Unwisdom

At my age it's not wise to play futsal, especially with a bunch of sprightly young kids. It's even less wise to do so after having pulled a muscle in your left leg only two days ago. But, then, I make few claims to wisdom. And the ones I do make are not exactly plausible.

Guess what I was doing in the early evening. And guess just how much I'm paying for it now.

Somewhat Sheepish

It seems a film entitled Baa Baa Land has just premiered in the UK. It features sheep grazing in a field - and nothing else, for eight hours. Stupidity. Genius. Or an astute mixture of both. The producer reckons it's very relaxing, sleep-inducing viewing.

I'd be more than happy to watch it. (And I can, because I've just found it on youtube!)

The Ladder Of Life

Caught a thoroughly depressing story this afternoon on the BBC World Service regarding the imminent demise of the African elephant, assuming losses continue at the present appalling rate. It seems that the elephant population of the continent was looking in reasonably good shape until around 2009. Then a combination of the financial crisis and the increasing influence of the Chinese in Africa, in combination with the trade in ivory with its deep roots in Chinese culture, turned the tide against Jumbo and his chums. It's taken less than a decade to place the elephant in real danger of extinction on the continent.

In my list of favourite living things I reckon trees and elephants vie for first place. And it's a terrible thing to say, but when I hear news like today's, when it's abundantly clear which species is to blame for what's going on, I reckon homo sapiens (so ironically named) are in last place, a long way behind the nearest contenders. (I suppose that'd be the cockroach for entirely prejudiced reasons. Though I must say, the sheer resilience of the blighters has gone a long way to winning a kind of very grudging admiration from me.)

Interiors

Quite often when Noi is watching one of her Malay dramas from Malaysia we find ourselves commenting on the houses in which the dramas are being played out. I think I'm right in my assumption that these are 'real' houses, rather than studio sets, and that 'real' people live in them when they're not being utilised for dramatic purposes. Well, I say 'real' people, but I should add the qualifier 'rich' real people. It's all intended to be very inspirationally aspirational for the poor viewers, like ourselves, I suppose, but it doesn't quite work like that. Not for us, anyway, for whom the general effect is to confirm the joys of a simple, cheap kind of life. The problem essential to any display of affluence is not so much bad taste (though there's a fair amount of that on display) as an inherent lack of lived warmth. Whatever happened to cosiness?

The Factory Floor

It was during the three-day week, under the Heath government. I was able to work beyond the three days since I worked in Dispatch, which meant you weren't tied to a machine and so could get on with shifting stuff around the factory and doing all sorts of bits and bobs. The only problem was that most of the factory was cold because the machines weren't running and, I suppose, the heating was turned down, if not off. There was one machine which, for some reason I never figured out, was allowed to run all the time, I think because shutting it down would have had ramifications that couldn't be dealt with. But it was a long time ago, so I could be wrong. What I know for sure is that we used to gather around the area during breaks because it was warm there, and there were some problems with the machine that meant some management types gathered around it for quite a few days.

The bloke operating it was very patient with it all, and just got on with taking instructions and doing the needful. Then one day he told me that he knew perfectly well what was wrong with the machine, but none of the experts had seen fit to ask him anything about it. This all struck me as bleakly funny and a bit of a parable for British industry at that time; possibly a parable for management at any given time. Not sure if there's much of that industry left today. Rotunda Ltd shut down years ago.

Useful Self Deception

I've developed the remarkable ability to convince myself prior to a visit to the gym that I'm going to enjoy the experience. Once I'm in there, it takes approximately two minutes on the elliptical trainer for me to start wondering how I could ever have been so naïve. Ten minutes in, and I'm sickeningly aware I've got another half hour of this torment, and I'm wondering if this time I'll be able to see it through to the end. Somehow I always do. And somehow I usefully forget just how bad it gets. And then I start looking forward to the next visit.

It's a strange thing, the mind. Well, the one that belongs to me is.

Making Demands

Got a bit operatic today. It's been quite some time since I've listened to my CD box-set of Mozart's big seven operas under the baton of John Eliot Gardiner. At the time I got this at a bargain price I considered it a great buy, and I suppose I still do. The orchestral playing is obviously of the highest order, crisp and vibrant and wonderfully clear in its textures, and wonderfully recorded. I suppose the voices are of the highest order as well, though I'm a bit more hesitant on this one since I generally struggle to appreciate really 'operatic' voices, especially those of the ladies, since they always sound a bit over-cooked to me. But I'm getting better at shedding my prejudices, and most of the time the singing sounds pretty much high-powered and often gorgeous to even these weak ears. But despite the many, many virtues of what's on offer I have a basic problem in listening to the operas, which has made me wonder whether it was right for me to buy the set after all.

