Biscuitry

Ramadhan 30 1429

Sometimes, probably always, the best things are the simplest. The cooking of biscuits in fasting month counts amongst the best. Astute viewers may notice who's doing all the work.

Hard Lessons

Ramadhan 29 1429

O you who believe, fasting is prescribed to you… That you may learn self-restraint… Simple, isn't it? Not really, I'm afraid. Controlling hunger & thirst is tough, but superficial. An outward sign of something more radical, more transformatory. And far more difficult to achieve. A challenge to remake the self. Another year of failure. But the chance to begin again, again is always there, regardless of season.

Best Price

Ramadhan 28 1429

The girls, and their ibu, have been with us over the weekend as ayah has been attending various bits of the F1 (an event in which I have zero interest.) We took them with us today as I went to pay my zakat. It's become something of a family tradition to have them come along, and Noi also gets them to assist her when she makes her donation to the big charity drive from MUIS at this time of year. After paying the zakat we picked up the girls' Hari Raya outfits from the tailor in Geylang and bought a heap of goodies for breaking the fast. (Coming soon - in about five minutes.)

Other than that I've occupied myself fruitfully by cleaning most of my CDs ahead of the big day. Almost there!

In Readiness

Ramadhan 27 1429

A few hours today were spent cleaning the books here, as part of the general cleaning operation prior to Hari Raya. It's rare, and tiring, for me to do them all in a day, but that's what I did. The operation has left me, as it usually does, a touch melancholy: the climate continues to wreak slow havoc on a fair number of the collection; and I wonder if I'm likely to catch up on all the reading I need to do just to do some kind of justice to what I possess even in the next five years.

I also found time to finish Post Captain, which left me quite the opposite of melancholy, if there is such a state. It occurred to me that Jack and Stephen share an openness to experience, a sheer delight in the world, that helps explain their friendship. This is not to say that they are immune to other states - both suffer convincing bouts of depression in the course of the novel - but it's as if they know that their friendship orients them towards an essential sanity manifest in their music and shared humour. And isn't it extraordinary that O'Brian creates a convincing sense of heroism without avoiding the grim, sometimes despairingly harsh details of naval life in the early nineteenth century?

I'm now deciding what novel to read next, bearing in mind I've still got the Alan Bennett book going, most pleasingly so. I was thinking of rereading one of the books my EE students are doing - A Clockwork Orange, Sexing The Cherry, The Blind Assassin (though I haven't yet picked up a copy of the last of these) - but I just fancy something totally new. It's probably going to be John Banville's The Sea since I know absolutely nothing about this one and it's pretty short so I'm not likely to get bogged down and regret it.

Reading Music

Ramadhan 26 1429

Whilst writing yesterday's post, the Tippett & Messiaen bit, I had at the back of my mind Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a tome I've had it in mind to purchase since coming across the very handsome hardback in Borders a few months ago. Just a quick browse was sufficient to confirm the quality of the writing, and since Mr Ross covers the kind of stuff I like to listen to but few others seem to, it seemed to me a must buy. Actually I assumed then it was a relatively minor sort of book and have been very gratified to see it winning prizes and getting an excellent review in a recent New York Review Of Books, which anyone interested in can access here. I think it comes out in paperback soon and that's when I'll be grabbing it.

I've also got in mind a couple of books by Jan Swafford, one on Brahms and another general survey of 'serious' music. It's not that either topic gets my pulse racing, but Swafford's biography Charles Ives: A Life With Music is the best book I've read on any musician of any type - proof that it is possible to write about music and communicate something of the experience of listening to it. I'd recommend it to anyone, even if they didn't particularly care for arguably the greatest of all American composers. It's just a tremendously insightful about a fascinating sort of chap. I'm hoping Ross gives Ives some coverage.

Oh and I saw a book about The Clash when we were last in KL that I wish I'd have bought - one with a green cover - so I'm the lookout for that. The wishlist just gets longer.

By the by, antestorm posted a spot-on comment regarding Funeral one of my picks for the CD changer. One of the truly great CDs for driving or otherwise. Strongly recommended for anyone with open ears.

New Music

Ramadhan 25 1429

I'm in the middle of changing the CDs in the car's CD changer. Just about to go in are: Duke Ellington & Johnny Hodges Play The Blues Back To Back, Van Morrison's Down The Road; Camembert Electrique by Gong; The Kinks's Face to Face; Arcade Fire's Funeral; and the first CD of Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony as played by Simon Rattle and the boys from Birmingham.

Coming out after being in there for a couple of weeks are: the compilation CD I got with the issue of The Word; Blur's Parklife; Seven Swans by Sufjan Stevens; Dylan's Infidels (which resolutely refused to play); Fairport Convention's Full House; and the final CD in my set of Tippett's Symphonies featuring Symphony No 4 plus the Suite in D for good measure. For the sake of completion I should add that I've also been listening to Billy Bragg's Don't Try This At Home on the cassette player in between bouts of Joyce's Ulysses in the Book At Bedtime recording by the BBC.

