Topped Up, Worn Down

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe last morning of a trip has its own particular quiet. Nobody says it’s over, but everybody knows. After breakfast I went for a slow walk around the hotel. It wasn’t to see anything new. It was to look one more time at what I’d already seen, the way you look round a room before you switch the light off.

Anita stayed behind to pack, which she does far better than I do and with far less commentary. I came back to find the cases already closed and the job done.

Then the morning’s small miracle: Idlan was on time. Not nearly on time, and not on time by a generous reading of the clock. Actually ready, bag in hand, when we said we’d leave. I didn’t mention it, in case drawing attention to it broke the spell. Some things you just quietly enjoy.

We set off just after eleven. With an electric car, a long drive is really a series of short ones, joined together by charging stops. The first was Kuala Kangsar, where the plan was to have lunch while the car had its own. The town didn’t go along with that. Most of the restaurants were shut, and the ones that weren’t didn’t look keen on visitors. So the car charged and we stayed hungry, and lunch moved down the road to the R&R at Sungai Perak. It wasn’t the meal we’d pictured, but an R&R lunch has never claimed to be anything grander. It fed us, and that was all we asked of it.

Then came Tapah. A lorry had broken down somewhere ahead, and for nearly an hour the whole highway seemed to be thinking about it. We moved slowly, then stopped, then moved a little and stopped again. You can’t hurry a jam like that, and you can’t blame anyone in it. Everyone is just sitting in their own car, losing the same afternoon together. The radio ran out of things to say. So, for a while, did we.

By the time we reached KL it was almost Maghrib. The light was going soft, the streetlamps were coming on, and the city looked the way it always does when you come back: louder than you remember, and somehow still home.

There was one more charge to do before we were properly home, at the charger near the house. It felt like a small last chore, the car topping up while the rest of us ran on empty.

It was a tiring day, and not because of any one thing. It was the miles, the waiting and the stopping, piling up slowly. That’s how journeys home usually go. The trip itself gets the photos. The drive back gets an aching back and a quiet car.

Work tomorrow. The cases can wait until morning. Tonight the only plan is to stop moving.

The Long Way Round to Where It Started

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA good night’s sleep. The rare, unbroken kind, where you close your eyes and open them again and the night has simply been folded up and put away without fuss.

I woke early. It had rained all night, and was still at it, steady and unbothered.

First order of business: charging the car. In the rain. There’s no graceful way to do this. You stand there with the cable, hood up, collar damp, feeling vaguely like a man refuelling a spaceship in a monsoon. The car, of course, stayed perfectly dry throughout. I did not.

Breakfast restored a certain dignity.

Then we drove to Kepala Batas.

I chose the first Penang Bridge this time. The older crossing. It seemed right, somehow, for where we were going. Then off the highway and onto the old Butterworth road, through the kampong, the way we used to come before there were quicker ways to come.

A lot has changed.

That’s the polite way of putting it. New houses where there were fields. Shops where there were none. Roads widened, corners straightened. And yet, every so often, something unchanged would appear: a particular bend, a stretch of paddy, a row of trees standing where they always stood. Like a familiar face in a crowd of strangers.

Then Permatang Bertam.

The house where I was born. Where I grew up.

I won’t try to describe what that feels like. Partly because it’s private, and partly because I’m not sure I could. Houses are smaller than you remember. Everyone says that, and it’s true. But it’s also larger, in ways that have nothing to do with size. We stood there a while. Didn’t say much. Didn’t need to.

Then on, because the day does go on.

A stop in town for biscuits. There’s always a shop, isn’t there. The one you’ve been going to since before you could see over the counter. Some purchases are less about the biscuits than about continuing a sentence that started decades ago.

Lunch with Teh in Sungai Petani. Good food, better company, the easy kind of catching up where nobody has to explain who anyone is.

On the way back, Seberang Jaya for jeruk. Penang’s pickled fruits, sharp and sweet and slightly alarming in colour. You can’t leave the north without them. It isn’t permitted.