I know that it's just not good enough to listen to what's on offer without following what all the warbling's about, so I make a determined effort to listen. But it's not easy. The cheapo-cheapo nature of the box-set means the operas come without the librettos. Now I have an excellent book comprising precisely the librettos in question, but because Eliot Gardiner's versions involve all sorts of cuts, the correspondence is by no means perfect. Also I'm hopeless at hearing the Italian clearly and often get lost simply as a result of this. So there I sit with the book of words (it's big and thick) on the table, with the little booklet provided with the CDs detailing the order and numbering of tracks balanced on top of that, listening hard and trying to follow - and usually succeeding. But at the cost of getting sort of exhausted, generally after about fifteen minutes.

I suppose this didn't work too badly for the first five operas of the set, but then I came to La Clemenza di Tito and just couldn't manage to get on with it. There were wholesale cuts to the libretto in the very first recitative with which the opera opens and I couldn't even distinguish between the two voices of the ladies warbling away, and since one of these was meant to be a chap, in true opera seria fashion, it all felt a bit cock-eyed and pointless. The result: I put the set aside for months.

Until today, that is, when I forced myself to sit down and get to grips with the piece. And I'm very glad I did. It doesn't have any of the obvious charms of Cosi or Figaro or Don Giovanni as an overall opera, but it's got bags of tunefulness and what I've gradually come to understand as Mozartian orchestral wit and sprightliness. Like all great creative work you come to grips with it by allowing the encounter, even it takes a bit of work to do so. In fact I've got a sneaking suspicion that it's the need to do the work that helps open up a potential for listening with understanding that may have been far too deeply hidden before. Sometimes demands are worth making, though perhaps I might have been less ambitious and just bought single operas rather than the whole set to avoid at least occasionally feeling overwhelmed.

Beginning Afresh

1 Muharram 1439

In my little corner of the world I have the odd privilege of enjoying no fewer than three New Years. That in itself is a reminder of a much, much bigger world beyond. And I'm fortunate enough to be allowed the kind of choices that enable me to make a new beginning with each new year. Heck, every day offers such possibilities.

I'm perhaps too much aware of enjoying my good fortune - for that's what it is. A lucky accident of time & geography. Today my prayers are for those who haven't had that kind of luck. Perhaps this year the tide might turn for some of them.

Top Man

Have recently been on a bit of a Steely Dan jag following the news of the death of the great Walter Becker. (Not that much of an excuse is needed for maxing out on the mighty Dan, of course.) Then it occurred to me I'd not given much airplay to WB's first solo album, 11 Tracks of Whack, for quite some time. I rectified the omission yesterday and suddenly realised that I actually preferred it to the various Donald Fagen solo albums. And since it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that DF's solo stuff is surpassingly excellent all the way through to Sunken Condos, I can't think of higher praise.

It's the sheer variety it offers that marks out something very special for me about 11 Tracks. And any album starting with the double whammy of Down In the Bottom and Junkie Girl has just got to be up there among the very, very special albums that every self-respecting muso must own. Yet, astonishingly, it's no longer available on CD, a deeply sobering fact I discovered when some time ago now I tried to buy Mr Becker's second solo effort, Circus Money, from those good people at amazon.com only to discover that both albums have been deleted (if that's the right term.) That's the reason that, until today, I'd not heard anything off the later disk. I sort of falsely assumed that Circus Money couldn't be up to much if it were no longer available having been originally released relatively recently.

Incredibly foolish assumption! Today I downloaded it from iTunes and it's seriously brilliant. I've spun it twice now, so obviously this is a very early judgement, but, again, I'd put it ahead of Mr Fagen's solo output. This goes to make the loss of WB all the more melancholy, but let's be grateful for what he left behind. And for how he rose above his demons. And the places he took us to. What a legacy, eh? Down in the bottom where your demons fly / Down in the bottom of the eastern sky / Down in the bottom where your lifeline shows / Down in the bottom where nobody goes / Drowned at the bottom of your mystery / Down in the bottom of the wine dark sea.

