In Transit

Touched down here at Manchester Airport around noon and are now safely installed in a nearby hotel for a couple of nights. It's cold, but not unbearably so. In fact, according to Noi the weather is Very nice. Can't see it myself, but there you are.

Enjoyed a seven-hour stop-over at Doha. We'd rather take longer arriving and have a chance to stretch our legs and grab a nice cuppa (and muffins and ice cream) along the way. And the airport there is spectacularly green (and a bit fake, but nicely so, in the modern fashion.) Tried to watch a couple of movies on the two flights, but sort of failed. Managed twenty minutes of Oppenheim and thought it was portentous tosh. Quite unfair of me, but there it is. Watched the whole of Alien: Romulus (or is it Romulus: Alien?) and wondered why I was watching. Couldn't follow any of the plot details - if they existed - and got tired of not being able to see very much in the darker bits, of which there were plenty.

Did rather better listening to Neil Young's After the Goldrush which struck me, as it always does, as being both mysterious (in a good way) and lovely. 

On The Move (Again)

Holmes and Watson seem to be constantly on the move, don't they? A client arrives and fifteen minutes after his or her plight has been unfolded off go our intrepid heroes to some far-flung corner of the kingdom to look for the necessary clues (or something like that.) Well, it takes Noi and I a good deal longer than just a quarter of an hour to settle pressing affairs and get prepared to move on. And we're in the final stages of doing the necessary as I write - with plenty still to settle.

Can't help but think of Dylan's meditation upon the act of getting going as he contemplates how he has stayed in Mississippi a day too long: 

Everybody movin' if they ain't already there / Everybody got to move somewhere.

A Bit Of A Test

When I embarked on a read-through of The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes back in early September I vaguely wondered if I might get through all the 1100+ pages by Christmas. But this was not to be. I'm at roughly the halfway mark now and I've decided the tome is too chunky to bother taking it with me halfway across the world. I'm also ready for a break from Holmes & Watson. The magic tends to wane somewhat when you move on relentlessly through tale after tale.

Another problem I'm finding is that for all his many virtues as a storyteller Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a very clumsy writer in quite an irritating way. You start to notice how over-written so many of his villains are. 

I suppose I'm rereading out of a sense of nostalgia and sometimes the rosy glow of the past proves not quite so glowing. Which leads me to a bigger conjecture: Real literature gets better on being re-engaged with after a decade or two. And Sir Arthur fails that test.

Getting Emotional

I really shouldn't be able to relate to early Radiohead at their most emo. But I can. 

This doesn't say much for my character, unfortunately.

Getting To The Point

Another packed day. Got stuck into the admin job I most detest and, predictably, detested it. The trip to the gym that followed felt like sheer comfort in comparison. At least it's possible to see the point of what you're doing when suffering on the elliptical trainer. Pointless paperwork aggravates precisely because of its supreme pointlessness.

On-going Business

I thought things might get busy in relation to work-related tasks as the year ends, but I've been surprised at just how busy that is. Just checking on the well-being of some of our newly-arrived students has involved a lot of walking about and climbing flights of stairs at the end of each day. This is no bad thing in terms of keeping this old body moving around. Indeed, it occurred to me last night that it's this aspect of business as usual that's gone a long way to restoring my faculties after the bruising they took in late 2022. I can vividly recall the challenge back then of negotiating a single flight of stairs and being forced in rehab to climb a structure of four steps pretty much against my better judgement. It's not so much a challenge now as an act of late-night drudgery. But one to counter-intuitively embrace.

Bright & Cheerful

Spent three quarters of an hour this evening in the big Kinokuniya bookshop at Takashimaya. It's the first time I've been in there for quite a while. I was checking out what is available ahead of our trip back to the UK to avoid unnecessarily bringing back from afar what I can pick up on these shores with no trouble.

I was struck by just how colourful so many book covers are these days, even of stuff that purports to be quite 'serious'. I suppose this is in the interests of sales, but I prefer my texts looking staid and sober. The coloration should be on the inside and left to the mind of the reader.

In Depth

I've listened to Pierre-Laurent Aimand performing Messiaen's L'alouette lulu three times over the last three days, and would happy to continue doing so for several days to come. I'd hesitate to say this is something by my favourite composer played by my favourite pianist, but it surely comes close. What astonishes me about this piece is the sense of music operating in three dimensions. I hear the depth of the wood the bird sings in. And then there's the sense that the bird is somehow more than a bird, its song transcending time. So the whole becomes an eternal truth.

