Slowing Down

We watched Episodes 2, 3 and 4 from the fourth season of the explosive spy thriller Slow Horses over last Friday, Saturday and Sunday. One episode per day is as much excitement as I can take at my age. And now I need a break of at least a week to get into shape for the end of the drama. Thankfully my life isn't remotely as exciting as that of the denizens of Slough House. I might have made a reasonable detective. But never a spook.

In Balance

Just got back from the gym feeling rather pleased with myself for getting in a session during what's proving to be a very busy period in relation to the Toad, work. In fact, this is the best time of year for reflecting on how much balance I'm achieving in my life since it is so busy. If I can reasonably claim to be achieving a modicum of balance in the second half of May, then things can't be all bad.

I think I can claim something like complete success in integrating physical activity into what might be termed my 'schedule' in recent years. I aim to get to the gym three times a week, for a solid hour on the elliptical trainer, and I've kept that up for pretty much a year and a half. I'm no longer thinking in terms of extending the number of minutes I spend peddling away now that I'm regularly hitting the weights, following the cardio bit. Rather I'm looking to increase the intensity of the work-out using the weights, having read a lot of late about how we old folks need to be focused on weight-training.

Anyway, all is well on that front. Now whether I'm achieving the balance I want in terms of exercising the old grey cells is another question. The answer is that I'm not. But I am managing to keep some kind of life of the mind going even now, and things will get better in June, and were a lot better in the early months of the year. Comparing how things are in May 2025 to the average for May in the pre-pandemic years suggests I'm getting something right. I just need to build on it, once I'm clear as to what it is.

Finally?

After months of trying, and getting closer and closer, we finally have an appointment to pick up whatever it is they give you to show you have a VEP to get entry for our car into Malaysia. Oh, and we've paid for it as well. It says so on the receipt. Surely nothing can go wrong at this stage?

It speaks little for my character that I'm fairly sure it can.

Worth Listening To

A restful Friday Prayers was the highlight of a busy day - not an infrequent occurrence at the end of the week. Today was particularly memorable for a striking khutba, which was easy for me to follow in translation since I found myself positioned right under one of the screens giving a translation from the Malay.

Some excellent advice on Preserving Marital Bonds. Like all the best advice the points sound cliched. Deep down, we all know this stuff. But putting it into practice is where the challenge lies.

Good News

Nice article in today's Straits Times about the launching of Bookshop.sg. Very much hope these guys are successful. My intuition tells me this is of greater importance to the future of this Far Place than many of its citizens might realise.

On the whole I'm a cynic when it comes to the world of business. But this strikes me as business at its best.

The Start Of Something

Back in the deeply dark days of the pandemic Robert Fripp released, through You Tube, a series of very beautiful soundscapes, one a week, for fifty weeks. It struck me then as an act of extraordinary imaginative generosity. A practical way of making the world a better place. Now, some five years later, that seems to me even more the case. 

Today I listened again to the opening Pastorale, Music for Quiet Moments 1. Glad I did.

More Rubbish

Spent a very satisfactory few hours at the Choa Chu Kang Sports Centre in the early afternoon, the highlight of my visit being watching our guys play out another solid victory in the quarter-finals for Basketball. But generally it was good to see a lot of youngsters from various schools having a jolly good time showing off their talents and letting off steam. 

One downside though, and do excuse me for being unbearably petty. I really need to ask: Who thought it was a good idea to make all the drinks machines at the location cashless? I ask this since I'm afraid I failed to get the drink I sorely needed in the humid centre, when I would have succeeded had simple cash been acceptable. Actually I paid my $2.50 for the drink I fancied through Pay Now, but it took so long to arrange the payment that it seems the machine cancelled my order and refused to give me access to the bottle I'd paid for. And there was no one to make a protest to regarding this injustice.

Let's face it: Modern life is rubbish.

(And, on another related note, we still can't register an appointment for the VEP thing despite remorselessly uploading everything the system asks for.)

Not Close Enough

It was just a week ago that I thought we were on the verge of getting an appointment with those who know about these things in Malaysia to install the device thingamajig that would signal our possession of a Vehicle Entry Permit for our motorcar. We had downloaded a Vehicle Registration Confirmation Slip and just needed to do something fiddly with a TouchNGo eWallet and that was it. Except it wasn't.

We did the necessary with the eWallet and actually put some money in it. But the website for the VEP kept telling us we still needed to do this. Then, after a couple of days, the website appeared to accept the fact we had an eWallet. Unfortunately it then informed us that we had failed to register the vehicle, despite the fact we had the confirmation slip. It seems we hadn't uploaded an insurance document, even though Faris had done this for us. Or, rather, that we needed to upload a pdf version. Which we have now done. But we still can't get an appointment as they need a copy of my passport and ID. Which we uploaded more than a week ago.

This is all quite exhausting in its way but, fortunately, doesn't count for much of anything at all since vehicles are being allowed into our neighbour without the entry permit since to all intents and purposes the Immigration Authorities at Tuas don't care.

Passion Play

Completed another excellent book today, and another disturbing read. I've been aware for some years now of the broad outline of the events which led to the tragedy of Karbala and the dreadful death of Hussein, the grandson of The Prophet (may peace be upon him.) Now I know a good deal more of the details, and I'm not sure that such knowledge is necessarily a good thing, though it's certainly a necessary thing. Lesley Hazleton's clear and compelling account of what took place in the years 632 - 680 AD in After the Prophet proved easy to read yet painfully so. I finished it at Holland Village outside the Tiong Bahru Bakery at 4.00 pm feeling dangerously, publicly moved.

She makes a case for equating the story with that of the Christian passion in terms of its deep and abiding power. And, now in some sense 'knowing' both, I cannot but agree. 

At An Extreme

I wondered last weekend whether I might finish Yan Lianke's The Four Books before the working week began. It was proving a fascinating read. I wasn't at all sure I had a solid grasp on the allegorical elements of Yan's account of the years of the Great Leap Forward, but the broad outline seemed clear enough and the surreal power of the plights of the various characters stuck in the Re-Ed camp by the Yellow River was clear enough. The novel won the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014 and that was obviously a fitting award.

Up to the final seventy or so pages I'd found Yan's story easy enough to read in the sense of not being too overwhelming in its sense of outrage over the historical events involved. I suppose I'd been half-expecting something along the lines of Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle and was a touch relieved to avoid that level of intensity. But what started to slow my reading down last weekend was the advent of the famine resulting from the insane agricultural practices that the second half of the work turns its attention to; quite simply, I found it difficult to deal with pages evoking the grim reality of starvation on a grand scale.

So I've spent the week dipping into the ensuing horrors attendant upon people starving to death, finishing the novel today negotiating depictions of cannibalism made all the more horrendous due to the deliberate blandness of the descriptions thereof.

I've never read anything quite like this before. Brilliant stuff. But close to unbearable.