The Best I've Got

Thought of an awkward truth today whilst in the gym: all my best ideas are never my own. Oh hum.

Finding A Voice

I'm still slow on the uptake when it comes to plundering the Web for its treasures. It only occurred to me today that it might be a good wheeze to see whether there was anything related to Walcott's mighty Omeros on Youtube, and boy was I glad I did. A full reading by the man himself of Book 1 of the epic was the main goody related to Omeros itself, but there was a fair amount of excellent material on other poems and the poet and his background. This included quite an early South Bank Show (at least that's what I think it is, with Mr Bragg looking very fresh, very spry) which I'm fairly sure I watched when it was first broadcast. I suspect this may have put DW on the poetic map for me since I'm pretty sure I never got to encounter anything by him, or indeed of him, at school or university. There's a mention at the beginning of the documentary that Walcott was little known in the UK at that point - a lack that now seems quite extraordinary.

The poet's own reading of Book 1 has wonderfully alerted me to the fact that I was hearing it, and thus the poem as a whole, wrong in my head. Whilst I knew what DW sounded like in interview, and had some sense of the Caribbean accent fundamental to the poem, I was failing to appreciate just how incantatory the underlying rhythms were intended to be. There was something more urgent, more pressing somehow in my mind. But having not just heard but been spellbound by DW's mastery I don't think I'll ever be able to hear anything by him again in any other way. This reminds me of getting similarly intoxicated with Seamus Heaney's voice, and, I suppose, in earlier times with Ted Hughes's.

I suppose this is part of the greatness of these guys. The metaphor of a writer finding a voice is literal with them. They don't so much find it in their work as manifest something that was there all along. And in each of them that voice is intimately tied to a sense of locality, though they effortlessly transcend all that's narrow and parochial.

Slow Progress

I've got several books on the go at the moment, a habit I've tried to break myself of. And spectacularly failed to do so. The problem is the sense that I'm not really doing complete justice to any single book that I'm reading as I keep putting one aside to pick up another. But the thing is that since everything I'm reading is excellent it's just too difficult to resist going back to each isolated case of excellence, and I don't mind taking so long to read each item since there's so much enjoyment in the individual encounter.

Case in point: I can't remember exactly when I started reading Derek Walcott's narrative poem Omeros, or started a rereading, I should say, my first reading having been completed some years back. It feels like a long time back as it's been a regular enough feature of my very late night reading to have its own spot on my bedside table. But I've only just reached Book Three, about a third of the way in. I reckon I'm reading every line at least twice, and probably more. It's just so astonishingly good that it demands instant revisiting just to try and take in what's on the glittering surface, though this reader has a powerful feeling that there are depths he's not managed to plumb - though he has, at least, managed to recognise them.

Walcott's use of the hexameter as his standard line has convinced me that this is the natural line for any narrative verse in English, by the way. And who knew that tercets could be this flexible?

Alternatives

Finished Philip Roth's brilliantly imagined The Plot Against America today, positively zooming through the final third. As I mentioned in a previous post, at points I'd felt a curious reluctance to read on, regardless of the entirely gripping nature of the novel, since its dark vision of the way a 1940s fascist United States might have been was just a bit too real, just a bit ever so likely, and just a bit too dark in its utter reality. I don't know how Roth does it. The level of plausible detail is such that I needed to remind myself that FDR did win through to a third term (and a sadly curtailed fourth) and that's there's still much to admire about the US.

The fiction has left me feeling sort of vulnerable though, or rather given me an enhanced sense I really didn't need at this particular point in history of the vulnerability of what we might see as civilisation. I've never been much of a one for manifest destinies, or conspiracy theories that suggest that someone, somewhere knows whence it's all headed. The cock-up theory of history seems to me intuitively reflective of what I know of human beings generally and reflective of the way the world looks at the moment.

Mind you, that's all the more reason for us as individuals to try and push things in directions that seem reasonable and sane, limited as any of those efforts might be. Because you just don't know - and maybe things can quite illogically turn out to be reasonably okay after all.

Sheer Laziness

Other than doing a bit of marking in the morning I've been enjoying what the Missus accurately terms a lazy day. The particular laziness of this one was characterised by tea, cake and sleep, though not necessarily in that order. Altogether splendid. And, I suspect, necessary.

