The word, I suppose, is madcap.

“Do you feel like going to a mall in Kent tomorrow?” Suz texted. It was very late Wednesday night, and I hadn’t looked at my phone all day. Now, this question.

There is a ritual we go through with my Kuala Lumpur grandmother, a long-faced woman with a warm and ready smile and a head of fine, white hair. “Ma,” my mother says, in Hokkien, some day, any day, “do you want to go out?” “No lah!” my grandmother says. She is in a light cotton blouse and a sarong. We may be sitting on rosewood furniture in the dimly lit living room, or at the dining table while the dog runs under our feet. My grandmother may flick her hand as she says this, partly in dismissiveness, and partly to divert a lazy fly from our noodle bowls.

“Ma,” my mother says, some minutes later, “shall I take you out later?”

“No lah!” my grandmother says, emphatically, before she asks, “Where would we go?”

“We could go to the shops,” my mother says, “just to walk, and see.”

“No need!” my grandmother says. The tabletop fan to the right turns slowly in the warm afternoon. The floor tiles are pleasantly cold to the touch. There is a china cabinet in the dining room, a modest affair with bowls and teacups and plates in jumbly, comfortable piles. I once admired a set of delicate Chinese teacups, each cup small and with a rose printed on it, and my grandmother wrapped them up in sheets of old newspaper for me. She is at that age, has been for a while now, where she parcels off her worldly belongings.

“No need,” my grandmother says, then, “What would we do?”

“We could take a walk, have some coffee,” my mother says, and my grandmother says, quietly, pursing her lips, “No lah.”

We eat.

“How,” my grandmother says, eventually, and perhaps we are spooning up the last small puddle of mee sua soup in the bowl, perhaps there is a small mound of chicken bones to the side, “would we get there?”

My mother is resourceful, and prepared. She is undaunted. This is what we do. “I can borrow Anak’s car,” she says. “We can drive to the shopping centre, walk around the shops, have a coffee.”

“No need,” my grandmother says. In my memory she is very wrinkled – though I know she has not always been so because there is a photograph of her and my grandfather above my mother’s bed, and in it her skin is like porcelain – and her eyes are always bright. Her wrists are small. “Too much trouble,” she says.

The ritual itself may contain minor variations, but the conclusion is generally thus: Within the hour my grandmother is at the bottom of the smooth wooden staircase with her handbag under her arm. “Hurry up!” she is yelling, in Hokkien, to whoever isn’t already standing on the porch-side of the metal gate. “Let’s go already!”

Late Wednesday night, when Suz texted, “Do you feel like going to a mall in Kent tomorrow?” I put down my book and went through my grandmother’s ritual all on my own. Thursday morning I woke up early to take a bus to a train to a train to meet Suz at the North Greenwich Tube station. “Hello!” I said, when she pulled up in her car. “This is gonna be great!”

Madcap was the chitter-chatter to the car workshop in Dartford for a quick tune-up, and madcap was the embracing of the instant coffee machine in the Skoda showroom while we waited. “I will choose Kenyan Dawn,” I said, after considering the free tea and coffee choices at length, “because it makes me see the wildebeest in silhouette against the rising sun.” “Look at all these buttons!” I said then, having picked a packet, and truly the machine seemed to promise a world beyond basic tea and coffee. Capuccino, the LED display read, Mochaccino, Espresso, and I wonder now if one of the choices wasn’t Chococcino. We were the only customers in a showroom of shiny cars and suited car salesman, and madcap was Suz opening the closet in the waiting area, only to announce, “There’s cake in there!” She shut it quickly, as if the baked good were coming to get us. We wondered how to proceed.

Hats off to you, Skoda salesmen!, for, none too shabbily, a man with no eyebrows came up to us. We were laughing at a Spike Milligan compilation by then. Reaching for the cabinet, he said, “Would you like some cake?” “Oh, no,” we said, “no, thank you. Yes, please.”

Madcap, you understand, was our languishing while the twenty-minute check-up turned into an hour and a half, and not even Spike Milligan could save us then. “I wonder if they’d mind if I crawled into the back seat of one of these cars and stretched out for a nap,” I said. We picked the roomiest-looking of the selection and opened the door. Quick on his feet, the man – but not his eyebrows – tried to sell me a car. “I recently stopped working,” I told him. “Started working?” he asked. “Stopped,” I said. “Ah,” he said. “Well,” he said. “When you start working again,” he said, “make sure to give me a call.”

Madcap, I tell you, was the car stalling as we pulled it out of the lot, and madcap, too, going round once, then twice, the traffic circle. I waved at the dappled horses in the fields. The trees were lush, still, though some leaves were turning a yellow-reddy-brown. We made it to Bluewater mall before our hunger consumed us inside-out. “The mall!” I said, as we pulled into the carpark. And then, because the emotion held me tight, I said, again, “The mall!!” I have instituted a moratorium on spending money, but a giant mall in an ancient quarry, its imported Canadian geese paddling on its gently rippling landscaped lakes among model sailboats, still sends the heart a-flutter. So many surprises England yet holds!

Mad, maybe, but not madcap, the ordering of chicken livers for lunch. “Yurgh,” I said, as Suz licked her lips. “Hey, but you know what Yumeibalasingamchow eats?” I said. “Brains!” I said.

“Yah, brains,” Suz said unblinkingly, “they’re nice.” She was slicing a chicken liver.

“Do brains look like brains when they come to the table?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, then, considering, “but chicken brains are smaller lah.”

We walked the mall in one direction, then we walked it in the other. There were a lot of babies and a lot of old people. The balloon woman held so many ballons they formed a shiny coloured-foil canopy over her head. We tried on fancy moisturizers in the shops. I was putting on a divine orange-scented lotion at L’Occitane when Suz whisked a bottle off the shelf and headed for the counter. “Here,” she said later, thrusting the small shopping bag at me. “Happy birthday!” “What?” I said, and my hands were out and palms-up in surprise. She hooked the bag on one of my wondering fingers and grinned.

Madcap, truly, the last stop in Asda, this giant of supermarkets I read about. The sign outside read “Asda, part of the Wal-Mart family.” “The mall and Wal-Mart,” I said. “This is great.” “Oh, wait, Asda!” I said, the realisation dawning. “Home of George at Asda!” I may not buy things, but I read, and I like to touch. And I had heard about this line of clothing, this George at Asda, whose clothes, though probably made by fine-fingered children in Southeast Asia, are also, in the grand tradition of Isaac Mizrahi at Target and Kate Moss at Topshop – though possibly not so much Jaclyn Smith at Kmart – the height of cheap chic. Like the first prehistoric hunters who appeared in the Dartford area 250,000 years ago, I approached with an optimistic caution. I pulled on a knitted, three-quarter-sleeved cardigan with big buttons and we turned the corners of the aisles in search of a mirror. The knit stretched unflatteringly over my chest and the cardigan ended, mushroom-like, around my hips. “Um,” I said, faced with my reflection. “Something… wrong,” Suz said helpfully. We wheeled the trolley round to meat and veg.

Mark my words, there are adventures to be had everywhere – and some, though sadly not all, of them will end with mango-passionfruit jams and jars of Nutella on special, with four bags of groceries carried home in the rush-hour crowd. This is where “Hurry up!” will take you, as you stand at the bottom of the staircase with your purse under your arm. This is where you find that “Let’s go already!” will not lead you astray.