The camera strap had left a red line along my neck by the time I got home, though I hadn't noticed it during the school visit. I noticed the hunger first: a hollow, sour feeling that made the smell from my wife's cooking seem unusually strong. She asked when I had eaten. I could name the people I had spoken to since morning more easily than I could answer that. After food I lay down without the bag, phone or camera on me and felt oddly light across the shoulders. There is still a tender place where the strap rubbed. I keep touching it while reading, then forgetting and touching it again a few minutes later.

An old colleague rang to say his new office pays on the same date every month. He was laughing, not boasting. I congratulated him and asked several questions about the work, then found that I had nothing else to say once we stopped discussing the salary. My wife said I looked annoyed. I said I was only considering the difference between the two jobs, which she did not seem to believe. It was good to hear him sounding settled. The newsroom has been quieter without him and I still turn towards his old chair when somebody says something absurd. Perhaps that was the part of the call I didn't explain very well.

There is a street here that everybody names after a shop which closed before my younger son was born. He asked where the shop was, and I pointed confidently at the wrong building; my mother corrected me later. Now I want to know how a place keeps an old name when the people giving directions never entered the original business. Is it habit, or does the name become more useful once nothing changes it? I found a small advertisement in an old edition, with an address that creates another question rather than answering this one. I may ask the barber next door. He has been there long enough to remember, and long enough to improve the story.