Injustice Before Breakfast

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoWoke up to the sort of football news that makes you want to lodge a formal complaint before you've even had coffee. Egypt had led Argentina 2-0, held it deep into the second half, and then watched it unravel in the space of about twenty minutes — a disallowed goal, a penalty appeal waved away, and Enzo Fernández finishing it off in stoppage time to complete the smash and grab. Argentina through, 3-2, and Twitter, predictably, on fire about it. Robbed felt like the word of the morning, even if the VAR officials would no doubt disagree with the verdict from the comfort of their monitors. Football has a cruel sense of timing, and Tuesday's dose of it arrived before I'd properly woken up.

The day itself started with a Grab, first stop physio, which is one of those appointments that's good for you in principle and mildly disruptive to a schedule in practice. It ran long, or perhaps I'd simply misjudged how long "long" would feel once I was watching the clock rather than my own shoulder, and by the time I was back in the car heading for Subang the morning had already developed a lean, hurried quality it hadn't asked for.

Getting back meant rushing straight into rounds, the kind of arrival where you're still mentally catching up to your own body. No graceful transition, just straight into it, one task chasing the tail of the last. The clinic that followed was a long one — properly long, the sort that eats an afternoon whole and leaves you slightly surprised at how much daylight has disappeared by the time you next check. A meeting at five kept things moving rather than easing them off, and by the time everything was finally done, the sun had already gone down without much fanfare, the way it tends to when you're too occupied to notice it happening.

Another Grab home, the city outside doing its usual evening thing — headlights, hawker smoke, the low hum of a Tuesday winding down for everyone except, it seemed, for me. Home wasn't quite the end of it either. More calls, a few stray emails that had been quietly multiplying while I wasn't looking, the low-grade admin tax that always seems to charge interest overnight.

By the time I finally sat down properly, it was less an evening and more the tail end of one, salvaged mostly by the first episode of Silo's new season, which I managed to squeeze in before sleep made its closing argument. Not a bad way to end a day that had, in its own way, mirrored Egypt's morning — promising, then complicated, then over rather more abruptly than expected. Bed came not a moment too soon.

A Day Measured in Fares

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days announce their length early, and this was one of them. It began, as the busier ones tend to, with rounds — the steady morning ritual of working through the ward, that unhurried procession of names and notes that grounds a day before it has a chance to run away. I moved through it knowing the rest of the morning had other places to be.

From there the city took over. A Grab across town to Hospital Ampang, that particular Klang Valley experience of watching your estimated arrival time negotiate quietly with the traffic and losing. The occasion was the launch of the new CPG — one of those events that exists somewhere between ceremony and admin, equal parts polite applause and genuine usefulness. There's a satisfaction in seeing one of these things finally put down on paper and sent out into the world; a great deal of patient work goes into a document most people will only ever skim.

Lunch followed, and then I dropped by Jerome's office — the kind of unscheduled detour that turns a working day into something more companionable. A conversation here, a familiar face there, the small social mortar that holds the professional bricks together.

And then the long crawl back to SJMC, which is where the day presented its bill in the most literal sense. Sixty ringgit. I sat in the back doing the arithmetic of distance against fare and arrived only at a quiet resignation. Surge pricing has a way of finding you precisely when the city is at its most congested and you are at your least patient. I paid it, of course. One always does. But I noted it, the way you note a small injustice you've no intention of contesting.

Home, mercifully, came early — early enough for a proper sit-down dinner rather than the rushed, standing-over-the-counter affair that long days usually produce. There is a particular pleasure in an early dinner after a day spent ricocheting across the city: the food unhurried, the chair welcome, the sense of the day finally consenting to slow down.

The evening, though, still had one thing left to offer. I settled in to listen to a talk by Elias Jabbour, over from MD Anderson, with Jerome in the chair — the same Jerome whose office I'd lingered in hours earlier, now presiding from a stage. Jabbour is the sort of speaker who makes a complicated thing sound almost conversational, and there's a quiet luxury in being able to take it in from the comfort of home rather than a conference hall's unforgiving chairs. I listened with the contented attention of a man who has done his travelling for the day and intends to do no more of it.

A long day, then, and a crisscrossed one — measured out in fares and finished, fittingly, with someone else doing the talking. I was happy enough to sit and absorb, the city's traffic safely on the other side of the window.

The Reward for Resting Well

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoBack to work, then — but I returned to it the way you return to anything after a proper rest: a little reluctant, a little restored, and quietly grateful that yesterday happened at all. There's a particular contentment in having spent a day off well. It pays out the next morning like interest.

The first business of the day was, admittedly, conducted at four in the morning. England played Croatia at that ungodly hour, and against my better judgement I was awake for it. They won, which made the lost sleep feel like a sound investment rather than a foolish one — though I'll confess the line between the two is dangerously thin at that time of night. By the second half I was less a supporter than a man simply too far in to turn back. It paid off. It doesn't always.

The ward round came and went with the usual rhythm, and then it was off to Sentul for teaching — that part of the work I genuinely look forward to, the chance to hand something on, to watch a concept land behind someone else's eyes. There's a quiet pleasure in it that the rest of the day rarely matches. You spend so much of your time solving problems that the act of simply explaining one feels almost restful by comparison.

Back to Subang for lunch, and then another meeting with the pharma people — the kind of appointment that arranges itself into your afternoon whether you've made room for it or not. These meetings have their own choreography by now, familiar enough that I could probably conduct one in my sleep, which after the four a.m. start was nearly a literal possibility.

But the day, kindly, was a short one. Done early, home by half five — an hour so civilised I scarcely knew what to do with it. There's something faintly disorienting about arriving home while the light is still generous, the evening still ahead of you and entirely unspent. We had an early dinner, the unhurried sort, and the whole thing felt like a small act of rebellion against the usual order of things.

Anita, meanwhile, had spent her day at the KL International Motor Show with Razak, returning full of it. The new Prelude had caught her eye — Honda's old coupe, back after the better part of two decades away, reborn as something sleeker and quieter and electrified. I find there's a particular pleasure in watching a name you'd half forgotten reappear, dusted off and reimagined for a different age. She described it with the enthusiasm of someone who has decided, without quite saying so, that she'd rather like to sit in one.

So the week resumed without protest. A short day, an early dinner, a head still half-full of football and lecture notes and Anita's revived motoring ambitions. Not every working day needs to be a long campaign. Some, mercifully, just let you home in time to enjoy the evening — and you take those gladly, without asking why.