The Day the Country Went Quiet

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe alarm went off at that particular hour which is technically morning but spiritually still night. The Klang Valley was doing its best impression of calm, the roads not yet clogged, the sky a soft bruise of grey. I made coffee, drank half of it, and left the other half to go cold on the counter, as is tradition.

First on the agenda was a BLS assessment. There is something faintly absurd about being asked to prove you can keep someone alive before you have fully woken up yourself. Compressions counted, airway opened, the mannequin as stoic as ever. It offered no feedback whatsoever, which I chose to interpret as quiet approval.

Then the ward round, unhurried at first, gathering pace as the morning found its feet. Somewhere between one bed and the next, the news arrived the way news does now, a buzz in the pocket and a line of text that takes a moment to absorb. Tun Siti Hasmah had passed away.

It is strange how a death can feel personal when you have never met someone. For many of us she was simply always there, a steady presence beside a very long chapter of the nation's history. She was one of the first Malay women to qualify in medicine, and she spent years in public health, often in places where the roads ran out long before the need did. She carried herself with a grace that never seemed to ask for attention, which is perhaps why she received so much of it. A sad day for Malaysia, and the corridors felt it. Conversations were a little softer. People paused over their phones a little longer.

The paperwork, however, did not pause. It never does. I spent the rest of the morning working through forms that appear to breed quietly when left unattended, and emerged at lunch with the mild satisfaction of someone who has bailed out a boat that is still, technically, taking on water.

The afternoon clinic came and went in its usual rhythm of names, faces and small stories. Then came the afternoon rounds, which had been planned with great optimism and ran with great disregard for that plan. Time, I have learnt, is less a schedule than a polite suggestion.

By the time I got home the sun was on its way down, spilling orange across the rooftops as if to say it had waited as long as it reasonably could. I sat for a while and let the day settle.

The evening went to reading about her. Old photographs, early interviews, accounts of her work in rural clinics, her writing, her voice. What stood out was not grandeur but steadiness, a life of turning up and doing the work, year after year, without much fuss. There is a lesson in that, though she would probably have been too modest to call it one.

Al-Fatihah.

A Birthday, Borrowed for the Day

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSunday started the way most of them do — with rounds, the ward apparently having never heard of weekends off, and a public holiday hasn't yet been invented that changes its mind. Brisk enough, though, and out of the way early, which left the rest of the morning free for something rather nicer: it was Mak's birthday, and the day belonged to her from that point on.

Drove out to Bukit Antarabangsa to collect her, the sort of drive that's become familiar enough to do half on autopilot, and from there straight to Rebung for lunch. Packed, predictably — it always is, birthday or not — but the food did what Rebung's food generally does, which is make the wait feel like a formality rather than a complaint. Some restaurants earn their crowds honestly, and this is one of them.

After lunch, a couple of quick stops — BSC first, then Taman Melawati, neither of them requiring much explanation beyond the ordinary business of a birthday outing, a bit of browsing, nothing that needed to be anywhere in particular. The kind of errands that exist mainly to stretch a nice afternoon a little further before it has to end.

Dropped Mak home after that — she had her own plans for the evening, which is exactly as it should be on a birthday, the day not needing to be handed back in full to anyone. From there, on to TWG for tea, Rwanda Express specifically, which felt like a suitably unhurried way to close out the outing. There's something properly civilised about ending a birthday lunch with a pot of tea rather than rushing straight into whatever's next — a bit of a pause built in on purpose.

Home after that, and the evening turned practical rather quickly. Some reading to get through ahead of the BLS course first thing tomorrow, the sort of task that's easy to put off right up until it can't be put off any longer. Did it anyway, without too much resistance, on the grounds that Monday-morning-you rarely thanks Sunday-evening-you for the delay.

The weekend, such as it was, settled itself in from there — nothing left on the list, nothing hanging over into the week uninvited. And somewhere in among it all, the now-familiar routine of checking in on Irfan, a message or two across the time difference, enough to know all's well on that end. It's becoming its own small ritual, that check-in, the sort that'll probably ease off eventually but hasn't yet, and there's no particular hurry for it to.

So: a birthday properly marked, good food fought for and won, tea to close things out, and a bit of homework squeezed in before the week reasserts itself tomorrow. Not a bad way to send a Sunday off.

KLJJ #033 - Ombak KLCC

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe daylight has a pale, hazy cast as I leave Suria KLCC, and the humidity makes itself known almost immediately. I’m heading to Ombak KLCC, the new mall that opened in August 2026. There is a buggy available, which seems a sensible response to the weather, but I decide to walk. It is under ten minutes away, after all. My shirt may have a different assessment by the time I arrive.

