A Trim Between Downpours

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA new week, and for once it turned up looking its best. Proper sunshine, the kind that makes the morning feel as if someone had gone to some trouble over it. Mondays don’t usually make that much effort, and I wasn’t going to argue with this one.

The good start carried on. Nothing went wrong early, nobody needed anything urgently, and for an hour or two everything stayed where it had been left. It’s an odd thing to be grateful for, but after enough weeks that start by falling over, a Monday that simply walks in counts for something.

The corridors felt fuller as well. Colleagues were back from meetings overseas, still a bit jet-lagged, with the odd souvenir and the usual reports about conference coffee. A place sounds different when its people are back. Conversations pick up where they stopped, and the building feels like itself again.

The afternoon split my attention in two. A meeting was running in the background, and I listened in between patients, picking it up and putting it down again as the day allowed. It’s an awkward way to follow anything, like reading a book one paragraph at a time with the pages shuffled. Still, I caught the gist, and these days the gist is often all anyone takes away, even when they’ve been in the room the whole time.

Then the weather remembered where it was. The morning’s sunshine had been a loan, and by late afternoon the sky took it back, all at once and with interest. Heavy rain, the kind that bounces off the road and floods the drains in minutes. Traffic did what traffic does round here when it rains: stopped, more or less, and stayed stopped. Wipers going, brake lights everywhere, and the satnav’s arrival time getting later the longer I sat there. There’s nothing to do in that kind of jam except accept it, and I eventually did.

Then out to Lucky Garden for a haircut, which had been on the list long enough to stop being an errand and become a need. A barber’s chair is one of the last places where nobody expects anything of you. You sit, you’re draped in a cape, and for twenty minutes the only decision left is how short. The rain kept going outside while the scissors did their work inside, and I didn’t mind which of them took longer.

I came out lighter around the ears and noticeably tidier. The streets were still wet and shining under the lights.

So the week started in sunshine and ended its first day in a downpour, with a lot of brake lights in between. It wasn’t an eventful Monday, but it had a shape to it: colleagues back, a meeting heard in pieces, and a haircut I’d been putting off for weeks.

The Borrowed Desk and the Gathering Sky

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA new week. Which is to say, the same week as the last one, wearing a different shirt.

I’m still minding someone else’s corner while they’re off somewhere with better weather and, presumably, no inbox. I don’t begrudge them. Much. Covering for a colleague is a peculiar sort of arrangement: you inherit their chair, their habits, their mysterious system of sticky notes, and none of their certainty about what any of it means.

Last week I was translating. This week, I think, I’m reading.

It was quieter, and I noticed the quiet before I trusted it. There’s a particular suspicion that settles in when a day doesn’t go wrong by ten o’clock. You keep glancing at the door. Nobody comes through it with a problem shaped exactly like your ignorance. And slowly, almost grudgingly, you begin to understand the rhythm of the place. The rhythm of someone else’s place. Which threads matter. Which ones only look urgent.

Getting the hang of it. That’s the phrase, isn’t it. As though competence were a coat you could hang up at the end of the day. Some days it feels more like a coat you’ve borrowed, and it fits, mostly, if you don’t raise your arms too high.

Lunch was unremarkable. I mention it only for completeness.

By mid-afternoon the light had changed its mind. It does that here without much warning: one moment the sky is that pale, overexposed white, the next it has gone the colour of a bruise someone forgot to mention. The air thickened. Somewhere beyond the windows, the trees started having opinions.

And then the thought arrived, as it always does, fully formed and slightly panicked.

Traffic.

Anyone who has lived in the Klang Valley long enough knows the arithmetic. Rain plus the end of the working day equals a car park that happens to have lane markings. A storm doesn’t just slow the roads. It rearranges them into a long, glittering queue of brake lights, everyone inching forward with the patience of people who have no other choice.

I did not want to be part of that procession. Not tonight.

So I found myself working with one eye on the clock and the other on the clouds, which is not a recommended posture for productivity, but there we are. Tidying. Closing things. Being unusually decisive about matters I might otherwise have mulled over. Storms, it turns out, are excellent for clearing a desk.

There’s a small, slightly childish pleasure in trying to beat the weather home. As though it were a race, and the rain had agreed to the rules.

Whether I won is, frankly, beside the point. The intention was sound. The windscreen wipers were ready. And somewhere between leaving and arriving, I remembered that the week has only just begun, and the borrowed coat will need wearing for a few more days yet.

It’s fitting better. I’ll give it that.

Ahead of the Rain

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe week began without fuss, which I'm choosing to read as a good sign. Last night's United result had left me somewhere between mild and resigned. A draw gives you nothing to celebrate and nothing quite to mourn, like a parcel marked "out for delivery" that then never turns up. I woke still turning it over, then let it go, on the grounds that a second look wasn't going to change it.

Work was gentler than I'd braced for. Rounds were done early, before the morning had made up its mind about anything, and I had the unfamiliar feeling of being ahead of the day rather than chasing it. That held until the afternoon, when clinic settled in for the long haul. It was a steady, unbroken run, and no single patient was difficult. There were simply a lot of them, one after another, for a long time. By the end the room had that dry stillness a full afternoon leaves behind, and I noticed I'd stopped hearing the air conditioning some hours earlier.