Doing Something Well

We had an appointment this afternoon at one of the government offices in town in connection with renewing our green cards. The last time we needed to go down there was some five years ago. Since that time we've had the cards renewed but that hasn't required having new pictures taken or new thumb-prints recorded (which is how the cards cunningly let you get quickly through passport control at the airport here), so we haven't had to go down to get all the necessary done. Now you might be surprised to hear this, but we weren't really worried about the inconvenience of the trip and its attendant bureaucracy since we remembered our previous visit as being a breeze.

And, astonishingly, this one was even breezier. Seriously. The appointment was for 3.30 pm, but we arrived some twenty minutes earlier. Believe it or not, all the paperwork, the photo-taking and the thumb-printing was done by 3.25, and we left five minutes before our appointment time. The already super-efficient processes had been speeded up by having everything done by one highly efficient and friendly lady. We could even check if the photos were okay and were asked if we wanted them done again.

It's easy to make fun of the obsession here with getting work done well and providing excellent service, but when you're on the receiving end of the excellent services you can't help but admire the results. And it all added to the sum of human happiness as we were able to go off in very good time for the cup that cheers at Arab Street and have a fine old time doing precisely nothing.

The Tyranny Of Numbers

Got to the gym again this evening and did my forty minutes, burning 1 more calorie than I managed on Tuesday.

Improvement!

Something New

Decided to download some music by the recently deceased composer Jonathan Harvey yesterday, and haven't been able to stop listening to it. The piece in question is called Bhakti, and I selected it pretty much at random, because I liked the title (which sort of half-reminded me of a great phase of ace guitarist John McLaughlin's career) and because I'd vaguely picked up through reading here & there about the composer that it's seen as representative, in a good way, of his work in general. He's known for experimenting with sound, ả la all those IRCAM johnnies, and there's a fair amount of that in Bhakti, though at times it sounds conventional enough - in a modernist, avant garde manner - such that you've got to listen out for it - the sound bending, I mean.

In fact, you've simply got to listen to this music, otherwise there's absolutely no point to it. As background it would empty a room sharpish with its dissonances and unexpected lurches, and it's just too odd and does too much to sort of amiably relax to, soundscape fashion. Frankly it irritates, unless you listen; and then it compels. Partly this is because even on a fourth listen you've no real idea what it's going to do next; and partly it's because eventually it all seems to fit together and make some kind of sense.

I suppose I should feel quite sophisticated listening to what I suspect quite a few folk would regard as cutting edge, arty sort of stuff. But it actually makes me feel quite childish, not really knowing what's going on but stumbling around in its sound world like a kid in a particularly well appointed amusement park. What this must be like to experience in the concert hall, I'd love to know, but severely doubt I'll ever find out.

No Regrets

A counter-intuitive truth I've discovered since developing problems with my back several years ago: it pays to ignore the body's moans and groans and get the thing working. With luck the moans and groans go away, or, at least, recede into the background. I'm hoping this truth still holds good, and I'm not going to regret going to the gym this evening. I've been struggling to move freely of late, having to resort to using a chair for prayers, and sitting with the old geezers at the masjid who struggle to do the necessary. So I wasn't exactly expecting great things on the old elliptical trainer just now. To my surprise I posted good numbers and, more importantly, felt easy and free doing my forty minutes - as well as feeling pleasantly exhausted. 

Just hope the title of this post holds good tomorrow.

A Good Idea

Here's a very fruitful idea from Iain McGilchrist's book: ... works of art - music, poems, paintings, great buildings - can be understood only if we appreciate that they are more like people than texts, concepts or things. De-contextualising the idea doesn't help to do it justice, and McGilchrist provides lots of, dare I say, empirical evidence in its favour, but even as a standalone apercu it makes a lot of sense to me. Indeed, it's something I've always 'known', matching perfectly my own experience of encountering great literature and great music. (I'm not so responsive to painting & architecture, so I'll pass on those.)

One of the several implications of this way of looking at how we respond to art is to severely call into question the whole notion of what might be termed the critical-analytic response - otherwise known as how Literature is 'done' in schools and other so-called places of learning. I suspect the real attraction of 'doing' lit this way is that it renders the experience open to some kind of assessment or measurement (clumsy as this usually is); the genuine human encounter is largely closed to such possibilities, which is, I suppose, in part what makes it human.

