It starts at about ten past six. I can be doing anything. Tonight I am draining pasta.
Nothing has happened. Nobody has rung. It is only that the light has gone a certain way, and some part of me that I did not ask has opened the diary for the week and started reading it aloud.
The list
Monday has a meeting in it that I have not prepared for. I know this, and I have known it since Thursday. I carried it round the garden centre on Saturday, in among the bedding plants.
So I get the notebook out of the bag, which I swore I would not, and I write down what I need to do before ten tomorrow. There are six things. Written down, they take up less of the page than they did of the weekend.
I shut the notebook and put it back in the bag, and the bag by the door.
The ironing
I iron on Sunday nights. I am bad at it and I find that restful.
There is a programme on about people buying a house in the country. They have a budget that I find hard to watch. I do five tops, one for each day, and hang them on the wardrobe door in order.
It looks like somebody who has things under control lives here. I have found that if I set it up to look that way on a Sunday, I can nearly keep up with it until the Wednesday.
What it is not
I used to think this feeling was dread, and that having it meant I was in the wrong job. I gave it a good deal of thought, mostly on Sundays.
I no longer think so. I have it before I go on holiday as well, and I like holidays.
It is more like the feeling of standing at the side of a pool. You know the water. You have been in it a thousand times, and you know that you will be fine once you are in. None of that makes the step any warmer.
Ten o’clock
My friend sends a message. She is a teacher, and she has it too. We do not talk about it. She sends a photograph of thirty exercise books on her kitchen table and a glass of wine beside them, and I send her the five tops.
That is the whole of it. We have been doing this for years.
Monday
The alarm goes at twenty past six, and by seven I am in the car. The meeting is at ten and I am ready for it, more or less, because of the list.
By twenty past nine somebody has rung about something else altogether. The meeting is moved to Thursday.
I would like to say that I have learned from this, and that next Sunday I will watch the house programme with an easy mind. I will be draining something at ten past six. The light will go, and I will get the notebook out of the bag.
This is a scene, and it is made up, like the book. Nobody in it is a real person.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: The training day