Oh What A Wonderful Morning

We left our usual place of residence to head north around 3.45 pm yesterday and found ourselves at Maison KL by 10.00 pm - most acceptable considering we were travelling on the eve of the New Year. Judging from the antics of a number of those on the highway it would seem they were late for their reunion dinners and determined to get there as fast as humanly possible, if not more so. I hope they all managed to arrive in one piece, despite the risks taken. There were jams at Tuas at both sides of the immigration desks, but fortunately the traffic was well-behaved with little in the way of cutting of queues, possibly due to a well-positioned police vehicle on the Malaysian side of the bridge. This meant that the queue moved at an even pace such that levels of irritation were at a minimum. A particularly fine bowl of mutton soup (hot and savoury) from a new stall at the Ayer Keroh services plus an outstanding mug of teh tarik (hot and sweet) from Rachid's ARAB Cafe there further served to ease the discomfort of the journey. 

Upon arrival we found the place in good order, I'm very happy to say, and had settled in within an hour or so, Noi performing her usual brand of domestic magic. Actually I'd been carrying a bit of a headache from a couple of issues that surfaced at work in the morning for most of the day, and by the time it came to hit the sack I was sorely in need of knitting up the raddled sleeve of care, but things could have been a lot worse. And I was able to enjoy the late-night fire crackers exploding just across the road even if they did disturb my slumbers.

The pay-off following all this was an almost sinfully relaxed morning. A decent lie-in, followed by doing nothing much at all, until it was time to amble out to Friday Prayers at the mosque just around the corner in the delightfully hot sun. (We'd been told it's been cold here with some strong winds of late, but it's just the usual succulent sultriness today.) Part of the nothing much at all, by the way, was finishing off the second volume in Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Man, reading the graduation episode in Maya Angelou's I Know How The Caged Bird Sings and getting to grips with a couple of the Dark Lady sonnets. Just can't think of anything that could be more fun than that, except for lending an ear to Jakszyk, Fripp and Collins's A Scarcity of Miracles which I'm just about to do.