The big surprise for me in all that, as mentioned in an earlier post, has been just how effective the Tippett symphonies have proved in the car. I'd say that the final one, the 4th, has been the best of all to listen to. At 30 minutes it's not all that long and there's no breaks between movements, though you can pick out a sort of slow movement and scherzo. Tippett packs in an extraordinary number of textures in that timespan and so, though it's not exactly melodic, there's always something going on that arrests the ears. This is the only one of the set not conducted by Sir Colin Davis, in this case it being Sir Georg Solti waving the baton and the Chicago Symphony giving it their all. It was also recorded a good ten years after the other symphonies and I get a sense that the quality of sound is just that bit better - a tad more immediate. It seems that the Chicago Symphony commissioned the piece, so it's no wonder they do it so well. Sir Georg is also responsible for the Suite in D (for the Birthday of Prince Charles) which accompanies the symphony in an inspired bit of programming. This is Tippett excelling in an occasional, very public, work, showing how pleasing to the ear he can be when he wants to be. It features at least two stand-out melodies, derived from folk songs, the kind of stuff you can (nearly) hum along to, but recognisably in Tippett's voice. The accessibility of the suite sheds light on what's going on in the symphonies, I feel.

It's been the success of my experiment with the Tippett set that has led me to put the Messiaen in this time round. Let's see what this one does to the old ears.

Plodding Along

Ramadhan 24 1429

Got out for my sixth run of Ramadhan just after breaking the fast. Last year was the first time I tried any sort of exercise in the fasting month and I seem to have got the knack now of knowing when to fit it in. In fact, over some twelve years of doing the fast my behaviour on breaking the fast has significantly evolved.

Time was when I would set about greedily wolfing down whatever was available in a sort of flurry of relief at finally being able to do so. I actually used to feel hungry. Nowadays I drink a glass of water, a cup of tea, eat a couple of dates and then do the prayer immediately. (By the way, it's compulsory to break the fast immediately you hear the call to prayer so all this is quite in order, just in case you were wondering.) By the time the prayer is done I feel pretty much replete so it's just a matter of a bit more tea and a very light snack. We only eat seriously a good deal later in the evening. So that's a great opportunity to get out and do some exercise once in a while.

Tonight's run was fairly enjoyable, though I did feel a touch heavy with a cup of tea or two on board. At the moment I'm sticking to the same route, running along what are known as the park connectors up to Telok Kurau Park and I can get a good sense of how comfortable I feel when I go up an overhead bridge on the way. On a good day I can bound up like a young gazelle who isn't too flustered by the sudden appearance of an overhead bridge on the plains of the Serengeti. (Yes, I know, there are probably no gazelles to be found there, but allow a little poetic license.) On a not so good day it's more like a gazelle who's just received a pension and might be spending it on a walking stick, which was the case this evening. I was just grateful to get to the top, and wouldn't have minded staying there a while. But that would have been to have delayed the utterly wonderful oxtail soup the missus had spent the day preparing. Sedapnya! (Which might be Englished as something along the lines of Get that down your neck!)

In Passing

Ramadhan 23 1429

We've got a bat on the balcony said Noi this morning, just before I set off to work. I popped out to have a look, but it's difficult to see anything too clearly out there at 5.50. There seemed to be something nesting at the top of the grille which fences off our balcony but neither of us was too sure what it was.

Incidentally we're used to bats around our house in KL. A couple or more used the gap under the small roof over our back door to 'hang around' (and as a sort of toilet) before we got rid of them. But this was the first time we'd encountered any on our territory in Singapore.

When I got back in the afternoon it was to be told that our guest wasn't a bat after all, but a bird, and, sadly, a dead one. It made more sense that it should be a bird out there. The tree directly opposite the balcony is home to several and we've had a few trying to nest with us. This poor blighter seemed to have got stuck in the grille, by its leg. In fact, Noi had shooed off another bird this morning and we're now wondering if that one was some sort of companion to our late friend.

I've just been up the ladder to remove the little fellow and put it in a plastic bag. Not used to dealing with dead birds, we've been discussing what to do with it and we've decided to bury it by the roadside tomorrow. Absurd, I suppose, but the idea of just shoving it in the rubbish bin doesn't work for me somehow.

Blake: How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

Home Thoughts From Abroad

Ramadhan 22 1429

Somehow I contrived to forget to ring Mum last night, probably because I got so caught up in the Chelsea game - I thought a draw was a fair result but was baffled as to how the mercurial Mike Riley saw fit to dole out 7 yellow cards to our heroes whilst apparently blind to a series of infractions (to use a polite word) from the boys in blue.

I made up for it just now to find that she won another twenty-five big ones at bingo yesterday. However, nowadays she appears to regard anything less than a three figure haul as strictly average so there was no real celebration involved. Mind you, she was just off to the chiropodist, a visit to whom she does not look forward, and that may have put a dampener on her mood. It seems there's a particularly unpleasant corn crying out for attention - I don't know exactly what they do to corns, but I'm guessing it's not relaxing.

I was telling her about our little outing to the bazaar at Geylang over the weekend and reminding her of times in the past when she went round it herself. The strange thing about that was how easily she fitted into it all when I'd expected the experience to be utterly foreign. Then I realised that essentially markets are pretty much the same the world over - which, I suppose, is why Noi loves roaming around Ashton, Hyde and Denton markets when we are in England. The only thing I think she found problematic about Geylang was finding somewhere for a quick smoke: the sight of an eighty-odd-year-old ang moh lady puffing away at a tab end did tend to attract a fair amount of attention from startled locals.

I think probably her all-time most startling moment over here though was at a little party poolside at some rather nifty condo when an innocent young lady (local, Chinese girl) confided in Mum how wonderful she (the young lady) thought Mrs Thatcher was. Big mistake - as the innocent realised after a colourful twenty-minute tirade from the old lady explaining precisely why Mrs T was not wonderful. She certainly broadened one or two minds, and vocabularies, that evening.

High Lights

Ramadhan 21 1429

And we'll be putting up our own twinkling lights soon, purchased yesternight at sweaty Geylang.