A Bright Morning That Asked a Lot

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe day began sunny, in that disarming way Fridays sometimes have — the light coming in clean and golden, promising an easy run into the weekend. The sky, as ever, had not consulted my schedule. What it promised and what the day delivered turned out to be two rather different things.

The Friday clinic was long, and considerably busier than I had braced for. There is always a certain optimism in glancing at the morning list and thinking it manageable; that optimism rarely survives contact with reality. The patients kept arriving, more of them than the hours strictly allowed, and the list refused to shorten no matter how steadily I worked through it.

The morning, on top of all that, decided to test its mettle with a run of emergencies — several of them, stacked closely enough that there was no real pause between, only the brisk shift from one to the next. There is a particular adrenaline to those stretches, a heightened clarity while they last, followed inevitably by the slump once they pass. By three o'clock that slump had well and truly arrived. I was tired in the bone-deep way that no coffee quite reaches, the kind that announces itself plainly and will not be reasoned with.

Still, the work was not done. A quick set of afternoon rounds, conducted with rather less spring than the morning's, and then the paperwork — that great unglamorous tide that follows every clinical day, indifferent to how spent you are. I dispatched it with the grim efficiency of someone who knows that leaving it only makes tomorrow's pile worse. There is no wit to be found in paperwork, only the small satisfaction of an inbox brought to heel.

By the time I surfaced, the better part of the day had been spent, and so had I. Home felt less like a destination than a reprieve. We had an early dinner — there is no shame in eating at an hour your younger self would have mocked — and I found my appetite for the day's events fully exhausted, replaced entirely by an appetite for the sofa.

The evening's sole ambition was to catch up on Star City, which Anita and I have been working through at our own unhurried pace. There is a particular comfort in a good series at the end of a hard day, the way it asks nothing of you but your attention, and not even all of that. We let an episode or two carry us along, the plot doing the work so we didn't have to.

Then, sensibly and without resistance, an early night. A long Friday earns one, and I was in no mood to argue. The weekend sits just on the other side of sleep now, and after a day like this, the prospect of two slower ones feels less like a luxury and more like a necessity.

For now, lights out. The clinic will keep its tally for Monday. Tonight belongs to rest.