Borrowed Hours

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoNearing the weekend, and you can feel it in the shoulders before the calendar admits it. Thursday has a particular texture, close enough to Friday to taste it, far enough away to be cruel about it.

The haze was back this morning, which felt frankly unsporting. It rained the night before, properly and at length, and I’d gone to bed with the reasonable expectation that the air had been washed clean. Apparently not. The rain did its best, the haze simply waited it out. There’s a lesson there about persistence, though I’d rather not learn it from smoke.

I got to work early, partly by choice and partly by necessity. A colleague is away on holiday, so I’m covering, which means my usual load plus theirs, folded neatly on top like an extra coat in a heatwave. I don’t begrudge it. Holidays matter, and someone will do the same for me when it’s my turn to vanish to somewhere with better air. But covering has its own quiet weight. You’re minding someone else’s patients, someone else’s loose ends, all while trying not to rearrange the furniture in their absence.

And then there was my own full clinic as well, because the day had clearly decided generosity was the theme. The timer earned its keep again. I’ve stopped feeling self-conscious about it. A man with a countdown on his desk looks either very organised or slightly unhinged, and on a day like today, I was happy to be mistaken for either.

In the afternoon I headed to Sunway for a talk. Driving across the Klang Valley mid-afternoon is a kind of meditation, if your idea of meditation involves brake lights and quiet muttering. Sunway itself always feels like a small city that got ambitious and never stopped building, which I mean as a compliment. There’s an energy to it I rather like, even when I’m too tired to match it.

Dinner was included, which is one of those small details that shouldn’t matter as much as it does. After a long day, not having to think about food is a genuine kindness. Someone else decides, someone else serves, and all you have to do is turn up and eat. I’ve come to believe that a well-organised dinner is the true measure of any event. The content can be excellent, but if you send people home hungry, nobody remembers the slides.

It ran late, as these things do. By the time I got home the day had long since used up whatever reserves I’d brought to it. Tired is the honest word. Not the dramatic kind, just the ordinary, earned sort, where the body is ready to stop well before the mind agrees to.

There’s a certain satisfaction in a day like this, though I’d only admit it once rested. Two loads carried, one talk attended, one dinner I didn’t have to cook. The weekend is close now. Close enough that I can almost see it, haze permitting.