Half-Full Halls

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoNo clinic today, though that didn’t make it a day off. A stem cell infusion was scheduled for the morning, the sort of booking that sets the tone for everything around it. Infusions need patience and careful attention. It’s a slow, precise process, and the main skill involved is not rushing it. Everything went as it should, and it was all done by lunchtime, which is about as satisfying as a morning gets: one important job, done properly, with the afternoon still to come.

Lunch didn’t live up to the morning. I had mee bandung, a dish I’m fond of, which is exactly why it’s disappointing when it falls short. The broth lacked conviction, and the whole bowl seemed to be going through the motions. It’s a small letdown, but with a dish you love, an average version feels more like a broken promise than a bad meal. I finished it anyway, out of loyalty to the idea of it.

Family news arrived in between. Julia is back from New Zealand after her family trip, still full of mountain air, presumably, and already packing again, this time for Japan on Friday. Some people travel the way the rest of us check the post. In the short gap between trips she found time to collect Mak this morning, which is very like her: just back from one adventure, nearly off on the next, and still the one who does the driving.

I was home early, and Anita had decided we were eating out. In our house that kind of decision is an announcement rather than a proposal, and I’ve learned to treat it like the weather.

We went to Pavilion Damansara. It’s a huge place, the sort of building that seems to stretch on into the distance. It was busier than the last time we’d come, which was nice to see, but only about half the shops are open. That gives it an unfinished feel, like a stage only partly dressed. Long stretches of shutters and hoarding sit between the lit-up shops. Malls in their early years always seem a little hopeful, as if waiting for a crowd that hasn’t quite found them yet. This one is getting there.

Naturally we stopped at Kinokuniya. A bookshop that size works on me in a predictable way: I go in meaning to browse briefly and come out realising half an hour has gone. There’s a calm to those aisles that nowhere else in a mall really has, everyone moving a little more slowly and speaking a little more softly, as though the books might mind.

Then dinner, and home. Nothing elaborate, just a meal out with company I’d choose every time.

A morning that went exactly as planned, a lunch that didn’t, a sister-in-law between continents, or whatever Julia’s next stop turns out to be, and an evening wandering a mall still growing into itself. A full day, quietly.

The Day Gets Away, Kindly

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoWhat a difference a night makes. After yesterday’s enforced rest, I woke properly restored, with the stomach back on speaking terms and enough energy to make the morning feel like a fresh start instead of a continuation. I hadn’t realised how flat I’d been running until the tank was full again. Rest is annoying that way: it only proves its point afterwards.

That was just as well, because the day didn’t hang about. It went by in a blur, one of those stretches where you look up for what feels like the first time and find the afternoon has nearly gone. It was busy, steadily and constantly so, but the good sort, where being occupied stops you counting the hours. It would have been a much harder day twenty-four hours earlier. Today it was simply full.

When the working day ended, the evening’s main job began. I chaired a medical talk after hours, with the speaker joining from Taiwan. Remote talks have a small drama of their own. There’s the moment of waiting to see whether the connection will hold, the slight lag between a question and its answer, and the odd intimacy of a face on a screen speaking to a room on the other side of the sea. It held, thankfully. The speaker was clear and generous with time, and the room stayed with it all the way through, which is all a chair can really ask for. My part was mostly introductions, steering, and making sure questions arrived in some sensible order. It’s quiet work, and you only notice it when it goes wrong.

Dinner came afterwards, and I’ll be honest: it was average. Not bad, just forgettable. The sort of meal that does its job and leaves no impression, apart from a mild sense that it could have tried a little harder.

But the evening wasn’t really about the food, and that was what saved it. It was Eileen’s birthday. She’s our pharmacist, and one of those colleagues whose steadiness you rely on long before you think to thank her for it. So we celebrated her: a cake, a song sung with more warmth than tune, and the particular kind of laughter that only happens among people who spend their days working together. An average dinner turned into a good evening because of the people at the table and the reason we were there.

Celebrating someone you work alongside every day is a fine thing. Those relationships mostly run on deadlines and requests and quick exchanges in corridors. Stopping for one evening to make a fuss of somebody puts the human part back in, and reminds everyone that a team is people before it’s a set of roles.

So the energy came back, the day ran away with itself, the speaker in Taiwan stayed connected, and dinner was forgettable but a birthday wasn’t. A long day, a good one, and I was glad to be well enough to enjoy all of it.

