Monday again

It's a Monday some months on, and the alarm goes at ten past seven. It's a real alarm clock, a cheap one with a loud tick that you've got used to. The phone is downstairs on the hall table, where it spends the night. You lie there for a minute and think about the day. You've a meeting at ten that you're slightly dreading and a dentist's appointment at four, and you're having dinner with Jo's sister. Those are your concerns this morning, and they're about your own life.

At the kettle you look out of the window. On the train you've got a book, a long one about the history of the region where the missile strike was. You started it because you realised that after a year of headlines you couldn't have explained the conflict to a twelve-year-old. You're two hundred pages in, and you could now.

At work the tab isn't open. At about eleven a colleague says, "Did you see the minister's gone?" You say, "No, has he? What happened in the end?" She tells you, in some detail and with evident enjoyment. It takes three minutes and it's the best conversation you've had with her in weeks.

At six, when you get home, you put the radio on for the news programme while you start the dinner. It runs for half an hour. The minister has indeed gone, and a correspondent who's followed the affair for months spends four minutes explaining why. There's been an election abroad, and an interest rate decision. When the programme ends you turn the radio off. That's it for the day. Whatever happens tonight will be on tomorrow's programme.

The first fortnight was odd. Your thumb went to the empty space on the screen forty times a day. You felt, for a while, as if you'd left the gas on, with a low sense that something was happening and you ought to be watching it. Something was always happening, and at six you found out what. Nothing that happened in those two weeks required anything of you before six.

There've been slips. In the spring there was a terrible attack in a European city, and you spent most of one evening on a live page before you noticed what you were doing and the state you were in. You closed it. The next day you read one long account, which told you more than the whole evening had.

On Saturdays you read a weekly over a late breakfast. You and Neil have started swapping articles. You've got a standing order to a medical charity that works in the region you're reading about. It's not a large amount, but it goes every month.

Jo said something a few weeks ago. She said, "You're back." You asked what she meant, and she said she wasn't sure, only that you'd been somewhere else for a couple of years and now you were here.

The world hasn't improved since the spring, as far as you can judge. You're better informed about it than you were, and much less afraid. The news got on without you, and you understand it better than you did when you checked it all day.

Here's one action. Turn off the news notifications on your phone now, all of them. Then decide what time tomorrow you'll sit down with the news, and what you'll read.