Forgetfulness

You know you're busy at work when you completely forget to eat. I righted the omission around 4.30 this afternoon with a particularly crunchy apple. And, let me tell you, it tasted good.

A Not-so Royal Scam

Interesting how language changes. Noi and I have been merrily chatting about would be scammers and their not-so-clever scams, yet I know for sure I'd never heard the word until the mighty Steely Dan released one of their greatest albums, The Royal Scam, in 1976. I know this because I hadn't a clue what the title meant when the album was released, and neither did any of my friends.

The reason the missus and I have been so merry over this, by the way, is that we've had a bit of fun thwarting the attempts of a would-be con artist to rip us off over the rental of an apartment in the UK in December. The whole attempt was so transparent as to be ludicrous. But just in case you come across something similar, avoid using Western Union money transfer (to the UK) if a third party strongly advises you to do so. Some sharks have obviously figured a way to ID themselves as the would-be recipients for the cash and I'm guessing some poor souls somewhere may have fallen for this. Fortunately we're too old and too wise (for once) to be taken in.

No Escape

I stuck a load of Beethoven in the car CD changer the other day - to be precise, all the symphonies (and three overtures); and to be even more precise, it's the series that Roger Norrington conducted with the London Classical Players using period instruments. The series was regarded as pretty revolutionary for its time, the late eighties, as was Beethoven, of course, for his rather earlier period.

Beethoven always sounds to me a rich burgundy brown.

Whether it's a good thing to have Beethoven blaring away as you drive, with no real choice in the matter (and trust me those authentic period horns blare) I'm not entirely sure. But it's certainly a bracing experience.

The kind of composer you wouldn't want as a house guest, methinks.

No Way Back

I've been a little unsettled in my reading just lately. I've found myself hopping from book to book in what has at times seemed to be an almost random manner, and I've made one distinct false start - though that was only of a page or two. I put this down to having a lot of very appetising books in waiting. I want to start them all and simply can't.

Some progress has been made on the following of late: Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness, American Fantastic Tales - Poe to the Pulps, and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions. The last of these I borrowed from Sakhar quite a few weeks back and it's been lying on my desk. I suppose I'm reading it out of something of a sense of duty, but I'm genuinely getting into it.

But the one I'm really zooming along on now is Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings Goes To School, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. This marks a real return to the past for me, deliberately so - that's why I bought it - or, rather, it should do so. But it doesn't. You can never go back, not to what you were. As a young lad I thought there was nothing funnier than a Jennings book, or more deeply involving. I suspect that at some level I was genuinely at that prep school, the wonderfully cosy Linbury Court, alongside Jennings and his chums. Now I'm a long way distant.

This is not to say I haven't enjoyed reading about Jennings and Darbishire and Mr Carter and Old Wilkie et al. And I've also found them funny, but in a gently predictable way, not with the kind of helpless hilarity I experienced at ten years of age. At that age I thought Buckeridge a genius; I now see him as a very fine, formulaic kind of writer, who sometimes struggles a bit in technical terms. To be specific, the story wobbles more than a little as soon as he leaves the boys behind and focuses on the adult world. And there's a fair amount of this in the first of the Jennings series. In fact, almost an entire chapter is devoted to some trite comedy based on the exploits of the Dunhambury fire brigade, who get called out when Jennings shows a little too much initiative. It doesn't work at all - except, I suppose, for ten-year-olds who don't think too deeply about such matters.

But what does work wonderfully is the glorious wordplay as the boys muddle themselves and everyone around them - who wouldn't love incongruous triangles? - and the archetypal quality of so many of the characters - like the four I mentioned above.

I did think of ordering more of the series on my last amazonian foray, and now I'm glad I didn't. You can never really go back, but you can gain an added appreciation of what it felt like to be there

Desert Places

After the debacle of Friday's viewing of the Surviving Species documentary on my Planet Earth DVD set I've wisely been avoiding Into The Wilderness, the next one along focusing on 'environmental issues', i.e., making you feel bad by showing the degree to which our species has screwed this glorious world. Instead yesterday I watched the earlier episode Deserts just to cheer myself up in the company of various camels, Namibian lions and the like. Why is it that just knowing of the existence of places I'll never get to and wouldn't survive for more than a few days if I could, makes me feel a whole lot better?

And before dinner today I'm off to a few gorgeously beautifully extreme Ice Worlds.

Which reminds me, for reasons I can't quite fathom, that over a cup of tea at the Paya Lebar Post Office Coffee Bean outlet we were entertained by the tune Frosty The Snowman sitting out in the sun on a warm and sultry Singapore late afternoon. Go figure, as they say.

Arrangements

Noi is busy fixing for various nieces and nephews to descend upon us later this month. Feeding and entertaining them will be a drain on finances and imagination. But essentially fun and to be welcomed. We're also trying to put into place various aspects of our trip to Manchester in December and figuring out how we're going to move out of the Mansion by January. Last weekend we shipped quite a few books up to Maison KL but there's still a lot to do.

It would be easy for all this to become overwhelming, but it won't be. I don't know why that is, but it's something I know for sure. I suppose it's linked to the fact that we're lucky to be able to do any of these things and have the wherewithal to do them with.

