The Father's Day Shift

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoAn early start, and not entirely by choice. Anita had decided, with the gentle immovability she reserves for these things, that I was going to the KL International Motor Show, and so I was. There's little use arguing with a plan once she's settled on it; the wiser course is simply to find your shoes and go along.

I got the rounds done by ten, and by eleven we were at MiTEC — ahead of the crowd, which on the final day of a motor show is the only sensible way to arrive. Parking, that great barometer of one's timing, was effortless, which told me everything I needed to know about how right we'd got it. An hour later it would have been a different and far more tedious story.

The show spread itself across two halls, comfortably uncrowded, and we managed to see most of it without the usual shuffling and craning. It was, tellingly, mostly Chinese and Japanese manufacturers this year — the balance of the motoring world quietly shifting in real time, on a Sunday, in Kuala Lumpur. We spent a good while at Zeekr and Xpeng, the Chinese marques that seem to have arrived fully formed and rather sure of themselves, all clean lines and large screens and an air of having skipped a few steps the rest of the industry took decades over. I'll admit they're impressive. Faintly unsettling, in the way of things that are clearly the future arriving slightly ahead of schedule, but impressive.

The Perodua, for what it's worth, was not bad at all — a perfectly respectable showing from the home side, holding its own amid the imported confidence. There's a quiet national loyalty that stirs at moments like that, whether you mean it to or not.

We were done in a couple of hours, which is about my natural limit for admiring cars I have no intention of buying, and had a quick lunch at the venue before heading off to PJ. The mission there was specific: wagyu cuts for dinner. Because it was Father's Day, and the dinner in question was one I'd be cooking myself — which is, I'm aware, a small and pleasing absurdity. The father, at the stove, on the one day nominally arranged in his honour. I wouldn't have it any other way. The cooking is the gift, as far as I'm concerned. Standing over good beef with a glass of something nearby is not a chore I need rescuing from.

So I cooked, and it was good, and we ate well — the marbled fat doing its quiet work, the whole thing requiring little of me but patience and a hot pan. And then, simply, we relaxed. No more agenda, no more halls to walk, nothing left to see or do. Just the slow settling of a full Sunday into evening.

A motor show I was talked into, a meal I talked myself into cooking, and a day that turned out rather better than its early start had any right to promise. A good Father's Day, by any measure I care about.