Getting Angry

People, rightly, worry about being angry. It can be a perniciously debilitating state to be in. It can wear one down. But it can, properly channeled, kept within boundaries, galvanise.

I experienced the latter kind today. I wouldn't say I enjoyed it. But I was happy to embrace it. And the energy remains available to me.

Making Sacrifices

Eid al Adha, 1444

Attended prayers at Masjid Darussalam for Hari Raya Haji this morning and celebrated the occasion at home with family in the late afternoon in a suitably jolly fashion.

Tried to spend some time between these events meditating on the meaning of sacrifice, in keeping with the spirit of the day. The khutbah this morning had taken 'unity in diversity' as its paradoxical theme and I found a way of linking this to my scrambled thoughts on the need to make sacrifices for something other than ourselves. It's not so easy to recognise that we're not at the centre of the universe but acting on this truth allows a kind of freedom.

Finding Strength

Noi and I followed the voluntary fast for Hari Raya Haji today. She, as ever, took it in her stride. I struggled.

It isn't that I developed a terrible headache or anything of that nature. The problem was that I kept forgetting I was fasting whilst at work and on at least five occasions found myself relishing the thought of the cup of tea I intended to imbibe when I got back to my desk only to have to remind myself that that was just not about to happen. The sense of being let-down was considerable each and every time.

Yet, as always, the experience felt like a deeply useful one. Immediately following each let-down came that odd sense of assurance that I'd be able to cope - a reminder of a strange sort of unexpected strength. Almost empowering in its way, as if an awareness of vulnerability allowed the discovery of something not quite as fragile as one might have assumed.

Not All There

Read Ian McEwan's Black Dogs when I was in KL. As so often when I'm reading McEwan I was aware at one and the same time of how beautifully written the novel is and how contrived. That strong feeling of reading a kind of thesis never quite went away. But what an engaging thesis the novel presents - or, rather, involves us in. And great set pieces. Including the haunting appearance of the dogs themselves.

But they're not really dogs at all, somehow. They are so obviously symbolic it's almost painful. Unforgettable, nonetheless. Powerfully unreal.

A Bit Down

I knew it wasn't likely to be the happiest of days. The news of Aloy's sudden unexpected death was shocking enough when it came to us in Amsterdam, but I thought I'd gradually got my head around it over the last week and a half. However, I realised I hadn't genuinely taken it all in when Paul and myself tried to work through some of the stuff he'd left behind, figuring out what we needed to give to the family and what needed to be kept as belonging, in some sense, to the department. We did what was needed but it all felt unpleasantly intrusive, as if we were blundering into what had been, and should continue to be, private and personal. I felt uncomfortably close to someone impossibly far away.

And then there was the sadness of letting classes know I would no longer be able to teach them due to the need to re-cast the timetable to provide for Aloy's classes. I wasn't quite prepared for how bad it all made me feel.

But it's a necessary badness, and sadness, I suppose. The price needing to be paid for keeping things going when there's more than a bit of temptation to want to leave it all alone.

On The Road Again

Still very temporary, sort of reflecting the human condition, I suppose. Happy to report that we've had hardly any problems in terms of freedom of movement on the roads here. Hope this continues for our next journey later today, but not necessarily naively counting on this.

Not Sticking Around

As usual the Missus has done wonders sprucing the place up. Me, not so much, I'm afraid, but I have got a few things done for the week ahead.

We'll soon be setting off to spend the night at Mak's house in Melaka. So feeling very temporary at the moment.

A Good Soaking

One of the several blessings of life here in the taman is the proximity of the masjid. It's just a five minute walk up the road, so you can afford to leave setting off for Friday Prayers until the last possible moment, as the azan begins, knowing you will arrive comfortably in time to take your place without undue hassle. I did that earlier today and all went well. Until prayers were over and it was time to make my way back.

