… if your house was burning down? It used to be a tricky question, didn’t it? Photos? money? passport?  Nowadays I’d bet most of us would grab our mobile phones as we fled. (After assuring the safety of our nearest and dearest. Obviously).

My Malaysian mobile is essential. Without it, how would I contact:

Dr Clean Laundry –  Pick up from and delivery to the Concierge, on line payment, does repairs. (I thought at first that  ‘Clean’ referred to the laundry, until the time I rang to query a bill and no one answered. When he returned my call, the proprietor explained  ‘Sorry, I was in the shower when you rang’. So perhaps it’s Dr Clean…)

My Teksi – App for finding a taxi (I love it when I can learn a new Bahasa Melayu word so easily. On the topic of transport, there’s also ‘bas’, ‘tren’ and ‘basikal’). Great service, good prices, and it’s not Uber, to whom I have taken a possibly irrational dislike. And all right, I’ll admit it – I thought the name meant my taxi, conjuring up a whole fleet of cars just waiting for my call. Until, that is, someone pointed out that ‘My’ is the abbreviation for ‘Malaysia’.

We don’t have a car here, so I also have numbers for the lovely gentleman who does airport pickups and another lovely gentleman who specialises in driving people between here and Malacca.

Then there’s the indispensable Booze Man. Alcohol is available in some shops for non-Moslems to buy, but Kamal has a better range. He  sends a message every week to say what’s available, then delivers at the weekend. Rumour has it that his day job is as a policeman.

My contact list wouldn’t be complete of course without the numbers of our favourite restaurants, the beauty salon (‘How about a facial this week? this one, anti-aging?’), and Yusuf the maintenance supervisor who comes along for a chat while his Indonesian technician fixes anything that goes wrong in the flat.

And last but definitely not least, Grace. Filed, in my mind at least, as Amazing Grace. She’s Filipina, works in Malaysia to support her three children back in Manila, she’s a bundle of energy and she’s delightful. She comes twice a week and irons and cleans and is a fantastic cook. And she is slowly, but surely, training us. ‘Madam the purple floor cleaner smells nicer.’ ‘No Madam you can’t drink the water. I’ll bring bottled water when I come’.’Madam I can bring bins for the bathrooms’. ‘Madam you can buy plants, they look nice on the balcony. And get one for outside the door. I’ll water them, don’t worry’. ‘No, Madam, we save the newspapers for cleaning the windows’.

The Saga of the Shoes illustrates the way it works. When we come in from outside we take our shoes off, leaving them by the door. Or at least we did. ‘Madam* shoes don’t look nice here’. When no meaningful response was forthcoming,  a note of firmness crept in ‘Shoes don’t look nice there. Madam let me show you, in this cupboard you can put a shoe rack’. ‘Madam, that shoe rack, you can get them in IKEA’. And then the final escalation, the clincher, sweeping away any last vestiges of resistance. ‘Debbie Madam has a shoe rack’.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve met Debbie Madam, who lives in the next door building, and she’s nice. Really nice. Which is just as well because it would have been very, very  easy to dislike such a paragon of style and domestic virtue. She has plants, lots of them, she has a shoe rack, she brought special cleaning stuff back from England to get rid of the stains on the work surface. She probably never even dreamt of drinking the water, even though the book says it’s safe. And I know that when Grace invokes Debbie Madam, I’m going to be found wanting. So we gave in. A trip to IKEA, a few fraught hours with hammer and screwdriver, and voila! shoes – what shoes?

And you know something? it really does look nicer to come in to a shoe free entrance…

*I’ve just realised – it’s always ‘Madam’, never ‘Sir’. Grace has worked out the weakest link in the household chain.