Port Klang Biscuits

Port Klang gave me four hours ashore and one very efficient shop. I would like to suggest that I used the time in a spirit of wide cultural enquiry, but the evidence came back aboard in a biscuit bag. Four hours encourages clear priorities. Mine turned out to be remarkably easy to establish once confronted with shelves of portable provisions.

I returned with pineapple biscuits, coffee sweets and a decorative tin of butter cookies showing Kuala Lumpur in gold. The tin is splendid in the confident way that souvenir packaging often is. I did not see Kuala Lumpur. I have the tin. This may not qualify as a meaningful encounter with the city, but it does offer a durable representation and somewhere to keep biscuits.

The bag rustled reassuringly as I came back. There is a modest pleasure in carrying supplies aboard, a sense of having improved one's circumstances through decisive action rather than merely sitting about hoping dinner will be good. I had tea times to think of, and the pineapple biscuits promised a useful expansion of the available range. The coffee sweets suggested possibilities of their own.

Container greeted me at the gangway and followed the biscuit bag all the way upstairs. Her attention was flattering until I noticed how precisely it tracked the purchases rather than the purchaser. Friendship has motives. I cannot be too severe about this, since my own enthusiasm for shore leave had just been expressed through butter cookies. We made our way up together, both apparently pleased with what I had brought back.