Wednesday again

It's a Wednesday evening some months on, and the doorbell goes at twenty to seven. You're not on the sofa. You got in at half past five, changed your shoes and walked round the block before dinner, which takes eleven minutes and has become the point at which the working day ends. Now you're standing at the worktop, slicing onions.

The day behind you looked much like the old one from the outside. It had the same drive and the same desk. But you took two calls on your feet, walked over to accounts with a question, and had your sandwich on the bench by the car park with Denise, who turns out to be good company. You stood at the back for the second half of the two o'clock meeting, and the head of department came and stood next to you. If you worked out the tally it would come to about ten and a half hours, which still sounds like a lot. But the longest sit of the day was forty minutes, and it used to be two and a half hours.

You walk to the door without noticing the walk, and that's what has changed. It's another parcel for next door.

Some things haven't changed, and I'd be misleading you if this chapter pretended otherwise. You're still fifty-four, and soon you'll be fifty-five. Your left knee is still the less reliable of the two. You're not an athlete and you haven't become one of those people. On Saturday you watched three episodes in a row, remembered at the end of the second, and got up then.

But the noise has gone. You didn't notice it stop. A few weeks ago you realised you hadn't heard it for a while. On Sunday you were down on the floor with Alfie and the train track, and when he ran off to find the bridge piece you got up and followed him, and only afterwards noticed that you hadn't reached for the coffee table. In the multi-storey last week you took the stairs because the lift was slow, and you were at the car before you'd thought about it.

The afternoons are better, though they aren't perfect. The slump still visits around three. Now you know what it is, and you walk to the far printer and back by the stairs, and by twenty past it's mostly lifted.

What pleases you most is harder to measure. The age story has lost its grip. You'd been reading every ache as a message about the years ahead, and it turned out that most of them were messages about the last two hours. You're still getting older, as everyone is. It's happening more slowly than you'd thought, and it's taking less from you than you'd assumed.

Here's one action, if you've read this far sitting down. Stand up. Walk to the furthest room of wherever you are, and back. Then set a timer for thirty minutes.