Company

A rich day culminating in much chatter amongst friends of long standing over the comestibles - of which there were a more than elegant sufficiency. I've read a lot of articles lately promoting social connections in old age as a safeguard against dementia. Possibly the case, I suppose, but worth pursuing in themselves just to guarantee a fine old time, I would suggest.

Sheer Villainy

I first read Marlowe's The Jew of Malta in 1975, in my first year at university. I grasped the flavour of the play, but not the detail. I just didn't have a clue as to how it would work on stage.

Some five decades on, after having just completed a second reading, I have a much better idea as to how the drama might play out. I suppose having a bit more direct theatrical experience helps in visualising various scenes. But I still feel the need to see the thing on stage to make it real.

The flavour remains the same, though. Simple really. A bracingly bleak look at humanity at its considerable worst. Gloriously, disturbingly amoral. And very, very funny. Plus, fizzing with cheerfully manic energy. To be honest, I much prefer Marlowe to very early Shakespeare. And I suspect it's a lot more fun to play Barabas than it is Shylock.

Just Playing

I want to stay here forever, said this little lass this morning as we got to the end of our second VIA session with the kids from Heartfriends. My basketball guys had just done a stellar job in keeping a bunch of primary school children occupied in the physical sense, sort of teaching them the skills of the game, but mainly just getting them running around mindlessly and having great fun.

What is it about children and running? Watching their obvious exhilaration when they are chasing the ball, each other, or outsize basketball players twice as big as they are, is a reminder of kids' capacity for simple, sheer joy, coming into being out of nowhere.

By Heart

Good to read an article on the Channel News Asia website relating to poetry. Even better to find it's about the value of memorising the stuff. When I was at school setting memorisation as an  exercise was still fairly common. By the time I became a teacher it was unusual, but always effective. The article seems open to the idea it might become a fashionable strategy in education again, but I doubt that will happen. It's so obviously straightforward and deeply powerful that it will never appeal to those who want anything 'progressive' to sound pointlessly complex.

In Order

It's that time of year when I endeavour to clean-up all the books & mags & sundries at home and at work. Given the lassitude I surrendered to over the weekend I knew it might prove difficult to get going today. And so it did. But I did.

In the event it was only a beginning as this year I'm making the exercise extra-meticulous. So progress was slow, which suited my mood, but steady, which it had to be to ensure all gets done in reasonable time. Given the fact I've got a fair amount of work-related stuff to do, the next few days will demand some planning. 

Better than just snoring through the days, I guess.

At Rest

Have enjoyed a very restful weekend featuring plentiful sleep. Yesterday I nodded off any number of times in the afternoon and evening as well as getting to bed early and sleeping soundly. And then I somehow managed to nap this morning despite getting up quite late. It was a good thing we went out this afternoon otherwise I suspect I would have further luxuriated in the land of nod - and added to a mild headache I developed from over-sleeping (I suspect.)

Am now planning to make myself get up and doing stuff tomorrow to avoid another thick head.

Positive Results

Had an appointment with my back doc this morning and am happy to report that my spine seems to be in pretty good working order. I can't recall a single problematic episode in the second half of the year (so far) which is a bit of a record. I was also pleased that the doc expressed surprise (in a positive sense) at the results I recorded on blood pressure & weight & stuff recorded when I checked in at his new office space. Previously this kind of check wasn't carried out so I don't think he had much of an idea as to what I usually score. It seems I have the pulse rate of a much younger man and, since it's definitely my rate & not someone else's, this suggests that my little work-outs at the gym are having a positive effect.

When people - those who are aware of how just touch & go things were for me in late 2022 - inquire about my health I'm apt to say I've never felt better, and today's numbers appear to back me up on this. Of course, all this could easily fall apart, and quickly so, as past experience proves, but I'll happily take the results for now.

Quite A Promise

We went to pick-up a new set-box from Singtel this afternoon to enable us to actually access the channels we pay them for. The previous box failed about two weeks after installation and we just couldn't be bothered to renew the thing for a couple of months. We made the arrangement for a new 'plan' to go with the box before Noi went on her Norway jaunt, but for reasons that escaped me we needed to get the necessary from a different shop on Orchard Road. Anyway we found the place tucked away at the back of one of the big shopping centres and duly picked it up. 

