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.

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.