Kit, Kin and a Late Kick-Off

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSunday, and another early start. I’m beginning to suspect my alarm clock doesn’t believe in weekends. It certainly doesn’t respect them.

The rounds, at least, were smooth. After yesterday’s overrun I’d braced myself for more of the same, but the morning was kind. Things went where they were meant to go, in roughly the time they were meant to take. I’ve learnt not to celebrate these mornings too loudly. Gratitude, quietly expressed, seems to work better.

Down in the lobby there was an unexpected bustle. People queuing to pick up their kits for the SJMC Run next weekend, clutching bags of race numbers and branded T-shirts with the hopeful look of those who’ve signed up for something and are only now remembering what it involves. There’s a lovely optimism to a kit collection. Nobody has run a single step yet, so everyone is still, in their own minds, rather fast. I admired them from a safe distance, which is my preferred relationship with running.

Then off to Bukit Antarabangsa to pick up May. It’s a drive I enjoy more than I probably should. The road climbs and winds, the city falls away behind you, and for a few minutes it feels like you’ve left Kuala Lumpur altogether, even though you plainly haven’t. There’s something about a hill road that makes you drive a little more thoughtfully. Or at least that’s my excuse for going slowly.

A quick lunch at Melawati followed. Melawati has an unpretentious, neighbourly feel that I’ve always liked, the sort of place where lunch is lunch rather than an event. No queues for photographs, no theatre, just food, a table and a moment to sit. I’m increasingly convinced the best meals are the ones nobody bothers to post about.

The afternoon turned to rain. Not the relentless kind of earlier in the week, but enough to settle the question of whether we’d be going anywhere else. We wouldn’t. Home it was, and home was exactly where I wanted to be. A rainy Sunday afternoon indoors is one of life’s small luxuries, though only if you’ve chosen it. Today, the weather and I were in complete agreement, which happens less often than you’d think.

At night I caught up with the Man United match. Supporting United these days requires a particular blend of loyalty and selective memory. You watch with hope, and you also keep a cushion within reach. I’ll say this for them: they never let you get too comfortable. Whether that’s a strength of character or a flaw in the defence is a debate for another evening. Possibly every evening.

Still, there’s something steadying about ending the week in front of a football match, whatever the outcome. It’s ritual more than entertainment now. The same seat, the same muttering, the same faint certainty that I could have done better from the sofa.

A full Sunday, in the end, but a gentle one. Work done, people collected, lunch eaten, rain watched. Next weekend, the runners. I’ll be cheering. From the sidelines, obviously.

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.

Two Cars, One Driver, Briefly

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe new car had its first proper commute today. Until now it had been treated rather like a guest, admired, driven with care and parked with the kind of precision usually reserved for exams. This morning it simply had to go to work like the rest of us.

There is a moment, a few days into owning something new, when it begins to stop being an occasion and starts becoming part of the routine. I noticed it at the first set of traffic lights. No glancing at the dashboard in quiet wonder, no testing of buttons out of curiosity. Just a red car, a slightly sleepy driver and the familiar Klang Valley crawl. It took the traffic with better grace than I did.

The morning's work went smoothly enough, which is to say it got done, and by late morning I had the rare and slightly disorientating feeling of being on schedule. This lasted until lunch, which was a meeting. Lunch meetings have a curious double life. They promise food and deliver agendas, and you leave with the faint sense that the sandwich was mostly ceremonial. Still, it was productive, and the coffee was decent, which counts for a great deal.

The afternoon belonged to physio. There is a particular humility in lying on a treatment table while someone gently but firmly identifies every muscle you have been neglecting. Each stretch arrived with a polite explanation and a less polite sensation. I emerged walking a little more freely and with a renewed respect for parts of my body I had largely been taking for granted.

On the drive home my thoughts turned to the MyVi, which has been patiently waiting for some attention of its own. It needs to go in for repairs, a task I have been mentally postponing with impressive consistency. It feels slightly unfair, really. The old faithful has done years of uncomplaining service, and the moment something shiny and red arrives, it is relegated to the to-do list. I made a mental note to sort it out soon, and then made a second mental note to actually follow through on the first.

