Good News

I'm pleased I got to see a few of the finals from the Paris Paralympics on-line but wish I'd made time for more. Great to see my home nation maintain second place in the medals table with an incredible overall total, but just as good to see talented athletes from other nations delivering the goods. Lovely to see the French crowd go barmy over their lads & lasses doing so well.

The coverage in the press was also excellent, especially in The Graun which outdid itself this time round. Good news, for once.

Almost Completely

It's remarkable what a good break can do. In just ten days I completely forgot how physically demanding my job can be.

Unfortunately it took rather less than a day to completely remember.

Night And Day

With no fewer than two eateries adjoining Mak's house, we are spoilt for choice both night and day.

From Below

Picked up my old battered copy of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class a few days back. Decided to read it again before it falls apart (and possibly before I fall apart also.) It resonates with me as much today as it did back in the 70s. Possibly even more now as I feel I have a wider sense of what history from below might comprise.

Frustration

Question: What is it best to do when you've just lost some 350 predicted grades, assiduously keyed into the International Baccalaureate's online system for recording such, since the system has decided to time you out for lack of activity, despite the fact you've just spent a considerable amount of time, energy and concentration keying-in said grades, which felt like some kind of activity?

Answer: Attend Friday Prayers. And pray hard for designers of online systems. And their victims.

Altered States

Something I've noticed about myself that has become more pronounced in recent years: I feel far more sleepy-headed during holiday periods than when working. This week, for example, it's been a real struggle for me to get going before 10.00 am. I've had to force myself to start marking, and since I've had a fair number of examination scripts to deal with on a daily basis the forcing has been a grim necessity. Yet on an ordinary work day I'm fine getting on with stuff from 6.30 am onwards, with no sense at all of having to force things.

Is it the case that somehow my body 'knows' that, technically speaking, it should be on holiday and is making a less than subtle protest at being made to do stuff it fundamentally doesn't want to?

And another odd thing. I've been sleeping early and deeply these last few days, but I don't wake up refreshed. I wake up wanting to sleep some more. Yesterday I felt particularly thick-headed and had to deal with a very distinct ache running along the jaw-line on the right side of my face. I suspect I'd somehow slept awkwardly face-wise and strained myself somehow. Fortunately the ache has eased considerably today, but getting my quota of marking done was a challenge.

All this has made me think a little more circumspectly about retirement than I was wont to do. When the day arrives that I don't absolutely need to get out of bed I'd better find good reasons for doing so.

Simplicities

Pepperoni pizza and mushroom soup (with bits of garlic bread). At a new eatery (well, new to us) called Mainroad, just off Ampang Road.

Team GB a strident second in the current medals table for the Paralympics 2024.

A family of monkeys in the trees opposite, which are ripe with birdsong in the long afternoons. (The trees, that is; not the monkeys.)

What's not to like?

Beyond Elementary

Took The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes off the bookshelves the other day, having decided it would be interesting to undertake a read-through. The novels and stories are sequenced in the order of publication and it struck me that whilst I knew the canon pretty well, having started reading the tales as a very young teenager, I had no real sense of the development of the body of work as a whole and it would be interesting to acquire a sense of that sequence.

I've been reading A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four over the lest three days and it's quite remarkable how fully formed the Holmes-Watson relationship is from the outset. Doyle established the template right away, from the opening pages of the first novel - or pamphlet, as the good doctor refers to it in A Study in Scarlet. But it's also odd how Doyle seems compelled to give us the rather tedious backstories of the perpetrators of the wicked deeds in both, with the requisite chapters occupying a good half of the first novel, completely derailing the Holmes-Watson heart of the story. Things aren't quite so bad in the second work, but the pages covering Jonathan Small and the Indian Mutiny are still pretty tedious stuff. I suppose Doyle thought his readers wanted plenty of foreign colour, when all they required was as much of No. 221B, Baker Street as possible.

By the by, the foreign colour in The Sign of Four is so racist as to be painful, but this is oddly fascinating in itself - and it puts the racism of Kipling and Conrad into massive perspective (as in, if you think these guys are bad get a load of what the average 'popular' writer of the period with few if any literary pretensions was capable of.) Mind you, Doyle manages to be reasonably even-handed in his treatment of Mormonism in A Study in Scarlet, being quite sympathetic to those undertaking the great migration to Utah, even though he's firm in his negative judgement upon their leaders in the years that followed.

More Heaviness

Just lately I've been noticing quite a few people in this Far Place who are, sadly, carrying a good deal more weight than is good for them. I suppose this sounds unpleasantly critical and self-righteous of me, but what I feel when I observe such folk doesn't feel that way. I hope I observe them with some degree of compassion, understanding and genuine concern. The problem is, of course, that there's nothing I can do to help them, though I'd like to.

What I'd like to say to them directly - but, of course, cannot - is that there is something that can be done when you're overweight and that it's not the natural way of things. Indeed, it can give a life real direction and purpose when you do something about the excess poundage; the feeling of being in control when you do take control is worth the effort of ignoring the promptings of appetite, no matter how impossibly urgent those promptings seem.

I noticed a couple of ladies the other day at the Ya Kun outlet at Clementi Mall. They looked like mother & daughter, with the elder being around 60, at a guess. The daughter possibly some 25 years or so younger. Both were carrying a lot of weight and in the mother's case she was having problems walking, needing the younger's one's assistance. It looked painful for her just to stand and move off from their table and I was struck by just how much intense effort simply walking around the mall required from her. In contrast the daughter looked sprightly, but I'm afraid the signs were there. The physical resemblance was striking but seemed to worryingly foretell more painful times ahead. Yet I felt sure that if the younger one recognised the problem then plenty could still be done to avoid a difficult few years in the future - and that if the elder were to shed some weight in the here and now her difficulties would be considerably eased.

In another time, before the age of the consumer, the quality of life of the two would have been so much better, I suspect. The price paid for the growth of consumerism (as so resonantly outlined by Andrew Marr in his book about my own country) is much higher than its victims suspect.

Heaviness

We travelled north today, taking quite some time to reach Maison KL. Many flags to get through, it being the day after Malaysia's National Day, and heavy traffic on the highway, for the same reason I suspect. But now we're here and all seems reasonably in order. (A working refrigerator is one of life's delights. Trust me on this.)