Ten Years, Signed Away

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoBack to work, though with one eye on the afternoon from the moment the day started. It's a particular kind of morning, that — the sort where everything gets done properly but slightly faster than usual, because there's something waiting on the other side of it.

Rounds first, then meetings, then more meetings, which is how the working day tends to distribute itself once you stop being surprised by it. Still, it all wrapped up in reasonable order and I was home by three, which counts as a small victory in any week.

The drive back provided the day's one genuinely unwelcome moment. A stone came up off the road and put a crack in the Myvi's windscreen — that sharp, unmistakable crack of impact, and then the slow realisation that the little star in the glass is not going to buff out and is, in fact, now a job. There's no arguing with physics and no one to blame. Just a piece of gravel, doing what gravel does, with impeccable timing on a day already dedicated to car admin.

Because the afternoon's real business was the Starex. Anita signed the documents to sell it, and that was that — ten years, concluded in a few signatures and a handshake. Ten years is long enough for a car to stop being a purchase and start being a piece of furniture you happen to drive. School runs, airport trips, holidays, the boot loaded past any sensible limit, that particular smell every family car eventually develops and nobody can ever identify. None of that gets written into the transfer form, obviously. The paperwork records a vehicle changing hands and says nothing about the decade.

Still, it's going to make room for the iCaur, which is the whole point, and there's no sense being sentimental about something we're replacing on purpose. The Starex earned its retirement honestly.

Early dinner at Mid Valley after that, which turned out to be busier than expected — some event or other going on, the sort that fills the place with people moving in a slightly different pattern than usual. We ate early enough to stay ahead of the worst of it and left before the crowd properly settled in, which I'd call good planning if any of it had been planned.

Then home to settle in, and on to the more enjoyable end of the car business: choosing a colour. There's a peculiar seriousness that comes over people at this stage — everyone treating a decision that will be entirely invisible to them while driving as though it were structural. Swatches consulted, opinions exchanged, nothing definitively settled. It'll go on a bit longer yet.

An early night after that, willingly this time rather than by medical necessity. A day that began with meetings and ended with paint samples, with one cracked windscreen and one decade quietly signed away in between. Not a bad shape for a Thursday.

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 Fortnight, Give or Take

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoWoke still rather blue. Not dramatically so — nothing that would trouble anyone looking at me — but the low weather from earlier in the week hadn't quite moved on. It was still there at the edges of the morning, the way a headache sometimes lingers as a rumour of itself.

London again, mostly. I've established by now that this is simply what my head does at this point in the year, and knowing the mechanism doesn't seem to switch it off. Some part of me has been packing a bag for weeks and keeps wandering into the hall to find it isn't there. I'd like to report a mature reckoning with this. In truth I just kept thinking about the particular grey of a Marylebone afternoon and being mildly annoyed at myself for it.

And Irfan goes in a fortnight, give or take, which is the other thing circling. It doesn't help that the number keeps sounding the same however many days pass — two weeks has a way of remaining two weeks right up until it's three days. I'm not making a production of it. He's going where he's meant to go and everyone concerned is quite sensible about the whole business. But there's a countdown running somewhere behind the ordinary hours, and it makes you notice things you'd otherwise walk past. Him in the kitchen. The particular noise of him coming in.

So it was a slow start, and I decided not to fight it. Might as well. There is a certain wisdom in recognising the days when your own resistance is the most expensive thing on offer. The morning went at whatever pace it fancied and I followed along behind it, and the world declined to collapse in the meantime.

In the evening Anita and I went to the Gardens for dinner. Nothing planned or particularly considered — just the two of us getting out of the house, which turns out to be a more reliable treatment than anything I could have engineered. The Gardens does its usual thing: polished, calm, a bit hushed, everyone moving at the speed of people who have decided the evening is not urgent. We ate, we talked about not very much, and the not very much was the point.

I've noticed this often enough now to trust it. A flat mood rarely survives a proper meal and decent company. It doesn't get argued away — it just finds itself with nowhere to sit. By the time we were heading back, the thing that had been sitting on my chest since morning had thinned out considerably, without anyone having addressed it directly.

Home, and a bit of television, which neither of us watched with full attention. Then bed, at an entirely reasonable hour.

