It was a Saturday at the start of the month, and I was interviewing my eldest at the kitchen table like a journalist who didn't want to lead the witness. Should he leave his school? I asked about sleep first. He said if he went somewhere closer he'd get an hour more of it, and he said it straight away, which told me something. Then hunger. Then friends, one at a time, by name. At some point he said something about wet socks and warned me not to take it out of context, and I said I would absolutely take it out of context.
I'd gone in thinking I was weighing it up. About halfway through I noticed I was just watching his face. When he finished I said I felt like I'd talked myself into it already because I was excited for him. Which was true, and also not the neutral interviewer's line I'd planned. The long answer was mostly him being patient with me.
The rest of the month ran on a clock I only really noticed around the 19th. Fox had boxing at 4:30. Dot had gymnastics at 4:50. For a while those two times overlapped by nearly an hour, and then, a week later, by twenty-five minutes, which is somehow worse because it feels solvable. Two bags on the passenger seat, one with chalk on it and one with gloves hung round its neck. I took the corner like an apology. Fox turned 14 on the 14th, and the day mostly went to boxing too, because that's what he wanted. He's taller than me now. He stands in the doorway of a gym looking like he's been cut out of a bigger photograph.
Work happened in a funny shape. I'd get up before five for an online lesson, the house dark, the screen the only light. Some days there were two. Midday I'd put a thirty-minute walk in the calendar and call it the dog walk, though really it was fifteen minutes of walking and fifteen of talking to the assistant I'd built. I'd do it with my mouth open and nobody beside me, and the dog got the exercise as a side effect. I think I'd have found that funny in somebody else.
There was a smaller thing on the 31st. A reminder sitting next to someone else's birthday party: pick a date for Dot's. I walked past it a few times. That's about as much as I can say for myself on that one. It's Dot's eleventh year and she'd rather I just booked it.
The record goes quiet on a lot of days, and I won't pretend they were empty. Mostly the month was small sums of time: who needed to be where, at what minute. I don't think I minded. At half past four, on one of the last days, the wind was up and the gloves were going on again, and that seemed like enough to be getting on with.
