A Sense Of Cheerfulness

We heard the news of Encik Dollah's accident with great concern late yesterday evening and are deeply saddened tonight over his death.

But that sadness is mixed in with the warmth of remembering my time working with him, for more than fifteen years. In all that time I cannot recall ever seeing Dollah upset or annoyed about anything. No matter what he remained cheerful and deeply obliging. If there was any heavy lifting to be done he'd be there to assist despite his short stature. Oddly I assumed he was quite a bit younger than myself, at least eight to ten years I thought. So I was taken aback on reading the reports about his accident to realise I'm his junior by two or three years. I suppose it was his air of carefree enthusiasm as he went about his business that kept him seeming so young. The only guy I've ever heard sing as he emptied bins.

We met quite frequently at Masjid Khadijah for Friday Prayers in my final years at TKGS, and as we worshipped together I caught a rare glimpse of his serious side in his reverence. But even then we'd greet and part with the broadest of smiles. 

Sad tonight, but happy memories. Innalillahi Wainnalillahi rojiuun... Indeed from God we came and to Him we shall return.  

In Focus

It's that time of year (in terms of the Islamic calendar) when I find myself making broad plans for the holy month of Ramadhan, which pretty much coincides with March in 2025 CE. I'd vaguely been thinking about the focus of my reading as the new year came in but it was just yesterday that I realised it was time to reread Ziauddin Sardar's Reading The Qur'an. Apart from a number of fascinating short essays on various aspects of the relevance of the scripture to our contemporary world, Sarder gives a lengthy, close exposition of its longest chapter, Al Baqara, and I need that kind of focus at this point in time. My very keenness to get to grips with his text, manifested in some dipping into its shorter essays today, suggests that paying due attention when I need to won't be too difficult even for an easily distracted reader like myself.

That's a bit of a confession, by the way, the 'distracted' thing. I've been foolishly half-expecting my ability to concentrate to improve simply because I want it to. But if I were commanded to subject myself to a regime of SSR (Sustained Silent Reading), as I've sometimes had occasion to supervise when students have been forced to do it, I don't think I'd do too well. For example, I've read four more of Conan Doyle's tales of the great detective since getting back from the UK and haven't managed to finish one of them in a single sitting. Oh, and I set off on a reading of Antony Beevor's Stalingrad thinking the sheer narrative power of his account of the battle would find me racing through the book at speed only to realise that I'm breaking off after a couple of pages almost every time I pick it up even though it fascinates.

Not sure what happened to the version of me that once felt guilty about reading Stephen King's Tommyknockers over a weekend simply because I couldn't stop myself - and this when I had work I really should have been doing.

Getting The Point

Found myself in a meeting this evening that lasted until 9.30. Weirdly I sort of enjoyed it, I suppose because there was some point to it all. It makes a difference, you know.

Talking Trash

On three occasions this year I've arrived early enough at the basketball courts to do a quick clean-up before my guys arrive for training. Each time the area wasn't exactly a mess - otherwise I'd have got the players to clean-up for me - but there were two or three empty cans up against the perimeter and at least one empty plastic bottle lying around. And each time I've got to wondering how exactly these were left behind. Was it some vague act of pointless malice, from someone who presumably had used the court but thought it best to show they didn't care about the maintenance thereof? Or was it just complete forgetfulness from someone caught up in other more important personal matters when leaving the place who'd neglected to take care of all their 'stuff'? Or was it it somewhere between these extremes?

Whatever it was I can't really wrap my head around the behaviour involved.

And here's the personal conundrum. As far as I can remember I didn't do anything like this as a kid. But I know for certain I was no angel. I can recall in embarrassing detail two anti-social acts I was involved in which were a good deal worse than just leaving a couple of cans around. So there's the possibility I'm ignoring or suppressing what I know to be true of the behaviour of idiotic teenagers (like me) in the interests of building a kind of communitarian mythology.

This is disconcerting. Maybe the sense of guilt lies behind my compulsion to tidy public spaces?

On The Physical

Had an odd experience yesterday. I came back in the evening after a stint at the gym and suffered a severe case of the shivers when I popped into our bedroom to change. The air-conditioning was on and the room was fairly cold, but not enough to provoke my rather extreme reaction. For the next few minutes I felt hyper-sensitive to the fans in the apartment and any feeling of coldness such that I was worried about slipping into a severe fever, but that didn't happen, I'm glad to say. I slept fitfully and sweatily, but I did sleep.

Then today I spent three hours at the National University Hospital undergoing a scan on my liver and blood tests related to that organ. This is part of the follow-up to when I found myself in ICU. My liver wasn't in too good a way at that time but seems to have made something close to a full recovery since and I'm hoping the test results support that observation. The great thing is that at this point in time I am entirely unmedicated, and I'd like to stay that way for as long as possible.

