By Surprise

One of the trickier features of my work is the way in which an issue requiring time and attention to deal with can blow up out of nowhere, cutting across other demands and intentions, pretty much at any time. This afternoon I suddenly found myself dealing with an administrative task I'd expected I'd have to do quite soon, but I had not expected the deadline to be tomorrow. It got done, but with some small cost to other things that needed doing, and with some slightly larger cost to my enthusiasm for doing things well.

We've built a culture predicated on keeping those who are lucky enough to be in work too busy to be able to do all their work well. This is not wise.

The Year Ahead

Bought my indispensable week-to-a-view desk diary for 2021 today. It's a relief to get hold of it these days as you see fewer and fewer on the shelves. I suppose not that many folks use them in our IT-enabled paradise. Normally I have a bit of a moan at this point about time speeding up, but owing to unforeseen circumstances this last year has felt pretty slow to me. I've just glanced at my battered diary for 2020 and in places there are more crossings-out than entries. And, of course, 2021 lurks deeply uncertainly in a deeply uncertain future. Yikes!

(Just tried to add a link to last year's post about buying my diary for 2020, but the unexpectedly new Blogger interface still won't allow me to insert links. So here it is in full, as evidence of my usual moaning: http://fromafarplace.blogspot.com/2019/09/spinning-even-faster.html .)

To Treasure

Good article in today's Life section of The Straits Times about the esteemed Ramli Sarip. It seems everyone's favourite Mat Rocker is releasing a new album this year. If we can get hold of it on CD it'll be getting some air play in this household, I can tell you. Every Ramli album we've got has proved a keeper.

When I told the Missus about the article she bunged on some live stuff she searched for on-line on her trusty i-Pad and, despite the fact we could only hear it through the tinny i-Pad, it sounded extremely tasty - the sign of a real musician: stuff sounding good when it really has no right to.

If memory serves, we've seen the great man live (really, I mean) three times and he's never been less than entirely, masterfully present in his music. A national treasure - though I'm not sure the nation quite realises that fact.

Still Very Ordinary

We've not even bothered to step out today. Noi decided to bake some bread to go along with the patented oxtail soup that she's been preparing, and she's also made a sort of orange cake that smells of orange in the best possible way. Since she had cunningly made sure she had the ingredients for all the goodies on hand, she announced we would have a day at home and I more than readily complied. In its way the lockdown helped us to an understanding of the pleasures of going absolutely nowhere and we're often quite content to develop our understanding further, as we have today.

All highly satisfactory and deeply restful.

A Perfectly Ordinary Evening

It's been raining here, and pleasantly so, the kind of rain you can happily walk across the car-park in - not nasty rain, not Manchester rain, if you know what I mean. And happily the rain seemed to have kept the crowds in, so it was easy to get a place in the Prata Alley shop, near Clementi Mall. It was my first time there, and won't be my last: the coin prata proved yummy in the extreme, especially for a man who just really fancied some prata, and the teh tarik gajah was of the highest standard. The Missus, by the way, opted for the thosai and was not disappointed.

So why am I relating all these mundane details? Because their sheer ordinariness goes to illustrate a great and abiding truth. There is nothing ordinary about the ordinary for the man, and indeed the woman, who keep their minds and their mouths open, and really don't mind trying something not new in the slightest.

The Eyes Have It

Watched Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit this afternoon. It vies with Chicken Run as my favourite animated movie, and possibly just edges it on account of the wonderfully rendered locations, especially the streets of terraced houses. The gags are uniformly funny, but it's the expressive faces that sell the humour. How does Gromit manage to say so much with those button eyes?

Insight

Richard Williams's unfailingly excellent blog thebluemoment.com is one of the very few music-themed blogs I drop in on regularly. His latest post, dealing with the work of Richard and Linda Thompson in the 70's, is typically informative & enthusiastic and left me feeling a little bit wiser as to the career of one of my favourite artists. It also served as a salutary reminder of the fact that my interest in RT only really blossomed in the late 90's. Mr Williams's mention of the eccentrically titled collection (guitar, vocal), which he helped compile, suddenly made me realise that it was that double album that finally got me into RT, but that was only after a few years of intermittently playing the thing until the light dawned.

The reference to the austerity of the Thompson sound accounting for their lack of popular success struck me as spot-on. Looking back I think that was the problem I had with the work in general. It didn't seek to please in terms of production, as if so assured of its quality it really didn't need to. I'm deeply glad I eventually got the point.

