The Long Way to the Sea

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe day started at six with a ward round, at an hour when the corridors are still yawning and the coffee has not yet decided whether to help. It was an early start even by recent standards, but there was a reason for the haste. The rest of the day had plans, and they were not inclined to wait.

From there I headed to Pudu to meet the photography crowd for the Kelby Walk. Ripi was leading again, with the easy authority of someone who knows exactly which alley has the best light and which has the best kopi. All the usual suspects were there, cameras slung, arguing amiably about lenses and pretending not to compare kit. Pudu obliged with its usual texture, all peeling paint and morning bustle. I could not stay long, which felt a little like leaving a party just as the good conversation begins, but the east coast was calling, and it does not call quietly.

We left by eleven. The drive to Cherating is long enough that you settle into it, the city thinning out and the hills taking over. Temerloh provided our first charging stop, and with it a pleasant interlude of stretching legs and watching the percentage climb with the patience of a kettle you are trying not to stare at.

The final stretch took us past Lynas, which I can report is not exactly scenic. Industrial in the most sincere sense of the word. One does not drive towards the beach expecting a rare earth processing plant, but here we were, and here it was, unbothered by our opinions.

We reached Royale Chulan by four. The villa turned out to have an extra room, which was a welcome surprise, if slightly puzzling, as though the place had been expecting guests we had forgotten to invite. We settled in, took a quick walk around the resort, and let the sea air do its gentle work of persuading us that we were, at least briefly, on holiday.

The rest was short-lived. By evening we were driving to Kuantan for the wedding dinner of Aya’s daughter. Aya was a classmate from MRSM Terendak, and there is something quietly remarkable about watching the children of school friends get married. It does sharpen one’s sense of time. The dinner was warm and generous, full of faces and familiar laughter, and we enjoyed it thoroughly.

Afterwards came another round of charging in town before the drive back to the resort. Forty minutes or so, along a road that was not in great condition and seemed to regard street lighting as an optional extra. I drove with the concentration of someone reading small print in a dim room, and the car, to its credit, did not complain.

When we finally arrived, I made it as far as the balcony. The plan was to sit down for a moment before changing. The moment, as it turned out, became the rest of the night. I fell asleep there, still dressed for the wedding, the sea somewhere out in the dark doing what seas do.

A long day, by any measure. But a good one, from a dawn in the wards to the waves at midnight.

Sarongs, Soup and a Curly-Haired Labubu

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoI woke with the back I'd earned. The couch had done its worst overnight and presented the bill first thing, which is the way of these things — you don't feel the damage while it's happening, only afterwards, when standing upright becomes a negotiation rather than a reflex.

A shower at the lounge sorted out the worst of it, or at least made me feel considerably more like a person and less like something that had been folded and stored badly. Then ward rounds, which the morning required regardless of what my spine had to say about it.

The good news came reasonably early. Anita was seen by her specialist and sent home — a quick, unremarkable review, which is exactly what you want a review to be. There's a particular relief in a discharge that arrives without qualification or a list of conditions attached. After that I had breakfast with a senior colleague before heading off, and there's something civilising about a proper sit-down breakfast after a night that didn't really involve sleep. Conversation, coffee, and the slow return of a normal rhythm.

Home, then, and straight into a nap that I'd like to describe as optional but wasn't. Brief, deep, and entirely necessary. I emerged from it slightly confused about the time, which is the hallmark of a good one.

Out again for lunch, dictated entirely by the invalid's preferences — vegetable soup, which is the food of someone whose stomach has recently been through something and isn't ready to hear any ambitious suggestions. Sensible, restrained, and exactly right. Recovery has its own menu.

Then, having survived a hospital stay, she decided what the day really needed was a Labubu. Specifically the curly-haired ones, which apparently are their own category and not to be confused with the other sort. I've long since learned that the correct response here is not to ask questions but to drive. A stop at the pharmacy afterwards rounded out the errands, and the day quietly became one of those where nothing on the list was planned twenty-four hours earlier.

The original plan had been rather different. Malaysia Day was meant to involve going out shooting with friends — Projek Keretapi Sarong, which is one of the better traditions we've invented: a trainful of people in sarongs, moving through the city with a kind of good-humoured absurdity that photographs beautifully and needs no explaining to anyone who's seen it. I'd have enjoyed it. Some years you get to be in the middle of the thing; other years the day has other plans for you, and you let it.

So we went home instead. The new season of Reacher had turned up at precisely the right moment — a show that asks nothing of you beyond sitting still, which is all I had to offer — and the evening stayed quiet from there.

Not the Malaysia Day I'd pencilled in. But she's home, the soup was good, the Labubu has curly hair, and I slept in an actual bed. Given how the previous day had gone, I'll take it.

A Holiday for Some

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere's something almost bureaucratic about a holiday that only half the country gets — Selangor still tucked up in its extended Merdeka afterglow while everyone a postcode or two over carried on as though nothing had been declared at all. SJMC fell firmly into the latter camp. No long weekend hangover there, no lingering bunting-and-lie-in energy — just Tuesday, dressed up as nothing in particular.

The clinic reflected it faithfully. Open as usual, and busier than the day's supposedly quiet reputation suggested — a fair queue of patients who'd clearly decided that other people's holidays were no reason to delay their own appointments, which is a perfectly sound piece of logic when you think about it. If anything, the mismatch worked in everyone's favour: quieter roads getting in, a full clinic once there, the sort of asymmetry that only shows up when the calendar disagrees with itself across a state line.

What struck as the day went on was how smoothly it all moved. Not the kind of smooth that gets remarked on at the time — more the kind you only notice in hindsight, once the last patient's gone and the day hasn't left behind the usual residue of minor delays and small frictions. Everything more or less ran to time, which for a full clinic is its own quiet achievement, rarely celebrated because there's nothing dramatic to celebrate. Things simply worked, in the unglamorous way things are meant to.

