The Long Way Round to Where It Started

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA good night’s sleep. The rare, unbroken kind, where you close your eyes and open them again and the night has simply been folded up and put away without fuss.

I woke early. It had rained all night, and was still at it, steady and unbothered.

First order of business: charging the car. In the rain. There’s no graceful way to do this. You stand there with the cable, hood up, collar damp, feeling vaguely like a man refuelling a spaceship in a monsoon. The car, of course, stayed perfectly dry throughout. I did not.

Breakfast restored a certain dignity.

Then we drove to Kepala Batas.

I chose the first Penang Bridge this time. The older crossing. It seemed right, somehow, for where we were going. Then off the highway and onto the old Butterworth road, through the kampong, the way we used to come before there were quicker ways to come.

A lot has changed.

That’s the polite way of putting it. New houses where there were fields. Shops where there were none. Roads widened, corners straightened. And yet, every so often, something unchanged would appear: a particular bend, a stretch of paddy, a row of trees standing where they always stood. Like a familiar face in a crowd of strangers.

Then Permatang Bertam.

The house where I was born. Where I grew up.

I won’t try to describe what that feels like. Partly because it’s private, and partly because I’m not sure I could. Houses are smaller than you remember. Everyone says that, and it’s true. But it’s also larger, in ways that have nothing to do with size. We stood there a while. Didn’t say much. Didn’t need to.

Then on, because the day does go on.

A stop in town for biscuits. There’s always a shop, isn’t there. The one you’ve been going to since before you could see over the counter. Some purchases are less about the biscuits than about continuing a sentence that started decades ago.

Lunch with Teh in Sungai Petani. Good food, better company, the easy kind of catching up where nobody has to explain who anyone is.

On the way back, Seberang Jaya for jeruk. Penang’s pickled fruits, sharp and sweet and slightly alarming in colour. You can’t leave the north without them. It isn’t permitted.

A quick rest at the hotel. Brief, but necessary.

Then out again, over to Balik Pulau for dinner, the island’s quieter side, all hills and dusk and winding roads. Laksa at Fara Idlan Cafe, again, because when something is right, you return to it without apology. Sour, fishy, fragrant, deeply unreasonable in the best way. Then goreng pisang to finish. Hot, crisp, a little greasy. A full stop with a flourish.

It had been a long day. Long in miles. Longer in other ways.

An early night, then.

Tomorrow, the drive back to KL. The road south, the city waiting at the end of it.

But today, for a few hours, I went home.

North by Northwest, in the Wet

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe morning’s work went quickly. Suspiciously so. By noon I was heading home, which felt faintly illicit, like leaving a party before the speeches.

Home, but not to rest. There was paperwork, the kind that multiplies when unattended, and slides for tomorrow’s talk to look over one more time. I went through them twice. Changed a word. Changed it back. Preparation, at a certain point, becomes a nervous habit wearing a sensible jacket.

Then the waiting. Idlan had his online class, and the departure was scheduled around it, as departures with children generally are. You don’t leave when you’re ready. You leave when everyone is ready, which is a different hour altogether.

And then we were off.

It rained. Naturally. The sky seemed to have saved it all for the moment we set out.

Getting out of KL was the usual negotiation. Heavy traffic, slow lanes, brake lights stretching ahead like a string of red beads that someone kept tugging. Rain doesn’t just slow the roads here. It seems to make everyone reconsider their choices at every junction.

Eventually the city loosened its grip.

Simpang Pulai for a charge. There’s a particular kind of stop that only EV drivers know: the deliberate pause, the plug, the small ritual of watching numbers climb in a car park with rain drumming on the roof. Not quite a rest. Not quite travel. A sort of in-between, with snacks.

Back on the road, it kept raining. All the way. Through the hills, past Ipoh’s dim silhouette, down the long stretches where the highway lights blur into soft streaks on wet glass. The wipers kept their steady, slightly weary rhythm. Conversation came and went. Mostly went.

But the traffic, at least, had relented. Smooth after that. Hours that pass without incident have their own quiet satisfaction. You don’t remember them, which is rather the point.

One more toilet break before the second Penang bridge. It seemed prudent. Nobody wants to discover a pressing need halfway across twenty-odd kilometres of water at night.

Then the bridge itself. Long, dark, lit in a thin line, the sea invisible on either side. There’s something about crossing water at night that feels like a proper arrival, even before you’ve arrived. The island announces itself slowly. Lights first. Then shapes.

We reached the E&O just before midnight.

The old building was calm at that hour, its corridors hushed, the kind of grandeur that doesn’t need an audience. We were too tired to admire it properly. A quick check-in. Bags in. Shoes off. The heavy, grateful silence of a room after a long drive.

