Which led me to consider what might be reasonably regarded as the highlight of the day. And I immediately had the answer! How could I fail on a day when the Missus had cooked up a stash of her cranberry muffins - the mini ones that fit so conveniently into their nifty cups, and the mouth?
So there you have it: living proof of the power of positive thinking. Or cranberry muffins. Whichever.
Must say, I'm impressed with the architecture in the area around the shop, and the abundance of trees. Which makes me worry that someone, somewhere is likely to be planning to knock it all down to improve the area. I feel a bit the same way about liking the bookshop. That's usually a sign a business won't last too long.
Which raises the question, in our case, as to where home actually is. Like Willy Loman we are always sort of temporary, but unlike Willy I don't think either of us quite feel that way.
This puts me in mind of an old fellow at a job interview I endured more than 30 years ago - I think he was some kind of parent-governor - who challenged my desire to teach in a place far from where I was born (Rotherham!) telling me I needed roots. It's difficult to represent the astonishing avidity he managed to inject into the vowel sound of that little word, but let me tell you he almost bit it in two, such was his enthusiasm for it/them. I remember thinking that if such roots held me back as surely as they had done to him, I would choose to avoid them. Of course, in those days I didn't have the courage to say that aloud, more's the pity.
These ramblings have been prompted in part by my reading of Flannery O'Connor's essay The Regional Writer. It was clearly of some importance to her to be seen as a Georgia writer, which is particularly ironic considering her Catholic affiliations. But then, possibly not so. One of the odd benefits of a Catholic upbringing is a peculiar sense of internationalism which never seems to get in the way of where you actually are. We had a picture of Pope Paul VI on the wall when I was a little lad, and there was never any doubt he outranked Queen Elizabeth by quite a distance. Mind you, the royals were pretty low on any league table of those we regarded as our betters, so that's not saying much.
I suppose any writing worth its salt will have a sense of the local, otherwise it will feel like the unanchored observations of a tourist. Even when Shakespeare's in Illyria he's really pottering around on the south bank of the Thames, or gazing into the Avon.
Another equally joyous noise accompanied us as we drove down to Alor Gajah this afternoon. I'd dug out an old Deutsche Grammophon tape of Christmas Music (bits of Bach's Christmas Oratorio for one) from the baroque earlier in the day and duly gave it an airing, unseasonal as that may have been. It put Noi to sleep but kept me happily alert. Now if only they played this kind of thing in the malls in December I might just enjoy Christmas shopping.
23.00
Got to enjoy more noise - and colourful visuals - from fireworks going off in the distance as we enjoyed a late night cuppa at Aziz's place at Rembia. Highly satisfactory as an end to the day.
By the way, this 2003 concert features one of the best, if not the best performing versions of the band. I've been focusing this listening on Geoff Whitehorn's guitar and he is unselfishly impeccable. Oh, and Gary Brooker's voice sounds in better nick than ever. I'm tempted to proclaim him the best English blues voice of his generation, but the term 'blues' seems so limited in this context.
And earlier today I was giving a spin to Elvis Costello's Momofuku and realised I'd forgotten how many great songs are on it. He did My Three Sons when we saw him in his solo concert over here to powerful effect yet if you'd named the song for me yesterday I'd have forgotten I owned a version of it. This put me in mind of what a massive body of work Elvis has now built up (and is still assiduously adding to) and how much of it I still haven't actually purchased - about a quarter as an off-hand estimate.
Which all adds up to the simple truth that I am an extremely lucky chap. And now Procol are playing the lovely Weisselklenzenacht and deserve my full attention.
The focus was on Primates and the antics of our closest relatives made for rewarding viewing. Clever old Attenborough built the series to a wonderful ending - a simple act of generosity from one chimp to another in the lending of a tool for cracking open a nut. Everything was kept beautifully low-key, with the overwhelming implications of what we might understand by the idea of the higher nature of some animals being left to itself. A nice contrast was created with the first sequence of the episode, in which we saw the sometimes ruthless discipline employed within groups of hamadryads, and conflict between their 'tribes'. (Fabulous visuals there, by the way - but then you can apply that comment to any sequence at all in the series.)