I had no choice but to do so in a torrential downpour. The experience served as a reminder of how incredibly, unforgivingly, disturbingly wet rain actually is. Put simply, it's just not pleasant stuff especially when it elects to soak through all your garments to make full-on contact with the skin beneath. Of course, I only needed to survive the discomfort for five to six minutes, but they were long minutes, trust me.

Working Order

Now resident at Maison KL after a fairly easy journey north yesterday. We're endeavouring to set things reasonably in order and I've just broken off from vacuuming the bookshelves as part of my contribution to that end. Fortunately most of the place is functioning to our satisfaction, including the refrigerator, which we've had to arrange the fixing of on our previous two visits here. I know we're fortunate to be home-owners, but that happy state brings along with it a fair number of anxieties and a fridge that refuses to function is high on the list of the causes of grey hair.

Found Wanting

Just a day or so back I was mildly bragging about how little tempted I was in Rome & Amsterdam by what was on offer in shops. It was just after recording this that I found myself in a small bookshop in the Dutch capital, exclusively selling books in English, gazing at a copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake and gravely wishing to possess the tome. The slightly incongruous thing was that the famously unreadable text was published as part of the Wordsworth Classics series and finely so - on good quality paper with what looked like a genuinely informative introduction. Since I've already got a copy of the Faber edition it would have been the height of folly to buy yet another hardcopy version, but it was so satisfying holding the book that I was strongly tempted to do so. Indeed, it occurred to me that it might be quite a wheeze to make a gift of it to Boon since he seriously thinks the text at least partly responsible for my breakdown last August. It seems that ranting about JJ's off-beat masterpiece was somewhat characteristic of the early stages of my Delirium and whenever I refer to it Boon looks more than a little distressed - but since that distress is well-meant I decided not to go through with my off-colour notion of a joke.

And then at Schiphol Airport I again found myself more than a little inclined to buy copies of books I already own, including a very nice edition of W.B. Yeats' Collected Poems and Melville's Moby Dick. Again I manfully resisted the impulse on the grounds of its utter pointlessness. And this time I made a mental note to avoid frequenting any bookshops anywhere for the next year and a half or so.

Two Notable Failures

Now back in blighty and recovering from the flight from Amsterdam. Managed to not watch the movies Tenet and Dune. Or rather, started both and failed to get beyond the first twenty minutes of either. Both looked splendid but I had no idea at all what was happening in the former and just didn't care what was happening in the latter. Probably my loss rather than the film-makers.

Did manage to listen to a fair bit of Dylan and profitably so. Does anyone think that Rough and Rowdy Ways is somehow not the equal of any of the earlier albums? If so, they are wrong and emphatically so! (I know it's only an opinion, but it happens to be the right one.)

For Sale

We spent most of our last full day in Amsterdam footing it around the shops and markets, which are, trust me, plentiful. In fact, the Albert Cuyp Market covered so much ground that we eventually gave up on our attempt to explore every corner of it. Must say, though, that we didn't actually buy all that much despite all the looking around. I suppose we enjoy the thought that there's a mountain of stuff available to us if we fancied it without troubling ourselves with the demands of actual ownership.

It's very inconsistent of me to be fundamentally so doubtful regarding the benefits of capitalism whilst enjoying the idea of markets and trade, but consistency about anything has never been much of a strong point for me.

Differences

Spent much of yesterday admiring the fine windmills out at Zaanse Schans. The place speaks much of Dutch ingenuity allying itself to an appreciation for crafting a decent way of life from the various possibilities of the landscape.

I suppose that's why it's easy to feel almost at home in Amsterdam. For all of its beautiful buildings and sense of the aspirational, you're never too far from the pragmatically ordinary. So much a contrast to the desire for the monumental in Rome.

And another striking difference. We have yet to see a single rough sleeper on the streets here in Holland. In Rome there were plenty (though nothing compared to what we saw late night in Manchester on our last trip there.) I don't know if the Dutch have solved the problem of homelessness, or have hidden it somehow, but they've achieved some kind of much-needed success, at least on the surface (and, hopefully, a lot deeper than that.)

