Something didn't happen in 2025. As the final hours of the year play out I realise I can't recall a single case in the last 12 months of my suffering from a cranky back. Never needed to take a single tablet just in case. Seems like trivial stuff, especially in relation to a world that seems to be doing its best to fall apart, but hugely important for me in terms of quality of life.
Hoping for continuity and its attendant great good luck in the months ahead, but wisely not counting on such.
It was whilst enjoying the magic of Maggie O'Farrell's novel about Shakespeare earlier this year that it struck me that it might be worthwhile to reread Anthony Burgess's fictional account of the love-life of the Bard, Nothing Like the Sun. And it turns out that it was worthwhile, if only to enjoy the linguistic fireworks involved.
The earlier novel has none of O'Farrell's impressive emotional power - the death of Hamnet in Burgess's work left me entirely dry-eyed - but it's hugely entertaining and deals far more with WS as a working dramatist. And it too captures something of the feel of daily life in the period in a way that's sometimes little short of magical.
Anyway, there's no competition involved. Good to have read both novels (though I doubt I'll be paying either any further visit. It's time to move on.)
I'm not at all sure how I could do this but after starting to enthusiastically re-watch the excellent version of Macbeth featuring Denzel Washington back in early October, I only managed to complete that viewing almost three full months later. Tonight I watched the Act 5 material and, as with everything previous to this, I found myself hypnotised by the visual richness of the movie. Every frame could go into an art gallery.
I suppose that's why I drew out the viewing experience. Since I'm achingly familiar with the play, the narrative held out no surprises, so I didn't feel any need to find out what direction the film would take. And having watched it already I knew the interpretive spin of its director, so no compulsion there. Taking forever to re-watch was by way of a homage, a recognition that the details are so memorable that it felt natural not to have any sense of urgency.
I first read T.F. Powys's novel Mr Weston's Good Wine back in the 1970s when Penguin re-published it in their Modern Classics series. Didn't really know what to make of it then and found it a bit of a slog to get through. Decided to attempt it again in my old age and this time I quite enjoyed it, though I can't say I followed the allegory involved other than the obvious idea that Mr Weston represents God, sort of in a Christian sense, and his wine stands for various aspects of his grace.
To be honest, I'm not sure it's necessary to have a firm interpretation of the text since Powys seems to be more interested in developing a sense of the uncanny than dealing in definite ideas about the godhead. On that level I found much to enjoy in the strangeness of the various episodes as the inhabitants of Folly Down received their comeuppances. Indeed, I've got a feeling that if someone were to explain it all to me I'd end up disappointed.
Spent the early afternoon getting very sweaty indeed, ministering to the books and magazines on the shelves outside the apartment with our trusty vacuum cleaner. I'm not convinced the bi-annual clean-up does the objects in question all that much good, but it makes me feel better. In fact, the stuff outside gets a bit more attention over a year than the books inside since I think there's a bit more dust out there. So the bi-annual notion applies to the stuff inside, plus the books and magazines in KL and my desk at work.
This end-of-year clean-up was spread over a month, starting towards the end of November and finishing today, so it felt a bit less frenzied than it has sometimes felt in the past, when I've tended to leave it to the last minute. Must say, I feel particularly virtuous as a result, hence, I suppose, the odd compulsion to record this for the world to know.
Played Dylan's Christmas in the Heart yesterday, following the tradition I've established of playing the only Christmas-themed album I enjoy once a year. The restrictions on playing the CD mean it remains fresh despite my familiarity with its contents. I played it in the morning in an attempt to conjure some nostalgic Xmas magic. That didn't work at all. What worked splendidly for me were the beguiling arrangements, the humour, the quirky sincerity, and that voice in contrast with the otherwise slick vocalising of the backing singers. It felt new. Just what I needed on a morning when the temptation was to feel old.
One can only hope it delivered its best to all who strive to keep it today.