That kind of day has a particular reward attached to it: getting home earlier than expected, with none of the usual scramble to make up lost time. There's a specific pleasure in a commute that ends before you've mentally prepared for it to — the sort of small, undramatic win that doesn't photograph well but counts for a great deal by the evening.

And the evening, once it arrived, didn't ask for much. The tiredness had been building quietly underneath the smoothness of the day, the way it often does — not the dramatic, flattened-by-a-difficult-shift kind, just the ordinary accumulated sort that a full clinic leaves behind even when everything's gone well. So there wasn't much resistance to an early night. No attempt to squeeze extra life out of the evening, no scrolling past the point of usefulness — just the fairly sensible recognition that the body had cast its vote and the vote was for bed.

It's an easy kind of day to undersell in the retelling, precisely because nothing went wrong. No queue disasters, no scheduling chaos, no lingering half-holiday confusion bleeding into the work itself — just a state on holiday, a clinic that wasn't, and a day that got on with things efficiently enough to earn its own quiet exit. Some days give you a story. This one gave an early night, which, depending on how the week's shaping up, might be the better prize.

Catching Up, and Catching Breath

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe day began in good faith — a clean stretch of sun through the window, the kind of light that makes you briefly believe you're on top of things. I started with the football, as has become the habit. The World Cup unfolds mostly while we sleep out here, so mornings have turned into a sort of forensic exercise: reading the scores I missed, piecing together what the night got up to without me. It's an odd way to follow a tournament, arriving always after the fact, but I've made my peace with being a step behind the world.

The drive in belonged to Jimbo and the Totally lot, broadcasting their cheerful post-mortems from Los Angeles after every matchday. There's something pleasingly absurd about it — three or four blokes by a Californian pool, dissecting Messi and Mbappé while I sit in Klang Valley traffic with the air-conditioning labouring. They are good company, even at a distance of several thousand miles and a great many time zones. The drive passed quickly, which is rarely a thing I get to say.

And then the day, having lulled me into false confidence, showed its hand. Clinic was packed — properly, relentlessly packed, the sort of session where you look up and an hour has gone missing and the waiting room has somehow refilled itself behind your back. I worked through it with the slightly hunted feeling of a man trying to outrun his own schedule, and lost. By the time I surfaced I was late for the lunch meeting with the pharma people, arriving with apologies already forming and a plate that had clearly been waiting longer than I had.

There was no graceful pause after that. Straight from lunch into rounds, and from rounds into admissions, the afternoon folding in on itself with no obvious seam between one task and the next. It was the kind of day that doesn't so much pass as get survived — busy in a way that leaves you slightly surprised, at the end, to find you've reached it.

But reach it I did, and earlier than I had any right to expect. The admissions settled, the work behind me, I made it home with the evening still mostly intact — a small mercy that felt entirely disproportionate to the effort it took to earn.

We capped it off with a nightcap at the Gardens, the unhurried sort of outing the day had been refusing me all along. Quiet, easy, the lights low and the pace finally my own. And over it, we did the satisfying thing: finalised the August holiday. Dates settled, the shape of it agreed, that pleasant administrative glow of a plan made real. There's a particular contentment in fixing a future good thing in place — a thing to lean towards on the heavier days.

A day that ran ahead of me from the whistle, and somehow still ended kindly. I'll take the catching-up, the catching-breath, and the small promise of August.

A Holiday That Forgot to Check the Roster

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere is a particular irony to a public holiday that arrives for everyone except you. The Agong's birthday had emptied the roads and shuttered half the city, yet the ward, as ever, took no notice of the calendar. Patients do not observe royal occasions, and neither, it seems, does the morning round. So while the rest of the country lay in, I made my quiet pilgrimage through the wards, notes in hand, the corridors unusually hushed.

Two of the team had vanished eastward — off to a meeting in China, leaving the rest of us to redistribute the workload with the cheerful resignation of people who know complaining changes nothing. The round went smoothly enough, and by noon I was free, which on a holiday feels less like an achievement and more like an unexpected refund.

Anita and I pointed the car towards Wangsa Maju, drawn back to Alpha Angle for lunch. There is something pleasantly unhurried about returning to a place that once formed the backdrop to ordinary life. When we lived in Gombak, this was where we drifted on idle afternoons, before either of us had the sense to wonder where the years were going. The mall has changed in the small ways malls do — a shopfront here, a new signboard there — but the bones of it remain familiar, and familiarity, on a day off, is its own kind of comfort.

Lunch slid easily into groceries, as these things tend to. One does not set out to buy a trolley's worth of provisions, and yet there I was, examining the relative virtues of one cut of something against another, while Anita made the more decisive calls. We left heavier than we arrived, which is the unspoken contract of any visit to a supermarket.

From there to Mid Valley, on a mission for bedding — a phrase that sounds far grander than the reality, which was the two of us standing before a wall of identical white linen, trying to detect meaningful differences in thread counts neither of us fully understood. We chose something, eventually. We always do.

The final stop was the Apple Store at TRX, where the day's true purpose quietly revealed itself. Anita had her eye on the new MacBook Neo, and after the requisite admiring of the thing in its box, she walked out with the citrus model — a colour that manages to be cheerful without being loud, much like its new owner. There is a small ceremony to collecting a new machine: the heft of it, the promise of a clean slate, the faint suspicion that one's old habits will migrate across regardless.

We came home as the light softened, the boot full, the day quietly accounted for. Not every holiday needs to be remarkable. Some are simply for retracing old steps, buying sensible things, and watching someone you love choose a laptop the colour of marmalade. That, I think, is holiday enough.