(Since the new, improved Blogger interface resolutely refuses to allow me to insert links, here's a link to the blogpost in question:  https://thebluemoment.com/2020/09/22/those-hard-luck-stories/ .)

Something Gorgeous

Came home to listen to some Duke Ellington. An excellent idea. Wondered why I didn't do this everyday. The CD in question was a nifty collection entitled The Ellington Suites comprising three of his suites written for specific occasions, the recordings stretching from 1959 to 1972.

It's all good (needless to say) but I was knocked sideways by A Single Petal of a Rose, an old favourite, featuring just the Duke on piano with some tasteful bowed bass from Jimmy Woode towards the back end. I'd forgotten just how wonderfully spare the Duke's playing is. There's a bit of ornamentation around the lovely melody, but it remains a bit. Billy Strayhorn, I suppose technically the better player, would have been all guns firing on it, and, much as I love his playing, I don't think that florid approach would do the piece justice.

Something Lost

When I was a little lad I could lose myself in stories. I mean, stories I made up and acted out. Quite effortlessly. Then I lost that ability, around the time I began to think about girls.

That's a huge regret. Somehow the loss reduced me. Growing up made me smaller in certain ways.

The Joys Of The Unfamiliar

I thought I'd find the poems in the Remains of Elmet section of the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes familiar, but this hasn't been the case so far - and I'm some seven or eight poems in. I'm wondering if this is because I'm so used to seeing them alongside Fay Godwin's photographs that reading them shorn of the pictures has transformed them for me. Or it could be just a case of a poor memory. Or it could be a case of lazy reading when I first encountered them, meaning I focused on my favourites and didn't pay too much attention to those that didn't immediately render their secrets. Indeed, it occurs to me that I never actually owned the collection but browsed through it whenever I was at Tony's and my exposure to its contents may have been a bit more limited than I assumed as a result.

One thing that has surprised as I've been reading through the Collected is how much I've enjoyed sequences I didn't think would appeal. For example, I must have previously read Adam and the Sacred Nine since it was published in Moortown, a volume I would have claimed to know well. And I assumed that since it didn't do much for me on its initial publication, that I wouldn't find much to enjoy this time around. Yet I found myself responding enthusiastically to every poem, especially those directly about birds, and thinking of them as quite magical evocations of the simple 'being' of the creatures, as in the best of Hughes's animal verse.

I think this points to why I've found myself sticking to the policy of reading books of poetry doggedly in sequence. The rewards of discovery are so powerful. This way the treasure can't remain hidden (unless I'm too dumb to see it. Always a sad possibility, I'm afraid.)

Something To Learn

Found myself almost cheering yesterday when listening to a chap on Sky News, an expert on infectious diseases who'd worked extensively in various African nations, talking about the problems the British government has had in dealing with the pandemic. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't cheering in relation to those problems, which he was analysing in quite damning detail. And the chap wasn't trying to sound nasty as he was keen to acknowledge just how difficult it is to get a grip on any pandemic.

No, it was when he referenced Rawanda that I had to control my desire to cheer. Astonishingly (in my jaundiced eyes, given the bad news that so often comes out of that sad nation) they've been extremely successful (so far) with regard to the measures they've taken and the chap was suggesting that the nation of my birth had much to learn from them. Basically Rawanda has had to deal with so many threats related to infectious diseases - Ebola for one - that they've developed real expertise in these areas.

One of my dark fears in the early days of the pandemic was that Africa in general was going to face its most savage effects. It seems a major mercy, worth celebration, that that scenario has not come to pass.

I must say, and I did say this at length to the Missus this morning, I reckon the UK could also learn a lot from the Far Place in which I currently, very happily, reside in terms of how to deal with their current problems related to containing the pandemic. I keep looking at the number of Covid-19 related deaths here (27 and not rising, having not risen for quite some time) and wondering why western governments aren't queuing up to find out just how it was done.

Of course, it isn't over yet, and definitive judgements are inappropriate, but the signs are there and are surely worth reading, and reading closely.

Reviving, Possibly Thriving

We found ourselves at Bussorah Street this afternoon and, happily, it was crowded. I say 'happily' in the sense that it was good to see the area reviving after what must have been a traumatic period for the businesses there. And 'happily' because there were few signs (in fact, none I was aware of) of businesses having to close down. I'd wondered whether we'd see Wardah Books reopen, but it was nice and crowded, with an Arabic lesson going full steam on the upper level when I was in there. And 'happily' because it was a lovely hotly sunny afternoon and it felt almost like a holiday.