Happy birthday, Eileen.

Tuesday, Returned to Sender

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA long weekend had done its job so well that Tuesday seemed to take it personally.

At least the morning was sunny. It was proper sunshine too, bright and clean, with none of the haze that’s been hanging about lately. After the long crawl back down the highway, it felt like a small kindness. It didn’t make the day any lighter. It just made the start of it easier to face.

And it wasn’t going to be light. Time away always gets paid for, and with Monday off as well, the bill had an extra day to grow. Everything you left behind has been waiting for you, and it doesn’t wait quietly. The first day back after a long weekend isn’t really a single day. It’s two days folded into one.

Morning clinic ran straight into afternoon clinic, with no gap between them worth calling a break. Lunch got squeezed into whatever minutes were left over. I ate it rather than enjoyed it, and I’ve already forgotten what it was. Some meals are just fuel.

The evening asked for a different kind of effort: dinner with a CAR-T company over from China. On a day like this, a business dinner can feel like one more thing on the list. This one didn’t. It was a nice affair, genuinely so. The conversation went well beyond business, and there was the particular warmth of people who’ve travelled a long way to sit at your table and are glad they did. Everyone was curious, and nobody was hurrying the evening along. It’s easy to arrive at a dinner like that already tired and expecting to stay tired. Every so often it surprises you and gives you some energy back.

But energy you borrow at dinner gets repaid later. It was late when I got home, and the house had already gone quiet. A bag or two from the trip was still sitting there half unpacked, a reminder that only a few days ago I was somewhere else entirely. The tiredness had been building quietly since the drive home, and tonight I finally noticed it.

It’s a strange thing, a return. You come back rested, and within a day the rest is spent. The long weekend didn’t fail. Tuesday was just always going to take it back.

So tonight there are no plans and no ambitions beyond sitting still and letting the day drain away. Recovery isn’t glamorous. It’s mostly just stopping, and trusting that tomorrow will be a little kinder for it.

The week has begun a day late, and it will want to make up for lost time. Tonight, at least, it can wait.

Freedom, Briefly Scheduled

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe colleague is back. Tanned, rested, and suspiciously cheerful, the way people always are on their first day after a holiday, before the inbox has had a chance to get its hands on them.

I handed back the borrowed chair. It felt like returning a library book I’d only just started enjoying.

More time for myself, then. That was the theory.

In practice, the day had other plans, and they were written in pen.

The morning’s work wrapped up early, which I chose to interpret as a good omen rather than a trap. Then straight to physio. There’s something quietly humbling about physiotherapy. You arrive believing you’re a reasonably functional adult, and leave having been gently informed that a muscle you’d never heard of has been sulking for weeks. They’re always kind about it. That somehow makes it worse.

From there, no detours. Straight to the PJ Hilton for a dinner talk.

The talk was good. Genuinely good. The sort where you find yourself nodding without deciding to, and scribbling a note you’ll actually read later. Ideas, well put. Questions that went somewhere. An hour that justified the drive.

The dinner was not.

I won’t dwell on it. Let’s just say the food had clearly been introduced to flavour at some point, but the relationship hadn’t lasted. Hotel banquet cooking occupies its own peculiar category. Everything is the right temperature for about four seconds. Everything looks as though it means well.

Still, you don’t go to a dinner talk for the dinner. That’s what I told myself, somewhere around the second disappointing forkful.

Afterwards, the evening’s last errand: charging the car at a TNB station.

A few weeks into driving an EV and I’m still learning its etiquette. Planning becomes a small, constant hum in the background. Not anxiety, exactly. More like a polite awareness. With a long drive coming, a full battery stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the whole plan.

So there I sat, in a car park at night, watching a percentage climb with the attention normally reserved for football scores. A curious modern ritual. Plugged in, waiting, the city carrying on around me. Oddly peaceful, really. A forced pause at the end of a day that hadn’t offered many.

Because tomorrow is Penang.

The weekend away, after work. Straight from one thing to the long road north, which is either admirably efficient or mildly foolish, depending on how the traffic behaves out of the Klang Valley on a Friday evening. I suspect I already know the answer. I’ve decided not to think about it.

There’s an odd lightness in having somewhere to go. Even with the drive, even with the work beforehand. The weekend has a shape now. A destination. Food that will, with any luck, make up for tonight.

Penang owes me a decent meal.

I intend to collect.

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.