Time Well Kept

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoAnother hazy start, though I’ve given up reporting on it as news. The haze is simply furniture now, like the wardrobe you keep meaning to replace. The morning itself, though, was smooth again. Two in a row. I’m treating it with the cautious respect one gives a cat that has suddenly decided to sit on your lap. Don’t move. Don’t make a fuss. Let it happen.

First order of business was setting up the new timer at the clinic. I’ll admit I expected the novelty to wear off by mid-morning, the way most clever gadgets end up as expensive paperweights by the end of the week. It didn’t. Something about seeing the minutes physically run down sharpened things. Less drifting, fewer half-finished thoughts, no reaching for the phone to check something that didn’t need checking. I’m slightly annoyed it works this well, because it means the problem was never a lack of time. It was me. A small box has politely pointed this out, and I’ve chosen to take it on the chin.

The morning clinic was busy, properly busy, the sort where you only notice your coffee has gone cold when you reach for it and it tastes of regret. But it moved. Focus does that. A full morning feels very different when you’re in it rather than being dragged along behind it.

Lunch was at Upstairs Cafe, which I’d earned, or at least I told myself so. The pasta was good. Not life-changing, not something I’ll describe to strangers, just honestly good, which I think is underrated. We’ve become a little obsessed with food that has to be extraordinary, plated like modern art and photographed before it’s tasted. I’d take a well-made bowl of pasta, eaten while it’s still hot, over a deconstructed anything. There’s dignity in a dish that simply does its job.

The afternoon slipped by quietly, and the evening followed suit. A quiet night is a fine thing after a day that asked a lot. No plans, no particular agenda, just the low hum of the house and the faint suspicion I should be doing something more productive.

Which, naturally, I then did. Lectures to sort. There’s always a lecture somewhere on the horizon, waiting like a dentist’s appointment you booked months ago in a fit of optimism. I opened the slides with the usual mixture of good intentions and mild dread. I’m one of those people who believes I work best under pressure, while knowing perfectly well that’s a story procrastinators tell themselves. So I got a head start. Not finished, not even close, but begun, which is half the battle and considerably less than half the work.

It occurs to me the timer might help here too. I may need to buy a third.

Perhaps not. Two timers is a system. Three is a personality.

The Second Timer

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA new week, and the sky over the Klang Valley hadn’t got the memo. The haze was still hanging about, that pale, indecisive grey that’s neither weather nor not-weather. It makes the whole city look slightly out of focus, as if someone forgot to wipe the lens. I’ve stopped pretending it’ll lift by lunchtime. It never does.

I spent part of the weekend catching up on Week 4 of the NFL, which tells you everything about my relationship with live sport. I’m a delayed-viewing man now. There’s something faintly absurd about watching a game whose result the rest of the world settled days ago, carefully avoiding headlines like a man stepping around puddles. But I’ll defend it. Knowing nothing and watching it unfold, even late, is still better than reading a score and feeling nothing at all. American football remains a sport I enjoy far more than I can sensibly explain. Every few plays I think, why does this need four downs and a committee meeting? Then someone throws a forty-yard spiral and I forgive it everything.

The morning itself was smooth, which I don’t say lightly. Smooth mornings are rare enough that I’ve learnt not to comment on them while they’re happening, in case they hear me. Coffee, a clear inbox, nobody needing anything urgently. Small mercies, and I’ll take them.

Lunch was with the pharma folk. These lunches are a peculiar genre: half conversation, half presentation, with a sandwich somewhere in the middle trying to keep the peace. I don’t mind them. You learn things, occasionally useful ones, and the food is usually better than whatever I’d have grabbed myself. I’d just rather the slides came after dessert.

The afternoon clinic made up for the gentle start. Busy, steady, one thing after another, the kind of afternoon where you look up and the light outside has changed without asking permission. Not unpleasant. Just full. By the end I had the slightly hollow satisfaction of a day properly spent.

Home, and a delivery waiting. The ZONE Timer by New Thing Lab, my second one. I already have one at home, sitting on the desk and quietly bullying me into finishing things. This one’s going to the clinic. Some would call buying the same gadget twice a lack of imagination. I’d call it evidence that the first one works. If anything, it’s a compliment to the designers that I didn’t bother shopping around.

There’s an odd pleasure in a single-purpose object these days. It doesn’t notify me, doesn’t update itself overnight, doesn’t want my email address. It counts down, and then it stops. I wish more things in life had that kind of clarity.

So, a Monday that behaved itself, mostly. Hazy outside, busy in the middle, tidy at the edges. A new timer to keep the next few weeks honest. Whether I actually listen to it is another matter entirely.

Buffets, Bazaars and Brakes

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe day began, as so many do, with a round of the usual duties followed by paperwork. The two have a way of travelling together, like a man and his shadow, except the shadow tends to grow longer as the morning goes on. I made decent progress on both and felt reasonably virtuous by late morning, which is about as virtuous as I generally aim to feel before lunch.

After lunch came a talk, and before the talk came lunch itself: a buffet at Vasco’s in the KL Hilton. I’ll say this plainly. A good buffet is the most honest way to bribe an audience into a seminar, and it works on me every time. The spread was genuinely nice, broad without being exhausting, and I exercised what I’d describe as selective restraint. That is, I didn’t try everything. Merely most things.

The talk ran until four. It was worthwhile, and I’ll leave it at that, partly because nobody wants a blow-by-blow of a seminar and partly because the post-buffet hour is never anyone’s sharpest. There’s an unspoken contract in these afternoon sessions: the speaker agrees to be interesting, and the audience agrees not to visibly digest. Both sides held up their end, mostly.