But, now I think of it, there were obviously no tourists around and Masjid Sultan was basically closed so these are early days in terms of recovery. I hope I'm not being overly optimistic in my positive assessment of the area.

Why should it make a difference to me? After all, these businesses are not my business and as long as I'm doing okay then things are quite alright thank you. But the moment I write that it's so obvious to me that none of that is true. In the oddest ways we are connected. Any sense of well-being of any depth must stretch beyond the individual. We can only thrive when the community thrives.

For A Change

I feel rather bad criticising the wonderful Blogger people who devised the system that allows From A Far Place to exist. And all for free, from my perspective. But I'll do so anyway, such is my irritation over a recent development in relation to what you're reading.

Someone has decided to change the interface on which I write this thing. When I first realised they were intending to so I was mildly concerned, simply because I know I take more than a while to adapt to anything new in the wonderful world of IT. But the switch was eased as I was still allowed to use what they termed the legacy interface, or legacy blogger, or something like that. Definitely 'legacy' was in there somewhere.

I did assume, though, that the new system would prove to be more adaptable and probably better in the long run. But it isn't. It's by no means impossible to use, but one or two things that were previously easy to achieve now seem impossible. For one thing, it's no longer possible to highlight a segment of text and change the font. Of course, that's not of much importance in the great scheme of things, but why improve a system by making it worse?

 

Sad Again

I was sort of goofing off and sort of working all at the same time today, watching videos of Prince live in concert, when, completely to my surprise, I was hit by a wave of sadness. It was caused, I assume, by a sudden sense of disconnection between the abundant joyous life I was watching and richly hearing on stage and the reality of that life being no longer with us. It wasn't grief in any way. It was just the hollowness left when something great has gone that seemed for a moment to echo. And a momentary sense of music lost.

Staying Safe

Just read about Tameside Hospital being identified as a centre for deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic. This is not exactly reassuring. I assume that John & Maureen know about this and will avoid getting hospitalised. Mind you, since Tameside in general has the fourth highest rate of infections in the UK, it's not as if they are guaranteed safety where they are.

I'm always puzzled by the bad rep of the hospital. Mum received excellent care when she was in there and on Christmas Eve last year, when I had to take Noi to Accident & Emergency, on account of her shingles, the service was first-rate - especially considering the time of year. Maybe there's something I don't know.

Out Of Step

I watch a fair amount of stuff on YouTube (though in very short doses) so I'm used to the interruptions from ads. Of course, I find these annoying, but I'm way too much of a cheapo-cheapo type to think of upgrading to a service without them. I also find some fascination in trying to figure who could possibly be influenced by any of the ads since I make it a policy to foster a negative impression of anything at all being advertised. I sort of vaguely assume that's what any sane person would do automatically, but I can't be right because the folks who devise the things wouldn't pay gazillions to upset people. There has to be some, possibly a hefty, financial reward for them putting this stuff out there.

Which makes me wonder just how out of step I am with the world. And it occurs to me that my enjoyment of going into shops and buying precisely nothing is probably not all that widely shared. Sad really, I think it's one of life's most useful skills.

Impressions

When I still lived in England I had a reasonable working knowledge of a range of sports. I had a good idea of what was going on, in a broad sense, in the worlds of cricket, boxing, motor-racing, rugby, et al. Most blokes of my age were the same. We grew up watching sport on the telly and reading the sports pages and we sort of soaked it in. That ended when I came to this Far Place. Coverage of what I'd previously thought of as main stream sport was spotty and that didn't bother me all that much. After all there's plenty to be interested about in the world, so I can't say I missed the exposure I'd previously enjoyed.

So although I'd heard of Lewis Hamilton and was aware of the fact he was very good at what he did, that was almost the sum of my knowledge. Except for a vague sense, picked up from nowhere in particular, that he wasn't seen as a terribly attractive character: I suppose I thought of him as a fairly superficial young man. I noticed that when he first won the World Championship in F1 (is that what they call it?) the nation didn't exactly fall over with rejoicing, something I (unconsciously, I suppose) put down to a defect in his character.

But here's the thing. In more recent times I've seen the guy not just win races but also speak up on various issues and he's obviously articulate, intelligent, concerned for others and morally brave - qualities which I think might be objectively acknowledged even by those who don't necessarily approve of some of his stances in relation to matters of a socio-political colour. Which makes me puzzled as to how this aspect of him as a person - an aspect I can't imagine suddenly appearing out of nowhere - wasn't something I had any real awareness of when he first came to public notice. I mean, he's an impressive individual beyond his deeply impressive skills as a sportsman - and that's a lot of impressiveness to take on board.

