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.

Ramen, and the Rest of It

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA sunny start, which after the week's steady grey felt like the city had remembered it had another setting. Everything looked better lit. It's remarkable how much of a mood is simply a question of what the light is doing.

Anita was out with friends today — a continuation of the birthday, which has by now stretched comfortably into its own small season. I approve of this entirely. A single evening never seems quite adequate, and she has the sort of friends who treat a birthday as a standing invitation rather than a fixed appointment.

Once the morning's work was behind me, I drove straight to Bukit Bintang. No particular reason beyond wanting to be somewhere with people in it. Ramen for lunch, which is a decision I make roughly once a fortnight and have never once regretted. There's something restorative about a bowl that demands your full attention — you can't check anything, can't half-do it, you simply sit there and get on with the business of eating. Twenty minutes of enforced presence, delivered by broth.

Afterwards, a short walk around the area, mostly to let the ramen settle and partly because it seemed a waste to leave immediately. Bukit Bintang in the early afternoon is a strange, pleasant thing — half the crowd is tourists moving slowly with their heads up, the other half is people who work there moving quickly with their heads down, and the two streams flow through one another without much friction. I walked without a destination, which I do far too rarely, and noticed several things I've driven past a hundred times without seeing.

Physio in the late afternoon. Necessary, useful, and conducted in that brisk, unsentimental manner these sessions have, where you're praised for something you didn't know you were doing and corrected on something you were certain you'd mastered. I came out feeling loosened and mildly humbled, which is presumably the intention.

Dinner at Bangsar Village, alone, and unexpectedly enjoyable for it. Eating on your own has a bad reputation it doesn't deserve. Nobody to consult about the order, nobody's pace to match, and a perfectly good excuse to watch the room. Bangsar on a bright evening is good watching: the shopping-bag brigade, a few families negotiating with children, the usual cast of people who appear to have been sitting at the same table since noon.

Then home, and prep for tomorrow's talks. That's the part of the day that always takes longer than the estimate, because the material never behaves the way it did in your head. You read through what you've prepared and find the joins, the bit that doesn't quite lead into the next bit, the slide that seemed clever on Tuesday and now seems merely busy. I got it into decent shape. Not perfect — nothing is, the night before — but decent.

Tomorrow will be a talking sort of day. Tonight was a walking, eating, stretching sort of day, and that seems a fair way to have earned it.

Injustice Before Breakfast

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoWoke up to the sort of football news that makes you want to lodge a formal complaint before you've even had coffee. Egypt had led Argentina 2-0, held it deep into the second half, and then watched it unravel in the space of about twenty minutes — a disallowed goal, a penalty appeal waved away, and Enzo Fernández finishing it off in stoppage time to complete the smash and grab. Argentina through, 3-2, and Twitter, predictably, on fire about it. Robbed felt like the word of the morning, even if the VAR officials would no doubt disagree with the verdict from the comfort of their monitors. Football has a cruel sense of timing, and Tuesday's dose of it arrived before I'd properly woken up.

The day itself started with a Grab, first stop physio, which is one of those appointments that's good for you in principle and mildly disruptive to a schedule in practice. It ran long, or perhaps I'd simply misjudged how long "long" would feel once I was watching the clock rather than my own shoulder, and by the time I was back in the car heading for Subang the morning had already developed a lean, hurried quality it hadn't asked for.

Getting back meant rushing straight into rounds, the kind of arrival where you're still mentally catching up to your own body. No graceful transition, just straight into it, one task chasing the tail of the last. The clinic that followed was a long one — properly long, the sort that eats an afternoon whole and leaves you slightly surprised at how much daylight has disappeared by the time you next check. A meeting at five kept things moving rather than easing them off, and by the time everything was finally done, the sun had already gone down without much fanfare, the way it tends to when you're too occupied to notice it happening.

Another Grab home, the city outside doing its usual evening thing — headlights, hawker smoke, the low hum of a Tuesday winding down for everyone except, it seemed, for me. Home wasn't quite the end of it either. More calls, a few stray emails that had been quietly multiplying while I wasn't looking, the low-grade admin tax that always seems to charge interest overnight.

By the time I finally sat down properly, it was less an evening and more the tail end of one, salvaged mostly by the first episode of Silo's new season, which I managed to squeeze in before sleep made its closing argument. Not a bad way to end a day that had, in its own way, mirrored Egypt's morning — promising, then complicated, then over rather more abruptly than expected. Bed came not a moment too soon.

