Extremely Ordinary

By 5.30 this afternoon the rain had set in. It wasn't coming down terribly hard, but it was drearily persistent in that spoiling manner to which we are so accustomed in November. The day suddenly felt dingy and dirty and sort of over somehow.

But none of this mattered in the slightest. Because Noi was back home from hospital and the tea was hot and plentiful and the kerepok was suspiciously easy to munch. And there we were, catching up on the events of the day, as usual, trying to figure out what we needed to do for the rest of the week, as usual, and aimlessly gossiping about just about all and everything, as usual.

What stopped it being as usual as it usually is, is that we'd not been able to do this for several days, and been reminded that we rather take for granted that we'll always have business as usual. We won't. But we'll relish how sweet it is while it gloriously lasts.

Confirmation

I've just popped home from the hospital where I've been for most of the day. Noi is looking a lot better and seems to be responding to the antibiotics the doctors have been pumping into her. She's walking reasonably comfortably, though still in some discomfort, and it looks like she won't be going under the knife. Indeed, she thinks she might be out of there by tomorrow.

Her being ill has been confirmation - not that I needed it - on how completely I rely on her for just about everything.

Now getting ready to go back to her bedside, and there's no place else I'd rather be.

Not So Forgettable

Very odd day. Spent the morning and early afternoon at a workshop related to the use of the voice. Spent the evening at East Shore Hospital whence Noi was admitted in the early afternoon. The cause of her stomach pain remains a mystery, despite a CT scan and the attentions of an excellent doctor. So she's now under observation in a safe place, particularly since it's not impossible they may need to whisk her into an operating theatre pronto.

We were lucky to have Siew to help her out this morning in taking her to the doctor again and the hospital, and then Fuad, Rozita and family to make sure she had all that was needed. I'm not much help, I'm afraid, just something of a helpless spare part.

Forgettable

The day started badly and just got steadily worse. As I woke up the rain came down, in the kind of grey storm typical of this rainy season, setting the tone for the whole day. And at the same time Noi started to complain of a really bad stomach ache. Since then she has been nastily, queasily ill all day, poor thing, and has now taken to bed, the only place she can get some relief.

We're hoping for better things tomorrow.

Found Wanting

Why is there so much emphasis these days on how much people must want something in order to validate their getting it?

Walls Come Tumbling Down

If someone had told me thirty years ago that the Berlin Wall would crumble in my lifetime, I would have thought them absurdly optimistic. The events of twenty years ago still seem possessed of an almost dream-like quality.

Just because things are, doesn't mean they should be, or that they will be. And that seems to me grounds for optimism. Unfortunately, it's equally grounds for pessimism.

Englished

I've been feeling disconcertingly English since the weekend, a state that was intensified, if anything, today by having to attend a workshop on National Education, Singapore style.

I suppose this, the state of feeling English, has had something to do with my current reading and recent listening. I'm moving steadily through Ackroyd's Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination which has exciting, original and pretty daft things on every page. And on the fiction front I followed The Handmaid's Tale (wonderful!) with Pat Barker's The Eye in the Door, the second in the Regeneration trilogy (equally wonderful! - an extraordinary demonstration of how to take material that may seem like it's been done to death and revivify it by coming at it slant-wise. And how completely she nails differences of social class and the differences they made, and continue to make.)

Also the weekend encompassed a pile of Vaughan Williams: Flos Campi, the 5th Symphony, Hodie, A Fantasia on Christmas Carols; plus a heap of Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius, the 1st Symphony, and various incidental bits and marches.

And here's a line from Ackroyd that sort of sums up the Englishness to which I aspire, but which I sadly fail to live up to: …much of the English genius resides in quixotic or quirky individuals who insist upon the truth of their independent vision in the face of almost universal derision.

Breathing Space

We completed our viewing of Fanny and Alexander yesterday afternoon. Noi wants us to be on the look-out for more foreign movies when we go to England, having enjoyed this one so much. At the point when Uncle Isak was stealing the children from the bishop - a control man, she astutely pointed out - she was jumping up and down on the sofa shouting Quick, quick. I would have been doing the same had I not watched the film before.

