Awal Muharram - The Midweek Lull

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA break in the middle of the week, which is the rarest and most civilised of luxuries. The trouble was the rain — a soft, insistent morning downpour of exactly the kind that turns the bed into an argument you're destined to lose. There is no more persuasive case for staying put than the sound of rain on glass before you've quite woken up. I lost the argument briefly, then got up anyway, as one does.

The ward round went ahead as usual, rain or no rain. The work doesn't observe public holidays of the heart, and the round has its own rhythm regardless of how reluctant its participants might feel. By the time it was done, the day had decided to behave, and I went to meet the afternoon properly.

Lunch was at TRX — Amazonas, which delivers every time and did so again. There's a confidence to a place that simply knows what it is and does it well, no fuss, no reinvention. You sit down, you eat properly, you leave content. After a damp start, it was exactly the right kind of indulgence.

Anita went off to inspect the new Mercedes F1 outfit, which tells you everything about where her attentions have wandered lately. She's back into the racing — properly back, the way one returns to an old enthusiasm and wonders why they ever left. I find there's something quite charming about watching someone rediscover a thing they love. The sport itself I can take or leave, but the renewed enthusiasm beside me is its own pleasant company.

Then, the film. Disclosure Day — Spielberg's return to the skies, the great man back among the lights and the wonder some fifty years on. I wanted to love it. I'd built a small cathedral of expectation around it. And it was, in the end, fine. Not the best of his work, not by a distance. There were moments where the old magic flickered, and rather more moments where it didn't. A perfectly decent way to spend a couple of hours, which from Spielberg feels faintly like an underachievement. You don't go to him for perfectly decent. Still — even his middling efforts have a craft to them that most directors would gladly claim as a peak.

The day closed with a haircut at Lucky Garden, that small reliable ritual that makes you feel marginally more put together than you did an hour earlier. There's a quiet satisfaction in it — the same chair, the same business, the brief sense of having tidied a loose end of yourself.

And now the evening winds down towards an absurd appointment: England playing at four in the morning. I'd like to say I'll have the discipline to sleep through it and catch the result over breakfast like a sensible adult. I'd like to say that. We'll see which version of me wins the argument when the alarm comes round — though I suspect, as with the rain this morning, I already know how it ends.

The Distinctly Average and the Genuinely Unexpected

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe clinic ran smoothly this morning, which is the sort of thing I've learned not to comment on aloud lest it overhear me and take offence. Names arrived, were seen, moved on. The rhythm held. There's a quiet pleasure in a morning that simply does what it's meant to, asking nothing more dramatic of you than steady attention.

The paperwork was less obliging. A whole sheaf of deferment letters for the insurers today, the prohibitive sort — the cases where the answer is no, dressed up in the cautious, careful language these things require. There's an odd weight to writing them, even when they're entirely correct. You spend the morning being a sound clinician and the afternoon being a faintly apologetic one.

Idlan came in the afternoon for a dental appointment, which gave the day a pleasant domestic seam running through it. There's something steadying about your own child turning up in the middle of a working day — a small reminder that the rest of life carries on outside the building, sons and teeth and all.

And then, on the way home, the day produced its one genuine surprise. We bumped into the President of Timor-Leste — José Ramos-Horta, Nobel laureate, the actual man — who had come to visit the son of one of his staff, a patient in our ICU. It caused a certain amount of excitement, as these things tend to. You go about your week assuming it will hold no heads of state, and then it quietly does. He was gracious, the moment was brief, and we carried on home slightly more interesting people than we'd been that morning.

Dinner was at a new place, Dapor Mekda, where I had the nasi kerabu. I want to be fair about this, so I'll be precise: it was distinctly average. Not bad. Not memorable. The kind of meal that politely declines to make an impression in either direction and leaves you respecting its restraint. A nasi kerabu should be a small riot of blue rice and herbs and crisp things, and this one had clearly read the brief and decided to phone it in. Still — a new joint tried, a verdict reached. Not every outing needs to be a triumph. Some are simply research.

The evening settled into quiet, helped along by the knowledge that tomorrow is a holiday for Maal Hijrah. There's a particular ease to the night before a day off, when the usual low hum of preparation goes silent and you're permitted to simply stop. No alarm to set with any urgency, no schedule lying in wait.

So the year turns over, in its quieter way. A new year on a calendar that keeps its own gentle time, marked not with fireworks but with rest and reflection — which seems, on balance, the more sensible arrangement. Selamat Maal Hijrah. A good night to be still, to let the day's small collisions of the average and the unexpected settle, and to wish the new year well.

A Kind Sort of Monday

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe week began the way Mondays rarely have the decency to: gently. A clean, unbothered sort of sunshine over the city, the kind that makes even the car parks look briefly forgivable. And then, against all reasonable expectation, the traffic behaved. Lanes moved. People indicated. I arrived with time to spare and a faint suspicion that I'd misjudged the day entirely.

That suspicion lasted roughly as long as it took to begin the rounds. Things found their momentum immediately — no slow warming up, no easing in. The morning simply started at full volume and assumed I'd keep pace, which I did, because the alternative was to be left behind by my own schedule. There's a particular satisfaction in a morning that asks a lot of you and gets it, even if it leaves you slightly winded by the back half.

By the time the afternoon arrived, I'd earned a pause, and I took it in the lounge with the football on. The World Cup is upon us again — bigger this year, sprawling across three countries and rather more teams than strictly seems necessary — and I'd missed enough of the weekend to feel out of step. So I sat and caught up, half watching, half simply enjoying the unhurried company of a game that asks nothing of you but your attention. There's something restful about a tournament happening in another hemisphere entirely. The drama unfolds politely in the background, on its own time, indifferent to whether you're keeping up.