I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was first published some 68 years ago. That's almost a decade more than the gap in time between Achebe's first novel and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, that being just 59 years. Both incontestably great works, though I suspect Achebe would contest that statement since he famously considered Conrad's novella an offensive and totally deplorable book. I think Achebe was wrong, but I can understand why he felt that way, and reading Things Fall Apart again was a powerful reminder for me of what he knew that Conrad didn't which led him to that conclusion.
It's astonishing how fresh Achebe's novel seems, especially placed side-by-side with Conrad. The great English (or Polish?) writer's prose reads as decidedly dated, for all its virtues, but this is not at all true of Achebe's writing. The great Nigerian achieves something quite remarkable - a version of English that transcends any kind of nationalism: it reads as effortlessly international, incorporating a story-telling voice that is recognisably African, generally sounding quite simple, yet making subtle demands upon its readers to recognise the complexities of the world it delineates. It's also astonishing just how much he crams into his short novel, less than 200 pages in the Penguin edition I finished yesterday, reading the whole in just a couple of days.
In fact, Achebe doesn't really cram things into his work. If anything he leaves things out, judiciously so. His characters suggest depth, but we are never given much in the way of actual detail. So it would be easy for the casual reader to see Okonkwo simply as an unpleasant bully, rather than a genuinely tragic figure. His complexities in fighting against the humiliations involved in being the son of a negligent, hopeless father and then facing what must seem like deep betrayal from his eldest son are brilliantly implied.
What struck me most of all on this reading of Things Fall Apart is just how desperately sad the plight of the people of Umuofia is as they face the collapse of all that gives their lives meaning and purpose. Perhaps that's one of the reasons the text seems so fresh? We live, after all, in a world of collapsing values with a bleak awareness of how nothing is guaranteed to last.
Back in the gym this evening. Had hoped to improve on Saturday's poor performance, but this was worse, despite me being reasonably rested prior to the session. Woeful whimpering through the first half hour, and then got even weaker. Prayed that no one would come in to inadvertently witness this pathetic display.
Kept going though, so that's something from the wreckage.
Grateful to be safely back in our usual abode. Arrived very late last night, but today's been an easy day, so we've been able to gently manoeuvre into our routines, including me getting this cranky old body to the gym.
I suspected I'd struggle, given a lay-off of some three weeks - and such was the case. At the half-hour mark of my stint on the elliptical trainer I noticed a distinct and necessary dip in my pace, and struggled after that, though never to the point of wishing to just give up and get off. It wasn't easy but, then, it wasn't supposed to be.
Hoping my next session will seem a bit more 'normal', if that's the right word for what is, after all, not exactly what most folk choose to do to themselves on a typical Sunday afternoon.
Slightly surprised myself by finishing Victory today. Found it unputdownable for the last two days. Not sure, though, that this is because I ascended to the seriousness that Conrad demands of his readers. In fact, I didn't really get what exactly was going on between Heyst and Lena, which is really the core of the novel, so that in some ways the ending escaped me. I grasped the desolation of it all, especially in the deaths of the trio of villains, but not what was specifically motivating the central couple at key moments. I suppose I missed the ways in which they failed to understand each other, rather taking it for granted that their relationship was a good thing, which may well have not have been so clear to the characters themselves.
What I didn't miss was how wonderfully nasty the antagonists in the novel are. It seems there's a school of thought that sees them as overly melodramatic and lacking in basic realism, and I think that's a reasonable point of view. But if you allow yourself to suspend disbelief and enter into enjoying the horror of it all they make for great reading. Also they are strangely plausible as comically trivial yet dangerous predators. I can see why Victory was another popular success for Conrad following Chance given the hypnotic power of the chapters dealing with the bad guys' invasion of the delicate paradise of the lovers' hideaway.
By the by, the sheer range of Conrad's work is astonishing, isn't it? What a pity he seems to have been reduced to just being the writer of Heart of Darkness for so many.
My progress on Conrad's Victory, which I embarked on towards the end of last month, has been fitful to say the least. Of the obviously great novelists I find Conrad among the most demanding (not quite in the league of Henry James, but getting there) but there's a certain pleasure in reading him at very slow pace to ensure both a genuine grasp of what's going on and why the writer thinks it is important. I suppose that's why I've come so late to this novel, despite having a sense of the high regard in which it is held by some major critics. (I'm thinking F.R. Leavis here.)