But here's the thing. In a large slogan emblazoned on one of its walls the shop announced itself as a One Stop Fulfilment Centre. (I'm not making this up.) It struck me that even the Vatican doesn't go as far as that. Some danger of over-promising there, I gently suggest. Though the set-box is working, at least for the moment. Not sure I feel exactly fulfilled, however.

Matters Of Opinion

Everyone's entitled to their opinion. It's just that mine is right and yours is wrong.

Worth Listening To

Chanced upon a fascinating account from Donald Hall, the American poet, regarding his interviewing of Ezra Pound, the even more famous-cum-notorious American poet and fascist sympathiser. Hall is wonderfully balanced on the subject, showing great generosity of spirit towards the deeply flawed genius.

I'm troubled to some degree though by some of the voices in the Comments section accompanying the video. Pretty much anything featuring Pound on YouTube gets these weirdly admiring comments relating to his economic ideas and disabling prejudices. And the funny thing is that the stuff that features Pound directly, on camera or just his spoken voice, immediately comes across as more than a bit off to any discerning listener. Given the choice of spending time with one of these writers I know which one I'd choose (and benefit from listening to.)

Perchance To Dream

I was talking today to a colleague who's been dealing with a severe sleep disorder for the best part of the year. It's quite remarkable that the colleague in question has dealt with this so well that I don't think anyone else suspects there has been a problem. Indeed, I wouldn't have guessed had I not been told. I can remember only one morning in the whole year when they looked somewhat out of sorts, and I only noticed that because it seemed to me so atypical.

The ability of people to deal with quite extraordinary personal difficulties and somehow transcend them continues to surprise me, even after many years of encountering such. It also continues to puzzle me why organisations develop so-called 'systems' that assume people can be relied on as high-functioning machines that rarely if ever malfunction.

Our capacity to switch off and sleep (and possibly dream) tells us, thankfully, otherwise.

Sheer Delight

Over the weekend I also finished reading Ted Hughes: Collected Poems for Children. Definitely a book I'll go back to over and over. Such a pity that the wonderful, sympathetically imaginative, illustrations by Raymond Briggs only apply to a limited range of the text. If they'd been featured on every page I think the volume might have been acknowledged as one of the greatest ever 'books for kids'. As it is, it's breathtakingly rewarding. Part of me suspects that some of TH's poems for younger readers might out-live his work for adults.

Actually on putting the book back on my shelves I immediately felt like taking down my copy of What is the Truth?, but since I'd just read the poems involved in the Collected that seemed a bit like over-doing it. Though I would like to read it soon and remind myself of how the connecting prose narrative works.

It looks like the poetry book that will be coming off the shelves is my Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, in the Penguin edition I got hold of in the late 1970s. I was thinking of holding back on the read-throughs of my various collecteds / completes after struggling a wee bit earlier in the year on the epic Robert Lowell reading, but I feel I've got my breath back after reading the Hughes (as I suspected I might.) And I'm still holding off buying any new books until I finally retire. Though if I see any exciting single volumes when we visit the UK that resolution may just crumble - hence the fact that I'm officially putting the Vaughan on hold until the new year.

Another Voice

I'd forgotten, if I'd ever realised before, the quiet power of the ending of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. The extraordinary resilience of those at the bottom end of English society is obvious throughout the book, but it needs stating, and the great historian does so memorably in its final pages: They had also nourished, for fifty years, and with incomparable fortitude, the Liberty Tree. We may thank them for these years of heroic culture. No reader will quarrel with incomparable given the mass of evidence Thompson puts together over 800+ packed pages. And the idea that a culture can be in some sense heroic also convinces.

And this is only one of two endings. My edition, published originally in 1968, has the lengthy postscript added to the first edition of 1963 - happily so. Although much of this is dedicated to Thompson answering back some of the criticisms of his early reviewers, the inclusion of an extract from a note found in the pocket of a young 'reformer' in March 1817 is inspired: All the way we have come we have been Garded by the Soldiers and a Grate Many have gon back agen... We se very plane the are Determined to stop us, a great many of us as been put in prison in nearly all the towns we have come throw - thear sordes gliter round our heades but the thing is as it is... Tell all the men that I ham in good spirets as ever tho I do not know but I may be in prison ten minetes from now. I ham a trew Reformer yet and I do not Care who knows it.

It's reassuring to know that through intelligent listeners like Thompson we can still half-hear the voices of others giving access to worlds not quite beyond our understanding, which allow us a better, richer understanding of our own.

