Rain Stops Play

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe day began quietly, which I’ve come to regard as a kind of warning. A quiet start is the weather drawing breath. Sure enough, by mid-morning the rain arrived, and then it simply stayed, like a guest who has taken their shoes off and found the remote.

It rained all day. Not the dramatic tropical downpour that empties the sky in twenty minutes and leaves everything steaming and slightly embarrassed. This was the persistent kind, steady and unhurried, the sort of rain that seems to have no particular destination and all the time in the world to get there. Umbrellas became a full-time job. Car windows fogged. Every doorway had someone standing in it, looking out with the same expression of mild betrayal.

I’ll confess a small part of me was grateful. After the haze of the past week, there’s something cleansing about a day of honest rain. At least you know where you stand with it. Haze lingers and sulks. Rain gets on with things. I’d rather be soaked than slowly smoked.

It finally relented as I pulled in at home, which felt either like perfect timing or a deliberate joke at my expense, depending on how charitable I was feeling. I chose charitable. Barely.

The evening afterwards was much calmer, as though the whole city had exhaled. The air had that rinsed, cool quality you only get after rain, the kind that makes you open a window just to prove to yourself it’s there. The streets below went quiet. Even the traffic seemed to have lost interest in being difficult.

So I did what any sensible person does on a damp, settled evening: I sat down and caught up on more episodes of The Diplomat. I’d been watching it in fits and starts, which is no way to follow a political drama, frankly. These shows punish the casual viewer. Miss one conversation in a corridor and you spend the next three episodes wondering why everyone’s suddenly furious with each other.

Tonight, though, things began to fall into place. Threads I’d half dropped were picked up and pulled taut. Motives that seemed muddled started to make an uncomfortable kind of sense. It’s a great plot, genuinely well built, the sort where you realise the writers knew exactly where they were going long before you did. I find that deeply satisfying, and a little humbling. I struggle to plan a Thursday.

What I like most is that nobody in it is entirely right. Everyone is clever, everyone is compromised, and the most dangerous people are the ones who are sure of themselves. There’s probably a lesson in that, though I’m too comfortable on the sofa to go looking for it.

A wet day, then, and a dry, calm evening. A story clicking into place on screen, and the weather finally making its peace outside. I’ll call that a fair trade.

One more episode, I told myself. We both know how that ends.

Nothing on the List

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA quiet start, and for once nothing waiting at the other end of it to make the quiet feel like borrowed time. Nothing on the list today. No appointments to be kept to, no morning that needed to be met at speed. Just an ordinary Thursday with the pressure taken out of it.

So the morning went slowly, and I let it. There's a version of me that would have filled the space with something — a project, an errand, some improving activity — but that version has been quietly retired over the years and I don't miss him much. I drank my coffee at the pace coffee is meant to be drunk at, which is to say not while doing three other things.

The rest of the day was paperwork, which I've complained about before and will complain about again, but I'll admit that paperwork on a day with no list is a different creature entirely. It stops being the thing squeezed into the gaps and becomes simply the thing. You can actually get through it. Forms, signatures, the slow accumulation of small administrative debts being settled one by one. Unglamorous, absolutely, but there's a modest pleasure in watching a pile go down rather than sideways.

It rained through most of it. Not the dramatic sort — no thunder making announcements — just a steady grey persistence outside the window, the kind that turns the light in a room soft and makes indoor work feel almost virtuous. Rain is very good company for admin. It removes any lingering suspicion that you're missing out on something.

Home by five, which felt almost illicit. There's a particular quality to arriving somewhere before the day has properly loosened its grip — the house still in its afternoon mood, the evening not yet arranged into its usual shape. I had time, and no plan for it, which is the best combination available.

So I finished the second season of The Gentlemen. And it was great television, genuinely. It has no interest in being important, which these days counts as a mercy — everyone is very well dressed, the plotting is preposterous and knows it, and every conversation is conducted as though the participants have all read the same manual on menace. Ritchie has always understood that style is a substance of sorts, if you commit to it hard enough. The country house continues to be the finest performer in the cast.