Conrad's sombre view of life and human effort can also feel somewhat overwhelming. I've just reached the well known lines: he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul. I didn't realise that this is actually articulated by the protagonist, Heyst, in dialogue with the woman he gets involved with. And it's so strange that the writer describes his tone as light as he tells her this.
I feel I need to become more serious about life when reading Conrad. A good reason for persevering with his work in a world that often appears to value only what is fleeting and superficial.
15.40
We're setting off for Mak's house in Melaka later today. Noi is putting the finishing touches to her final cleaning up of the premises, and we're assessing what still remains to be fixed and made ship-shape in 2026, when we'll next be here again. There's always something, of course, as a reminder that any home is a work in progress - and it's the kind of progress that, in its way, is worth looking forward to. Anyway, we're used to moving on, as this week's survey of my back pages was a powerful and sometimes melancholy reminder of.
22.25
Arrived about an hour ago here at Alor Gajah after a reasonably easy drive south. Every exit is an entrance somewhere else, as a wise man wrote (or something close to that wording.) More pages to be written. Hoping to avoid pointless repetition.
Finished working through my appointment diaries up to 2023, and will be discarding them in Melaka, where we're off to on the morrow. (Noi wants to burn them.) Going back over the years was an interesting experience, but not something I want to spend too much time doing at the kind of length making my notes involved. The version of the past I garnered turned out to be a burden of sorts. Not because of bad memories. Far from it. It was the amount of quiet happiness accumulated over time that felt strangely burdensome.
Best to fare forward. Especially since we have little choice but to do so.
I have two large cardboard boxes here filled with my appointment diaries stretching back to 1988. For some time I've been intending to throw them out once I've made a note of the major 'events', like vacations taken and shows directed, across the years. Not sure why I feel the need to record in this fashion, but it seems important as a way of capturing a few milestones along the way and I don't think I'll be able to discard the decaying diaries unless I do this.
I made a start today, transcribing key stuff from 1988 - 2000, and I'm hoping to finish the remaining years tomorrow, then take the diaries to Melaka to burn them there. It's been quite strange revisiting the past in this way, especially given the careless nature of the various scribbled entries. I only noted as sparely as I could what I needed to do to keep my life on its tracks, and little on the page makes coherent sense now.
I can't help but notice how the diaries tend to increase in terms of the detail of what I recorded over the years. Either my working life got more complicated, or my memory got worse, or a bit of both. I'm also struck by how the terminology I employed changed over time. There are quite a number of acronyms I suppose I must have understood then and deemed of some importance that just seem downright strange today. So much that mattered then that's entirely lost.
Ashraf worked very hard yesterday to enable us to download the Sooka app on our new telly. This will enable Noi to watch all the Astro stuff she wants, assuming we're able to subscribe to their various offerings without any hassle. We haven't really tried to use the app yet as we've plenty to occupy us on Apple TV, which we've been watching late at night. So it looks like we can do away with the Astro box and cancel our subscription, the only problem being that terminating the service is a bit complicated and we're not going to have time to get that done on this visit.
In the meantime we're quite far into the second season of The Morning Show and there's a lot, possibly too much, going on in terms of storyline, so we're happily watching an episode a day and getting what we regard as value for money.
I've come to realise that one hour of viewing on any given day is quite enough for me. That's something that my childhood self, pretty much addicted to the goggle box, would not be able to recognise. So some kind of progress there.
One of our priorities coming over has been to visit Sharifah in Shah Alam and catch up on how she's faring under the treatment she's been receiving. Very unfortunately we've not been able to do so as the treatment hasn't been going so well, resulting in her being hospitalised for most of the last couple of weeks and not being allowed visitors due to concerns about her picking up infections in her weakened state. She's at home now, but still not allowed to see people.
We're going across anyway later today, to take Hamzah & Aziqah & whoever else is around to dinner and offer whatever weak support we're able. To say this is not a happy situation is an understatement, but these are the kind of people who I know will find whatever positives are available and make the best of them.
