Big People

We were on our way out of the hospital yesterday when we bumped into a guy who obviously recognised us. I couldn't recall who he was, but Noi remembered him as a friend of Fuad's called Razali we'd met at least once before and we started chatting about why we were there. It turned out that his eldest son, a ten-year-old, had been diagnosed with stage four cancer, a brain tumour, just over a year ago, and he's still being treated, having gone through various stages of chemotherapy along with direct radiation treatment. His dad had just come from work to see him.

And all this told us in an almost matter of fact manner, without a trace of self-pity, just concern for the little lad.

Then today Noi found out from Rozita that the younger child, whom Razali mentioned in passing as it were, suffers from Down's Syndrome...

Headbanging

Popped over to the National University Hospital this afternoon to visit Kak Kiah, who banged her head badly against a door earlier today as a result of a fall. She looked very much the worse for wear in her hospital bed, with stitches and one of those cumbersome neck collars. Simply eating was difficult for her, apart from the fact she has no real appetite at the moment. The doctors are obviously concerned about possible further falls and damage to her spine. So, for the moment, things are far from good.

In contrast I'm happy to report that, back in Melaka, whence Noi paid a fleeting visit last Thursday, young Afnan is thriving once again. It seems he's now capable of climbing into his own baby walker. When he stayed with us generally the only thing he climbed over was yours truly. I suspect, I hope, he's got years of bruised shins and banged heads lying in painful but glorious wait.

Being Small

It was the smallness, the pettiness, of Julian Barnes's narrator in The Sense of an Ending that got to me. It's not that I was recognising myself, exactly, but the itching awareness of aspects of the self cried out for scratching.

Tony Webster can fairly be described as an everyman figure because we are all small in some ways; awfully, possibly most ways. Just hope it's not all ways.

Not Exactly The End Of The Day

Just finished Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. It got under my skin in a not terribly pleasant but wholly beneficent way of which more when I get a free minute. Not too many of those today as I'm taking some students to the Esplanade for a bit of culture: Bach, Mozart & Beethoven - which is almost like having everything except it's J.C. and not J.S. Bach so it's not quite.

Boxed In

I should have seen it coming. One of the first of the several ridiculous things I had to do in those long-ago, not-even-slightly-missed days of teacher training was a pointless exercise about devising some sort of lesson where you had to differentiate in the pre-ordained boxes given between Aims (whatever they are) and Objectives (whatever they may be.) I dutifully did what was necessary not terribly well in the certain knowledge that it was impossible to do the task well in the context of an English Language lesson, which was what I was forced to work on.

I have spent my career doing, as far as possible, what I want to do in the classroom and, generally, enjoying quite a fruitful time doing so. Unfortunately once outside the protected ground of the classroom I have spent inordinate amounts of time filling in boxes I do not wish to fill in.

At one time all this would have made me distinctly hot under the collar, prone to intoning Blake's I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's under my breath. Now I just smile at it all. Which, I'm afraid, indicates the extent of my enslavement.

Highly Graphic

Bought a couple of graphic novels/comic books recently with the spoils from services rendered at the Gifted Programme's Literature Seminar - along with a pile of poetry books, which seemed morally appropriate in the circumstances. Still haven't really started on the poetry, but have now finished the Century 1969 book in Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series and Jeff Lemire's The Underwater Welder. Enjoyed both, but wouldn't recommend Century 1969 other than to confirmed addicts of the series. I can't imagine the casual reader making anything of Mr Moore's current fictive universe, especially now it's chock full of deeply obscure references to pop culture of the period in question. There just can't be that many folks remember Edward Woodward's brilliant Callan, but there he is making a guest appearance, with Lonely to accompany. And if that sentence leaves you baffled, I'm afraid 1969 is not for you.

But The Underwater Welder is, surely, for everyone. It's wonderfully accessible in such a page-turning manner that I had to consciously slow down and deliberately take two sittings to complete the story. The introduction tells us that it's like an episode of The Twilight Zone, and that's absolutely right - The Twilight Zone at its memorable best - clever, but with a heart. And the wonderful thing is that the story could only really work to its full effect in this medium. Just one small thing: Lemire has a genius for drawing eyes. The two that peer out from the cover provide all the evidence needed.

