Good To Go

08.05

After yesterday's happy sense of stasis - we never went beyond the grounds of the hotel - today will see us on the move again. First up, we'll be off to the engagement do in a couple of hours. It sounds like quite an elaborate affair, concerning which Fahmi briefed everyone yesterday evening, but I'll be very much an observer with little to do except look old and respectable and eat & drink well. I think I'll be able to manage most of that.

Then it's off again down the highway. Although tomorrow marks another welcome break from being physically at work, there's still lots to do. As there always is. Indeed, I'm getting on with some marking now, in addition to enjoying the morning calm here in Bangi. So, more anon, assuming I get the chance.

Another Day In Paradise

Woke suddenly at 6.30 am from a dream, prompted by my alarm set for the Dawn Prayer, after a solid seven hours of sleep - a rare occurrence for me these days. This means I must have found the hotel bed pretty comfortable, though my back has felt a wee bit vulnerable during the day. Which suggests said bed was a bit too soft, but I'm not complaining.

Indeed, there's absolutely no cause for complaint over anything today. Far from it. This morning's breakfast was a bit of a cracker, for example. All sorts of goodies available from the buffet - if anything, it was all a bit too tempting. And that helped set me up for a day basically focused on work - marking and the like - whilst Noi relaxes and tries to get over the bout of head-achy coughing & spluttering, which has plagued her for the last couple of days.

I've been able to take a few breaks from my grafting over hot scripts to goof off to bits of music and stuff now and again, so don't worry about me. Indeed, at one point in the late morning I found myself deliberately fostering nostalgic memories of holidays as a small kid, inspired in part by the number of littluns on view in the hotel (all of whom seem to be having a rather jolly, noisy time - and rightly so, say I.) For some reason I found myself zooming in (in memory, that is) to a holiday we enjoyed when I was around eight-years-old at Butlin's Filey holiday camp the 'we' in this case being Mum, Dad, Maureen, little Brian, and Maureen's best friend Norma. My increasingly tired and unreliable brain couldn't recall the term for the accommodation in which we stayed and I needed to look it up by googling for the camp. It turned out to be 'chalet', a word which hugely impressed the younger version of myself. In fact, everything about the camp impressed me back then, though I'm now struggling to recall most of the details.

I have managed to salvage a few further fragments of memory through the help of on-line videos related to the place, especially the North Yorkshire Wanderer's lovely piece on YouTube which struck me as a fine example of a 'content creator' creating something that transcends content. Watching it added to the many pleasures of another day in my little bit of paradise. And now I'm going to goof off listening to The Kinks's Muswell Hillbillies which I've never actually owned but is now easily available through a multitude of streaming services. (Hope RD and the boys are getting plentiful royalties for the inestimable pleasure they have given the world. And me, particularly.)  

On The Move Again

15.20

We're off for another weekend in Malaysia - basically to attend an engagement ceremony for Shibri being held in Bangi. Got a feeling we might face a crowded highway, it being the eve of the National Day weekend. Well, we'll see.

22.20

Not too bad on the highway, and now safely installed in the Bangi Resort Hotel. Noi valiantly trying to order some grub from Room Service which has now been made efficiently difficult by having to access an on-line menu designed to be impossible to navigate. Ain't life grand! 

Really Really Hard Thinking

Was in the gym earlier this evening, doing my 60 minutes on the elliptical trainer. Set out to have an original thought to break the boredom. Failed. Ended up re-playing the old stuff and thinking other people's thoughts. Fortunately most of these were very interesting. Just wish my original ideas were actually original. I think I'd settle for that and forego the 'interesting' part.

Wasting Time

It's an odd quirk of my personality that no matter how burdensome marking might feel I don't really mind it because it's so fundamental to my work. On the other hand, put me in an urgent meeting that has absolutely nothing to do with the kids I teach and will be of no possible benefit to them and I'm liable to blow a gasket.

Yes, it's been one of those days.