Perhaps the answer to how I missed all this lies partly in my own obtuseness, but I suspect it lies more squarely in images conjured by media content to mediate certain stereotypes related to race. And it disturbs me that to some not small degree I fell for them.

Sort Of Ready

Now gearing up for work tomorrow. I've managed to do all the work-related stuff I had to do over the one-week break, which meant it didn't always feel like a break. But then, it didn't always feel like work either. And I managed to do one or two of the things I really wanted to do, though by no means all.

But, all told, I'm happy to be in work in a world of increasing uncertainties.

Surviving

21.58
Just survived an epic massage courtesy of the powerfully ministering hands of Kak Sabariah, Noi’s legendary massage lady.

23.55
And got home in one piece with the old body functioning with reasonable efficiency driving back.

And all this without taking a single painkiller - thus impressing both Fuad and Fifi who couldn't cope with their massages without pharmaceutical assistance. Hah!

The Sound Of Silence

Took a brisk walk up to Holland Village this afternoon to shake out the cobwebs and enjoy the trees. Whilst there I stopped off for the cup that cheers at the CBTL. In pre-pandemic days I'd be wont to sit outside whilst imbibing, but that option is no longer available. Enjoyed my chai latte inside but found myself keenly aware just how noisy the pace is when crowded. Industrial levels at points.

Not entirely unpleasant in its way. I quite enjoyed monitoring the ebb and flow for a while, but was happy enough to retreat into quietude thereafter.

Just Sad

The Pound of the final pages of Moody's biography is by far the most sympathetic version of the man offered across the three volumes it comprises. The account of the intense depression suffered by the poet in his final years made for grim reading. Something seemed to break in him, and his occasional acknowledgements that he'd got it all wrong and spoiled everything struck me as bitingly sincere, not least because of their obvious truth.

Why did it take him so long to see this? I suppose because the cost of seeing it was so monumental.

Mind you, he was incredibly lucky in terms of the support he received in those years from the various women in his life. Moody does a good job of spelling out the entanglements EP got himself into romantically without becoming overly prurient or judgemental, but I can't help but point out that it's difficult to defend the poet's behaviour, especially towards the younger women. Indeed, I'd say that Olga Rudge is the one character from it all who emerges as a figure to unequivocally admire. I reckon she's worth a biography all of her own. 

Conflicted

EP has just got out of St Elizabeths in my reading of Moody's brilliantly detailed and even-handed biography. It's proving an odd read insofar as I assumed Pound would have deeply regretted his anti-Semitism post-war, but this is clearly not the case. So no matter what the level of sympathy one feels for him regarding his incarceration, that sympathy is necessarily compromised. And it doesn't help that he embodies the worst kind of intellectual arrogance. Not a nice man. Yet generous to others and admired by many despite it all. I reckon I stand with William Carlos Williams with regard to how I feel about Pound, and since Williams is eminently sane I think that's a pretty good place to be.

Real Service

It is with considerable relief that I record the fact that we finally managed to submit an on-line application to renew Noi's passport this evening. We've been trying to do so for over a month, but the webpage you need to fill in had consistently rejected every version we tried to submit of a photograph for the passport. We'd followed up by trying to ring the office here responsible for the issuing of the passport, but it was impossible to get through, and emailing the office about the problem, but never receiving a reply.

I doubt that we would have ever succeeded had it not been for the assistance of the young lady, a Ms Lee, at the photography shop where we had the latest photo taken. Actually, she'd tried to help up a few weeks back, but we didn't get anywhere, and on that occasion she hadn't charged us anything for her services. That stuck me as extremely generous since we had certainly taken up her time, a good twenty minutes or more. Tonight she helped us get everything done, and was incredibly patient for the hour or so it took.

As far as I can gather, this is what she's been doing for those who come to the shop with the same problem. Talk about going beyond the call of duty! Further evidence, if we needed it, that the world is kept turning by the 'ordinary' workers we manage to take entirely for granted until we suddenly figure out how 'key' they are to our lives.

Listening Hard

In recent weeks I've taken to occasionally listening to spoken word stuff on YouTube - radio plays, audiobooks and the like. There's an abundance of it and most is of excellent quality. The problem for me is that listening is so wonderfully comfortable that it's easy to nod off. I even struggled to stay awake in a strikingly powerful radio adaptation of le Carre's Call for the Dead which struck me as better than the original novel.