Settled in quickly. No ceremony, no unpacking worth mentioning.

Tomorrow there’s a talk to give, and a weekend to begin.

Tonight, though, the island can wait.

The rain has finally stopped.

Halfway, and Slightly Behind

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoAnd here we are in July, which means the year has quietly folded itself in half while I wasn't paying attention. I could have sworn 2026 arrived only yesterday, still creaking with resolutions and good intentions, and yet somehow six months have slipped past like coins through a hole in a coat pocket. There's a particular vertigo to reaching the midpoint of a year — the sense that the ledger is now half-spent and the columns don't quite balance. Time to get things moving faster, I keep telling myself, though telling oneself is rarely the same as doing.

It was, ironically, a slow day that gave me the room to think all this. There's a certain kind of quiet that doesn't soothe so much as prompt — the mind, given a little slack, immediately wanders off to audit itself. Not unpleasant, exactly. Just a reminder that stillness and ease are not always the same thing.

The middle of the day was given over to a lunch meeting with a pharmaceutical rep, that peculiar genre of appointment where the food is generally better than the conversation demands and the pitch arrives somewhere between the mains and the coffee. Pleasant enough, and mercifully unhurried.

The afternoon clinic, however, had other ideas. What began as a manageable list stretched well past its expected borders, helped along by a couple of emergency admissions that arrived without appointment or apology, as emergencies tend to. There's no arguing with the genuinely urgent — you simply rearrange yourself around it and get on. So I finished considerably later than planned, the afternoon having quietly consumed the early evening before I noticed it was gone.

Still, I made it back in time for dinner, which after a day like that feels like a small negotiated victory. There's a great deal to be said for arriving home while the table still means something.

Then came the evening's great moral test. My Oura ring — that small, well-meaning tyrant on my finger — has been increasingly pointed in its counsel, nudging me nightly toward the radical proposition of proper sleep. It has a case. It usually does. Unfortunately, England were kicking off at midnight, and no wearable device yet invented can compete with the pull of a knockout tie at an unreasonable hour.

They made me suffer for it, too. DR Congo led early and held that lead with alarming conviction, until Harry Kane finally remembered his job description and scored twice in the closing stretch to drag England through, 2-1. A nervy, unconvincing sort of win — the kind that gets you into the next round and precisely nowhere in the estimation of anyone watching. Mexico await, apparently. I'll worry about that later.

For now, I've made my choice, and the ring will note it disapprovingly in the morning. Tomorrow I shall suffer — bleary, under-slept, and entirely without regret. Some bargains are worth the interest. This, I suspect, was one of them, though I reserve the right to revise that opinion at around six a.m.

The Drive Home

I was dreading the drive home for the past few days. When the day finally arrived, I decided the route to take with the help of one of my cousins. It would be through the new Lebuhraya Pantai Timur via Kuala Terengganu.

The drive was smooth once we entered the highway, but getting to the highway entrance was another story all together. We set off from Kota Bharu after dropping my father-in-law at the airport. We left at around 11, but only entered the highway just before 4 pm. The drive was horrendous. It seemed that there was traffic lights every half a kilometer and getting though the lights easily took 20 minutes each.

The powerbank was charged!We stopped for lunch at Jerteh as we were starving. Traffic was heavy both ways but luckily the boys were behaving themselves. It was just the sheer number of cars, there were no accidents and to be honest, they could do with less traffic lights.

Once we entered the highway, it was smooth going until we entered the Karak toll just after Bentong. The traffic piled up again and we decided to take the Janda Baik road, again reentering the highway at Genting Sempah. We finally arrived at Gombak at 8.30 pm.

I slept as soon as I unpacked at the apartment. It was blissful sleep until I woke up thie morning to send Idlan to school.

Driving Home

It was hard to say goodbye to Smokehouse when we were finally done. The boys were relieved obviously now that they were heading back to civilisation, but my in-laws would have preferred to stay an extra day. The combination of cool weather, nice room and great service made them wanted to room again and there were already talks about our next stay before we departed.

We left just after noon, deciding against staying for lunch since we had a heavy breakfast. We would later stop at Kuala Kubu Baru for a quick stop, and we did just that. I used the Hulu Yam route again, bypassing Rawang and Serendah, cutting the journey by about 30 km. We reached Gombak by 3.15, and then continued on to the apartment via Great Eastern Mall to do a bit of groceries and take-out for dinner.

We were worried that our MPV would play up, but luckily everything went smoothly. I might take a few days off in early January after the Xmas and New Year break, just before the school reopened for the boys. Maybe it would be to PD.