The Seven-Day Sentence

Sundays bring one job in particular. Not filling the tea caddy, nor putting the bins out, but a routine chore that serves solely to remind me that youth packed its bags years ago.

There is a distinct, hollow click-clack that signals your warranty has expired. It is not the crack of an arthritic hip or the creak of a floorboard under a heavier, middle-aged tread. It is the dry, rhythmic clatter of a seven-day pill organiser, the Tupperware of Doom, rattled like a cheap maraca in a chemist's back room.

For decades, I eyed those segmented plastic trays on the Boots shelves with pure, arrogant pity. I lumped them together with beige elasticated slacks from Marks & Spencer, thermos flasks, and birdwatching in the drizzle. They belonged to the dotage brigade. They were for pensioners who had swapped spontaneous pints for a rigid, colour-coded timetable of chemical upkeep.

Then, inevitably, the family doctor stops humming and starts prescribing.

First comes the statin—"precautionary, just to be safe." Next comes the blood pressure tablet, because modern life runs on pure cortisol. Add a chalky nugget of Vitamin D because the British sun is largely a rumour, followed by a Glucosamine horse pill the size of a surfboard to stop your knees snapping like dry twigs.

Before you notice the shift, you cease being an organism. You become an open-air laboratory experiment.

A peculiar brand of domestic defeat attends loading the cartridge on a Sunday night. You sit hunched like a bored quartermaster rationing ammunition for a pointless border skirmish. Monday is blue. Tuesday is green. By Wednesday, you stare into the little compartment, trying to remember whether you swallowed the small round tablet or the marginally flatter round tablet. I forgot the entire payload on Thursday. I realised only because the box made an accusing rattle in my jacket pocket at three in the afternoon.

Human beings fear the churchyard, so we purchase totems to ward it off. The wealthy pay fortunes to Scottsdale cryogenics firms to plunge their severed heads into vats of liquid nitrogen, betting on a resurrection that will never arrive. The rest of us make do with far cheaper superstitions. We buy seven hinged lids stamped with the days of the week. We obey a shrill alarm on a telephone at seven in the morning. We swallow the chalky little lozenges and pray the engine doesn't drop out of the chassis before next weekend.

No liquid nitrogen sits in my kitchen. There is only a glass of tap water and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the oil light on my biological dashboard has glowed amber since 2011.

We are not preserving our brains for deep-space exploration; we are simply attempting to remember our fish oil. Yet inside that rattle lies a grudging comfort. It proves someone has drawn up a tactical plan. It means staying on the pitch for extra time. If walking to the corner shop makes me sound like a carrier bag stuffed with loose Lego, so be it.

At least the rattle tells me what day it is. It is Sunday, and the magazine needs reloading.