By The Numbers

According to the devices that record such things Noi and I covered over 19,000 steps yesterday. That sounds and feels about right. My feet were aching having walked me through a couple of floors of the Rijksmuseum in the morning and then along and around and up and down the reasonably quiet streets of Haarlem in the afternoon, followed by further lounging around the bustling centre of Amsterdam in the evening.

But a figure I can't quite bring myself to believe relates to the number of readers (or 'hits', or 'views', or whatever) that are supposed to have visited (or punched, or glanced at, or whatever) this very blog in the month of June. At roughly the halfway point of the month this stands, according to the tab marked 'Stats' that lurks in the background hereabouts, at more than twice the all-time record for any month (which, coincidentally, was established last month.) Now this just doesn't add up. I'm pretty sure I've maintained my usual standard of dullish randomness in June and written nothing out of the ordinary. No clickbait here, as far as I can tell. No one banging on the door and asking me to 'monetize' proceedings. (This did happen once, long ago, but they didn't actually bang since there's no door.)

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm only writing for one pair of eyes (those are yours, Gentle Reader) and have no intention of engendering anything in the way of the horrifying idea of a wide readership. The notion that several thousand folks might have cast more than a glance in this direction in June 2023 is a touch debilitating. But I'm pretty sure that's not what's going on. I'm guessing that some kind of machine-induced artificial monitoring is responsible for the supposed increase and that I'm writing for the same happily highly limited audience I've always had in mind. It's just you and me, after all.

Eyes Wide Open

The Rembrandt House Museum here in Amsterdam gets my vote as the second best small museum I've ever visited. (The best being Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence in Istanbul.)

We spent two inspirational hours there yesterday afternoon. It isn't that you get a lot of original paintings/etching to look at - most of the actual art is encountered through reproductions - largely digital images. But what you get an extraordinarily vivid sense of is how the Great Painter actually worked and made that art on a day-to-day basis.

There's a deeply moving personal story told as well, with exemplary clarity - simple but not simplistic. Rembrandt buys the house, a prosperous, successful young artist in a happy marriage, looking set to further thrive. He leaves it some twenty years on, a bankrupt who has has weathered a number of personal tragedies & deep disappointments. To all intents and purposes a failure (and probably not a particularly nice guy.)

But he has produced wonders, and it looks like he was driven to do so. The details of the house suggest a man who was deeply in love with the details of life itself, in all its manifestations, driven to capture these on canvas, on paper, in chalk, ink, paint. And we get the privilege of seeing through his extraordinary eyes.

I came out of the house reminded of what a strange gift life is, and how easy it is to see that when you are invited to really, really look.

At Ease

Walking the city streets of Amsterdam feels a lot easier somehow than wandering around Rome. Less grandeur, more room to breathe, I suppose. Nothing corporate about the back alleys here. Shops feel like shops used to feel. And everyone speaks English - usually better than the English themselves.

It felt good to be out and about yesterday, especially in being able to attempt to process some very bad news from back in Singapore. Sometimes you need to be reminded of just how much lies beyond your own little world.

Easy Reading

Finished reading Anthony Horowitz's The Word is Murder on our flight from Rome to Amsterdam. Didn't really have much choice since I deeply needed to know whodunnit. And found a gratifyingly appropriate yet somewhat unexpected answer lying in wait in the final pages. This was my second easy read of the holiday. During our stay in Rome I'd happily succumbed to the predictable enjoyment of Jack Reacher being himself in Lee Child's Past Tense. Having said that, this one offered a bit more in the way of puzzlement than the usual Reacher adventure since it involved two seemingly unconnected plot lines that only came together in the final action-packed chapters. Highly contrived, of course, but beautifully worked.

Gosh, I do enjoy a good story - and the pleasure of recognising the sheer craft of this kind of popular fiction.

More People In Rome

Despite the date given above, it's actually still late on Sunday according to the time here in Rome and we recently returned to our apartment after what will be our last day here. Tomorrow, when it's really Monday, we set sail (in airborne fashion) to Amsterdam for the second part of our European holiday.