I wasn't allowed to grow too comfortable. The afternoon clinic was waiting, and it turned out to be a long one — the sort that begins reasonably and then quietly expands, each name on the list bringing a little more than its single line suggested. These are not difficult afternoons, exactly. They're just full. You give what each moment needs and look up some time later to find the light has changed and the day has moved on without telling you.

The rounds afterwards ran late, as they tend to when the clinic overruns its welcome. By the time I finished, the gentle morning felt like something that had happened to a different person. The kind weather, the obliging traffic — all distant, faintly improbable. The day had taken back its dues with interest.

Dinner was waiting at home when I got there, which is its own quiet kindness, the sort that doesn't announce itself but matters enormously. To arrive somewhere and find that the next thing is already taken care of, that someone has thought ahead on your behalf — there's no improving on it after a long stretch.

And so the new week is properly launched. It began kindly and ended tired, which is a fair enough trade and probably the natural shape of these things. What I need now is straightforward and unglamorous: rest. The football will keep. Tomorrow will arrive regardless. For tonight, that's quite enough to be getting on with.

Our Stories, Interrupted

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSunday began the way many of mine do, with a morning round — the work that doesn't observe weekends, attended to before the day could properly call itself a day off. But once that was done, I had somewhere I actually wanted to be, and that changes the whole complexion of a morning.

From there it was straight to Bukit Bintang, to Eslite, for a Ricoh GR event I'd been quietly looking forward to. It went by the name "Cerita Kita" — Our Stories — which is the sort of title that could mean very little or quite a lot, and on the day leaned firmly towards the latter. There were talks, and I settled in to listen properly, which is a different thing from merely hearing.

Zaidi Abdullah and Mitsuo Suzuki spoke, and I found myself genuinely absorbed — two photographers talking about the why of the thing rather than the gear, which is rarer and more valuable than it sounds. There's a particular pleasure in being among people who take a small camera seriously, who understand that the point was never the equipment but the looking. I sat with the Ricoh's quiet philosophy made audible, and for a while the rest of the week's noise fell away entirely.

For a while. The ER had other ideas. The call came, as calls do, with no regard for whatever absorption I'd managed to find, and the talks gave way — mid-thought, mid-sentence almost — to the more pressing business of being needed elsewhere. Our stories, interrupted. I'd have stayed for the whole thing in another life; in this one, I gathered myself and went.

It rained as I reached SJMC, the sky opening just as I arrived, which felt like the day adding its own punctuation. There's something almost cinematic about pulling in through the rain to do the necessary thing — though it loses its romance quickly once you're actually in it, damp at the edges and focused on the matter at hand. I saw to what needed seeing to, and in time the urgency eased.

By evening I was home, and dinner there felt all the better for the day's detours. A meal at your own table after an afternoon that pulled you in several directions has a settling quality to it — the day finally agreeing to stand still. Nothing elaborate, just the quiet relief of being back where the day had started, with the rain easing off outside.

And then, the proper full stop: the Spanish Grand Prix from Barcelona, which I settled in to watch with the contentment of a man who has earned his place on the sofa. There's a comfortable rhythm to a race on a Sunday evening — the noise of the cars, the long arc of the thing unfolding, nothing required of you but to watch. After a day that had refused to follow its plan, letting someone else's drama play out on screen was exactly the right note to end on.

A Sunday, then, that gave with one hand and rearranged with the other. Talks I'd looked forward to, cut short. Rain, an ER, a quiet dinner, and motor racing to close. Our stories, indeed — rarely the ones we'd have scripted, but ours all the same.

Weekend, and the Small Logistics of It

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe weekend arrived, though it didn't begin with a lie-in — those are a luxury reserved for a different kind of Saturday. Irfan had driving school, which meant the morning opened with a bit of domestic logistics: dropping him off on my way in to work, the two of us in the car at an hour that felt faintly unfair to both of us. There's something quietly pleasing, all the same, about these small handovers — the parent-as-chauffeur routine that I know has a shelf life, and that I'll probably miss more than I'd care to admit once he's driving himself everywhere.

Work, even on a Saturday, was waiting. But the clinic ran smoothly, which on a weekend morning is exactly what one hopes for. A stem cell infusion was done and went as it should — the sort of thing that demands full attention while it's happening and then, gratifyingly, recedes into the category of "completed." By the time lunch came round, the morning's work was behind me, and I could step out of it cleanly. A morning that knows when to end is a gift in itself.

Lunch was with Anita, which made the day feel properly like a weekend rather than a slightly truncated working one. There's a particular ease to a midday meal with no clock pressing on it, the conversation unhurried, the food allowed to be the point rather than fuel grabbed between commitments. After the week behind us, sitting down together felt less like an event and more like a quiet restoration.

Afterwards I found a little time to catch up with Star City before the day's next logistical obligation came due — namely, collecting Irfan again from driving school. The chauffeur, recalled to duty. He emerged, presumably marginally more roadworthy than he'd gone in, and we made our way onward.

And onward meant the pasar malam, because some weekend rituals don't require deliberation. There's no real planning involved — you simply go, and let the place do what it does. The crowd, the steam, the smell of things grilling, the small negotiations over what to take home and what to eat on the spot. It's the kind of unstructured pleasure that resists being filmed properly and is all the better for it. You just move through it, basket filling, appetite rising, the evening settling into something warm and slightly chaotic in the best way.

By the time we got home, the day had quietly used itself up, and what remained was a restful night — the proper kind, with nowhere further to be and nothing more to sort. After a hectic week and a Saturday that, for all its smoothness, still asked something of me, an evening of simply being at home felt like the correct ending.

Not a grand weekend opening, then. Driving school, a clinic, a good lunch, a night market, and a quiet house at the end of it. But the small logistics of an ordinary good day, strung together, add up to something I wouldn't trade.