A life beyond the timetable.

Five snails between the front gate and the corner. Bea named the largest one Mr Thursday, although it is Monday. Isaac wouldn't hold her book bag while she inspected them because, according to him, "this is how we get late."

He sounded exactly like me. I found this less charming than I ought to have.

School drop-off, then my own classroom, where the clock is four minutes fast and has been since February. I stood on a chair to fix it before the pupils arrived. If I am going to spend a term saying there is time to think, I could at least stop displaying evidence to the contrary.

Found the guitar behind the travel cot. We haven't needed the cot for four years.

The spare strings were in a biscuit tin with two foreign coins and a photograph of Matt wearing a waistcoat he has since denied owning. Changed the strings. Tuned them. Retuned them. Put the guitar beside the sofa.

That's as far as tonight went.

Fractions went badly. Not catastrophically; worse, quietly. A row of faces being polite while I explained the same thing in almost the same words.

Stopped and asked them to show each other. One pair used the squares on an exercise-book cover. Much better than my carefully prepared slide. I felt relieved and a little offended, which isn't an attractive combination.

Wrote their method down after class. I will use it next time and try not to introduce it as my own discovery.

Pasta. Three separate complaints, then all of it eaten.

Priya and I stood at the sink afterwards eating the peas nobody wanted. Fine dining.

Not a comeback tour

Ten minutes turned into twenty because Bea wanted the wrong chord again. She thinks the buzzing noise is part of the song.

It used to annoy me when people talked while I played. Tonight Isaac wandered through asking where his charger was and Priya shouted that the washing machine had finished and the whole thing felt oddly less embarrassing than playing in a silent room.

I haven't told Matt the guitar is out. He'll suggest meeting up, and then this will become a thing with a date, and I might discover I liked wanting to play more than I like playing.

For now Bea has commissioned a song about a snail. No pressure from the commissioner except that it must be finished tomorrow.

Matt still orders two coffees at once because he doesn't want the conversation interrupted. The second one is always cold.

We walked after. He asked if I was happy at school. I answered a different question about next year's classes. He let me finish and asked again.

Mostly, I think. I like the room when something starts to make sense to someone. I don't like how little of me comes home some days.

He said the waistcoat was rented. I hadn't mentioned the photograph. He must remember it too.

Found the cardigan. Missed the start of the race.

Bea wanted to know whether I'd seen her go past the cone. Said I saw the finish. She said, "The cone was the good bit."

No useful ending to this one.

A pupil left a note folded into a tiny square: "thanks for explaining it again."

I found it while clearing the shelves. Would have missed it if I had done the tidy-up in my usual furious way. Put it in the biscuit tin when I got home, with the guitar things.

I wish the evidence for a decent day were always this conveniently written down.

Priya went swimming. Children at her mum's. I had two hours to myself and spent forty minutes deciding what would make best use of them.

Eventually read in the garden. Neighbour was drilling. Still read.

Back. Last fortnight was reports, a school trip, Isaac's cough and a washing machine that drained into the cupboard.

I keep describing this as "end of term" as if the phrase contains an explanation for every person I failed to reply to. Matt sent two possible dates. Neither worked. I didn't suggest a third.

Made pancakes this morning. Bea insisted on pouring hers and produced a shape like a county boundary. Isaac ate it without comment, which may be his most generous act of the week.

Must reply to Matt before replying becomes another task that feels enormous.

We put it in the calendar: Tuesday evening is Priya's, Thursday is mine. The fact that it needed a calendar initially made me feel we were doing marriage in a joyless administrative way. Then I noticed Priya looking at Tuesday with the expression I usually reserve for the last lesson on Friday.

She wants to swim and sometimes see Leena. I had assumed she wanted to swim. Just swim. An efficient activity followed by coming home, because apparently even in my imagination I had booked her for the rest of the evening.

I said this out loud, badly. She said, "Yes, that's the bit."

We ended up talking longer than intended. About how I get a room with a closed door at work, even on the worst days, and she doesn't necessarily get an hour when nobody can ask where something is. About how I say I'm helping with the children when I mean I'm looking after my own children. Not an enjoyable phrase to hear returned to you.

I don't think either of us won the conversation. We changed the calendar so the person off duty doesn't also have to prepare dinner before leaving.

Thursday I might see Matt. Or sit somewhere and read. It isn't a prize I have to justify by coming home with an interesting story.

