A Change of Driver

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSunday, and it started the way Sundays around here usually do — with rounds, because the weekend has never quite managed to negotiate its way out of that one. Mercifully light this time. Not many patients, nothing lingering, and finished early enough that the rest of the day still felt properly owned rather than grudgingly handed back.

Which meant lunch could be early, and it could be somewhere worth the drive. Bandar Tasek Selatan, to a Yemeni stall called Nasi Arab Chef Abdullah — the kind of place you'd walk past if nobody had told you about it, and would regret walking past if they had. It was excellent. Rice that had clearly been treated with respect, meat that fell apart with the faintest encouragement, and that particular fragrance of Arab cooking that settles over a table and makes conversation briefly unnecessary. Some meals are pleasant; this was one of those that recalibrates what you'll expect from the next one.

Then on to Pavilion for a bit of shopping, with a specific mission: books from Muji. There's something very Muji about buying a notebook there — the quiet aisles, the unbleached paper, the faint suggestion that owning the right notebook might make you a more organised person. It never quite does, but the optimism is part of the purchase.

A stop at Bangsar Village after that, timed, as it turned out, just ahead of the weather. The sky had been building towards something all afternoon, and there's a certain satisfaction in getting in and out of somewhere before the heavens make their feelings known.

And then the moment of the day, arriving without much fanfare. Anita took the wheel from Bangsar Village to home — her first time driving in almost four years. It was handled with calm and no small amount of competence, and I did my level best to be the ideal passenger, which mostly consists of saying nothing, gripping nothing, and resisting any urge to point out things she can perfectly well see for herself. Four years is a long gap, but it's remarkable how quickly the hands remember what the head has half forgotten. The timing, too, couldn't be much better — with the new car on its way, it seems only fair that she gets properly reacquainted with the business of driving before it arrives. A car with two confident drivers is a considerably more useful thing than a car with one.

Home in good order, and the day settled in from there. The weather did eventually turn, as promised, and there's no better soundtrack to staying indoors than rain arriving just after you've stopped needing to be anywhere.

The evening went to Reacher, catching up on episodes — the show continuing to operate on the principle that most problems can be resolved by a very large man walking calmly towards them. It doesn't ask much of its audience, which on a Sunday evening is exactly the right amount.

A light round, an excellent lunch, new notebooks full of good intentions, and a driver back behind the wheel after four years. A tidy Sunday, all told — and one with a quiet milestone tucked into the drive home.