A quick rest at the hotel. Brief, but necessary.

Then out again, over to Balik Pulau for dinner, the island’s quieter side, all hills and dusk and winding roads. Laksa at Fara Idlan Cafe, again, because when something is right, you return to it without apology. Sour, fishy, fragrant, deeply unreasonable in the best way. Then goreng pisang to finish. Hot, crisp, a little greasy. A full stop with a flourish.

It had been a long day. Long in miles. Longer in other ways.

An early night, then.

Tomorrow, the drive back to KL. The road south, the city waiting at the end of it.

But today, for a few hours, I went home.

Sea Air and Second Helpings

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoI woke to the sea. Not the sound of it so much as the feel of it, that soft, salted breeze slipping in through the room, carrying the faint suggestion that today might be gentler than yesterday.

It wasn’t, as it turned out. But it started well.

The walk to breakfast along those long, pale corridors is a small pleasure in itself. The E&O does a quiet kind of grandeur: high ceilings, polished floors, ceiling fans turning with the unhurried confidence of something that has done this for a century and sees no reason to rush now.

And the breakfast. I’d half braced myself for disappointment, as one does with things remembered fondly. No need. It was as good as ever. Perhaps better. There is a moment at a proper hotel buffet where restraint simply leaves the building. I let it go without protest.

Then a Grab to Capri, and the working part of the day.

Two talks, back to back, followed by a discussion. The first talk is always the one where you find your feet. The second is where you discover whether you were standing on them correctly. Both went well enough. The discussion afterwards had that lively, slightly unpredictable quality good discussions have, where the room starts thinking out loud and you try to keep up without looking as though you’re trying.

Lunch was substantial. I say this with respect. It was the kind of lunch that assumes you’ll be doing very little for the rest of the afternoon, which, after the breakfast, was entirely fair.

Done by four. A rare and welcome finish.

Back at the hotel, Mak and Anita had reached that state of hunger that admits no discussion. Not peckish. Not interested in lunch. Starving, plainly and urgently. One doesn’t negotiate with that. One books a Grab.

So off to Dulang for an early dinner. Good food, unhurried, the sort of meal where the conversation picks up as the plates empty. It’s a fine thing, an early dinner. You get all the satisfaction of eating and still have the evening left over, like change from a generous note.

Not that the evening was finished with food. Back at the hotel, there were canapé bites waiting. Small, elegant, and frankly unnecessary. We had several.

Then Anita and I went for a stroll into town.

George Town at night has its own quiet charm. Old shophouses lit in warm yellows, five-foot ways half in shadow, the occasional burst of noise from somewhere tucked away. We didn’t walk with a purpose. That was the point. Just the two of us, the warm air, the uneven pavements, a pace set by nobody in particular.

It was a nice walk. Simple as that. Some things don’t need dressing up.

By the time we got back, I was exhausted. Properly, comprehensively done. Two talks, a discussion, too much food, and a city’s worth of pavement will do that.

I don’t remember my head touching the pillow.

The sea, I’m told, carried on regardless.

North by Northwest, in the Wet

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe morning’s work went quickly. Suspiciously so. By noon I was heading home, which felt faintly illicit, like leaving a party before the speeches.

Home, but not to rest. There was paperwork, the kind that multiplies when unattended, and slides for tomorrow’s talk to look over one more time. I went through them twice. Changed a word. Changed it back. Preparation, at a certain point, becomes a nervous habit wearing a sensible jacket.

Then the waiting. Idlan had his online class, and the departure was scheduled around it, as departures with children generally are. You don’t leave when you’re ready. You leave when everyone is ready, which is a different hour altogether.

And then we were off.

It rained. Naturally. The sky seemed to have saved it all for the moment we set out.

Getting out of KL was the usual negotiation. Heavy traffic, slow lanes, brake lights stretching ahead like a string of red beads that someone kept tugging. Rain doesn’t just slow the roads here. It seems to make everyone reconsider their choices at every junction.