I was excused a little early, which was just as well, because I had made a promise to Anita about the pasar malam. In my experience, promises about pasar malam are the binding kind. You can postpone a meeting. You cannot postpone a night market that someone has been quietly looking forward to all day.

So off we went. There’s something about a pasar malam that I’ve never quite been able to explain to anyone who didn’t grow up with them. It’s crowded, it’s warm, it smells of six different kinds of frying at once, and it is completely wonderful. I wandered, Anita navigated with considerably more purpose, and we came away with more than we needed and exactly what we wanted. Having eaten a buffet at lunch, I really had no business buying anything edible. I bought several things edible.

Home again, and the Singapore Grand Prix on the television. I’ll admit to a soft spot for that race. Formula One under floodlights feels faintly theatrical, which suits it. There’s a certain pleasure in watching cars cost more than houses navigate a city street, while I sit on the sofa having spent the evening debating the merits of one kuih stall over another.

Before bed, I went in an entirely different direction and watched a few videos on electric vehicle care. With the car still fresh from its touch-ups, I’ve decided it’s time I knew more than which end the plug goes in. Battery health, charging habits, the small routines that keep things running well. It’s not thrilling viewing, but it’s oddly reassuring, rather like reading the instructions after you’ve already assembled the furniture.

Strange, really. An evening that started with racing cars ended with learning how to drive more gently. I suspect there’s a lesson in that somewhere, but I was too tired to look for it.

A Birthday, Borrowed for the Day

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSunday started the way most of them do — with rounds, the ward apparently having never heard of weekends off, and a public holiday hasn't yet been invented that changes its mind. Brisk enough, though, and out of the way early, which left the rest of the morning free for something rather nicer: it was Mak's birthday, and the day belonged to her from that point on.

Drove out to Bukit Antarabangsa to collect her, the sort of drive that's become familiar enough to do half on autopilot, and from there straight to Rebung for lunch. Packed, predictably — it always is, birthday or not — but the food did what Rebung's food generally does, which is make the wait feel like a formality rather than a complaint. Some restaurants earn their crowds honestly, and this is one of them.

After lunch, a couple of quick stops — BSC first, then Taman Melawati, neither of them requiring much explanation beyond the ordinary business of a birthday outing, a bit of browsing, nothing that needed to be anywhere in particular. The kind of errands that exist mainly to stretch a nice afternoon a little further before it has to end.

Dropped Mak home after that — she had her own plans for the evening, which is exactly as it should be on a birthday, the day not needing to be handed back in full to anyone. From there, on to TWG for tea, Rwanda Express specifically, which felt like a suitably unhurried way to close out the outing. There's something properly civilised about ending a birthday lunch with a pot of tea rather than rushing straight into whatever's next — a bit of a pause built in on purpose.

Home after that, and the evening turned practical rather quickly. Some reading to get through ahead of the BLS course first thing tomorrow, the sort of task that's easy to put off right up until it can't be put off any longer. Did it anyway, without too much resistance, on the grounds that Monday-morning-you rarely thanks Sunday-evening-you for the delay.

The weekend, such as it was, settled itself in from there — nothing left on the list, nothing hanging over into the week uninvited. And somewhere in among it all, the now-familiar routine of checking in on Irfan, a message or two across the time difference, enough to know all's well on that end. It's becoming its own small ritual, that check-in, the sort that'll probably ease off eventually but hasn't yet, and there's no particular hurry for it to.

So: a birthday properly marked, good food fought for and won, tea to close things out, and a bit of homework squeezed in before the week reasserts itself tomorrow. Not a bad way to send a Sunday off.

The Night Before

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere's a particular kind of morning that starts early because the day itself has no intention of easing you in, and this was one of them. No gentle build, no warming up — just straight into it, the way some Thursdays seem to arrive with their minds already made up.

It stayed that way throughout. Plenty of patients, one after another with barely a gap to notice the time passing, the sort of steady volume that doesn't overwhelm so much as simply accumulate. Lunch got squeezed in around a pharma meeting rather than the other way round, eaten at the sort of pace that technically counts as eating but doesn't leave much of an impression afterwards. By the time the afternoon caught up with the morning's momentum, there wasn't much room left for anything but pressing on.

Home after seven, which on a day like that felt less like lateness and more like the natural conclusion of it — the kind of hour that arrives when it arrives, without much say in the matter. Dinner, at least, was a proper one, unhurried in a way the rest of the day hadn't managed, the sort of meal that quietly makes up for everything that came before it.

But the day's real weight wasn't in the clinic. Irfan leaves for London tomorrow, and as of this evening he still hadn't packed — which is either supreme confidence or a fairly transparent way of putting off the moment where the packing makes it real. I recognise the tactic. I may have used it myself once or twice, in the years before I was the one standing in the doorway watching someone else do it.

There's a particular flavour to the night before a departure like this. It isn't dramatic, not really — no one's making speeches, the suitcase will get filled eventually, the flight will go as flights do. But it sits there anyway, a low hum under the ordinary evening, the sense that tomorrow changes the shape of the house a little, even if only for a term. Sad is the right word for it, though it's a quiet sort of sad, more ache than upheaval — the kind that comes from something going well rather than something going wrong.

So: a long day handed straight over to a heavier evening, with a case still to be packed and a goodbye still to be said. Tomorrow will take care of the practical part. Tonight was just for sitting with it.