Completion

00.35

It's ether very late on Friday night or very early on Saturday morning, depending on you look at it. And Noi is just boarding a flight in Doha. Which means things will be back to normal in some nine hours or so.

A consummation to be wished, as one might say, if one talked posh.

10.30

Pick-up at the airport went smoothly. But this is what was being served at the CBTL in Terminal 1:

Christmas themed cake in early November. Not a good sign!

21.00

Prata & teh tarik at the Cheese Prata place on Clementi Road. Normal service is resumed.

And Still Now

Quite late in the evening, after a spectacularly busy day, I somehow remembered something I'd been listening to a year ago to this day. Playing it again it sounded somehow even better to these old ears than it did before. Strange how every now and then something transcends the everydayness of it all.

Some Discipline

Put in a good shift at the gym in the late afternoon. And have eaten reasonably moderately today. So not too bad.

But didn't get all the reading done I would have liked, even though I had a reasonable amount of free time. Sadly I remain much better at just wasting time than I would really like. So not exactly good.

But, on the balance, okay. (Those of my teachers whose reports read Could do better really knew what they were talking about, I'm afraid.)

Over-indulgence

I ate more than I really intended to at a lunch for my department in the very early afternoon. We were treated to a buffet at the Jen Hotel - which I've never heard of before - and since the grub was delicious and there wasn't much else to do I really tucked in. And then in the evening Fifi, who's sort of looking after me in the absence of The Missus, delivered to the kitchen counter a very decent kebab, with fries. Somehow I found room for this, but I'm now feeling the effects.

And what are they? Well I'm too full, too heavy, and too tired to care too deeply.

It occurs to me that I very rarely indulge to this extent and I'm grateful for a routine that manages to keep food in proportion. After all there's so much of it and it's so easily obtainable for the likes of me that it's not difficult to imagine living far, far too well. Tomorrow is set to be a lean day with an extra intense visit to the gym to try and set things right.

Planning

It's the time of year when most schools in this part of the world get on with the planning of what they would like to happen in the year ahead. Time was when schools and the individuals within them would essentially plan to repeat what they'd done well and cut out the stuff that just didn't work. Nowadays the emphasis seems to be on planning to do new stuff to prepare for an unknowable future which involves re-writing or re-positioning whatever was being done on the grounds that somehow this is no longer relevant. Even though chances are that people will end up wisely repeating what works.

It's a curious exercise. Exasperating if taken seriously; mildly amusing if dealt with sensibly. Actually I suspect that quite a bit of what I was doing in 1979 was better than the stuff I get up to these days. But no one wants to hear that.

Easing The Load

At some point last year it seems I had the good sense not to put my name down for marking for the November IB session. I'd managed to forget this and have been half-expecting an email to tell me to brace myself for a load of scripts. But since no such email arrived and the actual English examination papers start on Tuesday next, it occurred to me I might not have anything to be concerned about, a fact which I just confirmed by checking in the IB website covering such matters. It's not that I was dreading the marking, but the realisation I won't be tackling the marking on top of everything else I need to get done before we set off to the UK at the end of this month is very welcome indeed.

If I could celebrate I would, but without The Missus to celebrate with that would be pointless. So I'll just quietly enjoy the moment.

Getting It Over With

Realised as I was on my way to the gym just now that I wasn't looking forward to the experience. Usually the difficulty of a session only really becomes apparent to me once I've started, but I suppose I'm more ready these days to accept the grim reality of what it means to stretch myself physically ahead of the event. I'm wondering if at some point this kind of realisation is going to deter me from going at all, but that certainly isn't the case so far. The mild suffering seems rather to validate the experience.

One thing that I never feel these days is the mild high people claim that is supposed to result from the release of all the endorphins. Once I've got back and showered I just feel relieved and very tired. But that's quite pleasant in its way.

Hearing Voices

Now moving into the final sections of E.P. Thompson's magnum opus. His discussion of the development of a Radical Culture amongst the nascent working class serves as a reminder of how important the establishment of a cultural climate is and how vital the articulate consciousness of the self-taught was in English history. And how quietly heroic.

The extended quotations in these pages often make for gripping and illuminating reading. And it's possible to hear something genuinely fresh and individual and real in spite, or possibly because of all the errors: I dinna pretend to be a profit, but I naw this, and lots o ma marrows na's te, that were not tret as we owt to be, and a great filosopher says, to get noledge is to naw wer ignerent.