Oh What A Wonderful Morning

We left our usual place of residence to head north around 3.45 pm yesterday and found ourselves at Maison KL by 10.00 pm - most acceptable considering we were travelling on the eve of the New Year. Judging from the antics of a number of those on the highway it would seem they were late for their reunion dinners and determined to get there as fast as humanly possible, if not more so. I hope they all managed to arrive in one piece, despite the risks taken. There were jams at Tuas at both sides of the immigration desks, but fortunately the traffic was well-behaved with little in the way of cutting of queues, possibly due to a well-positioned police vehicle on the Malaysian side of the bridge. This meant that the queue moved at an even pace such that levels of irritation were at a minimum. A particularly fine bowl of mutton soup (hot and savoury) from a new stall at the Ayer Keroh services plus an outstanding mug of teh tarik (hot and sweet) from Rachid's ARAB Cafe there further served to ease the discomfort of the journey. 

Upon arrival we found the place in good order, I'm very happy to say, and had settled in within an hour or so, Noi performing her usual brand of domestic magic. Actually I'd been carrying a bit of a headache from a couple of issues that surfaced at work in the morning for most of the day, and by the time it came to hit the sack I was sorely in need of knitting up the raddled sleeve of care, but things could have been a lot worse. And I was able to enjoy the late-night fire crackers exploding just across the road even if they did disturb my slumbers.

The pay-off following all this was an almost sinfully relaxed morning. A decent lie-in, followed by doing nothing much at all, until it was time to amble out to Friday Prayers at the mosque just around the corner in the delightfully hot sun. (We'd been told it's been cold here with some strong winds of late, but it's just the usual succulent sultriness today.) Part of the nothing much at all, by the way, was finishing off the second volume in Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Man, reading the graduation episode in Maya Angelou's I Know How The Caged Bird Sings and getting to grips with a couple of the Dark Lady sonnets. Just can't think of anything that could be more fun than that, except for lending an ear to Jakszyk, Fripp and Collins's A Scarcity of Miracles which I'm just about to do.

All Set

We're planning to enjoy the break for Chinese New Year getting in touch with the homestead and environs in Kuala Lumpur. To that end the last couple of hours have been spent in the usual whirl of preparation and packing, and all the more for Noi who's been cunningly producing various New Year goodies to disperse over the last few days.

And I thought life was supposed to slow down once you'd reached the twilight years.

Murder In Mind

We were watching a good murder yesterday evening, the Midsomer variety, an episode we'd recorded earlier, when disaster struck. Just at the point when the first murder took place, remarkably an entire one hour into the episode, surely some kind of record for the series, the picture began to break up. And it continued to break up, making the remainder of the story unwatchable. 

The fault lay in the original broadcast. The BBC Entertainment channel, the guilty party, is apt to break-up at odd moments. Unfortunately we'd recorded the final airing of the episode in question so there was no chance of catching it again.

And to add insult to injury I'd pretty much figured out Whodunnit! (Actually Noi ran the episode to its unwatchable conclusion after I'd gone to bed in a huff and was able to see enough to make sense of the plot. This morning I stunned her with my nifty detective work.)

Ah, the perils of subscribing to cable tv. Life just isn't fair, is it?

Home Improvement

We were fortunate yesterday to enjoy a visit from our favourite handyman, Mark, who put up two clocks, fixed a slightly loose fitting in the shower and put up a new rail for the shower curtain before he left without charging a penny, even though Noi tried to get him to take something for his trouble - and considerable expertise. If I'd attempted to do the same jobs, by the way, I'd have taken forever and made a cack-handed mess of them. Actually his basic reason for popping in was to pick some keropok that the Missus had ordered for him via Intan's mum (seriously delicious stuff - fortunately she gave some to yours truly as well) so he didn't leave entirely empty-handed.

Normally I enjoy chatting away to Mark as he works. He has views on everything and isn't afraid to air them and always makes for excellent listening. Unfortunately, though, I had something on when he arrived and had to leave just after he started. But I did get a chance to ask him how things were in terms of work and supporting the family. Sadly they are none too good. He's driving a taxi some days now to ensure he can make ends meet. The problem is that there're a lot of guys competing as handymen since they are feeling the pinch workwise and they themselves are seeking to make ends meet. Mark can't afford to turn any chance of work down, no matter what the hour.

As is often the case, I find myself puzzled as to the economics of all this. This is someone with seriously useful skills, really good at what he does, completely reliable and extremely hard-working. Yet he's struggling to get by. Go figure.

A Matter Of Concentration

The other day I found myself talking to a class about what some see as a deterioration in the ability of students, indeed, folks in general, to concentrate for reasonable periods of time. The problem is, of course, that given the kind of generalising inherent in such observations and the sad fact that jeremiads against the iniquities of the younger generations are a feature of any age you care to think of, it's well nigh impossible to be sure that this isn't just a case of an enjoyable moan for its own sake.

With that major caveat in mind I'll offer the tentative observation that I think there might be a disturbing truth in the deteriorationist hypothesis. In part I base this on my own partial, limited but real experience and in part what I see as reasonable conjectures based on the kinds of demands on audiences and readers which were once quite normal in work intended to be popular which seem to have largely vanished - the demands, I mean. A significant majority of those I teach, in some ways the elite of their society, regard quite slight novels as being long and demanding. Goodness knows how they'd react if faced with a full-length Dickens.

