Arrivals And Departures

As we sailed through Singapore customs at Tuas yesterday afternoon we were worried that me might not have time to complete the white cards for Kak Kiah’s two grandchildren before we arrived at the Malaysian side. Our fears proved unfounded as what is normally a three minute crossing of the bridge turned into a three hour epic, the jam stretching back quite far onto the bridge itself. In fact, when I first spotted the sea of red brake lights in the distance I thought it might be as many as four hours until we got through. But I must say, we made the best of it. The two kids slept most of the time and I got through quite a bit of listening. By sheer good fortune I happened to have a couple of tapes of Trevor Eaton reading some Chaucer (I’ve been exploring my catalogue of cassettes lately) and these made unexpectedly great listening, particularly since there was no competition from engine noise. I say ‘unexpectedly’ in the sense that Noi seemed to enjoy them as well, once I’d explained that this was how English probably sounded several centuries ago. She delighted in picking out and identifying the odd word or phrase here and there – onion was a special favourite with a wonderfully flat first vowel, and the line With buttocks brod, and brestes round and hye had us both in stitches.

This was from The Reeve’s Tale which I don’t know all that well. It features a couple of characters from the north which Eaton does in a brilliant northern accent of the period. I was keen to look it up when we arrived and thankful that I have a cheap but wonderfully useful selection of the tales in a cheap Penguin paperback in Maison KL, to supplement the more wonderful but chunky Riverside edition back in Singapore. So that was my reading for the morning.

I’m raiding the books here to take a few back which will form the basis of my reading of novels for the next couple of months. This means a return for a while to some classics which I feel I’ve been neglecting and a temporary halt to the buying of contemporary novels. (Probably very temporary as I’m already feeling the itch for a shot of Atwood, Coetzee, Ishiguro…)

We’re not stopping here long. The plan is to go back to Melaka this evening and visit Mak in hospital tomorrow. She’s been having a torrid time of it lately, and we’ve been pretty worried. A tear in her intestines led to a problem with bleeding early last week and it was a relief to find out it was just a tear and nothing more sinister, but her cholesterol levels and blood pressure remain high so she needs to be closely monitored. We’re hoping this will be the last of the setbacks for her and she can get back to real life soon.