My brother rang me at two o’clock in the morning.
Nobody had died. Nothing was on fire. He wanted to know how I was getting on.
“Alright? How you doing?”
What I was doing was unconscious. Thirty-fourth floor, curtains shut, ceiling fan going round like a helicopter that can’t be bothered, and my phone lighting up the ceiling with a man in England who’d just got in from work and fancied a chat.
He hadn’t done the maths. He hadn’t started the maths. In his head I was simply over there, and over there apparently keeps the same hours as Essex.
Seven hours ahead. Or eight. Depends how Britain’s feeling.
Here’s the thing nobody puts in the moving-abroad guides, in between the shipping quotes and the advice about labelling your boxes.
Malaysia is seven hours ahead of the UK in British Summer Time, and eight in the winter, because Britain still shifts its clocks twice a year like a bloke who can’t get comfortable in bed. The flight is about thirteen hours from Heathrow. The time gap is most of a working day.
So when I get up, England’s asleep. By the time England’s had its breakfast I’ve done my day and I’m thinking about my tea.
My brother rang at seven in the evening, his time. Feet up, dinner eaten, an entirely reasonable hour to ring your brother. Add seven hours and you arrive at two in the morning, which is a slightly less reasonable hour to be rung.
He was mortified, for the record. Then he did it again about a month later.
So I put my own family on a timetable
There is no dignified way to send your mother a schedule. I did it anyway.
Five till seven in the evening, my time. Ten till twelve in the morning, yours. Don’t ring me — I’ll ring you.
Two hours a day, put out on WhatsApp like a garden centre announcing revised opening hours. After seven I’d like my evening. Meal, telly, bed. I’m fifty-four, not a switchboard.
And it worked, which was somehow the annoying part. I’d spent weeks not wanting to say anything in case it sounded like I was rationing my own family, and then I said it in four lines and everyone went “oh, right, fair enough.”
One warning, because this one catches everybody. The window moves in winter. When Britain puts its clocks back — the last Sunday in October, so the 25th this year — five in the afternoon here stops being ten in the morning there and becomes nine. Diarise it. Otherwise you spend a fortnight quietly annoying each other and nobody can work out why.
Thank god for WhatsApp
Almost everything now is voice messages. You leave one, they get it when they wake up. They leave one back, you get it when you wake up. It’s letter-writing with your actual voice on it, and it’s the only reason an eight-hour gap is survivable at all.
My daughter has never once just rung. Not out of coldness — she leaves a message, I leave one back, and it works better than a call ever did, because neither of us is watching a clock while we talk. She’s back in England now and we probably speak more than we did when I lived there. Make of that what you like.
“I thought you already was on holiday”
I told my mother we were off to Krabi for a week. Thailand. Beach, longtail boats, the whole postcard.
She said: “I thought you already was on holiday.”
Seven words, and there’s the entire English understanding of what I do out here.
You left England. You went somewhere hot. Therefore you are on holiday, and have been on holiday continuously since the day you landed, and going to Thailand is going on holiday from your holiday.
I’ve stopped fighting it. There’s no winning it. I go to work, I do a shop, I put a wash on and forget about it until it needs doing again. But the sun’s out while I’m doing it, so apparently it doesn’t count.
Close the door, you’re letting the heat in
Growing up in London it was “close the door, you’re letting the heat out” — bellowed up the hallway every winter by somebody who’d just watched a teenager leave the front door swinging on its hinges.
Out here it’s “close the door, you’re letting the heat in.”
Same sentence. One word different. They’ve got the heating on, I’ve got the aircon on, and seven thousand miles apart there are two people shouting at somebody about a door.
That single word is the whole distance between us, and it’s funnier than anything I could make up.
The bit where I disappoint everyone
They ring expecting an adventure. Temples. Monkeys. Some sort of incident.
“What you been up to, then?”
“Nothing really. Just been at work.”
You can hear it land. That small pause, and then the polite “oh. Was that it?”
They’ve come to the phone for a documentary and got a bloke describing his commute. And they’re not wrong to be disappointed, because they’ve pictured something and I’ve handed them a Tuesday. But that’s what living somewhere is. Visiting a place and living in a place are two completely different activities that happen to occur in the same postcode. After a while the palm trees outside the window are just what’s outside the window.
So I bank things up
Here’s the bit I don’t normally admit to.
I save things. If I find a decent restaurant, or I’m in a mall I’ve not been in before, or I’ve got on a train for no particular reason and ended up somewhere — part of me is filing it away. Not for the blog. For them. So that when the phone goes I’ve got something to hand over.
I’ll film it, as well. Get the video, save the video, ready for Sunday.
And they told me, flat out, not to bother:
“I don’t want you to send me videos. I want to hear your voice and have you explain it to me.”
Took me a while to understand that, and then it took about two seconds.
They don’t want Malaysia. They can have Malaysia any hour of the day, in 4K, off a phone, narrated by someone with better lighting and a drone. What they want is me telling them about Malaysia — badly, with the wrong details, in the wrong order, going back to correct myself halfway through.
The video is the thing anyone can send. The voice is the only bit that’s actually mine.
If you’re about to move a working day away from everyone
Four things, all of which I got wrong first:
- Set the calling window in month one, not month six. Do it before somebody rings at 2am, not after. It’s a much easier conversation when it isn’t obviously about your brother.
- Make it “I’ll ring you”, never “ring me”. Puts the clock in the hands of the person who has to live with it, and it takes the guesswork off everyone else.
- Voice notes as the default, calls as the treat. A two-minute voice message costs nothing and lands in their morning. Trying to schedule a live call across seven hours every week will quietly wear both of you down.
- Put the clock changes in your diary. The last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October. Malaysia never changes its clocks, so the whole gap shifts underneath you twice a year and only one of you notices.
If you want the rest of what nobody warns you about, I’ve written up what it was like arriving having not left Britain in twenty-two years, the British food you’ll actually miss, and the unglamorous business of what a month here actually costs. There’s also an honest guide to the weather, since roughly everyone asks.
What I do now
I ring, and I describe it. Badly. And if I’m out when we’re talking I’ll point the phone at whatever’s in front of me and send it while we’re still on the call — here, look, this is what I’m looking at right now — usually while it’s chucking it down in England and somebody’s got the heating on and the door shut.
They still think I’m on holiday.
I’ve decided to let them have it.
