There's a ten-year plan for the country. There's no plan for tonight.

Today the country was handed a ten-year plan. Watching it, I caught myself thinking about the future the way you think about someone else's project — a thing being sorted, elsewhere, on a timescale with my name nowhere near it. Ten years. The next decade. Good growth in every postcode, eventually.

Then the speech ended, and it was a Monday evening in late June, the light still up, and none of the decade had arrived. Just the hour in front of me. The one nobody is planning. No white paper reaches it. No mayor has a programme for what I do between now and sleep.

That is the strange thing about the time after work. It is the part of life all the big plans are supposedly for — and the part no plan ever touches. The future they describe is always further off than tonight. Tonight is just here: unspoken-for, a little too warm, faintly flat after all that talk of decades.

I know what I'll reach for to fill it. Something that asks nothing back. You probably do too.

Before you do, just notice the reach. Not to stop it — the evening is yours, and it's the one piece of the future already in your hands. Only notice that it is.