Civil Society

Yesterday afternoon we found ourselves attending the AGM of the residents’ association of our taman. We’ve been members since buying the house and happily paid our fees for several years believing that the money spent on the security here is well spent. And we’ve felt a bit guilty over the years that we’ve never actually supported any of the on-going activities (basically because we’re hardly ever around for them.)

The AGM was well run, with a few core members heroically keeping things going and finding themselves re-elected onto the committee for their trouble. They were obviously hoping for a bigger turn out with the possibility of others taking over their duties, but were realistic enough to know that that wasn’t likely to happen, and it didn’t. So for no reward, other than some lovely muffins at the AGM, and other tasty bits and pieces, these guys were yet again taking on any number of headaches just to do their bit for others.

When I used the word ‘heroically’ in the previous paragraph it was not intended ironically.

Falling Out Of Love

One of life’s smaller but still poignant sadnesses is realising that something that once possessed great power over one, a poem, a novel, a song, a symphony, a painting, has lost whatever magic it possessed, irrevocably. I suppose we put it down to some kind of moving on, maturing – but I’m not sure this is always appropriate. After all, what’s been lost was obviously of value and it’s gone somehow.

I felt this way recently when listening to The Yes Album, an album that long ago stood pretty much at the centre of my musical world. I saw that version of Yes (still with Tony Kaye on keyboards) and the subsequent line-up (with Rick Wakeman) live at the Free Trade Hall and they blew me away, big time. And now I just can’t relate to the grandiose element of it all, and there’s an awful lot of that – witness the daw daw daw daw daaaw, da da da da daw, da da da daw, da da da dah dah opening of Perpetual Change which now makes me cringe ever so slightly, more of a wince really, with embarrassment.

And I’ve been thinking of a similar phenomenon I experienced in relation to Tolkien’s greatest work The Lord of the Rings, particularly since posting a comment noting I now found it pretty much unreadable at the end of an especially fine post by the Hierophant over here. So what happened in the years between a fourteen-year-old me discovering there was actually a mega-sequel to that great story The Hobbit that was read to us at primary school by a wonderfully inspired teacher (we made glove puppets of Thorin & co!!) and roughly the same me in my late twenties embarking on a reading I thought I was going to enjoy and giving up about a third of the way in?

Essentially it was my inability to relate to Tolkien’s ‘heroic’ style – not the hobbity bits which still worked for me, despite the occasional jarring tweeness – but the noble Aragorny stuff which seemed to have no sense of irony at all. Those high and mighty elves who once seemed the height of cool had grown tedious. But the loss, I’m aware, was mine. So I’ll end my criticisms there since I don’t particularly want others to share in it.

Up North

Escaped from the National Day songs to arrive at Bukit Antarabangsa around 9.00 pm. Had close encounters on the way with at least ten certifiable maniacs who should not be allowed control of any kind of vehicle. This is the usual average for the journey.

Journey accompanied by Elvis Costello - The Delivery Man, Blur - Think Tank (hugely underrated album), Steely Dan - Everything Must Go. All rather jolly, really.

Ate prata on the hill and am now full and exhausted, but the house is in some sort of order.

And so to bed.

Cleaning Up

Just back from Parkway where we failed to buy a mop. The experience put me in mind of my years as an industrial cleaner. There's not a lot a lot I don't know about the floor of the women's toilet at Ciba-Geigy, Trafford Park, for the cleanliness of which I was responsible as a youngish teenager. I was a mean man with a mop and floor stripper in those days.

The guy we worked for was a Mr Potter. Nice chap. He'd lost a finger in the war and had a few stories to tell about his experiences, at that time, in France. He was also the uncle of Davey Jones of Monkees fame. Small world, well at least it was in Manchester.

Thinking back, it was instructive just how much you could get to hear about the war by asking middle-aged guys what it was like. I can't think of one who had a remotely heroic story to tell. Neither can I recall anything approaching animus towards the 'enemy'. (According to Dad: Good fighters. Good army.) Mostly it was a mess, I gathered, and not a nice one.

Sickness & Health

Got out for a bit of a run this evening - not so much trying to turn back the clock as to make it run a tiny bit slower. I did a bit of the park connector circuit again. For some reason just passing the park at Telok Kurau makes me cheerful. Thought for the day: the park is the best idea of the city.