And in addition to this I've come to notice how often similar observations concerning the problem crop up in the course of my reading, without having to seek them out. Just now I happened to be reading a critical essay on the work of Maya Angelou and came across a footnote noting the difficulty of teaching her autobiographical novels in American universities as they are seen as too demanding for students to cope with if set as independent reading. Good grief, part of me expostulated. Interestingly, the same footnote quoted a professor on the steady reduction in the amount of such reading he has set students over the years, the reduction stemming from a steady erosion in their capacity to cope. I honestly cannot remember ever reading this kind of moaning in what is otherwise a serious bit of lit crit before.

I'm really not sure if the idea that somehow the capacity of the educated elite of our species to fully and fruitfully concentrate adds up to something we should be worrying about. But in my darker moments I find myself weighing the darker implications.

The Ground Beneath Our Feet

Finished Robert Harris's excellent Pompeii yesterday just before the concert, sitting in the Starbucks located at Marina Square, just across the road from the Esplanade. Wonderfully imagined tale, quite slow-moving in the initial chapters as you are led into the world of the engineers responsible for maintaining the aqueducts and into the corruption of the main boom town, Pompeii, on a booming coast. Then gathering pace as a plot emerges based around the aquarius, Attila, and his love interest, who happens to be the daughter of the most corruptly doubtful of all the inhabitants of Pompeii. Oh, and some wonderful stuff about the venerable Pliny, at this point the overweight admiral of the imperial fleet.

At then comes the eruption of Vesuvius, which you know is on the way and yet still manages to surprise somehow. After that, a series of descriptions better than any disaster movie because of their wonderful detail and sense of the actual in action.

So it was quaffing the remains of my café latte that I enjoyed the various fates of the key members of the cast so cunningly assembled by the author, and very satisfying they were too. But the deeper success of the novel lay in its genuine sense of contemporary concerns in these ancient matters. Put simply, the reader was made to feel dwarfed by the ferocious and uncaring power of Nature, and the puniness of man in comparison - even the genuinely tough and in many ways estimable Romans lovingly detailed and understood by Harris.

And here's a curious thing: I couldn't help but think as I read of how the frontage of the shopping mall in which I was so delightfully killing the twenty-five minutes I had to spare was being dug up for some kind of renovation even as I quaffed. Surely, all quite unnecessary! I remember the building being newly opened not that long ago. And this seems typical of this modern city which seems to shrug off vestiges of its former self in almost any location you can think of with remarkable insouciance. It just so happens that I have fond memories of the steps outside which made up said frontage. The school in which I first worked here used the location for a series of fund-raising concerts for two or three years in the 1990s (pre-history, now, I suppose.) I'm guessing that it's not just my memories that will have been chipped away at but those of any number of teachers and students who gathered to make something a bit special, a bit memorable.

We don't need eruptions any more to sweep away the ground on which we stand.

All In The Timing

Just back from a jolly evening spent with the SSO doing the business on Strauss and Wagner. Basically I went for the Four Last Songs and they were gorgeously played. I can't remember twenty-odd minutes of music ever passing so quickly, though inevitably time stopped towards the end of Im Abendrot. The young lady doing the singing was no slouch either - one Annalena Persson, from Sweden. She soared over the orchestra in the high bits, but it was the middle-range stuff that did it for me.

She was back for the end of the Wagner, doing the Liebstod from the end of Tristan. Must say, it was a bit of a relief to get to the end of what was entitled An Orchestral Passion, based on the opera. Not  that it wasn't severely lovely, as you might expect, but there wasn't a lot of variety in terms of mood - ecstasy followed by more ecstasy, if you see what I mean. I got a bit lost after the first twenty minutes, though there was a fabulous solo for English horn somewhere in the middle that brought me round, and the Liebstod seemed to shoot by even though time was suitably standing still again - at least for this listener.

Crashing

I bade farewell to Noi just after the Asr prayer, had a shave, prayed Asr, put on a bit of Pink Floyd at reasonable volume - the studio album from Ummagumma which is quite a mess but has its moments - and somehow managed to sink into a stupor of massive proportions, generally oblivious to the world, except to occasionally manifest some awareness that I really did need to get up at some point, lasting up to an embarrassingly late hour. Now it's true that I'd felt a bit dozy during prayers at the mosque, though not unduly so, and I thought I might manage half an hour or so of shut-eye on getting back home from work, but I had no idea that I was in for such an epic snooze. I assume I must have in some sense needed it, but I suppose it might all have been a case of pure, blissful laziness.

Extremely non-productive, but all very nice indeed, I must say.

Shadowed

It's thirty-eight years to the day since Dad died. As I've mentioned here before, it's strange and oddly daunting to find myself older than he was when he was gathered into eternity. The younger me never felt that I was living in his shadow. Now I do, but, curiously, there's a kind of comfort in that.

Finding Time

I've just booked a ticket for the SSO's concert this Saturday. They're doing Strauss's Four Last Songs which I adore, but have never heard in the concert hall, so I'm particularly stoked up for this one, having been thinking about it ever since I spotted it in the rather handsome season booklet I picked up last year. Noi isn't going to be around though, as she's popping up to Melaka at the weekend. It'll be a bit odd being at a concert without her, and I rather think she might have enjoyed the piece, but never mind. Actually there's also some Wagner on the bill as it seems the soprano is going to be warbling bits from Tristan. I have no idea how that's going to work but, who knows, it might just turn out to be more than a bit of fun.

One of the irritations of being in a job that keeps one rather too busy at times is missing out on events of interest that turn out to be impossible to make time for. The only remedy is to try extra hard to carve out a life in whatever spaces open up.