Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days announce their length early, and this was one of them. It began, as the busier ones tend to, with rounds — the steady morning ritual of working through the ward, that unhurried procession of names and notes that grounds a day before it has a chance to run away. I moved through it knowing the rest of the morning had other places to be.
From there the city took over. A Grab across town to Hospital Ampang, that particular Klang Valley experience of watching your estimated arrival time negotiate quietly with the traffic and losing. The occasion was the launch of the new CPG — one of those events that exists somewhere between ceremony and admin, equal parts polite applause and genuine usefulness. There's a satisfaction in seeing one of these things finally put down on paper and sent out into the world; a great deal of patient work goes into a document most people will only ever skim.
Lunch followed, and then I dropped by Jerome's office — the kind of unscheduled detour that turns a working day into something more companionable. A conversation here, a familiar face there, the small social mortar that holds the professional bricks together.
And then the long crawl back to SJMC, which is where the day presented its bill in the most literal sense. Sixty ringgit. I sat in the back doing the arithmetic of distance against fare and arrived only at a quiet resignation. Surge pricing has a way of finding you precisely when the city is at its most congested and you are at your least patient. I paid it, of course. One always does. But I noted it, the way you note a small injustice you've no intention of contesting.
Home, mercifully, came early — early enough for a proper sit-down dinner rather than the rushed, standing-over-the-counter affair that long days usually produce. There is a particular pleasure in an early dinner after a day spent ricocheting across the city: the food unhurried, the chair welcome, the sense of the day finally consenting to slow down.
The evening, though, still had one thing left to offer. I settled in to listen to a talk by Elias Jabbour, over from MD Anderson, with Jerome in the chair — the same Jerome whose office I'd lingered in hours earlier, now presiding from a stage. Jabbour is the sort of speaker who makes a complicated thing sound almost conversational, and there's a quiet luxury in being able to take it in from the comfort of home rather than a conference hall's unforgiving chairs. I listened with the contented attention of a man who has done his travelling for the day and intends to do no more of it.
A long day, then, and a crisscrossed one — measured out in fares and finished, fittingly, with someone else doing the talking. I was happy enough to sit and absorb, the city's traffic safely on the other side of the window.