Whilst enjoying the good fortune of my good health (at least for now) I had occasion to think of those dealing with other less happy circumstances of the body, and at least one in extremis. I, like most of us, have taken all too little care of this.

Ending It All

There's something a bit odd about reading something by a major writer who happened to attend the same school as yourself. Much as I enjoy the works of Anthony Burgess the feeling of a peculiar familiarity generated by the fact that his feet trod at least some of the same corridors of academe as myself, though many years before mine, and that we shared the same teacher of History, something I only realised when reading the first volume of his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God, haunts my reading of pretty much everything by him. There's a connection also with the fact that he's one of those writers who never entirely loses himself in his work. You have an awareness when you read him, or at least I do, that this is Burgess putting on a performance, usually of a virtuoso nature. Storyline and characters are generally paper-thin, at the service of the writer being his larger-than-life self.

The novel I finished yesterday, The End Of The World News, proved to be no exception to this rule. Burgess calls it An Entertainment in a sub-heading, curious really since this would surely apply to nearly everything he writes. I suppose here it's a sort of apology for what was obviously a bit of a rush job of a novel. The three parts, a kind of memoir of Freud, a sort of Broadway musical version of Trotsky in America immediately prior to the revolution of 1917, and a self-referential bit of sci-fi dealing with the imminent end of the world neatly tied in with the then approaching millennium, have no right being thrust together in the pages of a single novel, and Burgess doesn't seem to have the energy to attempt a justification. But he has an abundance of energy for lots of other things and the jokes and insights keep coming thick and fast.

I enjoyed it all immensely, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than the most convinced fans.

A Giant's Shoulders

His name implied a certain foreign grandeur, a weightiness, possibly a sense of hard labour, so it was a relief that the actual work was clear and approachable. I'd guess that for many of my generation reading Aleksander Solzhenitsyn marked their first exposure to any kind of contemporary literature outside their immediate 'western' experience. I remember feeling enormously pleased with myself for reading and, more importantly, 'getting' A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, but considering the remarkable economy of expression and straightforward vigour of its ideas who wouldn't have instantly 'got' it? (The film starring Tom Courtenay was, I think, the first 'serious' film I went to see, and well worth seeing it was.) By the time I went to university it was rare to find a student's room that didn't have a copy of Cancer Ward or The First Circle or August 1914 lying on a bookshelf, and to think that this all came before the publication in the west of the monumental Gulag Archipelago. When I first heard that title I had no idea what 'gulag' meant, the word being almost entirely unfamiliar at the time, an indication of the degree to which Solzhenitsyn can be said to have constructed a crucial twentieth century landscape of our minds.

It was obvious from his work that this was a writer who was in any number of ways as odd as his courage made him admirable. Not someone who would make a good houseguest - a man given to quirks and obsessions. Yet there was always that certainty that at the core of things he'd got it right; somehow from a seemingly limited perspective, that of a not particularly important victim of the system, he'd managed to grasp the system in its awful entirety. That's what I felt when reading The First Circle, my favourite among the early novels and, I believe, along with 1984 an almost perfect read for a bright somewhat idealistic young teenager in terms of giving them exactly the kind of political education they need.

Waking to news of Solzhenitsyn's death on the BBC this morning, I confess to a faint sense of surprise that he was actually still alive. At first I thought in terms of him being somehow yesterday's man, but the more I've considered this through the day the surer I am that it's quite wrong to see it in those terms. What was striking about his fiction was how it transcended the immediate, awful circumstances which might be said to have engendered it. The sheer scale of what the writer took on is in itself a lesson for us in the desperate need to keep faith with the truth and, above all, speak truth to power.

I'm guessing that there's going to be a sense in the obituaries of the passing of something (rather than someone) of massive nobility, and that we, thankfully, Shall never see so much, nor live so long. And so there should be - his death leaves us taller yet diminished.

Completion

Just back from Woodlands where Fa Fa serenaded us on the old joanna and I got to mark a stack of Fi Fi's grammar exercises. We gave the girls a quick summary of last night's band concert with much emphasis on the medley from The Little Mermaid, probably our favourite bit.