Today we travelled up to the northern suburbs of the city to have a look at the Mosque of Rome. It was a bit tricky getting there, since it's well out of the way of any direct bus route - and even trickier getting back, partly because we got stuck in a considerable late afternoon downpour. 

But our least 'touristy' day turned out to be one significant in a variety of human encounters. At the mosque we met a family from Singapore touring Italy in a rented vehicle who'd been robbed of all their luggage, including passports and travel documents, after a brief stop-off on their way from Napoli. This put any problems we had with the rain into considerable perspective. Noi also got chatting to a lady from London (now living in Rome) at the mosque as they prayed together. She was entertaining company, if only briefly so. And then later in the evening whilst waiting for a bus back home from the Metro station we got chatting to a young lady from Turkey studying at the university here who was both charming and fascinating with regard to her experiences of studying in Italy.

All in all, a useful reminder of the incorrigible plurality of humanity no matter where it finds itself, and how unexpectedly pleasant most of it manages to be.

Brief Afterword: Forgot to mention that we encountered quite a number of dogs in the course of our seven-day sojourn, but only two cats. Odd.

People In Rome

The most obvious thing to say about the people in Rome is that there are lots of them, of all shapes and sizes. There's also a lot of them on display in terms of the quantity of flesh many choose to reveal. This can be rather off-putting when it's the kind of flesh one would normally choose to avoid viewing, but let's be charitable and acknowledge it's a case of each to his or her own.

Must admit though, I've been taken aback at just how many of the ladies here have decided it's a good idea to tattoo themselves in ways that it's difficult to see as appealing - and I'm referring here to ladies in their middle years rather than callow youngsters. I hesitate to describe the majority of such tattoos as disfiguring since that sounds so unpleasantly judgmental, but, in all honesty, that's the way I see them. I suspect there's something rather sad going on, but it's not something I understand.

By the way, in case the above sounds unbearably sexist (and in some ways it does) I should add that it's a pale reflection of the Missus's critique of what we've witnessed.

Much To Admire

You can have a bit too much Art at times. I often find this the case when visiting major art galleries, and yesterday's trip to the Musei Vaticani and Sistine Chapel fell squarely into this category. Frankly if I never encounter any examples of Roman statuary again, I won't feel there's anything missing in my life.

Of course, it's impossible not to admire the technical artistry of it all. The marble almost comes to life. But, for this viewer, the problem lies in the 'almost'. It just doesn't live for me. Nearly all the sculptures impressed in the way they pointed to aspects of human experience, but they never really breathed - they just hinted at that remote (and disturbing) possibility.

In contrast, the modern stuff encountered immediately prior to the entrance to the Sistine Chapel blazed with life, when it wasn't just downright odd and puzzling. But, even then, I prefer to be puzzled than banged over the head with the kind of 'public' art that just states the obvious - that being, we're rich and powerful and we can embody who we very publicly are in these cold statues.

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was something else again, though. But difficult to genuinely take in with the crowd milling below and around and filling the sacred space with not-so-spiritual sound.

Must say, though, for all my reservations the visit felt like time well spent. It provoked thought. And it felt good to be in one of my fabled places.

In The Ruins

Maintained our impressive step count yesterday wandering around the Colosseum and the nearby Palatine Hill. Lots of photo opportunities for the Missus, who is becoming something of an expert on the selfie front. Me not so much.

Struck by the sense of how the ruins of Imperial Rome dominated the European imagination - the most interesting aspect of the Colosseum for me being how the fallen structure was made use of in mediaeval times and after. Perhaps those years served to exorcise the ghosts of those who suffered when it was initially constructed?

Imperial power came at a steep price. Sometimes ruins are worth celebrating in their own right.

Getting In Touch

We've done exceptionally well on the step-counting front over the last two days, averaging 15,000 a day. This has entailed getting up close and personal with the highways and byways of Rome, of which there are plenty. Favourite spot so far, the Spanish Steps - plenty of tourists around, of course, but still room to think of poor, doomed Keats there or thereabouts in his final feverish days. Least favourite spot by far, the Trevi Fountain. Just too many tourists, I'm afraid, which is ironic since we were there to add to the considerable number.