Mistaken

Big mistake early this evening, just when things were going extremely well. I'd got back from work early in the afternoon and decided to allow myself some soothing sounds, and possibly a nap, on the grounds that as it's a public holiday here for Deepavali I deserved a treat as compensation for having to get up and go into the workplace at all.

The sounds were suitably soothing - Songs of Love and Hate by Leonard Cohen; Think Tank by Blur - and I reckon I nodded off once or twice. After that Noi put the kettle on and we got the Polar puffs ready for consumption on the little table in front of the tele.

At this point I thought it would be rather a good wheeze to view one of the programmes from my Planet Earth DVDs and have a nice wallow in the beauties of nature. It's been a long time since the rhythms of my life have allowed me such an opportunity and I've been missing the experience. The problem came in choosing an episode. I've now run through all the main ones, but had not yet looked at anything on the final disk, Planet Earth - The Future, touted as a companion to the series, comprising three documentaries related to conservation issues. I was somewhat hesitant to do so since the depressing experience of watching a similar sort of programme from The Blue Planet DVDs whilst on a conservation boat in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam as part of a trip made with a class some three years ago. (It was so powerful I've not yet been able to watch it again despite now owning the series myself.)

Bravely, foolishly, I plunged in, and, as expected, was knocked sideways, left, right, every-which-way by the excellent first hour, Saving Species. The magnitude of just how badly we've screwed this planet is so monumentally, humungously, overly overwhelming I find myself drowned by it. Basically I've spent the rest of the day brooding over the mess, and it's been guilty brooding - this is something I'm aware I've taken too little care of.

But perhaps if I can get beyond brooding to doing something even slightly useful, which is all the use one is ever going to be able to achieve, my viewing experience might not have been all that mistaken after all.

Unseasonal

Odd sight of today: in a Coffee Bean at Kallang - a plenitude of Christmas decorations, and we're only just into November. It's not even bonfire night yet!

Is nothing sacred? Well, no, of course not.

Living Dangerously

Odd sight of the last few days: some daredevil young motorcyclists riding their machines in a distinctly unconventional style along the North-South highway in Malaysia.

But let me start at the beginning. It was last Sunday evening and Noi and I were on the highway on our way back from KL, about ten minutes from Seremban. The light was beginning to go and a few cars had their headlights on. Then in the mirror I spied the lights from a number of motorbikes some way behind. Around about fifteen of them I would have guessed.

I didn't think too much of it. It's quite normal to find bikers packing together on the highway, especially at the weekend. I assumed they'd been out as a group somewhere and were on their way back. I almost commented on their appearance on the road to Noi, but didn't bother when I realised they weren't catching up with me. I further assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that they were unlikely to actually overtake. In fact, I'd decided that they were obviously quite careful riders maintaining a sensible speed.

Then the lights began getting perceptibly closer, and I told Noi that the group were catching up. I took it they had slowed down to group together and were now reunited, as it were. No, wrong again. They had slowed down to prepare the rather grand, crazy stunt that followed. It became clear that they were now going at quite a rate of knots. I was in the centre lane and the bikes had spread right across the three lanes of the highway in a kind of V formation. The first four overtook me going at quite a lick, two on either side, and we were more than a little surprised to see that the riders weren't sitting on their bikes. Each was lying on his belly, with the belly on the seat of the motorbike, in a position horizontal to the ground. Each had crossed his legs in a distinctly insouciant manner and was swerving his machine in between the cars around and ahead.

The remainder of the gang passed also at high speed, but conventionally seated - much to our relief. A few of these bikes had girls riding pillion on them. Part of me hoped that their mums and dads had some idea of what they were up to, and intended to put a stop to it, and another part that their parents knew nothing and so wouldn't be overly worried.

Looking back on all this I can say with some authority I never did anything close to as daft as this when I was a youngster. But, with somewhat less assurance, it did put me in mind of one or two less than estimable scrapes I got myself into. Fortunately I survived. I pray that these kids will.

True Greatness

A word or two more about Fitzgerald's masterpiece while the experience of being quite overwhelmed by it is still fresh in my mind. It's been a few years since I read it cover to cover and this reading was the first time I felt I genuinely plugged into the emotional power of the novel, particularly the bleak melancholy of the ending. Gatsby himself came alive for me as more than just the superb idea of the character. I've always, I think, grasped what the character represents intellectually from the first time I read the book (at university.) But this time he moved me profoundly - as he moves Nick, the narrator.

The bit where Gatsby's (Gatz's) father shows up after he's killed and passes Nick the schedules for self-improvement his son drew up as a child was devastatingly powerful for me. I saw the charming, charmed, doomed boy as Fitzgerald saw him. I suppose living so long in a culture underpinned by precisely the same notions of self-help and self-improvement helped me grasp what before had escaped me at the level of feeling.

Fitzgerald is brilliant in this novel - but not so much in the others, curiously - at providing glimpses of his characters, such that they are illuminated, given to us, as it were, in fragments of hallucinatory clarity. He just doesn't put a foot wrong. Yet all the other novels are patently flawed, despite their moments, sometimes stretches, of genius. How did he get it so right this one time? I suppose it helped that he stayed sober whilst writing it.