Usually, We'd Be in London by Now

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA new week arrived this morning with all the ceremony of a bin lorry — noisy, inevitable, and not especially interested in whether I was ready for it. I wasn't, particularly. Mondays rarely ask permission.

There's a particular flatness that comes at this point in the year, and I know exactly where it comes from. Normally, by now, we'd be in London. Cool air with a bit of an edge to it, the light going amber by late afternoon, that specific pleasure of walking somewhere without a plan and ending up in a bookshop you didn't mean to enter. The body seems to keep its own calendar, quite independent of the one on the wall, and mine has been quietly flicking through pages and looking up expectantly. Nothing doing this year. So the mood sat a bit low, not dramatically, just a background hum, like a fridge you only notice when you're trying to think.

Irfan is still here, at least. Two more weeks before he goes. That's the sort of thing you tell yourself is plenty of time, and it is, right up until it isn't. I've learned not to make too much of the countdown — nobody enjoys being treated as a departure lounge — so I mostly just note it privately and try to make sure the ordinary days between now and then are decent ones. There's something to be said for the last stretch before someone leaves. It's rarely the grand farewell dinner you remember. It's the two of you in the kitchen at an odd hour, agreeing that the kettle is taking its time.

Work was slow today. Not slow in the sense of dragging, but slow in the way a river is slow — moving steadily, going somewhere, unhurried about the whole business. Days like that are underrated. Nothing arrived that needed to be solved in the next five minutes, and so things got done properly rather than merely quickly. I got through what needed getting through. No heroics. No fires. Just a sequence of tasks that agreed to be finished in the order I attempted them, which is more courtesy than one usually gets.

And yet by the end of it I was thoroughly done in. That's the odd arithmetic of a gentle day: you'd think the tiredness would scale with the drama, but it doesn't. Steady effort has its own weight, and it settles on you all at once somewhere around the drive home, when the podcast you've been half-listening to finishes and you realise you couldn't summarise a word of it.

So, an early night. No principled stand on wellness, no elaborate wind-down. Just an honest assessment of my own capacity, which had run out somewhat before the evening had. Bed, at an hour I'd have found faintly embarrassing twenty years ago and now regard as one of life's quieter luxuries.

London will still be there next year. Tonight, a pillow will do.