Yours Is No Disgrace

With the dictum Dignity at all times in mind I successfully restrained myself from running after the leading pack this morning in the staff race and took it reasonably easy for half the course. Then I stretched out a bit over the last kilometre or so and did a fairly convincing imitation of a runner up to the finish line. All in all, not a bad morning's work - but I've yet to see if any damage has been sustained in my vulnerable areas (which now include just about everywhere.)

After a brief stop at work to pick up stuff for the weekend it was off home and a relaxed walk to Mesjid Abdul Aleem Siddique at Telok Kurau, one of my favourite mosques, for Friday Prayers. It's a lovely, modern little place (I used to go to the run-down old building before it made way for the new version), but it pulls a big crowd and it can be difficult to get a good place to pray if you're not early. There's some gorgeous carving (I think in stone but I might be wrong) around the mihrab and minbar which is very easy on the eye. I've also noticed that the imans there have an occasional tendency to deliver their khutbas in a real fire and brimstone manner. Today's was particularly bracing with the iman seemingly intent on blowing the PA to pieces. If any CIA agents had infiltrated our worship I suspect we may all have ended up on a list for Guantanamo, but any sermon's contents here are unexceptionable as they all come centrally from MUIS. So it remains something of a mystery to me how some of the imans get quite so worked up, but it's great stuff. A bit of passion and drama now and again can certainly shake one out of an unhealthy complacency.

The other thing I've got done today is to try and fix the layout of yesterday's post to this Far Place. Much as I admire what these technical johnnies at Blogger can do they cannot provide an easy way for low-tech guys like myself to format text. For anyone reading the entry the little poem therein should be in two four line stanzas, and it's a mark of my literary obsessiveness/pettiness that I remain incredibly irritated that this is not the case. (Not to mention the big gaps between individual lines. Doh!)