Let me be frank - painfully, brutally honest. At 10.30 this morning I didn't feel in any way whatsoever inclined to start cleaning the many windows in this house. But I'd cunningly told The Missus I would do the job the night before, and before coming up to KL I'd imagined the satisfaction of completing the job, so I really had no choice.
I started slowly, lethargically, and the pace never picked up. But that's the point. You can't clean windows quickly. By its nature it's a tedious job and needs to be done in a steadfastly tedious manner. Which meant the exercise worked well for me. It took me until the late afternoon to get every window done, but done they are, and I'm now highly satisfied by how I've fooled myself into some kind of minor accomplishment.
It would be misleading in the extreme to claim that the second part of Frederick Douglass's Life and Times is a gripping or compelling read. Little of interest happens to Douglass other than his achieving a fruitful life in terms of supporting his chosen causes, unless you happen to find the finely wrought rhetoric of his many speeches something that demands attention. This wasn't true for me, though I suspect that hearing the speeches delivered live by the great man might have done the trick. But I've found it very easy indeed to break off from reading this part of the autobiography.
On the other hand, I've also found it very easy to pick up the tome and start reading again. There's always much to admire in terms of Douglass's supreme command of his rhetoric, such that just following the flow of his thoughts is pleasurable. And I find it striking just how often I've found myself recognising that this isn't empty rhetoric. The style is allied to substance. The thinking is clear but can be complex, as in his speech on the unveiling of the Freemen's monument to Lincoln, in which the dead president comes in for some pretty trenchant criticism in places, making the praise for his achievements all the more convincing.
Douglass spares nobody, not even himself. But his readiness to praise the good he sees in others, and himself, is deeply refreshing.
Got back from Penang in time to get to the office of our service provider in order to re-establish the functioning of our modem. We've been a bit lost moving around without Google Maps to guide us for a couple of days now, though we somehow managed to get where we wanted to go. Which was a reminder of the seemingly distant past when we get to all sorts of places without any electronic assistance. Mind you, we also managed to get spectacularly lost on occasion. Particularly in Bali for some reason.
By the way, the helpful assistant at the shop who did the necessary for us commented that our modem was very old. That struck me as odd as I had the impression it was fairly new. But since anything that lasts longer than 12 months is now by definition old I suppose I can see where the guy was coming from.
Enjoyed watching the world drain of colour as day turned to night on the beach at Batu Ferringhi. And good food from a very pleasantly appointed beach restaurant made it all even better. Restful, much.
We're very much getting out and about here in Penang. We got ourselves on the funicular railway up Penang Hill in the late morning and spent a few hours in the evening wandering the streets of George Town, playing the role of dedicated tourists. In between we enjoyed the hospitality of our excellent hotel, which keeps a lounge open round the clock with free drinks & snacks in lieu of providing drinks in guests' rooms. Nice concept which definitely suits us.
Just one fly in the ointment. There's a sort of open air restaurant across the road which clearly does good business. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, we just purchased some chicken wings as a late night snack, bringing them across to consume later in our comfortable lounge. But the problem is that at 9.00 pm the live music starts and it's uncompromisingly loud. I thought it might be over by 11.00 pm yesterday, but it went on to midnight featuring a particularly strident female singer who seemed to get more excited as the evening wore on. I thought I would easily nod off to the background noise, but her voice was individually irritating enough to keep drawing attention to itself such that it never quite became background, if you see what I mean.
Not a soothing experience, and sort of being repeated as I write. But tonight we know what's in store and intend to rise above it.
Spent the evening sampling the considerable charms of George Town in Penang. The streets are authentically run-down, yet quietly pulsating with life. We ate at a P, Ramlee-themed restaurant and found ourselves treated to music from the man himself that genuinely sounded amicably charming - and the fact that the food was excellent made for a gently memorable evening.
And since the journey here from KL was uneventfully easy-going, and the hotel we're in is more than a bit pleasant, today joins the count of highly-satisfactory days scored in this vacation.