Lots Of Ideas

Reading Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is proving to be an extraordinarily thought-provoking experience for this reader. On almost every page there's some fascinating nugget of information - who knew that carp discriminate between the blues and classical music? - but it's the slightly uncanny fact that the broad outlines of the central thesis expounded within its pages are helping me understand almost every random thought I've had for the last few years about art, music, creativity, human nature, paradox - in fact, pretty much the whole caboodle - that's exhilaratingly unnerving. I keep thinking, this explains everything, though, of course, it doesn't. But it does make me feel as if it's possible to get some genuine coherence into what might previously have been characterised as a hodgepodge of intuitions and half-articulated suspicions.

And I'm less than a third of the way in!

In For Repairs

My good deed for the day was to help take Mak to the Pantai Hospital at Ayer Keroh to see if they could treat her foot, the sore spot on which has been giving her some trouble. It looks like we might have been just in time. They didn't do anything immediately, but she's due for an appointment on Monday when the plan is to clean out the wound which seems to have been the result of the tight socks that were applied to her feet when she was in ICU. Several weeks ago Noi was worrying and complaining about the soreness created as a result of the tightness but the doctors at the main Melaka Hospital said it was of no concern. Just lately Mak has been complaining of pain in the area. Now the talk is of gangrene setting in. Hope we've managed to get it seen to in time.

Taking A Toll

I was moaning about slow-moving traffic on the north-south highway last Sunday and, guess what? I'm moaning about it again today. Not that I've been on the road today since I've been lazily bumming around relaxing in Melaka, but on the road I was last night, and for a lot longer than was necessary. On a very ordinary Thursday night, well after the rush hour, you might reasonably expect the journey from the capital to Sungai Petai to take around an hour and three quarters tops. We added a good (actually a badly irritating) fifty minutes to that due to the very slow-moving traffic after Senawang or thereabouts. The cause? Originally we thought it could only be an accident that had blocked the three lane highway, but we failed to take into account the genius of whatever fulfils the role of a Department of Works over here who'd decided to shut down a full two lanes without thought of a contraflow system of any sort, in order to do something to the road, which was only fully opened less than five years ago.

Now I'm sure you're thinking that in an age when too many cars are on the roads it's just par for the course to expect a measure, possibly an unpalatably big one, of inconvenience. And, yes, I'd agree, but you have to pay a hefty fee each time you use the highway for the privilege of getting stuck in its slow-moving traffic. There's something deeply paradoxical about this that becomes a cause of frustration all of its own.

I need to remind myself of the mantra I so frequently cite to my students: Life isn't fair. True. And in this case the unfairness runs deep, deep, deep.

Dark Days

Quite a bit of coverage in the press locally concerning the plight of the Rohingya refugees fleeing Rakhine. Not sure that anyone comes out of this terrible situation standing on the moral high ground, but the grim reality of what bears all the signs of a 'slow genocide' is now obvious to all but the most obtuse (though there always seems to be a remarkable number of such types when it comes to the persecution of Muslim minorities.)

Wondering what, if anything, is going on within the ASEAN 'family' relating to all this. If a major humanitarian catastrophe takes place, or has taken place, it's not going to speak well for any of the member states.

Dread

Making fitful progress in Roth's The Plot Against America. Why so? After all, amongst Roth's many virtues one would assume his ability to engage the reader in turn-paging fashion would guarantee a novel with such a striking title to be supremely readable. And one would be quite right. I don't doubt I could easily finish the novel in a couple of days - were it not for the disconcerting sense of dread engendered by his all too plausible vision of a fascist America.
 
I've got as far as the Roth family's painful trip to Washington  in the first months of the brilliantly imagined Lindbergh presidency and much as I want to read on to find out what happens next, a large part of me doesn't want to know what happens next because it isn't going to be very pleasant. I'm reminded of old friend Tony's oddly naïve declaration that he didn't see the point in reading novels with unhappy endings. In this case I think I know how he felt.

Quite Certain

Yesterday saw me deliberating as to whether the recently deceased John Ashbury was a fine enough poet (for me, that is - he obviously is for a lot of other people) to make it worth my while making another attempt to read him at length. I'm still deliberating. Another interesting article in the on-line edition of The Guardian certainly pushed me in a direction favourable to a positive decision, but I couldn't help but notice the poet's own seeming uncertainty therein as to the ultimate value of his work. Certainly seemed to be a decent sort of bloke, though, and the sort of teacher poetry deserves.

