Friday, but not a typical Friday. In fact, I don't think there is such a thing as a typical Friday or any typical day in my life.
On Thursday night, I was planning a big, long bike ride on Friday, so I created space to do that. However, Alison decided that was not the right use of my time and decided that the long bike ride would be better on Sunday, and for various reasons, I agreed (Everyone has a boss, after all).
And so, Alison and I worked late on Thursday night, her at the breakfast bar on a terrible sh*t NHS computer, which causes much consternation and anger and me setting up all my patient notes from the week, making sure all the letters were done, all the treatment plans properly constructed, all the notes completed, all the patients ready to be contacted, all the appointments in place.
I do this when I have a heavy week of consultations, like the week I've just had. I store up tasks for all the dictation for the notes, letters, tasks, etc. that I do, and then I knock off the dictation, and it's all enormously effective and efficient.
I did this on Thursday night rather than on Friday because I planned to ride my bike on Friday.
I went to bed, got up early, walked the dogs on Friday morning, and then I got to work around 7.30 or 7.45, eating my breakfast, and just dictating for the 90 minutes of all the notes I did.
This may seem like a lot of hard work and go against my principles of trying to get everything done while I'm in surgery, but the truth is that I live what's known as a portfolio life, as defined by Charles Handy in the 1990s and early 2000s.
A portfolio life is one where you can construct your life and carry out your work at the times that suit you best and construct the rest of your life around that. So, for about 90 minutes on Friday morning, I blasted off all the work for the week.
For those of you who are interested, and for another blog post, the treatment plans that I put together over nine hours of clinical work (Tuesday morning and an early shift on Wednesday) amounted to an excess of £150,000 worth of clinical work value.
It's not to say that everybody will pick those up, but 80% of my consultations generally proceed with treatment, so you can do the math.
To spend 90 minutes dictating letters on a Friday morning is indeed valuable but that's by the by and something different and this is turning into a longer blog post than most people would like, and it's more about Joni Mitchell than it is about treatment plans and revenue for businesses, which is a bit anti-Joni Mitchell at the best of times.
But the point is that you can create a portfolio life. When you do this and make space for other things in your life, you can see longer, further, and better than you can if your nose is stuck to the grindstone.
So, I went to bed on Thursday night with a few problems related to my work that I needed to think through, some difficult conversations that I needed to have, some issues related to numbers that I needed to get my head around, things that take some time to think about and need some space.
After 90 minutes of dictation, I got on my bike for a shorter ride than I had planned.
The weather on Friday was magnificent; there was no way I was riding a bike in a shed, so I got the gear on, the bike out and ready, and off I set for what was, in the end, about two hours and 45 minutes of bike riding in the sunshine, trying to loosen off the things in my head that were complicated and needed some space to think about.
I headed out on my usual route and turned first left in Bradmore (Alex, you know the one, the lumpy road). Then, I ascended the three small bumps on the lumpy road to Plumtree.
The third of those lumps is the hill that I wrote about in December 2017 after we bought the land for the practice. I can see the practice from that hill, but as I was ascending it, I looked left, and there was a field of wheat almost ready to be harvested about as far as the eye could see.
"They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot."
And then I heard Joni Mitchell in my head for a reason that I don't know, but it was basically telling me that it was brilliant to be outside, brilliant to be in the sunshine, brilliant to be on my bike, and brilliant to look at these fields that I see changing on a week-by-week and month-by-month basis.
Sometimes they are yellow with rapeseed, and sometimes they are fallow, sometimes they're growing grass for hay, and sometimes, like today, they are one or two days of harvesting with 100 million heads of wheat just blowing gently in the breeze.
And then I realised that I spend too much of my time not here and too much of my time somewhere else.
Because the time that I spend here and around here opens my mind, my brain allows me to solve the problems that I need to solve and remove the roadblocks that I need to remove.
"They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum."
As I'm climbing up the hill with the wheat on my left and on my right, I'm thinking about the places that I've been, which were supposed to be great but were not as great as they should have been; things that I was promised, trips that I went on, on the basis that I would be visiting places of extreme wonder and realising that they weren't as wonderful as I thought they would be, and they weren't as wonderful as here.
"Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone."
And then it hit me just close to the top of the little hill, where I first looked at the site for the practice; I spend too much of my life thinking about the future and not quite enough of my life thinking about how wonderful things are now despite the problems, issues, and knots that I have to undo.
These are indeed the days of my life; these are the days of our life.
Joni Mitchell knew that when she wrote the song.
She wrote it in Hawaii as she looked at a beautiful view from a hotel window at the mountains and then down to the car park and the botanical gardens.
Sometimes, you don't know how good things are because we are too focused on what might come next.
Thanks, Joni, that was one of the best bike rides.
Here's Joni Mitchell Live singing that song, telling the story much better than I ever could.
Blog Post Number - 3891
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