Leaving Early, Arriving Late

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe haze has stopped being polite about it. This morning it sat over the city like a damp tea towel, and I left the house already squinting at the horizon as though that would help. It didn’t. It rarely does.

It was an all-day clinic, which is a phrase that sounds manageable on paper and rather less so by mid-afternoon. The morning was long, not in the dramatic sense, just in the way some mornings stretch out like a queue you can’t see the end of. One person, then the next, then the next. I kept the timer going and it kept me honest, though I suspect even a very good gadget has its limits against a full list.

After the ward round there was a meeting, the kind that begins with everyone agreeing it’ll be quick. I’ve sat through enough of these to know that the word “quick” is purely decorative. Halfway through, I had to excuse myself. Not out of boredom, I should add, though I’d be lying if I said leaving early didn’t carry a small, guilty thrill. There’s something about standing up mid-meeting with a genuine reason that makes you feel briefly like a man in a film with somewhere better to be.

The somewhere better was Le Méridien, for a talk. The drive over was the usual Kuala Lumpur negotiation between optimism and traffic, and the haze gave the whole city a sepia filter nobody asked for.

The speaker had come from Kraków, and the talk was very good. I say that without the usual qualifications. Plenty of talks are fine, informative, competent, the sort you remember for the coffee break. This wasn’t one of those. It was clear, well-paced, and delivered by someone who knew the material well enough not to hide behind the slides. I find that rarer than it should be. Anyone can fill forty minutes. Making them feel like twenty is a craft.

It ran late, as good evenings tend to. By the time I was heading home the day had folded itself into night without my noticing, which is either the sign of a good day or a badly managed one. Possibly both.

The haze had worsened by evening. From the balcony I could see it properly, a thick grey wash across the city, the usual skyline softened into suggestion. Buildings I know are there simply weren’t, or were only half there, like a photograph left too long in the sun. I’ll admit it has a certain eerie beauty, which feels like an inappropriate thing to say about air you’re not meant to breathe. But I stood and looked anyway, for longer than was strictly sensible.

Then I came inside and shut the door. Some views are better appreciated through glass.

It was a long day, though not an unhappy one. Full at both ends, interrupted in the middle, and finished with something worth the effort. I’ll take that, haze and all.

Usually, We'd Be in London by Now

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA new week arrived this morning with all the ceremony of a bin lorry — noisy, inevitable, and not especially interested in whether I was ready for it. I wasn't, particularly. Mondays rarely ask permission.

There's a particular flatness that comes at this point in the year, and I know exactly where it comes from. Normally, by now, we'd be in London. Cool air with a bit of an edge to it, the light going amber by late afternoon, that specific pleasure of walking somewhere without a plan and ending up in a bookshop you didn't mean to enter. The body seems to keep its own calendar, quite independent of the one on the wall, and mine has been quietly flicking through pages and looking up expectantly. Nothing doing this year. So the mood sat a bit low, not dramatically, just a background hum, like a fridge you only notice when you're trying to think.

Irfan is still here, at least. Two more weeks before he goes. That's the sort of thing you tell yourself is plenty of time, and it is, right up until it isn't. I've learned not to make too much of the countdown — nobody enjoys being treated as a departure lounge — so I mostly just note it privately and try to make sure the ordinary days between now and then are decent ones. There's something to be said for the last stretch before someone leaves. It's rarely the grand farewell dinner you remember. It's the two of you in the kitchen at an odd hour, agreeing that the kettle is taking its time.

Work was slow today. Not slow in the sense of dragging, but slow in the way a river is slow — moving steadily, going somewhere, unhurried about the whole business. Days like that are underrated. Nothing arrived that needed to be solved in the next five minutes, and so things got done properly rather than merely quickly. I got through what needed getting through. No heroics. No fires. Just a sequence of tasks that agreed to be finished in the order I attempted them, which is more courtesy than one usually gets.

And yet by the end of it I was thoroughly done in. That's the odd arithmetic of a gentle day: you'd think the tiredness would scale with the drama, but it doesn't. Steady effort has its own weight, and it settles on you all at once somewhere around the drive home, when the podcast you've been half-listening to finishes and you realise you couldn't summarise a word of it.

So, an early night. No principled stand on wellness, no elaborate wind-down. Just an honest assessment of my own capacity, which had run out somewhat before the evening had. Bed, at an hour I'd have found faintly embarrassing twenty years ago and now regard as one of life's quieter luxuries.