There's a small, ridiculous sadness in finishing a season. Not enough to dwell on, but you close the laptop and there's a beat where the evening has to reorganise itself around the absence. I'll find something else. There's always something else.

And that was it. A day with very little in it and nothing missing from it, which are two quite different things that occasionally coincide. Rain outside, paper cleared, home early, good television.

Some days are just well-behaved. Best not to interrogate them too closely.

A Day That Wandered Off Script

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoEvery so often the day declines to follow the usual template, and today was one of the declining sort — less of the standard grind, more of the odds and ends that don't normally get a look-in. No complaints there. A bit of variety has a way of making even a familiar week feel freshly arranged.

Morning rounds came first, as they generally do, but what followed them didn't — an interview, recorded rather than simply lived through, which changes the texture of a morning in a way that's hard to explain until it happens. There's a particular self-consciousness to speaking somewhere the words are being kept, a low hum of "get this right" running underneath the actual answers. It went smoothly enough, though, and there's a certain satisfaction in ticking off something that isn't part of the usual rotation.

Lunch, and then rounds again, briefer this time — the kind of quick pass through that clears the essentials without dragging the whole afternoon along with it. With that out of the way, the rest of the day opened up rather generously, and it seemed only sensible to head home earlier than the week had been allowing.

Home early meant paperwork, which sounds like a poor trade for freedom until you remember that paperwork done at your own pace, in your own chair, barely counts as work at all by comparison. This particular batch was for MSH — the sort of task that's easy to let pile up precisely because none of it is urgent on any given day, which is exactly how it becomes urgent on some future day if left alone long enough. Better dealt with now, unhurried, than later, in a rush.

With that cleared, the evening earned its keep properly — a couple of episodes of "The Bombing of Pan Am 103," which turned out to be the kind of compelling that makes "just one more episode" feel less like a cliché and more like an entirely reasonable decision. The sort of documentary that reconstructs something you thought you understood and quietly reveals you hadn't, in the way the best ones do.

Then, at eight, a meeting with the team on the Hands of Heritage video project — a proper bookend to a day that had already leaned unusually creative. It's a different kind of tired, that sort of meeting, the good kind that comes from building something rather than simply getting through something, and it rounded the evening off with a bit of momentum rather than draining what was left of it.

So: an interview in the morning, medicine squeezed in around it, paperwork tackled early enough to actually enjoy the rest of the evening, a documentary that earned its screen time, and a project meeting that closed the day on something being made rather than merely managed. Not every day gets to be different. This one made reasonably good use of the chance.

Danger Will Robinson

I had been watching the trailer for quite some time and when it finally came out today, I watched ethos first couple of episodes straight up.

"Lost in Space" received a Netflix reboot and the story was quite compelling. The Family Robinson was there of course - to keep the old nostalgic storyline going - although the premise was different.

Another bit that got me was one of the daughters was clearly not theirs. Hollywood wanted to keep the diversity thing going on I guess. I found that rather distracting.

Clearly Netflix spent a ton of money on this. The acting was solid, the special effect wouldn't be out of place in a mobile blockbuster. Now, the story arch must meet expectation. And expectations were pretty high ...

I watched 3 episodes so far. Another 7 to go for the season ...

Williams

I had always been fascinated with Formula 1. Not just at the glamour of it all, but at the engineering and the skills behind it.

In the last decade, with the retirement of drivers such as Schumacher, certainly some of the charm from Formula 1 had been lost. They are no more than a commercial ventures nowadays. Gone were the risk-taking and attitude which made racing so enthralling to watch. They are now sterile.

After work the other day, I was flipping through Netflix and came across this documentary about of the characters in motor racing, Sir Frank Williams. The title was simply "Williams". And it told the story of the great man.

Fascinating watch and at the end, I couldn't help but appreciate that the gentleman was from a different time. A different breed, from the era where motor racing meant something else. Well worth a watch. And I will be supporting Williams next season on the back of that ...

Here is the trailer of the documentary of you are interested.