The Witching Hour ...

The hospital has just a slight air of eeriness in the smaller hours of the day. Following the purple dots I was alone, not another person wandering the halls. I know that particular rabbit's warren very well — over the past twenty years I've investigated its nooks and crannies more often than most. The solitude you find there at night contrasts with the sometimes quite frenetic activity level of the daylight hours. I was a little early, reporting just before midnight for imaging at 00:30.

While lying quietly inside the MRI machine, what struck me was how much windier it is than a similar experience inside the CT scanner. The technician laughed when he freed me and I told him so. It was simple and easy. Textbook really.

Waiting for the cab to go home, sitting under a pot light, I was vaguely mesmerized by the colours of the mother of pearl and shell ring I had bought on the French Riviera many years ago, and the sparkle of the cubic zirconia flower on my other hand. Mickey said it was 1:30. I don't wear good jewellery to the pond, where we had swum earlier in the evening. My thoughts drifted off to the last time I sat at that entrance, waiting for a taxi. It was after the bedside service for April, almost a year ago now, before the staff took her to the operating room so her organs could provide better lives for others.

Memories, it seems, can have the slightest air of eeriness all their own at the hospital during the smaller hours of the day. And yet just a short time later, scooping up a groggy and cuddly cat at 2:00 a.m., carrying him upstairs, and laying him gently (purring) on the bed there was a profound sense of comfort that neither of us would have known otherwise.