Tough Decisions

Tomorrow I'm off to Medan in Sumatra on a recruiting trip for the school I work for. I'll be there until Sunday. I suspect I'll be busy marking a lot of material from students aspiring to get an education in Singapore but it's still an opportunity to explore the region a little more. I was surprised when I found out that Medan is the third largest city in Indonesia with a population of around two and a half million. For some strange reason I've always pictured it as a sleepy little town.

Now I'm busy packing, or rather Noi is putting my house in order for me. She is frighteningly efficient when it comes to ordering my life. Thank goodness. She will be going over to Melaka in my absence - a great opportunity to help out, especially with Mak whom she'll be taking to her eye doctor.

I've been planing the reading I'll take with me with great care, and I'm hoping to find some time to genuinely get some done. Over the weekend I made a start on Colm Toibin's The Master and revisited Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory. Both are going down well and shall constitute the centre of my reading. I'm also taking across a recent edition of the New York Review of Books in case I can only find the time to dip into stuff. The question now is whether to take some poetry along or to travel really light. I'm tempted to pack the rather tasty Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays from the Library of America but this could be a case of over-egging the pudding. I'm going to get very irritated if I don't get any chance at all to do it justice, which might well be the case. Ah, the rigours of globe-trotting.