Friday

I wake up at the hospital and the day is overcast but warm. I have slept 5 hours but feel exhausted and as I plunge into the pool for my morning laps I feel as energetic as a cat fallen off a skyscraper balcony for the 10th time... But I manage to swim up and back a few times and feel more awake by the time I sit down at diggies for breakfast by the beach with my good friend Janet.

While there's not a lot of direct sunlight there is a hell of a lot of sparkle coming from the ring glued to her finger. The cluster of pink and white diamonds announcing She's Engaged!! (Note, I never really take notice of these things and she probably waved it around for hours and had to actually point it out before I noticed it - the classic gay best friend it would seem I am not...). Despite my slow uptake I'm quite thrilled. She's a real catch and why it's taken this long for the straight men in this world to notice I simply don't understand. Finally I've also moved to second place in her mum's books which a whole lot healthier place for me to be. While I'm there not noticing the ring, I am noticing the incredibly hunky guy wandering around dressed just in a towel and surfboard, he has a chest and back to die for and the rest ain't so bad either, so in those few minutes I think we must have been discussing wedding plans - because I don't recall any.

Then I head to work for the day where the most remarkable experience is standing in a hospital room for a palliative care consultation while an entire family piles into the room, surrounding me. There must have been a dozen people entering the small room. Why some of them didn't pass out I'm not sure, but I felt like it myself at one point as I didn't really feel for euthanasia talks right there and then, but such is life, and death. And everyone seemed happy in the end. If you really can in such circumstances.

So after work I head back to the pool and gym. I'm still feeling like that cat in the pool from this morning, so get out early and take my weary body to the gym. I remember to take the ipod which has become my gym buddy and it energises me with a random selection it chooses perfectly. I lose count of how many abdominal exercises I do and feel happy moving about the gym as if in another world, oblivious to everyone around me. Somehow this makes me feel mysterious and interesting, even though right now I'm neither mysterious nor interesting. I'm introduced to a cute guy called 'Hussein' and all I can think of is how I really shouldn't say anything related to his name as it would be inappropriate, but he has the cutest smile and still I have Saddam and Iraq and 'The War on Terror' going through my head and say nothing much because I can't think of anything else right now and I'm so fatigued and it really doesn't matter - this is the gym and I'm being mysterious anyway.

And so on my way home I realise I've left my work shoes at the pool, my head somewhere in the clouds, and tomorrow morning (yes Saturday) I have to work again...