Quiet moments behind the counter, between prescriptions

Around half past two in the afternoon, a peculiar stillness settles over the pharmacy. The gap after the lunchtime rush has cleared out and before the parents start arriving after school lets out. I call this stretch "pocket time" — unrecorded anywhere, needing no explanation to anyone, a period that exists solely behind the counter.

Brewing and counting

The first thing I almost always do is make tea. There's a small electric kettle in the dispensary at the back, and no one remembers who brought it in. Lately I've been fond of Assam loose leaf. I have no interest in the milk-first-or-last debate; I simply enjoy those two minutes of waiting for it to steep strong enough. There's a strangely similar rhythm between counting pills and letting tea brew. Rush either one and you get it wrong.

Once the cup is in my hand, I look back over the prescriptions I handled that morning. Not so much to catch mistakes — though it does serve as a double-check — but more as a kind of tidying-up ritual. Reading the medication names on the paper, the faces from that morning come back to me. The elderly man with the bad knees, the young father picking up antibiotics for his child, the regular lady who never, ever remembers the name of her medication and feels not the slightest bit sorry about it.

Small talk across the counter

People assume pharmacists only deal with medicine, but in practice we spend a considerable amount of time in conversation. Nothing grand, mind you. It starts with "Raining again, isn't it" and ends with "I know, they say it'll be like this all week." Sometimes someone waiting for a prescription will show me photos of their cat. I'm more of a dog person, but in that moment I admire the cat photos with genuine enthusiasm. What's peculiar about a pharmacy as a space is that people are less guarded than at the GP but more candid than at a café.

Once, a grandmother waiting for her prescription told me she used to live near the Fawlty Towers filming location. I have no way of verifying it, but it put me in a good mood for the rest of the afternoon. The pharmacy counter is the kind of place where stories like that drift in for no particular reason.

Tidying up and mental arithmetic

One thing I actually do a lot during the quiet hours is mental arithmetic. Tallying stock quantities in my head, or tracing back the numbers to make sure this month's controlled drugs register adds up. It's neither glamorous nor dramatic. Just counting numbers, checking they're right, and turning the expiry-date labels on medicine boxes one by one. Surprisingly, I've rarely found this repetition boring. If anything, standing behind the quiet counter organising labels puts me in a kind of meditative state — though saying it like that might be overselling it. Probably I'm just zoning out.

Sometimes my colleague, the dispenser, and I stand side by side sorting different shelves, and ten minutes pass without a word. Then one of us asks, "Another cup?" and the other nods, and that constitutes a complete exchange. From the outside it probably looks like nothing is happening, but there's an order to it all the same.

When I hear the door open, I head back to the front of the counter. I set my mug on the corner of the shelf, switch on the screen, and say with a smile, "How can I help you?" Pocket time is over — until the next one comes along.