Small Parcels, Steady Ground

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe second day back is always kinder than the first. Nothing about the work had changed overnight, but I had, slightly. The edges were softer. I knew where things were again, and more importantly, I’d stopped expecting a sea view every time I looked up.

The day began with a small, genuinely lovely surprise. Eileen, our pharmacist, had just come back from the UK, and she’d brought me something: a box of chocolates and a Jellycat. I’d like to report that I received both with dignified restraint. I did not. There’s something disarming about being handed a soft toy as a grown adult in the middle of a working morning. You can’t hold it seriously. It simply won’t allow it.

I’ve always maintained that the best gifts are the ones that tell you someone thought of you while they were busy doing something else entirely. Bringing back chocolates from abroad is a kindness. Choosing a Jellycat suggests she has me figured out rather more accurately than I’d like to admit. The chocolates, I suspect, will not survive the week. The Jellycat has already found a place where it can keep an eye on things.

After that, the day settled into being long. Not dramatic, not difficult, just long, in the patient way that some days are. I’ve noticed that long days feel shorter when they start with a kindness. It’s not scientific, but I’d defend it.

By evening, Anita took the wheel and drove us to NSC. I was happy to be a passenger, a role I’ve come to appreciate more with age. You get to look out of the window and hold opinions about other people’s lane discipline without having to do anything about it.

We did some shopping, which I’ll describe as purposeful rather than necessary. There’s a difference, and Anita understands it better than I do. I mostly carried things and offered views that were neither requested nor acted upon. It’s an arrangement that has worked for a good many years.

Then the car needed a top-up, and we charged at the TNB headquarters just across the road. I’m still adjusting to this business of planning around plugs, and I’ll confess I went into owning an EV half expecting to find it a chore. Tonight it simply wasn’t. The charger was right there, the area felt well lit and safe, and it was a short stroll from where we’d been anyway. If every charging stop were this convenient, I’d have very little left to grumble about, which would be a loss in its own way.

There’s a small irony in charging an electric car at the electricity company’s own front door. It felt rather like buying bread from the baker’s back step. Fitting, somehow, and slightly too neat.

We drove home with a full battery, a few shopping bags and the sense that the week had found its footing. Two days in, and the holiday already feels like something pleasant that happened to someone I know quite well.

Breakfast Club, East Coast Edition

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSunday began the way Sundays ought to, slowly and without apology. No alarms, no rounds, no particular reason to be anywhere at any specific minute. The sea outside the villa was already up and about, but it seemed happy to let us lie in.

Eventually we stirred ourselves and drove into Kuantan for breakfast with the MRSM friends. The venue was Nasi Lemak Lerek, conveniently close to the house of one of the group, which is the sort of local knowledge no guidebook can quite replicate. The food was very good, and the company better still. There is a particular ease that comes with friends who knew you before you had any idea who you were going to be. Conversation picks up exactly where it left off, sometimes decades earlier, and nobody needs reminding of the plot.

Most of them were heading back to KL after the meal, so the farewells came with full stomachs. We, rather smugly, had another night in Cherating.

First, though, the car needed charging, a ritual now as natural as checking the weather. Then came the seaside drive back, taken at a leisurely pace with frequent and entirely justified stops. Fruit from a roadside stall, roti paung still warm, putu and keropok lekor. The back seat began to resemble a small travelling market, and the car smelt faintly and wonderfully of fried fish crackers.

Along the way we stopped at Holiday Villa. We used to stay there many times when Idlan and Irfan were toddlers, often with Anita’s parents. Walking around, I was pleased to find it still well maintained, the gardens tidy, the sea exactly where we had left it. Places like that hold memories rather patiently. You return years later and find them waiting, a little older, a little quieter, but intact. Small feet on the sand, grandparents in the shade, the endless negotiation of naps. It was good to be reminded.

Back at our resort, we arrived in time for the F1. A quick late lunch at the café overlooking the sea, then settled in for the race. This year the Bahrain Grand Prix was held in Malaysia, bringing Formula 1 back to Sepang, which felt like a homecoming of sorts. The weather, being Malaysian, insisted on making a contribution, and rain delayed the start. There is a certain poetry in waiting for cars capable of three hundred kilometres an hour to be held up by a cloud.

The race eventually finished, just in time for a walk on the beach. The tide was out, the light was going gold, and the sand was firm underfoot. We did not talk much. There was no need.

Dinner was at the stalls just outside the resort, simple and satisfying, with plastic chairs, good food and the hum of other people’s weekends around us. It was the right ending to a day that had asked very little of us and given back a great deal.

We slept well. Properly, deeply well, the way you only manage near the sea.

Charged and Trimmed

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days you can feel coming before they arrive. I woke this morning with that particular awareness, the sense of a diary that had been filled in by someone with great ambition and very little regard for the person who would have to live it. A busy day, then. Best to get on with it.

The morning clinic was a long one. Not unpleasant, simply long, the sort where the waiting room never quite empties and each conversation leads politely into the next. By the time it eased off, the morning had been thoroughly used up, with nothing left over for the luxury of a proper pause.

The afternoon brought a stem cell infusion, which is quieter and slower than it sounds, a matter of patience and careful watching. There is something steadying about it. The clock moves at its own pace, and for a while you move with it, whether you like it or not.

Somewhere in the background, the weekend had been assembling itself. Tomorrow we head for Cherating, by way of Kuantan, where Aya’s daughter is getting married. A wedding has a way of rearranging everyone’s priorities, and ours were duly rearranged. Plans were made, clothes considered, and the question of the drive itself came up, as it now inevitably does.

Which is how the evening began with a trip to Bangsar in search of somewhere to charge the car. Owning an EV, I am learning, adds a new layer to any journey. You no longer simply go somewhere. You go somewhere via somewhere else, with one eye on the battery percentage and the other on a map of charging points. It is not a burden exactly, more a new habit forming, like checking your pockets for keys before shutting the door.

While the car took its fill, I took the opportunity to have a haircut. There is a pleasing efficiency in two things being topped up and tidied at the same time. The barber worked with quiet focus, and I left looking marginally more presentable for a wedding, which seemed only fair given the effort everyone else would be making.

Home again, and the day was not quite finished with me. There was an online meeting with the team in Kota Bharu who are organising the ASM next year. Planning something a year ahead has its own strange gravity. Dates, venues and programmes all feel slightly hypothetical, until suddenly they are not. The team were enthusiastic and organised, which is the best combination one can hope for, and we ended with that pleasant sense of things beginning to take shape.

By the time the screen went dark it was late, and the house had settled around me. The car was charged, my hair was shorter, and the plans for both this weekend and next year were rather further along than they had been this morning.

A packed day, as predicted. There is a certain satisfaction in a forecast that turns out to be accurate, even when the forecast was mostly for exhaustion. Tomorrow, the east coast. Tonight, a little rest, and perhaps a last look at the packing list.