It reads like a line about parenting. It is a line about arithmetic.

Graham's move is small and brutal. He takes a continuous quantity — time, which behaves like a river and so feels like it cannot end — and converts it into a discrete one.

Weekends. A figure you can write on the back of an envelope.

Continuous things cannot be wasted, because they cannot be counted. Discrete things run out.

Run the conversion on something you have never counted. Your father is seventy, and you have lunch at his flat most Sundays, which honestly means twice a month.

That is under four hundred lunches, and the figure moves one way only.

The number does not make the lunch sadder. It makes it scheduled.

A thing with a count attached stops losing to the Saturday deck, because you can finally see what the deck charges you.

That is this column's whole arithmetic too. Thirty thousand days sounds like plenty until you write down how many you have spent, and then the line stops reading like a lifespan and starts reading like a balance.

So before the inbox opens: pick one person you see on a schedule nobody chose, do the multiplication, and put the next date in the calendar. What you can count, you can defend.