Not sure that the recently deceased composer, guitarist and partner in crime with Donald Fagen as half of Steely Dan, the brilliant Walter Becker, might fairly be described as a decent sort of chap. I don't think he would have thought so himself, or aspired to such a reputation. But who cares? The music speaks for itself and himself: a certified genius.

The albums from Can't Buy A Thrill though to Gaucho constituted a sound track of sorts to my years at university, and added immeasurably to that experience. Singing an off-key Bad Sneakers with old chum Stevie Cannon, prancing down the main road to the arts tower, is the sort of memory you either seek earnestly to repress or find a strange and doubtful joy in. It says little for me that the latter applies, but much for the compositional talents of WB & DF.

Another Opportunity

Reading about the death of poet John Ashbery in the on-line version of The Guardian was an awkward reminder of the fact that I have never been able to understand why he is so highly rated. Awkward because lots of accomplished and sensible readers of poetry tell the world he is good - so I don't have much doubt he is, otherwise why the enthusiasm? - but I'm just not up to grasping why this is so. At the simplest level I'm so far short of understanding his stuff that it's embarrassing. Normally my not entirely 'getting' something doesn't put me off a writer too much, but in this case I just feel clueless.

Now I can easily let this go, and for years have done so. After all there's so much wonderful stuff out there by writers I do 'get' that it's odd to be so bothered by this deficit. But I don't think the botheration comes from a sense of missing out on something. Rather it relates to a feeling that I'm somehow being less than fair to a major talent in not making an effort. And also a sense that there could be great rewards in making some kind of breakthrough.

I'm reminded of my initial encounters with certain kinds of music, or composers, that once seemed impenetrable. Even in the case of my beloved Messiaen I remember struggling, but somehow trusting that if the experts said this was the real thing it would eventually reveal itself as being so. It helps that there's always been an element of the pretentious about me: you need that to soldier on with stuff that fails to reward even the fourth time round.

Fortunately a bit of help is at hand with regards to the work of Mr Ashbery. The Guardian runs a neat feature called Poem of the Week in which writer Carol Rumens gives an analysis of the chosen poem and there's a pretty good one of the late poet's Breezeway which has led me some little way if not to an understanding of the piece in question at least to being able to grasp why someone might choose it as their poem of the week. It's a start, I suppose.

Getting It Together

15.10
Now packing for our journey north. The usual minor crisis as to which books & CDs to load is almost at an end, but I know I'll end up hankering for something I have decided not to take by the second day. Must say, am looking forward to getting stuck into my Collected Keats, sorely missed during my recent reading of Motion's biography. Endymion here I come.

22.45
I thought we might be blessed with an easy journey up to Melaka (where we've stopped off at for the evening in order to spend a bit more time with Mak & family.) And it looked that way initially as we sailed through Tuas admiring the jam coming into Singapore, probably resulting from folks returning after spending the long Hari Raya Haji weekend in Malaysia. Then it all went pear-shaped, as they say, or used to say the last time I was resident in the UK. How is it possible to have such slow-moving traffic between Pagoh and Melaka on an ordinary Sunday? Why do we need to pay a hefty toll for roads that can't handle the volume of traffic they were (presumably) designed for? Why do I bother getting irritated by all this?

Never mind - a fine bowl of soup and accompanying roti at Aziz's place put all to rights.

Adapting To Circumstances

Spent a most fruitful morning at Jurong Regional Library helping our drama guys prepare for and deliver a couple of performances in a room they've got there set aside for this kind of small public performance. It's not a perfect space for doing something theatrical in nature, but that's the point. Any space you can fit an audience into can be made to work assuming you've got enough imagination and determination, and the necessary skills.

Peter Brooks's The Empty Space remains the best book on acting I've ever read (and one of the shortest - just one of its many virtues.) Wish I knew what happened to my old copy.

Taking Nothing For Granted

Eid al Adha 1438

Found myself using a chair for prayers for both visits to the masjid today, just as I needed to do for prayers for Hari Raya Puasa back in June. It's possible I could have managed without, but I didn't want to take a chance and find myself unable to stand up at the crucial point. I've reached an age when it's necessary to live life defensively.

Now sort of wondering how I managed to cope with the physical strain of last year's Hajj, and marvelling that none of it seemed like a strain at the time. Sometimes just getting through is as good as it gets.