Nodding Off

If I were short of sleep after the first week of work - and I'm not sure I was - I certainly reclaimed the necessary over the weekend. The ease with which I've been toppling over into the Land of Nod is a bit frightening. It's a useful talent to possess, but caution needs to be applied in deploying it too readily. Life does need to be got on with, after all.

In Tune

Prior to a couple of days ago the only version I'd heard of Dylan himself singing Lay Down Your Weary Tune was the one on Biograph. Then I had the good fortune to get to hear the one from Bob Dylan Live at Carnegie Hall 1963 which brought a great, great song alive for me again. The live version seems to me to be more rhythmically alive than the original recording, more unpredictable, such that the listener is forced to engage with the details of the singer's phrasing and the way this intermeshes with the less than fore-square strumming of the guitar. As more than one commentator has noted, the Carnegie Hall version is possibly the perfect riposte to the persistently daft notion that Dylan can't sing. And I'd add to that the absolute proof it offers that, far from being himself rhythmically challenged musically as some misguided souls contend, it's the Bobster who challenges our ears to catch his sense of what is rhythmically possible within seemingly ordinary song structures.

I was further reminded on listening to the live version of the perfection of the lyric. There really isn't a word out of place. Even the repeated poeticism in the chorus, rest yourself neath the strength of strings, works, not sounding at all naively precious (as it invariably does when employed by Dylan-imitators of the period.) You would need to go below the strings in laying down, thus maintaining the integrity of the imagery, but singing 'beneath' would both mess up the rhythm of the line as well as fracturing the aural smoothness with that plosive 'b'. As it is neath nicely echoes the 'th' of strength and its open vowel helps the line sing.

The word is also so entirely appropriate to the world of Scottish ballads that Dylan is conjuring that it would seem odd for the speaker/singer not to employ it. Plus this singer makes it sound like colloquial slang rather than anything to with poetry. It just sounds right, as does the whole song.

Somewhat Soggy

An uncompromisingly wet day here, and it's still pouring down. Wouldn't be surprised if there were floods somewhere on the island.

I was happy to stay indoors, though I did need to brave the rain getting to Friday Prayers. Mind you, with The Missus providing a lift to and from the masjid that isn't quite the challenge it used to be. And praying in congregation in the safe dryness of Masjid Darussalam was probably the highlight of a gently satisfactory day.

A Sense Of Superiority

When we were in the UK in December we managed to catch the excellent tv series, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, made in relation to the Post Office scandal. It made for grimly compulsive viewing. In a very limited sense there was a 'feel good' aspect to the dramatisation in terms of the courage and resilience of Alan Bates and the other falsely accused subpostmasters featured. But it left this viewer facing a genuinely puzzling conundrum: How could those at the highest levels of the organisation have behaved for so long in so thoroughly despicable a manner? What happened to their simple sense of decency?

And then today I stumbled across what I think is the answer, courtesy of a clip from the official inquiry on YouTube featuring the closing remarks of Edward Henry QC. He argues that the board wanted control of their employees and sought this through the Horizon software later shown to be full of glitches. At the point when they could have responded appropriately to the complaints about the failing computer system they did not want to accept the truth about how faulty the software was as this would deny them the control they believed it had afforded them.

This explanation works for me. The great danger for those who are successful is how easy it is to make the terrible assumption that they are genuinely superior to 'ordinary' folk, and fall into the trap of thinking how, somehow, those folk don't matter quite as much as their superiors.

Almost Perfect

In the final chapters of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning Laurie Lee really transcends the personal. The two chapters dealing with his experiences in the little village of Almunecar by the sea afford great insight into just how quickly Spain descended into civil war once the Republic was established and how horribly inevitable that must have felt at the time. Seeing this through the naively innocent eyes of the memoirist adds to the reader's sense of something close to despair as life in the archetypally Spanish village unravels. It's very much a powerfully unnerving contrast to the predominantly celebratory quality of the descriptions of life in the country in the earlier chapters, even when that life is being dealt with at its most poverty-stricken.

And what a wonderfully evocative writer Lee is, whether he's celebrating or casting shadows. There's something to savour in almost every paragraph in terms of striking imagery or fine phrasing, yet it never seems that he's trying too hard. It's clear that this comes naturally to him; it's the way he sees the world.

But I did take slight exception to one usage he employs. In the chapter dealing with the procession of the Virgin in Toro - a typically vivid set-piece - he recounts the townsfolk praising of the Saint thus: so comely, so linda, such an excellent colour... I like comely but since when was linda a word in English? I had to look this one up, and couldn't find it even in the big OED, but fortunately an on-line search pointed to the fact that linda means 'pretty' in Spanish (hence, the English name.) It's a pity he didn't go for pretty, I reckon. A rare misstep. Very rare though in a work that comes close to perfection as far as I'm concerned.