A Free Weekend, Technically

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSaturday, and in theory a free weekend. I say “in theory” because the theory didn’t survive contact with the morning. Colleagues are away, someone has to hold the fort, and this weekend the fort-holder was me. A free weekend with obligations is a bit like a decaf espresso: it looks the part, but you can tell something’s been taken out.

Morning rounds came first, and ran longer than planned. They always do on a Saturday. There’s an unwritten rule that weekend work expands to fill whatever time you’d hoped to save, partly because there are fewer hands and partly because the quiet makes everything feel slower. You walk the corridors with that particular weekend hush around you, and somehow an hour becomes two without anyone being consulted.

Still, there’s a certain virtue to covering. It’s a favour that gets returned eventually, the professional equivalent of lending someone your umbrella. I just wish the umbrella weren’t so often in use.

Once I was finally released, I made a quick stop at Bangsar Village. Quick being the operative word, and for once I stuck to it. Bangsar Village has the slightly polished calm of a place that knows exactly who it’s for, and on a Saturday afternoon that’s a lot of people who look as though they’ve just come from brunch and are considering a second one. I admire their commitment.

Then on to The Gardens for an early dinner. An early dinner is one of the great underrated pleasures of adulthood. You beat the rush, you get a decent table, and you’re home before the evening has a chance to turn ambitious. People mock the early diner, but the early diner is rarely seen queuing.

The weekend crowd was out in force, of course. Mid Valley on a Saturday is less a shopping centre than a migration. Families moving in formation, couples drifting in and out of shops with no apparent purpose, teenagers travelling in clusters like weather systems. I find it oddly reassuring. Whatever else is going on in the world, people still turn up on a Saturday to walk slowly past things they don’t need. There’s something stubbornly human about that.

I didn’t join the stampede. I took things easy, ate without rushing, and let the noise wash past. That was the whole plan for the evening, and it’s the best plan I’ve had all week. Not every evening needs a purpose. Some just need to be got through gently.

There’s a contradiction in all this I’m happy to sit with. Part of me resents a weekend chipped away by work. Another part quite likes being the person people can rely on when they’re away. I suspect most of us carry both, and pick whichever one suits our mood that day.

Tonight I’ve picked contentment. It’s easier to digest after a good dinner.

Tomorrow is Sunday. Technically free. We’ll see.

Ramen, and the Rest of It

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA sunny start, which after the week's steady grey felt like the city had remembered it had another setting. Everything looked better lit. It's remarkable how much of a mood is simply a question of what the light is doing.

Anita was out with friends today — a continuation of the birthday, which has by now stretched comfortably into its own small season. I approve of this entirely. A single evening never seems quite adequate, and she has the sort of friends who treat a birthday as a standing invitation rather than a fixed appointment.

Once the morning's work was behind me, I drove straight to Bukit Bintang. No particular reason beyond wanting to be somewhere with people in it. Ramen for lunch, which is a decision I make roughly once a fortnight and have never once regretted. There's something restorative about a bowl that demands your full attention — you can't check anything, can't half-do it, you simply sit there and get on with the business of eating. Twenty minutes of enforced presence, delivered by broth.

Afterwards, a short walk around the area, mostly to let the ramen settle and partly because it seemed a waste to leave immediately. Bukit Bintang in the early afternoon is a strange, pleasant thing — half the crowd is tourists moving slowly with their heads up, the other half is people who work there moving quickly with their heads down, and the two streams flow through one another without much friction. I walked without a destination, which I do far too rarely, and noticed several things I've driven past a hundred times without seeing.

Physio in the late afternoon. Necessary, useful, and conducted in that brisk, unsentimental manner these sessions have, where you're praised for something you didn't know you were doing and corrected on something you were certain you'd mastered. I came out feeling loosened and mildly humbled, which is presumably the intention.

Dinner at Bangsar Village, alone, and unexpectedly enjoyable for it. Eating on your own has a bad reputation it doesn't deserve. Nobody to consult about the order, nobody's pace to match, and a perfectly good excuse to watch the room. Bangsar on a bright evening is good watching: the shopping-bag brigade, a few families negotiating with children, the usual cast of people who appear to have been sitting at the same table since noon.

Then home, and prep for tomorrow's talks. That's the part of the day that always takes longer than the estimate, because the material never behaves the way it did in your head. You read through what you've prepared and find the joins, the bit that doesn't quite lead into the next bit, the slide that seemed clever on Tuesday and now seems merely busy. I got it into decent shape. Not perfect — nothing is, the night before — but decent.

Tomorrow will be a talking sort of day. Tonight was a walking, eating, stretching sort of day, and that seems a fair way to have earned it.

A Long Weekend, Locally Sourced

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA long weekend has a way of announcing itself before it's even properly started, and this one had Merdeka Day to thank for the extra day tacked on — Monday off, the sort of arrangement that makes a Saturday feel less like the start of something and more like a stretch already comfortably underway.

The morning still had its say, though — a ward round that, credit where due, wrapped up before noon, leaving the rest of the day refreshingly unclaimed. Lunch was the plan, straightforward enough on paper, but town had other ideas. Traffic was building in that particular way that tells you something's afoot before you've worked out what — and what it turned out to be was a double booking of sorts: roads closing for tomorrow's marathon, and more closing still for the Merdeka Day celebrations, the city apparently unwilling to pick just one reason to inconvenience its drivers.

Faced with that, the sensible move won out over the stubborn one — home instead, no argument, no sitting in it out of principle. And it turned out to be the better decision anyway, because just round the corner was Kebun-Kebun Bangsar, which nobody had quite got round to properly since it's the kind of place that's always "just round the corner" and therefore easy to keep postponing. Worth the wait, as it happens — considerably bigger than expected, more of a proper wander than a quick look. Muggy, admittedly, with not a breath of wind bothering to show up, but there was enough open space to make up for it, room to actually move rather than shuffle along in someone else's wake.

Dinner followed at Jibby Chow in Bangsar Village, which did the job nicely, and came with the unexpected bonus of a few pop-up stores dotted about — the sort of thing that turns "just going for dinner" into a bit of a browse as well, without ever quite admitting to being an event. Nothing bought, necessarily, but a nice enough way to stretch a meal into an evening.

From there, the day did the only sensible thing left to it and simply wound down — nothing else on the list, nothing needing attending to, just a bit of chilling out before calling it early. There's a particular luxury to an early night when there's no early alarm the next morning to justify it; this one earned its keep purely on the strength of the day behind it.

So: a long weekend that started with a small detour, found its footing round the corner instead of in town, and closed out calm. Sometimes the plan you didn't quite manage turns out less important than the one you stumbled into — and Bangsar, on this showing, still has a few surprises left in it even after all this time.

Pumpkin Invasion

You can tell that Halloween was around the corner when there pumpkins aplenty when you walk around Bangsar Village.

There had been around for the last couple of weeks and we were about 10 days away from the end of the month. Maybe they had extra stocks this year ...

Not a Bad Selection

During one of my late morning stop in Bangsar, I was undecided about staying a bit longer for lunch or leave and take an early dinner later. Then I walked across this new joint on the Ground Floor.

It was called Village Pantry, owned by Village Grocer next door. It basically sold bites and sandwiches but the variety was fantastic.

There were fresh sandwiches, sushi and pasta, something which you could either pick up on the go or had there at the shop where tables were provided. Convenient and time saving.

I picked up a plate of rice and saba fish to take back to the apartment and had a pleasant lunch there while doing some reading. Definitely would be stopping there again ...