Afterwards I looked at my Thursday and realised I had been picturing it very specifically: Matt, the guitar, a satisfying feeling of having recovered a former version of myself. If he couldn't make it, I would probably waste the evening feeling that the opportunity had gone wrong. That seems a heavy load to put on a Thursday.

I asked Priya whether she wanted company for a drink after swimming sometime. She said yes, sometime, but not on her first Tuesday. I felt briefly rejected before catching up with the fact that I had just invited myself into the space we had spent an hour making for her.

This is going to require more than entering a repeating event.

The children came down because they could hear us talking. Bea asked whether we were planning a holiday. Isaac asked whether somebody would still be here on Tuesdays. We explained. He said okay and went back upstairs. I don't know how much of our conversation he had heard before he came down, or what shape it had taken in his head.

Note for Tuesday: find the swimming towels before she needs them, then don't announce that I found them.

Library game: choose a book for someone else.

Bea chose me a dragon story with twelve words on a page. Isaac chose Priya a book about volcanoes. Priya chose him a football biography and he tried to look unimpressed while opening it immediately.

I chose Bea a book I remembered loving. She put it back. Mildly devastating. Borrowed the dragon one.

Matt sent a voice memo of the old song, played too fast. Tried it while dinner cooked. The rhythm was wrong until I stopped thinking about what my fingers used to know.

Bea sang her own words. Isaac asked us to stop because he couldn't hear the timer. Priya took the pan off the heat and let us carry on another minute.

I sent Matt twenty seconds. No apology attached.

Outing cancelled. Rain, then the venue email, then Isaac saying he hadn't wanted to go anyway. I was unreasonably cross with him for being less disappointed than I was.

Blanket fort took the entire sitting room. They wouldn't let me inside until I paid a toll of two biscuits.

Later Isaac asked if I was still angry. I'd thought I'd stopped showing it hours before.

Bea says triangles taste better than rectangles. Isaac conducted a test and ate both samples before reporting his findings.

Played the snail song before breakfast. Forgot the second chord. Bea didn't; she's become an exacting colleague.

Returned the dragon book. Bea looked through the slot after it, as if checking it had landed safely.

Bus late. Cloud over the roof looked like the rented waistcoat. Sent Matt a picture with no explanation. He understood.

Tea from Priya while I was looking for the salad servers. She said we could use spoons. Revolutionary household technology.

I cleaned the bathroom. That is the full list of cleaning completed before people arrived.

Matt brought bread and Leena brought a salad in a bowl I immediately wanted to apologise for not having anything as nice as. Priya gave me a look across the kitchen. I stopped halfway through the sentence and offered everyone a drink instead.

For a while there were three conversations going on: work at the table, a complicated disagreement about a game on the floor, and Bea telling anybody who passed about Mr Thursday. Apparently the snail now has a family. I haven't been keeping up.

Matt saw the guitar beside the sofa and picked it up without asking. I nearly said the strings were new, as though he needed an explanation for finding it there. We played the song we used to finish our sets with. He remembered a middle section I'd completely forgotten. Halfway through, Leena carried the empty plates around us. Nobody stopped talking. It was wonderful.

Then it wasn't wonderful. Isaac wanted help with the game, I said in a minute, and apparently I said it four times. By the time I went over he had packed it away. We sat on the stairs for a bit. He said I am allowed to play, but I should say when a minute means not yet. Fair.

After everyone left, Priya and I found a piece of bread in the bookcase. No idea. We left the washing-up. I told her I'd enjoyed having people here and she said, "We can just do it again, you know."

Yes. Though next time I want to hear the rest of Leena's story about her new job. I kept interrupting to offer things.

One extra chapter aloud after everyone left. Isaac stayed in the doorway, pretending he was only there to ask for water. Left the door open so he could hear the ending.

Bag packed for tomorrow. The good pens are already missing.

Summer wasn't the long, open stretch I had imagined in June. It was a collection of small negotiations: who gets an evening, when a promise expires, whether to answer a work email from the garden. Some of those negotiations went better than others.

Matt and I have another Thursday pencilled in. The guitar is still beside the sofa. Bea knows the first two lines of the snail song and has replaced the rest with noises.

I put the tiny thank-you note inside my planner. Not on the cover. I don't need it to be a slogan. I want to find it on a day when the fractions aren't working.