I took the bus out of Penang heading south across Malaysia. As we approached Kuala Lumpur, three year old memories started jostling to be reviewed. Three years ago I had come here on a two week holiday from work, stayed in KL, visited the east coast island of Pangkor and taken a sleeper train down to Singapore. It was my first trip outside Europe and the US, and my main recollection of my time in KL was the incredible humid heat - it destroyed me. I was forever retreating to air conditioning, so as a result never adapted and had bizarre sleep patterns.

But I remember, on the road out to Pangkor, seeing from out the bus window huge and various housing construction sites, one after another. Coming back into the city three years later, these sites were still being built, and had been added to - enormous blocks of flats were being skeletoned out by cranes.
Into KL, it was amazing how much was still in my memory: the beautiful Maybank HQ, the Petronas towers, the road up a hill leading to all the posh hotels.

The tallest building in the world:

My brother had offered to pay for my night in the hotel he and Georgina were staying at, and this turned out to be the not too shabby five star "Mutiara" (forty pounds a night, if you're interested). I was told they hadn't checked in yet, so I have been reclining in this frankly stunning and voluminous room and am typing until they arrive.

How to describe my brother? Aside from having the same parents, a good rule of thumb is that we are opposites. Physically, he is taller and much broader than me. He takes after the Scottish side of the family, from our father - I take after the Eastern European Jewish side, from our mother. So I have a hairy chest, brown eyes and a somewhat substantial nose - he is pale, burns easily, has blue grey eyes. He looks, I think, far more "English", if such a thing exists. To many people in Latin America and Asia, I seem too dark-featured to be English (I've discovered the world gets its picture of the English through watching all those Merchant Ivory / Helena Bonham Carter films). I frequently get told I look French, most memorably at a Honduras street stall: "I thought you were French, but then I said to myself, no Frenchman would eat food with us common people in the street - he cannot be French"...
Beyond physical comparisons, the true differences lie. My brother is far cooler than me - he likes garage and hip hop music and can apparently dance to both, and he's been courting fracas since an early age, perhaps beginning when he drank bleach thinking it was orange juice. But looking at it another way, he's quite the old man, very set in his ways. He knows what he likes and doesn't like to experiment. People at his work make fun of him because he has exactly the same sandwich at the same time for lunch every day.
He loves football - I hate it. He doesn't like travel - in his words, "The further you get from England, the bigger the bugs get".
I think he sees me as quite a weirdo. Wheareas I am perpetually running around trying to do new things and worrying about concerns never occurring to him, he seems to find contentment with far less difficulty.

My brother:


Why has this reunion in Malaysia come about? Well, Mark's (rather glamourous, if I may say) girlfriend, Georgina, has landed a three week role in a new production of Annie the musical, showing near to KL in the Genting Highlands, the "Las Vegas of Malaysia". She and the rest of the cast are staying in this highland hub of casinos and hotels, and so Mark flew out to stay with her and meet up with me.

Although we get on very well now, I think, we are still very different people, and want quite different things for the next two weeks. So I think what will happen is that I will spend a couple of days with him and Georgina, go off exploring somewhere, come back after some days, visit the Genting Highlands and watch the musical with him, and see how everything goes. Very eager, very eager to meet him, quite curious how he'll take to his nomad brother blown in from the desert...

Waiting for a long time, I went back to the lobby to get some food, and immediately spotted him waiting for me - he had no idea I had arrived and had been sitting watching the door.
We embraced each other - it was just great to see him. He, Georgina and I talked for a long time - the things I had been doing, what had been going on back in London, how Georgina's show was going. We remembered our stories: how I had nearly killed him as a toddler, when I had rocked him in the rocking chair too hard and sent his little body on a catapulting collision course with a radiator; the time he had thrown a shoe at my face, shouting, "I'm the Incredible Hulk!" - this incident had resulted in the parental confiscation of his Incredible Hulk pyjamas and bedroom curtains.

It was great, as the three of us walked the streets later on, to be seeing Asia afresh. So many things no longer captivate me, so many things I haven't even noticed their metamorphosis into the almost everyday. To see the low prices of almost everything here as unbelievable, to be happy that a meal costs a third or less of what it does at home - these are pleasures I realised I had lost through experience. I had a lovely day, especially as Mark kept buying me my meals and drinks - "Your money's no good here Dan". I made a token effort to repay him by tracking down a pirated DVD of the incredible (and incredibly brutal) Thai movie, Ong Bak.
A very ironic moment: we went to a Chinese restaurant, I expecting a reunion with the food I had eaten so much of in west China. But this restaurant, just like most of the ones in London, served what I think is southern Chinese food, the cuisine of the Cantonese who now live across the world. The menu was full of English favourites that I had all but forgotten - Mark and Georgina were the ones feeling at home in the restaurant, I was the one at sea.

Here are several attempts to get Mark to smile for the camera - Georgina managed it fine, but I've just got some silly faces from my brother: The many faces of Mark.

We went back to the hotel, and paused for a few hours before going for some beers. I enjoyed the delicious luxuries a five star hotel room offers - first among these was the room's big bath. I slept the night in my huge double bed, nibbled the cakes mum had sent out with Mark for me.

Daniel, Kuala Lumpur, 9 June 2004