Half-Full Halls

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoNo clinic today, though that didn’t make it a day off. A stem cell infusion was scheduled for the morning, the sort of booking that sets the tone for everything around it. Infusions need patience and careful attention. It’s a slow, precise process, and the main skill involved is not rushing it. Everything went as it should, and it was all done by lunchtime, which is about as satisfying as a morning gets: one important job, done properly, with the afternoon still to come.

Lunch didn’t live up to the morning. I had mee bandung, a dish I’m fond of, which is exactly why it’s disappointing when it falls short. The broth lacked conviction, and the whole bowl seemed to be going through the motions. It’s a small letdown, but with a dish you love, an average version feels more like a broken promise than a bad meal. I finished it anyway, out of loyalty to the idea of it.

Family news arrived in between. Julia is back from New Zealand after her family trip, still full of mountain air, presumably, and already packing again, this time for Japan on Friday. Some people travel the way the rest of us check the post. In the short gap between trips she found time to collect Mak this morning, which is very like her: just back from one adventure, nearly off on the next, and still the one who does the driving.

I was home early, and Anita had decided we were eating out. In our house that kind of decision is an announcement rather than a proposal, and I’ve learned to treat it like the weather.

We went to Pavilion Damansara. It’s a huge place, the sort of building that seems to stretch on into the distance. It was busier than the last time we’d come, which was nice to see, but only about half the shops are open. That gives it an unfinished feel, like a stage only partly dressed. Long stretches of shutters and hoarding sit between the lit-up shops. Malls in their early years always seem a little hopeful, as if waiting for a crowd that hasn’t quite found them yet. This one is getting there.

Naturally we stopped at Kinokuniya. A bookshop that size works on me in a predictable way: I go in meaning to browse briefly and come out realising half an hour has gone. There’s a calm to those aisles that nowhere else in a mall really has, everyone moving a little more slowly and speaking a little more softly, as though the books might mind.

Then dinner, and home. Nothing elaborate, just a meal out with company I’d choose every time.

A morning that went exactly as planned, a lunch that didn’t, a sister-in-law between continents, or whatever Julia’s next stop turns out to be, and an evening wandering a mall still growing into itself. A full day, quietly.

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.

Charged and Trimmed

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days you can feel coming before they arrive. I woke this morning with that particular awareness, the sense of a diary that had been filled in by someone with great ambition and very little regard for the person who would have to live it. A busy day, then. Best to get on with it.

The morning clinic was a long one. Not unpleasant, simply long, the sort where the waiting room never quite empties and each conversation leads politely into the next. By the time it eased off, the morning had been thoroughly used up, with nothing left over for the luxury of a proper pause.

The afternoon brought a stem cell infusion, which is quieter and slower than it sounds, a matter of patience and careful watching. There is something steadying about it. The clock moves at its own pace, and for a while you move with it, whether you like it or not.

Somewhere in the background, the weekend had been assembling itself. Tomorrow we head for Cherating, by way of Kuantan, where Aya’s daughter is getting married. A wedding has a way of rearranging everyone’s priorities, and ours were duly rearranged. Plans were made, clothes considered, and the question of the drive itself came up, as it now inevitably does.

Which is how the evening began with a trip to Bangsar in search of somewhere to charge the car. Owning an EV, I am learning, adds a new layer to any journey. You no longer simply go somewhere. You go somewhere via somewhere else, with one eye on the battery percentage and the other on a map of charging points. It is not a burden exactly, more a new habit forming, like checking your pockets for keys before shutting the door.

While the car took its fill, I took the opportunity to have a haircut. There is a pleasing efficiency in two things being topped up and tidied at the same time. The barber worked with quiet focus, and I left looking marginally more presentable for a wedding, which seemed only fair given the effort everyone else would be making.

Home again, and the day was not quite finished with me. There was an online meeting with the team in Kota Bharu who are organising the ASM next year. Planning something a year ahead has its own strange gravity. Dates, venues and programmes all feel slightly hypothetical, until suddenly they are not. The team were enthusiastic and organised, which is the best combination one can hope for, and we ended with that pleasant sense of things beginning to take shape.