I'll just have to work harder at listening harder. Always a good thing.

Leaving There

Last Saturday I was praising the comfort offered the reader by Philip Pullman in La Belle Sauvage. That was before I reached the second half of the story and the great flood navigated by Malcolm and Alice and baby Lyra. There's precious little comfort on offer in the second part of the novel, but plenty of visceral discomfort and an overwhelming sense of threat, such even though you know Lyra has to survive to play out His Dark Materials you're fairly dubious that she will make it beyond eight months of age.

Pullman is brilliant at suggesting the real heroism of Malcolm and the wonderfully surprising Alice lies in just how genuinely terrified and depressed they are by what is expected of them and yet do what is needed in a way that seems entirely realistic. The sequence in which Malcolm throws up as a result of the terror he feels is one of the most convincing evocations of physical fear I've ever read.

I didn't want the story to finish, but I'm glad it did.

Oh, and the illustrations by Chris Wormell are stone cold perfect.

Making Demands

I thought I might finish La Belle Sauvage before the weekend. The narrative power of the novel is such that it takes some effort to break off from reading, and Pullman's inventiveness is particularly dazzling in the second half of the novel. But there have been plenty of demands upon me - and by no means unreasonable ones - such that I can't see completing it ahead of the morrow. I've just arrived at the last chapter and I don't want to rush it. Pullman demands reading, but he also demands full attention for the reader to enjoy the unorthodox gifts of his fiction.

Also we spent most of the evening over in Woodlands celebrating Rozita's birthday, answering to the demands of family togetherness, the happiest demands of all.

Not Exactly As Usual

The last time I found myself in a mosque for Friday Prayers was back at the beginning of April, so it was a delight and a relief in roughly equal proportions to get back to Masjid Darussalam this afternoon. I was also fortunate to get the opportunity since we are restricted to just 100 worshippers at any one time, distancing being very strictly observed. Fuad helped me apply on-line for a place and it'll be another three weeks before I'm allowed to try again for a booking. So we're not exactly back to normal.

And the prayers themselves didn't feel quite normal, despite the comforting familiarity of the experience. Not praying shoulder to shoulder and wearing a mask feels odd - but completely right, given the circumstances. I was also lucky in that the khutbah was in English, as were sections of the prayers normally said in Malay. At one point we were praying for those who'd lost their jobs, more specifically that they'd find something better. It felt sharply sad to do so.

Went The Day Well?

A day of noise - cheerfully exuberant - and silence - warmly comforting. And lots in between. Including a fair amount of cake and kueh and cookies. A day to settle for.

The Unbearable Heaviness Of Being

I'm annoyed with myself. I don't know how I managed to do it, but I'm a good 2 kg over my fighting weight for no reason I can think of. I've not exactly been gorging lately - and completely forgot to eat until the early evening one day last week, such were the demands on my time. I suppose not being able to go to the gym has something to do with it.

The funny thing is that I feel as if I've been giving my old body quite a pounding in terms of keeping moving during the day, yet the old body in question seems to have decided to expand itself as if it's been having a nice relaxed lie-down. It's all irritatingly paradoxical, but you can't argue with the scales, can you?

Being Present

I was thinking back the other day to the time my sister, Maureen, got married - her first marriage to Colin, that is. I don't remember much at all of the wedding, but I can vividly recall how I felt on the evening of the day. By that time the married couple had gone off on their honeymoon and I was with Mum and Dad in the room behind the shop on Guide Lane. I'm certain that up to that moment I hadn't thought at all in real terms about what it would be like without my sister at home because the feeling of something close to complete devastation, a kind of emptiness, took me entirely by surprise. I don't know how long it lasted, but I know how it felt that evening.

How old was I? I think I'm right in assuming I was twelve. Maureen married when she was nineteen - which seems very young now, but was quite normal at the time. So I suppose I was still pretty much a child. I say this because the memory brought home a realisation to me regarding the way young kids experience others, specifically those close to them. I reckon that Mums and Dads and Grans and Grandads, and anyone who's always around, always there, are experienced as much as presences as they are as individuals.

They sort of fill all the empty spaces in a way that I think most of us experience as deeply comforting. And part of the painful process of growing up is getting cut off from those presences and coping with the loss.

Thinking that made me consider for a moment what it must be like for those denied that kind of security - or, worse, those who must deal with presences that embody some kind of threat. But it's almost too painful to go there.