Lazy, Strategically

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe day began early, as they so often do now, with the sky still undecided between night and morning and the neighbourhood holding its breath. I stood at the door weighing my options and came to a decision that I would like to call strategic but which was, in all honesty, simply lazy. I booked a Grab to UMMC.

Anyone who has tried to find parking there at that hour will understand. It is less a search than a pilgrimage, circling the same rows in the hope that someone, somewhere, has had a change of heart and decided to leave. Sitting in the back seat, letting someone else worry about lanes and lights, felt like a small luxury. I watched the city wake up through the window and felt very little guilt about it.

The respite was brief. Before long I was heading back across town to SJMC, where the morning clinics and round were waiting with the patience of things that know you cannot avoid them. Two venues before mid-morning is a particular kind of geography. You spend the first hour in one place and the next three slightly catching your breath in another, as if part of you is still sitting in a car somewhere along the Federal Highway.

Lunch was with pharma, which is to say a meal accompanied by conversation of the professional sort, polite and purposeful. The food was good, the company pleasant, and I left knowing a little more than I did going in, which is about as much as one can ask of any lunch.

Then the afternoon clinic, and after that the rest of the day simply whizzed by. There are days that drag their feet and days that sprint, and today was firmly in the second camp. I looked up at one point expecting it to be mid-afternoon and found the light already softening, the hours having quietly slipped out while I was looking the other way.

The evening, though, had a different flavour. Tomorrow I pick up the car, and so tonight was given over to preparation: documents gathered, details checked, the small administrative rituals that come before something new. There is a curious anticipation to it. Not excitement exactly, more a sort of tidy readiness, like packing a bag the night before a trip.

It did not escape me that the day began with a decision not to drive and ends with the prospect of a new car. If there is irony in that, I am choosing to enjoy it. Perhaps the Grab this morning was a farewell of sorts, a last indulgence before parking becomes, once again, entirely my problem.

For now, the papers are in a neat pile by the door, the house is quiet, and the day that sprinted past is finally sitting down. Tomorrow will have its own pace. Tonight, I think, I am allowed to have mine.

A Night on the Couch

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days arrive quietly and then keep adding to themselves. This was one of those — the sort that starts with one item on the list and ends somewhere entirely different, with you sitting in a room you hadn't planned on being in, wondering where the hours went.

It began, reasonably enough, with the Starex. It's being sold to make room for the new car, which is the unglamorous half of buying something — the part where the old one has to be moved on, priced, described, and eventually handed over to someone else's driveway. There's no great sentiment about it. It's a vehicle. It carried people and shopping and the occasional argument about directions, and now it'll go and do that for somebody else. Still, there's a small pause in it. Cars accumulate a surprising amount of ordinary life without ever asking permission.

That, though, turned out to be the easy business of the day. Anita's stomach trouble, which had been an irritation over the weekend, decided to get properly serious — the sort of worsening that stops being something you manage at home and starts being something you do something about. So: admitted, and put on a drip for fluids, which is one of those interventions that sounds more alarming than it is and works rather better than anything you could have offered her from the kitchen.

By the afternoon she was improving, steadily and visibly, which is the best kind of improvement — no drama, just a gradual return of colour and conversation. Relief arrives quietly in these situations. You don't announce it. You just notice, an hour or two later, that your shoulders have come down from around your ears.

There was a brief escape for dinner at Upstairs Cafe — quick, functional, eaten with one eye on the clock — and then home, not to stay, but to collect clothes. There's something faintly absurd about packing a bag for your own hospital-room sleepover, standing in your own bedroom at an odd hour, deciding how many shirts constitute optimism.

Back to the room, then, for the night. Hospitals have their own peculiar relationship with time — the corridors never fully dark, the sounds never fully quiet, and the furniture designed by someone who clearly believed that visitors don't really sleep, they merely wait horizontally. Luckily, tomorrow's a public holiday, which took the edge off the whole thing considerably. Whatever the night did to me, at least it wasn't going to be followed by a full working day.

I went down early, which felt like a small triumph at the time. Less so this morning, when I woke up with a back that had strong opinions about the couch and wasn't shy about sharing them. Sore in places I hadn't previously thought of as places.

Still — she's better, which is the only line of the day that really matters. Everything else was logistics. The car will sell, the back will recover, and the holiday is here at exactly the right moment, which almost never happens.