The blue hasn't gone, exactly. It's more that I've stopped giving it a seat at the table. And there are two weeks yet, which is either not very long at all or perfectly adequate, depending on how you decide to look at it.

I'm choosing adequate. For tonight, at least.

The View Was the Best Thing on the Menu

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoAnita's birthday, and it began, as the good ones do, with someone else doing the work. A friend arrived with breakfast — unannounced in the nicest sense, the sort of gesture that can't be reciprocated so much as passed along later. There's real generosity in feeding someone on their birthday before the day has had a chance to make demands of them. The house smelled like a small occasion by half past eight.

Then I went to work, as usual, which is the unromantic part of birthdays that fall on weekdays. The world declines to observe them. I left her surrounded by the early wave of gifts and made my way in with the mild guilt of a man who knows the better party is happening in his absence.

By all accounts the gifts kept coming. Gifts galore, in fact — the sort of steady arrival that turns a living room into a modest depot by mid-afternoon. She has a gift for being loved, Anita, and days like this simply make the evidence visible. I got updates throughout, each one photographed with the enthusiasm of someone genuinely surprised, which after all these years I still find rather lovely.

The afternoon turned wet. Rain, properly, for hours — the kind that arrives without negotiation and settles in, turning the roads into something to be endured rather than driven. I'd braced myself for a long crawl home and, against all reasonable expectation, got away early and beat the worst of it. Small mercies, and on a birthday, mercies count double.

Dinner was at Anjum, up at KLCC. And here I must be honest, because a diary that only records the good bits isn't worth keeping: it was overrated. Not bad — nothing arrived that offended anyone — but it had that particular quality of a place trading rather more on its address than on its kitchen. Middle Eastern flavours, all correctly assembled, none of them insisting on themselves. You find yourself saying "this is nice" in the tone people use when they mean "this is fine."

The view, though. The view was tremendous. The towers doing their nightly performance, the park below all lit up and green, the whole city arranging itself obligingly outside the window. There's a reason the room is designed to face outward. I'd go back for the view and eat beforehand, which I appreciate is not the review the restaurant is hoping for.

But the company was the point, and the company was excellent. We stayed on longer than we meant to, which is my favourite kind of staying on.

There was a slight drizzle when we came out, barely worth the name, and it had given up by the time we reached the car. The afternoon's downpour had left the air washed and cool, that brief window when the city smells clean.

Home, and we chilled until late. No agenda, no winding-down ritual, just a room with the two of us in it and no particular reason to end the day.

A good birthday. She earned it.

Scrambled Eggs, Scrambled Lunch

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days announce their intentions early, and this was one of them. Barely through the door and already behind, the sort of hectic that doesn't build so much as arrive fully formed, like weather. There wasn't much to do but fall in step with it and hope the pace eased somewhere before evening.

It didn't, particularly — not straight away. Rounds ran long enough that they practically introduced themselves to the double clinic waiting on the other side, the two sessions stacking up back to back with none of the usual breathing room in between. By the time there was a gap to speak of, lunch had gone from "at some point" to "immediately or not at all," and it landed somewhere closer to the latter — a scramble in the truest sense, eaten standing up, remembered more than tasted. The kind of meal that counts purely on a technicality.

And yet, for all that early sprint, the day had no intention of wrapping up early to compensate. It simply kept going, stretching out well past where a day that starts that briskly has any right to. There's a particular tiredness that comes from a day like that — not the dragging kind, but the kind that sneaks up once you finally sit still, as though your body had been too busy to notice how long it had been on its feet.

The evening, at least, came with proper reward. Dinner next door at Dorsett turned into one of those conversations that outlasts the meal itself — unhurried, the kind where the plates get cleared and nobody quite notices because the talking's still going. A welcome contrast to a day that had spent most of its hours refusing to slow down for anyone.

Threaded through it all was an update from Timothy William on antibiotics — the sort of exchange that's easy to underrate in the moment but useful precisely because someone bothered to walk it through properly rather than leaving it for later. Colleagues who take the time to actually explain something, rather than simply flag it and move on, are worth more than they're usually given credit for, and today was a reminder of that.

So: hectic in, contemplative out, with a scrambled lunch somewhere in the middle standing in for the whole day's rhythm — start fast, catch up when you can, and let the evening do the smoothing over. Not every day balances itself out quite so neatly, but this one, eventually, did.