Even Harder Thinking

Around about this time last year I was valiantly attempting to wrap my poor, tired, aged brain around issues attendant upon AI in education. I still am, and in my small part of the world complicated things have become even more complicated both at the practical level of real problems in the classroom, as it were, and the big philosophical problems looming behind it all. I have no answers and even my questions are confused. So it all remains, as it was for me in August 2025, exciting, destabilising and frightening, but now 'very, very' all those instead of just 'very'.

Content

It seems there a significant number of folks out there who regard themselves as 'content creators', presumably for the Internet. And, again, presumably, some of them, maybe most, do well out of this in financial terms.

The day someone tells me I too am a content creator (of anything, but most likely this very Far Place) is the day I finally shut up shop completely. Just saying.

(And if that makes folks content, then so be it. Hah!)

A Kinky Weekend

Alexis Petridis came up with a particularly excellent 'ranking' article in the Graun last week centred on The Kinks (though, I must say, I'm a bit puzzled he didn't go for the 50 greatest songs, at the very least.) And this had put in mind of giving various Kinks' CDs a spin over the weekend. But funnily enough I decided to kick off with a Ray Davies solo album, Working Man's Cafe, before plunging into the hard stuff. Not sure why. Possibly because I'd generally enjoyed the CD when I first acquired it, but thought of it as a bit routine. Not genuinely inspiring stuff. And I wondered if I might have been wrong.

Yes, I was. I gave it a spin on Saturday and every track worked for me, with the title track and Imaginary Man as bona fide classics, up there in the very crowded RD top ten tunes of all time. I suppose I'd finally listened often enough to tune in completely.

I followed that with my compilation CD of all the singles up to 1970 and, as I knew I would be, was blown away by the variety & simple brilliance of it all. It's so strange to think that we all took songs as profoundly beautiful as Waterloo Sunset and Days for granted when they first came out, as if we had some kind of right to be delivered works of genius almost as the throwaways of pop culture. And after that it had to be The Village Green Preservation Society - at which point it came to me that somehow The Kinks had managed to encapsulate in one album all of my feelings about what England has somehow carelessly lost.

Finished everything off by viewing a clip of Ray Davies's 2010 set at Glastonbury at which he dedicated the two songs I mentioned in the previous paragraph to the recently deceased Pete Quaife, the original bassist with the band, and a very tasty player indeed. At which point I dissolved.

Still Ranting

I found myself back at the doctor's across the road this morning, having blood drawn for yet another test ordained by MOM before they'll grant me a pass to work here next year. The last time I spoke to the doc was just ahead of the World Cup semi-final in mid-July when we'd talked seriously of it coming home. Today I launched into my rant concerning the ubiquities of a certain German coach following the scoring of England's goal around the 55th minute. Funnily enough I'd launched into a pretty much identical monologue last night talking to Peter & Chris. (Oddly Lia didn't seem interested at all.) I'm now hopping it's all out of my system, but suspect I'm likely to get triggered again before the year is out.

Funnily enough the news regarding my own medical condition continues to get better despite my bitterness over the events of July - though both the doc and myself proclaimed justice had finally been done with Spain's victory. It turns out that a chest x-ray requested by MOM earlier proved astonishingly clear according to the doc. He'd had a sight of the scans of my lungs as they were in late 2022 and 2023, distressingly full to the brim with an unpleasant looking grunge, so he thought the latest x-ray would show some scarring of my breathing apparatus. But it didn't, which left left me a very happy soldier.

I celebrated by performing some pretty impressive dance moves for The Missus in a free-form interpretation of The Kinks' You Really Got Me later in the afternoon. But she just seemed to find these funny rather than alluring. There's no accounting for taste, is there?

Catching Up

Met up with Peter & Lia & Chris over some excellent grub at Al Ameen's this evening. Referenced a range of colleagues from our collective pasts who, somehow or other, have gone their separate ways. Not sure that dwelling on the past is such a good thing. Unless we learn from it. Which we rarely do.

And dwelling on the future isn't so hot either.

But grasping the present moment seems to me fundamentally sound. Especially when the grub & company make it worth holding onto.