By the time the screen went dark it was late, and the house had settled around me. The car was charged, my hair was shorter, and the plans for both this weekend and next year were rather further along than they had been this morning.

A packed day, as predicted. There is a certain satisfaction in a forecast that turns out to be accurate, even when the forecast was mostly for exhaustion. Tomorrow, the east coast. Tonight, a little rest, and perhaps a last look at the packing list.

Landed

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere's a particular kind of morning where you're only half paying attention to your own day because most of your attention is somewhere over the Indian Ocean. That was this one. Irfan's flight was due into London by noon Malaysia time, and between patients there was a fair bit of quiet phone-checking going on — the flight tracker open in one tab, doing the thing flight trackers do, which is tell you almost nothing useful right up until the moment it tells you everything.

No delay, in the end, which felt like more than it probably deserved to. He landed on time, got himself an Uber straight to the apartment without any drama, and that was that — the sort of arrival that's almost disappointing in its lack of incident, except that a lack of incident is exactly what you're hoping for when someone you're fond of is landing in a city eight time zones away for the first time on his own. Uneventful is underrated. Uneventful is the goal.

Work carried on regardless, because it does. Clinic was smooth, mercifully so, the kind of morning that doesn't ask much of you right when you don't have much extra to give. I went through it a little distracted, checking the phone between patients more than I'd normally admit to, but it moved along without any real friction, which I'll take as the day cooperating for once.

Home early after that, properly tired in the way accumulated worry tends to leave you once the worry's been resolved — not the sharp kind of tired, more the sort that settles in once you're finally allowed to relax. And relax, more or less, is what the rest of the day was for. Knowing he'd arrived safely did more for the afternoon than anything on the schedule could have.

Dinner came early, unhurried, eaten with the particular lightness of a day that had turned out better than the quiet nerves of the morning had suggested it might. The evening after that asked for nothing much — just the sort of settling-in that comes naturally once the thing you'd been half-holding your breath for has actually happened, and happened well.

So: a flight tracked, a landing uneventful, a clinic survived on partial attention, and an evening spent simply glad of it. Not every day needs more than that. This one didn't.

Departures

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days have one job, and everything else is just filler around it. Today was that sort — the packing, the last errands, the slow accumulation of things that had to happen before the one thing that actually mattered. Irfan's off to London tonight, and the whole day arranged itself around that fact whether it meant to or not.

The packing itself got sorted during the day, which spared everyone the particular chaos of last-minute zip-wrestling an hour before leaving for the airport. I went about the morning's work as usual — rounds, the ordinary shape of a working day — though with half an eye on the clock in a way that doesn't normally happen on a Friday. Some days you're present for the whole of them. Today I was present for most of it and quietly counting down through the rest.

Home earlier than usual, because there was somewhere to be and traffic to be respected. The drive to KLIA was slow, the way it generally is at that hour, everyone else apparently also headed somewhere important, or at least driving as though they were. Still, we reached with time to spare, which meant no scrambling, no last looks at the departure board through breathless urgency — just the ordinary business of getting there properly, for once.

Dinner was the four of us, which doesn't happen as often as it should, and certainly not often enough to take for granted. There was a particular texture to it — nothing said out loud about it being a send-off dinner, but everyone quietly aware that it was. Good conversation, the sort that fills a table without needing to address the thing everyone's actually thinking about.

Then it was time, and he went in. The flight was delayed slightly, which is either a small mercy or a mild cruelty depending on how you're inclined to view extra waiting on a night like that — a bit more time in the airport, a bit less finality to the goodbye, though the goodbye had already happened by then in all the ways that count.

Home after, to a house with one fewer occupant for the foreseeable future. Anita wants his room left exactly as it is over the weekend — nothing tidied, nothing rearranged, no rush to make the absence official just yet. I understand it completely. There's a difference between a room that's simply empty and a room that's been cleared out, and she's not ready for the second one. Neither, if I'm honest, am I.

So: a day built entirely around one departure, handled properly, without fuss, and landing somewhere quieter than usual by the time it was done. He's on his way. The house will get used to it. Not tonight, though.