I suspect the final episode was all a touch more teleological in its implications than the makers may have bargained for, but I also suspect that's something written into the nature of things that we can't get away from.
Now roughly mid-way through a journey north to Maison KL. Sitting outside Rachid's ARAB cafe at the Ayer Keroh rest-stop enjoying a jolly nice cup of teh tarik and his famous toasted bread.
23.25
I was feeling quite pleased with myself back at Ayer Keroh, thinking we'd made smooth progress, but that was before hitting the capital itself. Up to the toll at Sungai Besi it remained an unexceptional journey, and then we hit a swamp of tail lights as KL turned into its own traffic jam. The last 40 km across the city took more than two hours involving a number of exciting situations - and we're not quite home yet. We're now in the cafe at Wangsa Maju and I'm imbibing a restoring cuppa.
The most darkly ironic moment of our little quest occurred just fifteen minutes ago when having finally got to the road running round the back of our Bukit we were very surprised to find yet another jam. In general we'd been puzzled as to what exactly had brought out all the cars late on a Friday when it's not yet Chinese New Year's eve, though I suppose we're seeing part of the exodus from city to kampong that's a feature of life here. But this road is usually clear and doesn't lead anywhere obviously significant enough to deserve a jam. The answer became apparent when we reached the completely pointless police roadblock cleverly installed to add to the mayhem on the roads. And this after not seeing a single copper doing anything about the chaos at any number of junctions along our way.
A Muslim will automatically utter, or at least think, Insh'allah (God willing) regarding any event posited for the ever uncertain future. Our Insh'allah for this one comes with a very definite sense of yearning.
Today I sort of trapped myself in viewing an extraordinarily bitter set of exchanges within some of the blog pages managed by folk who see themselves as part of the skeptic/atheist community. (Before, gentle reader, you assume that as a theist I'm just having a go here, let me say that I'm certain I could unearth the same sort of stuff within various 'theist communities' if I looked hard enough. This kind of stupidity is hard-wired into our species at every level.) It was like witnessing a pile-up on the highway - horrible, but fascinatingly horrible. I admit, by the way, that it doesn't say much for my character that I stuck around to read the stuff.
And so much of it! I'm talking about single blog entries followed by 300+ comments. That's almost the full extent of this Far Place for a year. Whilst it's true there are sane, conciliatory voices in there, they just get overwhelmed by the mounds of vituperation. (Awful mixed metaphor there, but it sort of conveys my distress, so I'll let it stand.)
And the nastiest ones often seem to think they are so much in the right that the vituperation is not merely justified but somehow represents a positive and necessary moral good. (A bit like signs of The Elect.) I really don't want to have too much to do with a world in which straightforward decency, kindness, politeness, tolerance, compassion have become moral failings.
Maybe I'm just unenlightened. Thankfully.
In the middle of all this I found myself in Bishan Library where I happened to pick up Alex Ross's Listen To This, a book I was sorely tempted to buy when last in Kuala Lumpur but didn't - for complex reasons involving lack of shelf space and a puritan bout of conscience. I couldn't actually borrow the book as I no longer hold a library card for the National Library. But I did read the chapter on Dylan which was full of insights making me even more tempted to break my own sanctions.
In the essay, written around when Time Out Of Mind came out, Ross notes that Dylan was irritating lots of folk by simply not going away and providing closure and a neatly packaged obituary. Imagine how annoyed they'll feel now with his last decade or so to process.
Elvis's take on Misunderstood is blistering. He sounds like a guy who really is on some kind of personal edge in this pressingly intimate, one-to-one, claustrophobic version of the song. When I first heard the version, as a single, I actually had the impression the band were not quite in tune, or that something was off somewhere. In fact it's the voice - so hurt it sounds discordant when it's not. When Elvis sings with this much passion you know it's no fun to fail to make your intentions clear.
I read one reviewer somewhere once, saying the vocal was overly dramatic. Idiot.
And then there's the fact that this is not one of the singer-songwriter's own songs. Now I know he's done covers before, in his Cat Stevens incarnation, but these were few and far between, and it seems odd to give space to this admitted classic when he obviously had a lot of new material up his sleeve. (At least, I assume so. The Roadsinger CD followed Another Cup pretty closely.)
