Awal Muharram - The Midweek Lull

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA break in the middle of the week, which is the rarest and most civilised of luxuries. The trouble was the rain — a soft, insistent morning downpour of exactly the kind that turns the bed into an argument you're destined to lose. There is no more persuasive case for staying put than the sound of rain on glass before you've quite woken up. I lost the argument briefly, then got up anyway, as one does.

The ward round went ahead as usual, rain or no rain. The work doesn't observe public holidays of the heart, and the round has its own rhythm regardless of how reluctant its participants might feel. By the time it was done, the day had decided to behave, and I went to meet the afternoon properly.

Lunch was at TRX — Amazonas, which delivers every time and did so again. There's a confidence to a place that simply knows what it is and does it well, no fuss, no reinvention. You sit down, you eat properly, you leave content. After a damp start, it was exactly the right kind of indulgence.

Anita went off to inspect the new Mercedes F1 outfit, which tells you everything about where her attentions have wandered lately. She's back into the racing — properly back, the way one returns to an old enthusiasm and wonders why they ever left. I find there's something quite charming about watching someone rediscover a thing they love. The sport itself I can take or leave, but the renewed enthusiasm beside me is its own pleasant company.

Then, the film. Disclosure Day — Spielberg's return to the skies, the great man back among the lights and the wonder some fifty years on. I wanted to love it. I'd built a small cathedral of expectation around it. And it was, in the end, fine. Not the best of his work, not by a distance. There were moments where the old magic flickered, and rather more moments where it didn't. A perfectly decent way to spend a couple of hours, which from Spielberg feels faintly like an underachievement. You don't go to him for perfectly decent. Still — even his middling efforts have a craft to them that most directors would gladly claim as a peak.

The day closed with a haircut at Lucky Garden, that small reliable ritual that makes you feel marginally more put together than you did an hour earlier. There's a quiet satisfaction in it — the same chair, the same business, the brief sense of having tidied a loose end of yourself.

And now the evening winds down towards an absurd appointment: England playing at four in the morning. I'd like to say I'll have the discipline to sleep through it and catch the result over breakfast like a sensible adult. I'd like to say that. We'll see which version of me wins the argument when the alarm comes round — though I suspect, as with the rain this morning, I already know how it ends.

A Holiday That Forgot to Check the Roster

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere is a particular irony to a public holiday that arrives for everyone except you. The Agong's birthday had emptied the roads and shuttered half the city, yet the ward, as ever, took no notice of the calendar. Patients do not observe royal occasions, and neither, it seems, does the morning round. So while the rest of the country lay in, I made my quiet pilgrimage through the wards, notes in hand, the corridors unusually hushed.

Two of the team had vanished eastward — off to a meeting in China, leaving the rest of us to redistribute the workload with the cheerful resignation of people who know complaining changes nothing. The round went smoothly enough, and by noon I was free, which on a holiday feels less like an achievement and more like an unexpected refund.

Anita and I pointed the car towards Wangsa Maju, drawn back to Alpha Angle for lunch. There is something pleasantly unhurried about returning to a place that once formed the backdrop to ordinary life. When we lived in Gombak, this was where we drifted on idle afternoons, before either of us had the sense to wonder where the years were going. The mall has changed in the small ways malls do — a shopfront here, a new signboard there — but the bones of it remain familiar, and familiarity, on a day off, is its own kind of comfort.

Lunch slid easily into groceries, as these things tend to. One does not set out to buy a trolley's worth of provisions, and yet there I was, examining the relative virtues of one cut of something against another, while Anita made the more decisive calls. We left heavier than we arrived, which is the unspoken contract of any visit to a supermarket.

From there to Mid Valley, on a mission for bedding — a phrase that sounds far grander than the reality, which was the two of us standing before a wall of identical white linen, trying to detect meaningful differences in thread counts neither of us fully understood. We chose something, eventually. We always do.

The final stop was the Apple Store at TRX, where the day's true purpose quietly revealed itself. Anita had her eye on the new MacBook Neo, and after the requisite admiring of the thing in its box, she walked out with the citrus model — a colour that manages to be cheerful without being loud, much like its new owner. There is a small ceremony to collecting a new machine: the heft of it, the promise of a clean slate, the faint suspicion that one's old habits will migrate across regardless.

We came home as the light softened, the boot full, the day quietly accounted for. Not every holiday needs to be remarkable. Some are simply for retracing old steps, buying sensible things, and watching someone you love choose a laptop the colour of marmalade. That, I think, is holiday enough.