Good Health

Around 9.00 am I didn't feel terribly well without actually being ill. And then it passed.

The non-experience served as a reminder that I've maintained undeserved good health for almost all the year so far. Sometimes when people (kindly) ask me about my back I have to take a moment to remember I have a problem. I'm under no illusion that the problem has vanished, I know it's lying dormant, as it were. But being able to move around for the most part with hardly any consciousness of the fact I'm not suppposed to be moving around with anything close to reasonable ease will do for me.

And there's a certain joy in not taking any medication whatsoever.

Now when you add to all this the fact that Maureen has sounded entirely like her old self for every phone-call I've made since her original return to form, you'll understand why I'm going to stop writing on this topic while I'm winning.

As It Stands

Just taking a quick break during half-time from United's game at Anfield. Lucky to still be in the game, even though they've now got the extra man. (Shelvey had to go - just watch what he does with his right leg.) But then I expected Liverpool to up their game by a factor of ten for this one. Must say I really rate the boy Sterling.

To be honest, just for a change I'm not so bothered about the result this time. It's enough that the crowd behave decently. Signs seemed good at the beginning, but you never know.

Hope Sir Alex gets out the hair-dryer ahead of part 2, though. Even in my present benign mood I still want victory. But I'll settle for a draw as things stand.

22.40

Winning ugly is what Liverpool used to be able to do. Sometimes it's what you've got to do.

Casualties

Gave The Who's Quadrophenia a spin this afternoon, and was jolly glad I did so. Tuneful, toe-tapping stuff. Which got me thinking how really extraordinary it was that no fewer than three major British bands of the sixties were following in the wake of the greatest of them all, those lovable mop-heads from Liverpool, each one possessed of someone, sometimes more than one, of major song-writing ability and several of superlative instrumental chops: The Rolling Stones, The Who themselves, and The Kinks (possibly the finest of the trio in their way, though hardly recognised as such.) What was it in the air that allowed such a blossoming?

And then I got to thinking of how a few days ago I was reminded of the death of the unsurpassable Jimi Hendrix (sort of semi-British in an oddly sixties kind of way, and just twenty-seven when we lost him); and then I just happened upon a nice piece in The Straits Times telling with melancholy ruefulness (not a quality you find too often in its pages) of the fortunes of Mick Taylor, poor Brian Jones's replacement in the Stones, after leaving Mick & co. It seems he left to get away from their destructive life-style (i.e., hard drugs) and believes himself highly fortunate to have done so, despite now living in near poverty.

There are those who tacitly link the creative blossoming of the period with the license it extended for young people to screw up their lives through experimentation with various dangerously fashionable substances. I don't. Not at all. All I see is waste - the frittering away of talents, and sometimes something greater than that, in the pursuit of oblivion.

It's good to know that young Mick Taylor (I can somehow only see him that way despite the passage of years) escaped that.

Unawakened

Unusually for me I watched a couple of fairly substantial things on telly early this evening. The first was deliberate. I've been feeling mildly depressed since finishing the Ishiguro, largely on account of following it by dipping into some Holocaust related reviews and writing, including a very fine piece by Christopher Browning in a recent New York Review of Books dealing with material on some of the Jewish leaders who negotiated and, to some degree, collaborated with the Nazis. So I thought I might as well watch something to cheer me up.

The something was the first episode from Attenborough and the BBC's Blue Planet series. If watching the blue whale at the beginning doesn't make you feel better about the world then nothing will. Out came my trusty DVD and some fifty dazzling minutes later I'm thinking the world isn't such a bad place after all - well, the bit that comprises oceans, that is.

Then I'm idly browsing through the channels and I hit the start of that film documentary The Fog of War featuring Bob McNamara spilling the beans on the American involvement in Vietnam. Brilliant stuff: McNamara is captivating on camera, and the supporting footage is an extraordinary counterpoint. The only problem is that although watching this obviously highly intelligent and, more importantly, obviously deeply decent and humane guy is hypnotic in the extreme, it's also depressing. So I'm back where I started.

History is a nightmare from which I don't think I'll ever wake up, to mangle a much better line.