Obviously the song meant something pretty important to him for him to record it and perform it - though there's a serenity, almost a blandness in his vocals that suggests a measure of restraint involved. His is not an anguished version. But I suspect there's deep anguish behind it, given the public beatings he has had to endure on occasion related to the faith he found in his second life. This is clearly a man who finds being misunderstood extremely painful and my heart, for one, goes out to him in that regard. And to others who feel the same way.
But my advice is to find a way not to care.
My favourite example comes from around ten years ago when I told a class, several classes in fact, that the only really good question is one that can't be answered. I'm not quite sure what I meant, but it sounded good. Quite by accident I discovered that one very bright student incorporated this apercu into a speech, telling the world that Mr Connor had told everyone that the only really good question is one that has an answer. I wasn't really all that miffed as I quite liked the sound of that - and began to offer it occasionally in lessons, immediately following a lesson in which my original comment had been let loose for contemplation.
Marking essays, of course, provides a wonderful window onto the capacity of the mind to distort any in-coming data in weird and woeful ways. Except once you come to accept this the woe sort of evaporates to be replaced by a wary respect for the wrongheadedness central to our species. If nothing else it's highly entertaining once you get beyond the anguish of failing to connect. And there's something endearing about people only hearing what they want to hear.
That's the kind of sentence I never thought I'd get to type. The wonders of modern technology, eh?
I'm inclined to say it's the most visually ravishing nature documentary I've ever seen, but since I tend to think that way about almost every Attenborough programme I see it's a bit of an exaggeration. But not much of one.
Yesterday I was carrying a little load of booklets across a couple of corridors, which were weighing me down a little, and was offered help by no fewer than five kids, in the space of three minutes, one of whom I'd never seen before.
Today I found myself avoiding crowds to escape the embarrassment of being thanked rather too fulsomely just for doing what I'm paid to do.
It's sometimes difficult to be cynical as one might like to be.
So that's why I'm more aware than I normally would have been of a confluence of stories in the news there circling, one way or another, around issues connected with race: the Suarez mess, ditto for Terry, the Stephen Lawrence case, M.P. Diane Abbott getting into trouble with her comments on Twitter, and the like. The connecting feature of all these (without passing particular judgements on the various actors therein) is the extremely wonderful fact that it's now absolutely, entirely, unequivocally impossible to get away with any kind of public racism without a deluge of opprobrium descending upon your head. And this from even the most reactionary elements of the media.
Sadly this was not the case even twenty-five years ago. I know, because I was there. I remember vowing not to attend football matches in certain parts of the country because of the appalling open racism of crowds towards black players particularly. (Unless you've seen middle-aged fathers, their young sons at their sides, making monkey noises and doing 'funny' things with bananas because a black player has touched the ball, you won't really know what I mean.) Now, as far as I can tell, that's gone. Impossible to imagine - as it rightly should be.
Proof that with determination the moral climate of a society can change for the better. If there is such a thing as progress in human affairs - and I'm something of a nay-sayer on this one - this is it.
And why am I thinking of this now? Dealing with the kind of ludicrous 'documentation' that has, somehow, become central to my work I realise there are far worse frustrations that should elicit even more bitter tears. Fortunately I'm manfully holding mine back.
And I didn't even listen particularly well. Imagine if I were able to. Complete escape. Blimey.
Aware as I was of the commitment, and its failure, I didn't seek for remedy in 2009, 2010 or 2011, though not completely neglecting some study of the language, as I reached the conclusion that there was an element of futility behind the resolution. Put simply: I was too busy at work to allow the time necessary for improvement in the language. And writing this I recognise a truth in the excuse. But it is an excuse, rather like the one I hear from colleagues who can't find the time to read as they are too busy. The answer is, of course, to make the time, even when it's almost impossible to do so, through something akin to habit.
Which means, in some sense, re-thinking one's life. Difficult in the extreme, but not quite impossible, something I discovered a long time ago - and which I am resolved to rediscover in a small (though trust me, this won't feel small) but important manner.