Eventually the city loosened its grip.

Simpang Pulai for a charge. There’s a particular kind of stop that only EV drivers know: the deliberate pause, the plug, the small ritual of watching numbers climb in a car park with rain drumming on the roof. Not quite a rest. Not quite travel. A sort of in-between, with snacks.

Back on the road, it kept raining. All the way. Through the hills, past Ipoh’s dim silhouette, down the long stretches where the highway lights blur into soft streaks on wet glass. The wipers kept their steady, slightly weary rhythm. Conversation came and went. Mostly went.

But the traffic, at least, had relented. Smooth after that. Hours that pass without incident have their own quiet satisfaction. You don’t remember them, which is rather the point.

One more toilet break before the second Penang bridge. It seemed prudent. Nobody wants to discover a pressing need halfway across twenty-odd kilometres of water at night.

Then the bridge itself. Long, dark, lit in a thin line, the sea invisible on either side. There’s something about crossing water at night that feels like a proper arrival, even before you’ve arrived. The island announces itself slowly. Lights first. Then shapes.

We reached the E&O just before midnight.

The old building was calm at that hour, its corridors hushed, the kind of grandeur that doesn’t need an audience. We were too tired to admire it properly. A quick check-in. Bags in. Shoes off. The heavy, grateful silence of a room after a long drive.

Settled in quickly. No ceremony, no unpacking worth mentioning.

Tomorrow there’s a talk to give, and a weekend to begin.

Tonight, though, the island can wait.

The rain has finally stopped.

Freedom, Briefly Scheduled

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe colleague is back. Tanned, rested, and suspiciously cheerful, the way people always are on their first day after a holiday, before the inbox has had a chance to get its hands on them.

I handed back the borrowed chair. It felt like returning a library book I’d only just started enjoying.

More time for myself, then. That was the theory.

In practice, the day had other plans, and they were written in pen.

The morning’s work wrapped up early, which I chose to interpret as a good omen rather than a trap. Then straight to physio. There’s something quietly humbling about physiotherapy. You arrive believing you’re a reasonably functional adult, and leave having been gently informed that a muscle you’d never heard of has been sulking for weeks. They’re always kind about it. That somehow makes it worse.

From there, no detours. Straight to the PJ Hilton for a dinner talk.

The talk was good. Genuinely good. The sort where you find yourself nodding without deciding to, and scribbling a note you’ll actually read later. Ideas, well put. Questions that went somewhere. An hour that justified the drive.

The dinner was not.

I won’t dwell on it. Let’s just say the food had clearly been introduced to flavour at some point, but the relationship hadn’t lasted. Hotel banquet cooking occupies its own peculiar category. Everything is the right temperature for about four seconds. Everything looks as though it means well.

Still, you don’t go to a dinner talk for the dinner. That’s what I told myself, somewhere around the second disappointing forkful.

Afterwards, the evening’s last errand: charging the car at a TNB station.

A few weeks into driving an EV and I’m still learning its etiquette. Planning becomes a small, constant hum in the background. Not anxiety, exactly. More like a polite awareness. With a long drive coming, a full battery stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the whole plan.

So there I sat, in a car park at night, watching a percentage climb with the attention normally reserved for football scores. A curious modern ritual. Plugged in, waiting, the city carrying on around me. Oddly peaceful, really. A forced pause at the end of a day that hadn’t offered many.

Because tomorrow is Penang.

The weekend away, after work. Straight from one thing to the long road north, which is either admirably efficient or mildly foolish, depending on how the traffic behaves out of the Klang Valley on a Friday evening. I suspect I already know the answer. I’ve decided not to think about it.

There’s an odd lightness in having somewhere to go. Even with the drive, even with the work beforehand. The weekend has a shape now. A destination. Food that will, with any luck, make up for tonight.

Penang owes me a decent meal.

I intend to collect.