Outside, the weather had ideas of its own. Rain was coming down hard over Subang, the sort that turns a road into a river and every driver into a nervous philosopher. I've learnt, slowly and at some cost, that the trick with heavy rain in the Klang Valley is not to be on the road when everyone else is. So I left early and got home ahead of the worst of it, watching the brake lights from the dry side of a window instead of the wet side of a windscreen. It felt slightly smug. I allowed it.

Once home, the first job was the NFL scores, which I went through in the order they'd finished, like someone opening the post. A few results were what I'd expected and a few weren't. There's an odd comfort in reading about games you didn't watch. The outcome is settled, and nobody can let you down any further.

That left Reacher, and the final season at that. I've been with the show long enough that its ending carries a little weight, though it has never been one to make a fuss about itself. A very large man arrives, a local unpleasantness is politely explained to him, and matters resolve along the lines you'd expect. I watched with the rain still going outside and no reason to be anywhere else, which is more or less the whole appeal.

Not much to report, and I'm fine with that. The week has started, the traffic was avoided, and somebody in a fictional town got what was coming to them. It'll do.

Extra Time, Extra Tired

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThree in the morning has a particular quality of silence to it — the kind where the fridge hum sounds like an orchestra and every footstep on the tiles feels like a confession. That was the hour the alarm went off, not out of necessity but out of principle. The World Cup final does not wait for a reasonable bedtime, and neither, it turns out, does Anita.

She was up before me, already settled in with the air of someone attending a proper occasion rather than watching football at an ungodly hour. The halftime show was the priority — BTS were on the bill, and she had opinions about camera angles before a ball had even been kicked in the second half. I'll admit I was there for the football and stayed, somewhat helplessly, for the spectacle. Shakira, Chris Martin, a school choir from Staten Island, and enough pyrotechnics to make the neighbours wonder if we'd finally gone to war with someone. Ten minutes of it and I still couldn't tell you how they got Coldplay involved, but there we are.

The match itself was Spain's, thoroughly. Argentina had Messi, and Messi had one good sprint in him early on, but the rest of the night belonged to a Spanish side that defended like it owed someone money and attacked like it didn't. A red card, a disallowed goal, a goalkeeper making saves that will be replayed for years — and then, deep into extra time, Ferran Torres did what substitutes are occasionally put on the pitch to do. Deserved winners. Argentina, for all their pedigree, never quite looked like men who believed it was their night.

None of which helps at half six in the morning, when the alarm goes off for real this time and the body simply declines to cooperate. Getting to work felt less like a commute and more like wading — everything slightly delayed, as though the whole day had also stayed up to watch the final and was equally reluctant to get going. Clinic ran long, the way clinics do when everyone in the room is operating on borrowed sleep and good intentions. Patience held, just about, though there was a point mid-afternoon where a very ordinary sentence took three attempts to land correctly.

Small mercy: I was back home in good time, which felt like the day's one unambiguous victory. No extra time required for that particular fixture.

What's left now is the business of recovering — an early night non-negotiable, sleep owed and about to be collected. And somewhere in the back of my mind, the quiet, low-grade nag of a JB trip that needs packing for, sitting there patiently, waiting its turn. Tomorrow's problem. Tonight belongs to the pillow.

Monday Ledger

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoGood sleep has a way of making Mondays feel almost reasonable, which is either a triumph or a trap, depending on how the rest of the day intends to behave. Mine woke up somewhere in between — properly rested, mildly optimistic, and entirely unprepared for how quickly the morning would fill itself in.

There's a particular rhythm to the start of a new week that I've never quite managed to outsmart. You tell yourself Monday will be gentle, a sort of warm-up lap, and then somehow by nine it's already sprinting. New faces queued up early, the kind of morning where names and histories arrive faster than you can properly file them away. Nothing unmanageable, just steady — the sort of busy that keeps you upright rather than buried.

By the time the afternoon clinic rolled round, things had eased considerably, almost suspiciously so. New patients, yes, but fewer of them than the morning had threatened, and the pace slowed to something almost civilised. I've learned not to trust a light clinic entirely — it tends to be lulling you into a false sense of calm before Tuesday reasserts itself — but for now I'll take the reprieve without asking too many questions of it.

There was a small, unfamiliar gap in the evening where football usually sits. No match tonight, which after weeks of the World Cup dictating supper times and sleep schedules alike, felt oddly like discovering an extra room in the house you'd forgotten existed. I didn't quite know what to do with the silence at first — kept glancing at the clock the way you might check a phone that hasn't buzzed in a while — but eventually settled into it. Turns out an evening without extra time and penalty shootouts is rather good for the nervous system.

Dinner was Al-Halabi, which is never a decision so much as an inevitability once the day has been long enough. There's something steadying about the ritual of it — the bread, the mezze, the unhurried business of eating with your hands and not feeling remotely guilty about it. Anita and I didn't talk about anything of consequence, which is precisely the point of that kind of meal. Some conversations are best kept as garnish.

Back home, I looked at my desk with the particular dread reserved for a mess you've been actively ignoring for a fortnight. Papers in geological layers, cables doing their best impression of abstract art, a coffee cup that has quietly become part of the furniture. I made a note — again — to sort it properly, filed mentally under "tomorrow's problem," which is where most of my best intentions currently reside.

Still, a good sleep, a manageable Monday, no football to referee my evening, and a plate of hummus to round it all off. Some days ask very little of you beyond showing up reasonably rested. This was one of them, and I'm not inclined to argue with that.