expecting these things to go our way, but there's a difference between low expectations and having them confirmed with that much thoroughness. It lingers into the next morning in a way a normal defeat somehow doesn't.

Still, the day had proper business to attend to. The car purchase is finally reaching its conclusion — the paperwork stage, which is where enthusiasm goes to sit quietly in a chair and wait. The loan officer came to SJMC rather than the other way round, which was a small mercy and saved an afternoon that would otherwise have been spent in traffic and a waiting room somewhere. Signatures, clarifications, the usual ritual of initialling things in three places for reasons no one fully explains. All very civil, all mercifully brief.

After that, rounds — quick ones — and then more paperwork of a different flavour, which is the sort of symmetry the day seemed determined to provide. Clinic afterwards was slow, unusually so. There's an odd quality to a quiet clinic. You spend most weeks wishing for one, and then when it arrives there's a faint suspicion that something's been overlooked, or that everyone's simply decided to be well at the same time out of sheer coordination.

Home by five, which is early enough to feel like a small windfall. Dinner was quick and unfussy — nobody was making a case for anything elaborate — and then the evening turned to the one thing genuinely worth looking forward to. Week One of the NFL, finally back after an off-season that always feels longer than it has any right to be.

There's something restorative about a new season. Everything is still theoretically possible. Nobody's been ruled out, nothing's been decided, and every team is briefly allowed to believe its own preseason press. After the previous night's business in Manchester, a sport where hope hasn't yet been tested felt like exactly the right choice.

So: a slow start, a bit of admin, a quiet clinic, and a football season opening while another one continues to test the patience. Not a day that will be remembered in any detail, but not one that asked much either. The week has started. That, for a Monday, is achievement enough.