Afterwards I mentioned the slow pace of the film to her (by the way, the version we watched is the full five hour version shown originally on Swedish television, not the three hour version released in cinemas) intending this as praise, but Noi didn't think it slow at all. And I realised how right she was. The story moves along at a considerable pace over the full arc of the movie. But Bergman allows time for the wonderful monologues and set pieces, like Carl's scenes with his poor wife - so painfully, hurtfully, funny. This is a movie that allows itself, and the viewer, to breathe.

I'm wondering if the reason I find most films today difficult to watch with sustained attention lies in the lack of such space. And I'm furthering wondering why so many features of our lives today seem to seek to deny us such space.

Acceptance

With our visit to the UK and environs looming I've finally been catching up on the DVDs we brought back with us last December. This has been a most enjoyable process, particularly since the Jeeves and Wooster series (Fry & Laurie) has featured prominently. I'm now on series three, the first three episodes of which are set in New York, and this is the stuff I've never seen before - very much worth waiting for, I must say.

And then on Friday we embarked on Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, which if I were forced to make one of those silly lists of my top ten favourite movies would be likely to feature at number one. We're now up to Act 4, with the children having just arrived at the bishop's house/palace and Noi was almost demanding to keep watching late last night as she desperately needed to know what happens to them. Great story-telling.

So what makes Fanny and Alexander so good? I can think of four obvious things. First off, it's gorgeous to look at. You could freeze almost any frame and have something you wouldn't mind hanging on a wall. Beautifully composed, yet it genuinely moves in filmic terms. Whilst this is more obviously the case for the first act of he Ekdahls' Christmas, it remains true of the later more austere scenes at the bishop's. Secondly, the acting is wonderful. So much is done with so little - extreme close-ups, sparingly yet dramatically employed, convey the puzzling depths of the characters. These people look authentically like they are living and thinking at the turn of the nineteenth century. Physically in terms of gesture, stance there isn't a note out of place. Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, the story in itself is so powerfully engaging. It has an archetypal force - the Hamlet subtext, the warmth of the Ekdahls set against the chill of the bishop - that it wears close to the surface but which never lacks in subtlety. Finally, the whole experience is encompassed within a sense of tolerance and humanity that is deeply touching.

Unlikely as it seems, I can see something in common between Wodehouse and Bergman, and it's this: an acceptance of human folly that rises to a kind of sublime charity.

Monkey Business

We've still not received any kind of notification from the Telecom in Malaysia that our KL phone line has been repaired. It was the lack of a proper connection that prevented me from getting on-line this time last week. Noi developed a plausible theory as to why we'd become disconnected involving monkeys, having spotted three of them tightrope walking, or rather scurrying, along the line outside Maison KL. She reckoned they'd played about with the connection box fixing our line to the main one and, I must say, when I caught sight of the blighters they looked distinctly guilty. They also looked distinctly self-contained, as if the human world could not impinge upon their monkeydom and, thus, was not worthy of examination. Up there on the line they gave me, at ground level, barely a second glance.

In the taman newsletter for October there was a reference to them as 'cute' - though the brief paragraph was advising the human residents to sensibly keep their distance. But 'cute' seems to me to be so entirely inappropriate as to suggest that whoever wrote it has not really been seeing our simian chums as they are. In their effortless domination of the telephone lines and the nonchalance with which they swing from these to the fragile branches of nearby trees, they are very much other, very much themselves - hard and crisp and graceful in a ferocious way.

I told Mum about seeing them when I phoned her on Monday, explaining that it had been their probable interference with the line which had meant I had been unable to phone her over the weekend. She was, as I guessed she would be, delighted to hear about them. In fact, the idea of them seemed to make her forget the pain from her shingles for a short while - she was actually laughing, as was I.

It's nice to be able to phone so easily from the Mansion here, but I miss the strangely real life of the other taman-dwellers.