Rain on the Way to a Wedding

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe weekend came into view at last, and with it a morning that started smoothly — no early alarms of the urgent kind, just the gentle beginning a Saturday ought to have. There were rounds to do, of course; the ward doesn't observe weekends, and there's something almost meditative about the quieter weekend version of it, the corridors calmer, the pace more forgiving. I worked through it without event and emerged into the rest of the day feeling I'd earned it.

I caught up with the football, naturally — that ongoing ritual of reassembling the night's results, the World Cup still unspooling across distant time zones while we sleep. By now I've stopped fighting the rhythm of it. I take my football secondhand and slightly stale, and I've come to find a certain charm in arriving at the drama after everyone else has gone home.

Then out to Kota Damansara for physio, that standing appointment my right shoulder and I have reluctantly entered into. The session does its work — somewhere between massage and mild interrogation — and I leave each time feeling marginally improved and considerably more aware of muscles I'd rather not have been introduced to. Progress, they assure me. I take their word for it.

A quick bite afterwards, grabbed in the gap, and then the heavens opened. Properly opened — the sort of tropical downpour that turns car parks into rivers and reduces every driver to a crawl, wipers labouring, visibility down to the next set of brake lights. There's a particular resignation that settles over the Klang Valley when the rain arrives like that: everyone simply slows, accepts the delay, and waits for the sky to finish its business.

The evening's main event was a wedding dinner — the son of one of Anita's old friends from her UiTM days, held out at Le Meridien Putrajaya. There's a lovely continuity to these occasions, watching the children of long friendships arrive at their own milestones, the parents now seated in the role their own parents once held. Anita moved easily through the reunions, that warm rediscovery of faces not seen in years, while I did my contented part — eating well, nodding along, enjoying the gentle theatre of a Malaysian wedding dinner in full swing.

The drive out to Putrajaya in the wet had its own slow patience to it, but the destination was worth the journey: those broad ceremonial avenues looking rather grand under the rain, the hotel warm and bright against the weather. It was the kind of evening that asks little of you beyond presence and appetite, both of which I supplied generously.

We finished well after half ten, which by my current standards counts as a genuinely late night. The drive home was quiet, the rain finally easing, the day's long arc settling at last into tiredness. A full Saturday — rounds, physio, a downpour, and a wedding — and a good one. I went home damp, well-fed, and ready for sleep.

The Body Sends a Memo

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA sunny start to the day, and the morning round went smoothly — patients sorted out in good time, the list closing neatly rather than fraying at the edges. There's a quiet satisfaction in finishing on schedule, in walking away from a morning that asked for nothing more than what you'd planned to give. A weekend round done well leaves the rest of the day feeling earned.

Which was just as well, because the rest of the day was largely given over to repairs. I drove out to Kota Damansara for physio — the right shoulder has been playing up this past month, and it has now reached the stage where ignoring it is no longer a credible strategy. It was sore enough to warrant acupuncture, that curious business of being made to feel better by means of small needles and quiet faith. I won't pretend to understand entirely how it works, only that the shoulder and I have reached an arrangement, and the shoulder, frankly, has the upper hand at present. The body, having served without complaint for a good while, has begun sending the occasional memo. One reads them whether one wants to or not.

After that, a late lunch at Johnny's in Alpha Angle — the sort of unfussy, familiar place that asks nothing of you but your appetite. There's comfort in a meal that requires no decisions, no occasion, just sitting down somewhere you've sat a hundred times before and letting it be exactly what it always is.

And perhaps it was the familiarity of the place, or the slowness of a sore Saturday, but we fell to reminiscing — back to the Gombak years, when we lived out that way and the boys were still small. Funny how those days arrive unbidden, summoned by nothing in particular. They were not, at the time, days we thought we'd one day miss. They were just the days we were in — busy, ordinary, faintly exhausting in the way that small children make everything. And now they have that warm, burnished quality that ordinary things acquire only once they're safely behind you. We didn't dwell on it. You don't need to. A few minutes of "do you remember" is enough to acknowledge the thing and move on, which is probably the healthiest way to handle the past.

A quick stop at the pasar malam in Melawati on the way back — that reliable parade of light and smoke and noise, the smell of grilled things hanging in the evening air. I didn't buy much. Sometimes the walking-through is the point, more than the buying.

Then home, and an early night, the shoulder insisting on it more firmly than I'd have chosen myself. There's no arguing with a sore body once it's made up its mind. It had been a good day, in its quiet, slightly creaky way — a morning done right, an afternoon spent mending, and a brief, unsentimental visit to a version of us from twenty years ago. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday. The shoulder may disagree. It usually does.