Good Guys

The saga of our difficult relations with Singtel continues. We thought they'd cut off our services. Indeed, a young lady speaking on their behalf seemed to think the same thing, but it turned out we'd lost our broadband simply because it seems they simply don't know how to maintain its supply. That was some time ago. And we've lost our connections more than once since then. In fact, this time round we've been without an Internet connection for about three weeks.

Each time we talk to a customer service officer about this on the phone they ask why we haven't switched to fibre and we say we'd like to but you don't seem to want to allow us to do so. Then they go silent. Each time a hard-working technician comes round to try and restore our various connections they ask the same thing and we give the same reply. They usually look puzzled, but sort of knowingly so, as if familiar with the strange workings of the Singtel bureaucracy, or whoever's bureaucracy it is that is reluctant to allow us to be connected despite our desire to pay to be so. 

We've had three such technicians round already this week, and we're due another tomorrow morning. But here's the thing. It's impossible to get annoyed with the guys who come round, or the people we speak to on the phone, because they are so obviously doing their best to help us and are genuinely sympathetic. There's a kind of sincerely unaffected courtesy about these 'ordinary' workers that gives one hope that the inhuman systems we create might sometimes work to the good of people. But it's a faint hope, at best, and probably illusory. 

A Fresh Start

Surprised myself by finishing the Collected Poems of James Merrill before the year's end. Can't say I enjoyed all of its 869 pages, finding quite a few almost entirely baffling, but it was rare to read a poem without at least a few striking phrases to admire and often there was a good deal more than that. As is so often the case on these readings of a Complete or Collected, I generally found myself enjoying the later poems more than the early stuff. Indeed, the last two poems in the collection, both written in the year of JM's death, were probably the two I'd pick out as 'favourites', at least for now.

The slight irritation I suffered in making my way through the whole volume came when I fancied reading a good chunk of someone else at moments and realised this wouldn't be wise. I've been longing to give Thom Gunn's Collected a go, and I'm happy to say I'll be doing just that from tomorrow.

Hardly Matters Of Life And Death

I've been feeling somewhat weighed down by various trivial matters in the last few days - trivial, yes, but still needing to be resolved. When I tell you that one such matter has involved an improbable amount of admin work to settle the finances for the various English courses we have to run for overseas scholars new to the school from this time last year through to October 2018, you'll perhaps be able to guess at the sheer remorselessly plodding dullness of it all. And I can guarantee a sequence of interrogatory emails to follow once the paperwork reaches those who task it is to submit it to scrutiny and spot the gaps - which I'm sure are there.

It's at times like this that I desperately need to remember my own worthily wise advice to colleagues beset with troubles of their own to keep a perspective and disengage. I'm actually better at doing this now than I used to be. The problem is, though, that I'm still not particularly good at doing what I know is the obviously sensible thing.

Matters Of Life And Death

We've just been watching 6X7, the Malay drama centred around a funeral company. Focusing on the day to day dealings of such a company sounds an unlikely premise, but it works extraordinarily well. The simple pieties, typical of this kind of Suria production, with which it deals become powerfully moving at times due, I suppose, to the honesty in how it deals with the simple, painful reality of death and how ordinary people deal with it. Remarkably the series manages to avoid the usual melodramatic tropes, even when the deaths involved have a quality of the unexpected, I suppose because death is so ordinary.

In The Moment, Again

I really should be reading Descartes's Meditations. An old Everyman edition of his writing primarily featuring A Discourse on Method is my main designated reading of the moment, and I read said Discourse quite happily a couple of weeks ago, assuming I would race through the Meditations, having become familiar with them long ago in my first year at university. But I've found reading them again extremely laborious, to the point of wondering whether I'd read them in a highly edited version back in 1974, or skipped all the troublesome bits in youthful impetuousness.

Anyway, it's not difficult to distract me from reading our French friend, and James Shapiro managed to do so effortlessly through his wonderful 1599 - A Year in the Life of Shakespeare. I first read this in its year of publication in paperback, 2006, and knew then that I'd go back to it one day - specifically if I were to be teaching any of the four plays Shapiro features: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and, best of all, Hamlet. Since Hamlet is on the cards for one of my classes next year I felt I had to pick it up again and remind myself of Shapiro's very convincing thesis on the likely revisions of the great play. 

In fact, pretty everything Shapiro suggests regarding the Bard's output in 1599 is intuitively convincing. The notion that the lived experience of the social and political ups and downs of the period is central to Shakespeare's dramas, rather than the conventional notion of the influence of literary 'sources', just feels so right that you begin to take for granted that Shapiro's hunches and suppositions are spot on.

And what an astonishing run of plays it was. Each one brilliant in its way, and entirely individual.

Apocalypse Now

Watched a documentary on the opioid epidemic in the US that aired on BBC World today. Wished I hadn't. It ended with the simple caption: America is losing the war on drugs, and that was the obvious conclusion to be drawn. A few days ago I'd read a powerful essay entitled Opioid Nation in the NYRB that was equally despairing, but somehow the reality of the suffering involved was more haunting in encountering the pain of the various victims interviewed in the documentary.

There's something apocalyptic about the scale of the problem - such that the word 'problem' seems entirely inadequate in this context.

Living In The Moment

It's been a good day for my body. I went to see my back doctor this morning and he found me to be in full working order with good mobility. This was an improvement on my previous visit when he had noted signs of wear and tear. I seem to have staved off the inevitable degeneration of my lower back, at least for the time being, and that's more than good enough for me.

And then, without really meaning to, I achieved the personal best at the gym that's been eluding me for so long. Again, it's gently thrilling to think my old frame is in better nick than it was a year ago. I'm happily not thinking too far ahead, but just enjoying the moment, a kind of celebration of my almost complete lack of depth.

Not So Easy

Why is it that it's never actually possible to register a warranty for a product on-line despite the apparent simplicity of being able to do so? Case in point: I've just made a valiant effort to register the warranty for the water pump we recently purchased for Maison KL. I got all the way to the final segment I needed to complete which involved the details of the tax invoice for the product. Noi came back from KL with the warranty registration card and the invoice for purchasing the pump, but no tax invoice, since she wasn't given any; this means I can't fill in the last box so I can't register the product.

Is it cynical of me to wonder whether this final step is put there to make it extremely difficult for customers to actually complete the registration for their promised warranty? Could a business be so calculating?

I think I know the answer to the above.

Complete

Noi arrived home earlier this evening thus making the world a simpler, warmer, richer place.

Not Entirely Natural

I've been feeling particularly virtuous lately on account of upping my consumption of fruit. There is a problem though. All the fruit I buy comes, for reasons I don't understand, in plastic containers. I'm guessing this is the kind of plastic that doesn't do the environment any good at all. So here am I, striving for personal health whilst damaging the health of the planet. Somehow this doesn't add up.