For three days at the start of June the record has almost nothing in it: no meetings, no tasks, no reason given. The first of the month went past like that, then the third, the city sitting under the same broken cloud like it had run out of ideas too. I was working through all of it — most of it from home by now, with three clients up in Auckland and the odd quick trip north that ended with me still going at eleven at night in a hotel room. None of that writes anything down.
Then the couch arrived. Two hours of wrestling a new sofa through the front door on a wet Wednesday, and somewhere around noon someone leaned in a doorway with a number they were proud of and asked if I wanted to see something interesting. I did. A fortnight later I finally sat down on the thing properly, Max wedged in beside me, and it felt like a genuine win, which tells you something about the size of wins on offer that month.
The best afternoon wasn't mine. Fox and Dot went out the front door on their scooters not talking to each other and came back ten minutes later as friends, unprompted, then asked, with suspicious timing, whether we could all go to the zoo. We said not this year. I still wonder whether the scoot itself was the negotiation, the zoo the terms of the treaty. Fox spent the same month running a far longer campaign, for an e-bike, and settled — provisionally, he'd want that on the record — for an e-scooter, on the grounds that it bought him forty-five minutes in bed and would pay for itself inside a year in unbought bus fares. I have been pitched worse by adults.
A few days after that, Lou wet his pants on the lounge floor and we stood him on a towel the way we always used to with Bowie, same towel, same instructions, before either of us caught what we were saying out loud. Bowie had been gone barely a month. The habits hadn't got the message yet.
Work came back to life around the same time as the couch. A hexadecimal task string turned up between "call the dentist" and "buy milk", which is about as accurate a picture of my head as I can give you. By the middle of the month I sat down to a lunch with people who'd all arrived at the same belief about where this is going, and by the end of it an old client relationship that had gone quiet came back, apologising in advance for how long the email was. And Tim came in properly, which we'd been saying we'd get around to for about a decade. One afternoon given entirely to him — three and a half hours, no screen between us — and it was the first conversation in a long time where I didn't have to explain the premise before I could start.
My dad's heart came up hard over tea one evening, the kind of conversation that starts as small talk and isn't. We talked it through and it settled back into diet and blood sugar, same as it usually does. Jas and I had our usual round of arguing about tone, once over the dishes, once about what's worth complaining about, and I fixed both the way I generally do, with an offer and a chore, which isn't quite the same as fixing them.
On the last night of the month I sat somewhere warm with eleven ideas landing at once: a turntable for Jas, a book, a LinkedIn scheme, and a note to myself about the difference between reflecting and ruminating. I wrote it down. I still haven't worked out which one I was doing.
