Four Years of Thursdays

I came because a colleague brought me, which I understand is how nearly everyone comes^[1]. I expected to attend twice and stop. That was in 2021 and I have now missed four Thursdays in three years, two of them for a funeral.

What I want to record is the ordinariness of the change, because the literature makes it sound like a conversion and it is closer to physiotherapy. Nothing was revealed to me. I simply began, very slowly, to finish things.

The first year I resented the silence. The second year I used it to plan my week, which Gwen tells me is cheating. The third year I stopped noticing it. Somewhere in the fourth year I found that I had become the person who is telephoned when the boiler fails, and that I liked this, and that I could not have predicted liking it at any earlier point.

I have not been asked to believe anything. I have been asked to turn up, repeatedly, in weather, and to be findable afterwards. The second part is the part nobody warns you about.

There is a cost and it should be stated plainly. My correspondence with my steward is longer than my correspondence with my brother. I have thought about this sentence for a month and I am publishing it without resolving it.