Played a bit of Amy Winehouse, the first album, in the car, and we were into the fourth song before Noi asked Is that Amy? (How she comes to be on first name terms with the chanteuse in question, I don't know.) After I answered in the affirmative the missus expressed surprise that we owned anything by her, leading me to point out that I'd been listening to her, and playing her stuff in the house, long before the gossip columnists had discovered the joys of documenting the wreckage of her life.

After touch down at Still Road I got on the blower to Mum to confirm that she is well, Manchester is actually warm, and she's off to bingo soon. And thus concluded as close to the perfect weekend as one is likely to get.

The Time Of Our Lives

I've been enjoying the privilege of an entirely relaxed weekend, well so far, at least. We wandered across to Parkway Parade yesterday afternoon to munch on some kaya toast. I spent absolutely nothing in Gramophone and Borders, thus striking a major blow in the War on Capitalism, but Noi made me buy a pair of shoes before we left. This was a sad necessity as my only other pair are now broken. (I've seen the term 'broken shoes' before but never really understood it until the sole of the right shoe of this pair fell apart. They don't make them like they used to.)

Then it was time for a nap and a couple of Haydn string quartets until Mei & Boon arrived when it was off to dinner at Serangoon Road. Actually Noi was keen to go to Mustapha's, the big 24 hour store, to buy some rice and we had quite a jolly time mingling with the crowd and admiring the cheap dates and astonishing range of frozen naans and pratas and the like. Ironically we emerged riceless but with intentions to return in fasting month. Dinner was at Sakuntala's (I think that's the name) and was tasty and filling - we discovered a new dish, fried bindi, which needs to be revisited. We were all pretty much exhausted by 10.00. Highly satisfying.

This morning Mark, our indispensable handyman, came round to fix a toilet and a light fitting and give us his usual running commentary on the state of the world. Among other points to note: don't buy China-made fittings in hardware stores - they're crap; and hati mesti baik is a motto to live by. He's one of the most trustworthy people I know and amongst the wisest.

Whilst I wasn't listening to Mark, or Noi for that matter, it was Mozart (a couple or three of symphonies) and Sandy Denny (who always makes me feel a kind of happy melancholy.) In between times I've been reading Anthony Burgess's The End Of The World News which I bought for $2.00 in school the other week.

In the afternoon we made our way to Arab Street where Noi dropped some material off with Alice, her tailor. We are gearing up for Hari Raya already! There was a bit of a market there and we were able to admire the crowds whilst supping tea and munching epok epok outside our favourite café.

Now we're back home and preparing to make our way to listen to the school's symphonic band tonight. Last year we were tapping our toes to an Abba medley so expectations are high. It just doesn't get any better than this, thank you.

Yours Is No Disgrace

With the dictum Dignity at all times in mind I successfully restrained myself from running after the leading pack this morning in the staff race and took it reasonably easy for half the course. Then I stretched out a bit over the last kilometre or so and did a fairly convincing imitation of a runner up to the finish line. All in all, not a bad morning's work - but I've yet to see if any damage has been sustained in my vulnerable areas (which now include just about everywhere.)

After a brief stop at work to pick up stuff for the weekend it was off home and a relaxed walk to Mesjid Abdul Aleem Siddique at Telok Kurau, one of my favourite mosques, for Friday Prayers. It's a lovely, modern little place (I used to go to the run-down old building before it made way for the new version), but it pulls a big crowd and it can be difficult to get a good place to pray if you're not early. There's some gorgeous carving (I think in stone but I might be wrong) around the mihrab and minbar which is very easy on the eye. I've also noticed that the imans there have an occasional tendency to deliver their khutbas in a real fire and brimstone manner. Today's was particularly bracing with the iman seemingly intent on blowing the PA to pieces. If any CIA agents had infiltrated our worship I suspect we may all have ended up on a list for Guantanamo, but any sermon's contents here are unexceptionable as they all come centrally from MUIS. So it remains something of a mystery to me how some of the imans get quite so worked up, but it's great stuff. A bit of passion and drama now and again can certainly shake one out of an unhealthy complacency.

The other thing I've got done today is to try and fix the layout of yesterday's post to this Far Place. Much as I admire what these technical johnnies at Blogger can do they cannot provide an easy way for low-tech guys like myself to format text. For anyone reading the entry the little poem therein should be in two four line stanzas, and it's a mark of my literary obsessiveness/pettiness that I remain incredibly irritated that this is not the case. (Not to mention the big gaps between individual lines. Doh!)