London will still be there next year. Tonight, a pillow will do.

A Weekend Wrapped in Haze

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe weekend turned up on schedule, though it brought a slightly murkier version of itself than usual — that particular haze that settles over the Klang Valley every so often and quietly flattens the whole sky into one uncommitted shade of grey. Not dramatic, not alarming, just the sort of weather that makes staying in feel less like a decision and more like the day agreeing with you before you'd even asked.

Morning rounds still had to happen, weekend or not — haze doesn't get you out of that particular commitment, however much it might argue for staying under the duvet a little longer. Brisk, done, out of the way early enough that the rest of the day could be claimed properly rather than merely inherited.

After that, the plan, such as it was, amounted to not really having one. No lunch outing this time, no reason invented to leave the house before it was strictly necessary — just the quiet decision to let the haze keep its sky and let the indoors keep its residents. There's a particular contentment to a day with nowhere urgent to be, especially one where the air outside isn't putting up much of a case for itself either.

Indoors, then, for the bulk of the day — unremarkable in the best possible way, the kind of stretch that doesn't generate anecdotes because nothing needed to happen for it to count as time well spent. The sort of pause a week occasionally deserves without having to justify it.

Evening eventually pulled everyone back out, pasar malam being the sort of fixture that survives even a hazy weekend — there's something reliably good-natured about a night market, haze or no haze, all string lights and predictable smells doing their best to compensate for whatever the sky's been up to all day. On the way, a stop at Alpha Angle, which broke up the journey nicely and gave the outing a proper shape rather than just a destination.

Once back, the evening settled indoors again, closing the day the way it opened — unhurried, undemanding, content to let the haze have the outdoors while everyone else got on with something considerably more comfortable. No great plans for the rest of the night, and none particularly missed.

It's the kind of day that's easy to undersell purely because so much of it happened at home — but there's a case to be made for a weekend that asks for almost nothing back. Rounds handled early, a market visited late, and everything in between spent exactly where it felt right to be. The haze may have taken the view; it didn't take much else.

500px Photowalk Architecture

I was not feeling much inspired that morning and coupled with the poor weather, I did not hang around for too long.

But there was enough time for me to do a bit of urban architecture shots.

Due to the poor visibility, I used my Ricoh GR in monochrome mode which allowed me to capture the grim mood. KL appeared to be like Gotham at that rate. Nice to appreciate the city and certainly the cityscape would continue to change as the city grows, finding its identity.

The 500px Route

The instructions were given. The group photos were posed. Breakfast was done. So, it was time to get on with the walk. So, how was the route?

Put it this way, if I was the one organising the walk, I would've picked this particular one. To put it mildly, it was uninspiring. It was basically one round loop, with clear instructions to only venture off once we met up at the end of the formal walk. I could have finished the route in 30 minutes, and we had close to 4 hours before the designated rendezvous. Too much time to kill.

So, I explored MaTIC itself for a start. Neat colonial building and this early in the morning, there was hardly anything happening there.

I then took a left along Jalan Ampang to the Jalan Sultan Ismail turn opposite Renaissance Hotel. A bit of street work, building site and architecture. The Bukit Nanas Monorel Station had a bit of colour.

Next up, we walked along Jalan Sultan Ismail, passing by Hard Rock Cafe and did an anti-clockwise turn joining Jalan P Ramlee walking towards KLCC passing by a few more buildings.

The whole group then congregated by Laman Standard Chartered, a nice little piece of greenary smack in the middle of town next to KLCC. First time discovering this place, it was actually quite nice and tranquil.

We then noticed that the air quality dropped and the haze started coming in. I escaped towards Suria KLCC, with the plan to have a quick cup of coffee. I walked towards the famous fountain at KLCC Park and the visibility had dropped considerably by then.

Since I parked the car there, I decided to split and drove home. Might as well spend the rest of the morning with the family. There would be another photowalk coming next weekend, so I might as well just safe my energy for that one ...

The combination of uninspired route, poor air quality and too big a crowd put me off in the end, but it didn't mean that it was the fault of the organiser. I was sure that they did their best. I route around Bukit Bintang, Chow Kit, Masjid India or Kampung Baharu would have been better I guessed. Looking at the snaps, it wasn't that bad. And photography was all about creativity. The real talent was making a scene appeared inspired. After all, anybody could pick up a camera and press the shutter!