Took delivery of a new television set today. Now receiving Apple TV, but having problems installing the app which will enable Noi to watch her Malay dramas. Our old Astro box no longer plugs in, so it looks like we'll be abandoning that subscription and watching stuff online. Nice to be able to watch a bit of telly together, but I'm struck by how little we really need this. Still, need to acknowledge we're lucky to have it.
Very glad I decided not just to skim-read the early chapters from Frederick Douglass's Life and Times on his years of slavery on the grounds that almost everything therein is a repeat of the material on those years from My Bondage and My Freedom, which is in itself an expanded account of the pithy Narrative of the Life. For some reason the painful injustices of slavery as experienced by Douglass seemed even more intense on this re-reading and his remarkable strength of personality came through even more vividly than ever.
I'm now embarked on his account of the years of his freedom, so the narrative has a sense of novelty about it as I've only got the vaguest notions of what he achieved in those years. But you wouldn't need to be a detective to guess that his life is going to be an extraordinary one given the qualities he shows in his youth. The man is one of the most abundantly formidable I've ever read of. I'm not sure he always gets it right, but I am sure he lives with an overwhelming drive to do what is right that is deeply inspiring, and chastening.
Enjoyed a neighbourly makan session at our place this evening with Susan & Mike & their daughter, Ashley. Good to catch up on the gossip from the taman, and Malaysia in general, and share tales of adventures overseas - nattering about everything in general and nothing in particular.
Did you know that there are people who need to have the tv series Friends being screened in the background so they can lull themselves to sleep? It seems that the show has been a mainstay of the streaming service Netflix for several years, but now they're dropping their screening, and there's been an outcry from fans who desperately need the comforting familiarity of the many episodes to drop off to. According to the article I was reading about all this, it's the predictability of the rhythms of it all that do the job for these folk, sending them happily to the land of nod. I certainly didn't know this, or suspect anything like it, until I read about the phenomenon today, and I don't think the new information has in any way enhanced my life
Indeed, the way in which I found it out, idly scanning the news just to fill in time, frankly, is strangely reminiscent of what these viewers, or, rather, half-viewers are doing. I'm feeling acutely guilty at the moment at just how little of real value I've accomplished today. I've read hardly anything of genuine value, requiring effort and attention. Just trivial stuff off the phone, with me sometimes scrolling pointless comments on the pointless stories simply to fill in time, it being too much trouble to extend myself further.
So instead of feeling complacently superior to those who employ an old favourite comedy as a narcotic, I'm worrying that I'm only too ready to embrace my own version of brain-rotting substances at the first opportunity.
18.06
A grey day. A lazy day. A sleepy day. A snuggling day. Neat descriptions from The Missus. And we’re on the road. So far, so good. Now supping tea at Ayer Keroh.
20.15
Now munching dinner on the hill after one of the easiest passages north we’ve ever experienced. Talk about smooth-sailing!
22.23
Now installed in Maison KL with most things working. Will be able to stop moving soon!
22.45
Spoke far too soon. Sudden blackout meant we needed to deal with dicey things going on in the main fuse-box. Now celebrating the equivocal joys of home-ownership as things remain dicey. But grateful for a roof over our heads.
Spoiler alert: more first world moaning ahead.
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling increasingly out of sorts with the barrage of advertising I encounter online. Somebody somewhere seems to think I need to subscribe to a course in tai chi for the elderly and interrupts every video I'm watching to tell me so. I'm never going to subscribe to any such course, largely on account of the fact I find the ads so irritating. And weirdly patronising. As are the ads for the six month course in AI that I'll never get involved in.
And why is that every story in the Graun online gets covered up with ads as I'm reading along, often meaning I lose track of where I'm up to? I'm used to the idea of reading as a reasonably soothing activity. Now the online version of the activity is usually mildly unsettling and occasionally feels impossibly fragmented.
The irony of it all is I never buy anything advertised, so if I'm being tracked by the surveillance capitalism they talk about, why don't the capitalists give up on me as a sad loss? I won't mind at all.