But we managed a cooling drink and excellent ice-cream at a nearby hostelry, so all was well in its way.

Seeing The Sights

We did the top deck of the tourist bus tour of the city thing yesterday, having successfully found our way into the centre of Rome. As with any major city, more than a bit overwhelming in addition to being completely fascinating. All very foreign in the best sense. Today we'll probably be zooming in on a couple of specific locations, but we're happily open to experience with no real plans other than to enjoy ourselves while we are able.

Adjusting

Now attempting to adjust to life in Rome. Having had a good night's sleep has helped considerably in this endeavour. Was awakened by some delightfully tuneful birdsong.

One thing somewhat out of tune: Don't think I've ever been in a city with quite this level of graffiti everywhere one looks.

On Arrival

Well we got here, which is usually a good thing when travelling. And 'here' is very comfortable indeed, which is always a good thing, whether travelling or not. So with coffee easily available and being all wifi-ed up it looks like we have a happy afternoon/evening on the way.

By the by, I managed to read Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills on the flight(s) over (we got here via Paris.) I strongly recommend reading everyone's favourite British-Japanese Nobel Laureate as superior in-flight entertainment. Loved his first novel, but clueless about the ending.

Ups And Downs

Definitely up: Finishing the mighty second and final volume of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons. Instantly wanted to go back and read some more, but it really is time to take a break from Archie's beguiling voice. Now thinking of what Collected I might have left to get to grips with next.

Definitely, indisputably doooowwn: The result from yesterday's final at Wembley. Puzzled how it turned out like it did after I'd worn my favourite Man U jerseys all week and my lucky socks on the Saturday itself.

Possibly down: Being incredibly busy today getting bits of marking out of the way and scrambling to get ready to set off for our evening flight to Rome.

Mind you, that last bit is quite an Up and compensates for all the rushing, no?

Not A Rant

On an evening when we discovered that one of favourite eateries - Prata Alley - is moving to a new location due to a hike in the rental being charged for their current premises, and the new location is somewhat off the beaten track for us, this coming after my realisation that I can no longer use the ATM for my main bank account since I was sent a new one which failed to 'activate' despite me following all the instructions about getting it to do so to the letter, and then forgetting to follow up on this with the bank directly due to being swamped by work, after being unable to establish contact on the telephone number I was given since it was unnavigable by ordinary human intelligence, I have manfully decided to forgo moaning about any of this.

After all, it's modern life, and, therefore, rubbish. (And we're talking first world problems here, guys.)

I'd rather remember the two fine teh tariks (gajah) I consumed in the midst of all the frustration and the surpassingly excellent late period poems by Archie Ammons I got to read prior to going out. 

Dining Out

Out again for a 'posh' dinner this evening. Two in a row constitutes some kind of record for me.

And, speaking of couples, fortunately it was just the two of us cozily at the table - eminently restful.

Ah No, The Years, Oh

Found myself at a dinner this evening  celebrating the 70th anniversary of a school in which I once taught. I sort of knew that I'd be reluctant to go to the dinner when I was first invited, simply because of the date. I suspected I would be extremely busy as June began, and I certainly was today, all the way to 5.00 pm. But I also suspected that once at the dinner I'd enjoy seeing some old friends and acquaintances - and that's the way it turned out.

By the way, the word 'old' is very distinctly the operative word above. When I first started teaching at the school in question I might reasonably have been described as a young man. When I completed my stint there that was no longer the case and it is even longer no longer the case now, if you see what I mean. So several of my conversations at the dinner revolved around the topic of dealing with the vicissitudes of aging. Curiously enough they were all distinctly cheerful in tone. 

Time may not exactly be our friend, but neither is it necessarily an enemy. I mean, without it how would anything ever happen? (Deep, eh?)