The route through KLCC Park is rather pleasant. With the distant buildings softened by haze, my attention settles on nearer things: the texture of tree trunks, the edges of the planting and the changing surfaces underfoot. People pass through the frame, and I adjust my pace to give them room. These small negotiations are part of filming a continuous walk. Occasionally, someone falls neatly into a composition; more often, they have somewhere else to be.

Ombak’s architecture gives me plenty to consider when I reach it. The name means “wave” in Malay, and the flowing lines make that connection easy to understand. I keep looking from slightly different angles, watching how the curves overlap as I move. Inside, I work my way upwards through the seven levels, looking across the open spaces as much as ahead. A person moving through such a large interior gives it scale in a way that an empty architectural photograph rarely manages.

At the top, the open-air rooftop offers a welcome change of setting, although the view is largely defeated by the haze. I had hoped for a clearer look across the city. Instead, the more distant buildings are reduced to faint outlines. Looking harder achieves very little, so I turn my attention back towards the foreground and the building itself. There is usually something worth noticing once I stop insisting on the photograph I came for.

I suspect Ombak will become popular as more people discover it. The easy walk from Suria, the park along the way and the rooftop all give it appeal beyond the shops. For today, I’m glad I passed on the buggy. The walk gave me time to look, and the new building gave me a reason to keep going. A clearer rooftop view can wait for another visit.

Fifteen Years and a Cake

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome dates carry a bit of extra weight without ever announcing it loudly, and yesterday was one of those for me. The 26th of September marks two things at once — Dr Ng Soo Chin's birthday, and the anniversary of the day I joined SJMC fifteen years ago, which isn't a coincidence so much as the reason the date matters in the first place. He was the one who brought me there to begin with, and there's something quietly satisfying about a milestone that comes with a person attached to it rather than just a number on a calendar.

It was marked properly, in the low-key way these things ought to be — cake and breakfast together, which is really the correct order of priorities for a morning like that. Fifteen years is long enough that the maths of it catches you slightly off guard when someone says the number out loud, and long enough that gratitude feels like the more honest response than nostalgia.

Rounds finished up after that, and then it was on to the more domestic end of the day — collecting Anita for lunch at KLCC, followed by the specific kind of shopping that comes with a trip on the horizon. Clothes for Cherating, which has a way of making even routine shopping feel a bit more purposeful, everything selected with a beach and some actual downtime in mind rather than just general wardrobe upkeep.

From there across to TRX, for a rather more considered purchase — the Mac Studio, finally collected. Went for the M5 Max in the end, the Ultra still a few months off yet, and there's a particular pragmatism in choosing the thing that exists now over the better thing that doesn't exist yet. Setting it up was refreshingly straightforward, the sort of process Apple has clearly spent a great deal of effort making feel effortless, which is its own quiet achievement even if it's designed never to be noticed.

The evening had one more thing on the agenda — a dinner talk at KL Hilton, which rounded the day off on a rather more formal note than it had started, breakfast cake giving way to a proper evening engagement by the time it was done.

Fifteen years, a new machine, a beach trip inching closer, and a debt of gratitude to someone whose birthday happens to fall on exactly the right day to be remembered alongside it. Not a bad way for a date to earn its significance.

Landed

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere's a particular kind of morning where you're only half paying attention to your own day because most of your attention is somewhere over the Indian Ocean. That was this one. Irfan's flight was due into London by noon Malaysia time, and between patients there was a fair bit of quiet phone-checking going on — the flight tracker open in one tab, doing the thing flight trackers do, which is tell you almost nothing useful right up until the moment it tells you everything.

No delay, in the end, which felt like more than it probably deserved to. He landed on time, got himself an Uber straight to the apartment without any drama, and that was that — the sort of arrival that's almost disappointing in its lack of incident, except that a lack of incident is exactly what you're hoping for when someone you're fond of is landing in a city eight time zones away for the first time on his own. Uneventful is underrated. Uneventful is the goal.

Work carried on regardless, because it does. Clinic was smooth, mercifully so, the kind of morning that doesn't ask much of you right when you don't have much extra to give. I went through it a little distracted, checking the phone between patients more than I'd normally admit to, but it moved along without any real friction, which I'll take as the day cooperating for once.

Home early after that, properly tired in the way accumulated worry tends to leave you once the worry's been resolved — not the sharp kind of tired, more the sort that settles in once you're finally allowed to relax. And relax, more or less, is what the rest of the day was for. Knowing he'd arrived safely did more for the afternoon than anything on the schedule could have.

Dinner came early, unhurried, eaten with the particular lightness of a day that had turned out better than the quiet nerves of the morning had suggested it might. The evening after that asked for nothing much — just the sort of settling-in that comes naturally once the thing you'd been half-holding your breath for has actually happened, and happened well.

So: a flight tracked, a landing uneventful, a clinic survived on partial attention, and an evening spent simply glad of it. Not every day needs more than that. This one didn't.