The evening brought the day's main event. Anita took the new car for a drive. I would like to report that I sat back and relaxed, the very picture of serene confidence. In truth I was a fairly attentive passenger, offering the occasional observation in a tone I hoped sounded helpful rather than supervisory. She handled it beautifully, of course, and seemed to settle into the quiet of it far quicker than I had. The car, for its part, appeared entirely indifferent to who was holding the wheel, which is perhaps the most reassuring quality a car can have.

By the time we came back the house was dim and still. One car tucked away, the other awaiting repairs, and two people who now, it seems, share custody of a red EV.

A quieter day than the last, but none the worse for it. Some days are milestones. Others are simply the miles.

Landed

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere's a particular kind of morning where you're only half paying attention to your own day because most of your attention is somewhere over the Indian Ocean. That was this one. Irfan's flight was due into London by noon Malaysia time, and between patients there was a fair bit of quiet phone-checking going on — the flight tracker open in one tab, doing the thing flight trackers do, which is tell you almost nothing useful right up until the moment it tells you everything.

No delay, in the end, which felt like more than it probably deserved to. He landed on time, got himself an Uber straight to the apartment without any drama, and that was that — the sort of arrival that's almost disappointing in its lack of incident, except that a lack of incident is exactly what you're hoping for when someone you're fond of is landing in a city eight time zones away for the first time on his own. Uneventful is underrated. Uneventful is the goal.

Work carried on regardless, because it does. Clinic was smooth, mercifully so, the kind of morning that doesn't ask much of you right when you don't have much extra to give. I went through it a little distracted, checking the phone between patients more than I'd normally admit to, but it moved along without any real friction, which I'll take as the day cooperating for once.

Home early after that, properly tired in the way accumulated worry tends to leave you once the worry's been resolved — not the sharp kind of tired, more the sort that settles in once you're finally allowed to relax. And relax, more or less, is what the rest of the day was for. Knowing he'd arrived safely did more for the afternoon than anything on the schedule could have.

Dinner came early, unhurried, eaten with the particular lightness of a day that had turned out better than the quiet nerves of the morning had suggested it might. The evening after that asked for nothing much — just the sort of settling-in that comes naturally once the thing you'd been half-holding your breath for has actually happened, and happened well.

So: a flight tracked, a landing uneventful, a clinic survived on partial attention, and an evening spent simply glad of it. Not every day needs more than that. This one didn't.

Departures

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days have one job, and everything else is just filler around it. Today was that sort — the packing, the last errands, the slow accumulation of things that had to happen before the one thing that actually mattered. Irfan's off to London tonight, and the whole day arranged itself around that fact whether it meant to or not.

The packing itself got sorted during the day, which spared everyone the particular chaos of last-minute zip-wrestling an hour before leaving for the airport. I went about the morning's work as usual — rounds, the ordinary shape of a working day — though with half an eye on the clock in a way that doesn't normally happen on a Friday. Some days you're present for the whole of them. Today I was present for most of it and quietly counting down through the rest.

Home earlier than usual, because there was somewhere to be and traffic to be respected. The drive to KLIA was slow, the way it generally is at that hour, everyone else apparently also headed somewhere important, or at least driving as though they were. Still, we reached with time to spare, which meant no scrambling, no last looks at the departure board through breathless urgency — just the ordinary business of getting there properly, for once.

Dinner was the four of us, which doesn't happen as often as it should, and certainly not often enough to take for granted. There was a particular texture to it — nothing said out loud about it being a send-off dinner, but everyone quietly aware that it was. Good conversation, the sort that fills a table without needing to address the thing everyone's actually thinking about.

Then it was time, and he went in. The flight was delayed slightly, which is either a small mercy or a mild cruelty depending on how you're inclined to view extra waiting on a night like that — a bit more time in the airport, a bit less finality to the goodbye, though the goodbye had already happened by then in all the ways that count.

Home after, to a house with one fewer occupant for the foreseeable future. Anita wants his room left exactly as it is over the weekend — nothing tidied, nothing rearranged, no rush to make the absence official just yet. I understand it completely. There's a difference between a room that's simply empty and a room that's been cleared out, and she's not ready for the second one. Neither, if I'm honest, am I.

So: a day built entirely around one departure, handled properly, without fuss, and landing somewhere quieter than usual by the time it was done. He's on his way. The house will get used to it. Not tonight, though.