Things Newborn

Very much reminded just now of one of my favourite lines from The Winter's Tale. The Old Shepherd observing literally and thematically: Now bless thyself: thou met'st with things dying, I with things newborn. When I first read this many, many years ago the inherent contrast seemed to me strange in its way. Now I've reached an age when dying & being born seem quite familiar as intertwined aspects of this thing we call life, but the line has not lost its simple magic.

And it sprang forcefully to mind when Noi confirmed that, after quite a long labour, Fafa was delivered of a baby girl today. Just typing that makes me happy. Noi showed me a picture of the child (unbelievably cute) and I almost cried. But didn't. Instead smiled broadly with a sort of silly happiness. Isn't (new) life wonderful?

Home At Last

Came back just now from a late-evening duty. Opened the door to find the apartment delightfully suffused with the smell of porridge. It really felt like home.

(And if you've never heard the mighty Dan bring it home, here's how it's done.)

Living In Hope

I hardly feel involved in the World Cup at all. Just following the results and checking the highlights, but haven't watched anything live. Happy to see England top their group and progress to the knock-out stages, and relieved they're not meeting Senegal. (Had a bad feeling about the prospect.) But also have a feeling that Congo might just surprise.

Actually the really entertaining thing these days is reading the comments below the match reports. It's astonishing how sure the various writers are of their opinions. Helps in understanding how Gareth Southgate was seen as some kind of failure despite his consistent success in creating squads that genuinely competed at the highest levels.

Heat

I've been reading reports of scorching temperatures in Europe in the last few days, especially concerning the UK and France. Not sure how climate change denialists deal with such regular reports of records being broken. I know that I'd be more than happy to support any politician who genuinely tried to deliver net zero emissions or any initiative that sought to do away with our reliance on plastics. It all looks very urgent to me.

In the meantime it's a matter of just getting on with what can be done even when temperatures soar. Today it's 31C here and feels hotter, I think due to the overwhelming humidity. So the idea of cleaning our bookshelves wasn't such an attractive one. But I managed to get on with it, at the cost of a very wet t-shirt, once I decided enough was enough. Actually, the enough wasn't enough and I'm all set to get ferociously sweaty again tomorrow.

In Sickness

We were intending to eat dinner at Aziz's place on Tuesday when we were in Alor Gajah. On arrival in the early evening we were a bit surprised and disappointed to find his eatery closed with no sign of life at all. And shortly after that we got a text that Aziz wasn't well, with a worrying reference to a heart attack.

Much to our relief we found out next day that the reference to a heart problem was misleading and that the pain Aziz had experienced and which had sent him to the doctor was due to a kidney stone. An operation was necessary, but nothing life-threatening was involved, thank goodness. However, he couldn't be operated on immediately as he was suffering from jaundice and needed further monitoring.

Which is why we found ourselves in the main hospital in Melaka yesterday afternoon, visiting the sick patient before making our way along the North-South Highway. It was good to see Aziz looking pretty well and not complaining about being in pain, but I can't imagine that his surroundings were conducive to striving for full health. It's an old hospital and, despite some heroic efforts to make it look cheerful, it has a sense that the wear and tear of time is now deeply ingrained in its fabric. I wouldn't have wanted to spend a night there, and I'm not the sort who's overly fastidious about these things.

Funnily enough the visit helped put the journey back into perspective. Better on the road and feeling well than being stuck in a hospital bed waiting to get back to the joys of just being normal.

Getting Moving

Today I decided to take the pills prescribed by my back doc since my left side is feeling distinctly cranky. I'm doing so with some reluctance as I much prefer to let my body take care of itself. But since I paid for the medication I figure I might as well experiment and see if it helps in a decisive way. If it doesn't, I'll discontinue the experiment and let nature take its course.

Actually I suspect the crankiness is related to a glaring lack of genuine physical exercise on my part after arriving in Malaysia. I've repeatedly failed to establish any kind of regimen in these parts, even simply walking. So, somewhat counter-intuitively, I'm looking forward to getting back to my old routines as these featured lots of healthily moving around. Since we're heading south later today it could be that I'll be back in the gym tomorrow, which I suspect will prove efficacious. I'll be more than happy to put the pills back into storage.

Wise Words

Hamzah was in fine form when we went out for dinner with him, and Aiman & Aziqah, on Monday evening. Two particularly resonant observations have remained with me: Better to follow your heart than your mind, and There are more angels than devils. He applied these to the very practical matter of surviving in the jungle when completely lost and did so in a most down-to-earth fashion, by the way, so nothing overly esoteric going on here, despite appearances.

Not Meeting Expectations

I had quite a clear picture of how I was going to spend the day before dutifully checking my email in the early afternoon. I was all set for some complete relaxation. Then everything abruptly changed.

I found myself staring disconsolately at a message from an Assessment Operations Analysist from IB informing me I'd been allotted more marking of the 'at risk' variety - essentially a kind of double-check on other examiners' initial marking. I've done this before, but what took me by surprise was a screenshot showing how to access the new scripts which suggested a significant number needed to be re-assessed fairly urgently, this number being well in excess of what I've tackled in previous years.

It turned out that the screenshot wasn't related specifically to my own load. The number I'd actually been allotted was even greater. But the urgency was definite, as indicated by an equally unforgiving deadline as in the illustration. So I was not in any way, shape or form a happy soldier.

But, having no wriggle room at all on this one, I put my shoulder to the wheel - which entailed firing up the old brain cells to move back into marking mode and forcing myself to full-on concentrate and do justice to the efforts of the students whose scores were in doubt. I managed some three hours of this today, and there's more to come tomorrow & onwards.

It's not exactly a fulfilling way to spend the final days of a holiday, but at least it keeps me off the streets. 

On Our Way Again

Our June sojourn at Maison KL is rapidly approaching its end. As usual this is signaled by Noi impressively vacuuming & mopping & brushing to ensure the place looks spick & span, ready for our next visit, whenever that might be. And I'm now starting to put together all those bits & pieces that of necessity accompany us on our travels.

Real life is beckoning, but only gets going in earnest this time next week, when I'll be back at work. In the meantime we will be holidaying on with a visit to Hamzah & family later in the day, followed by a couple of days at Mak's house. So the sadness of leaving is balanced by the cheerfulness of arrival, as ever. And another ending balanced by beginning again. 

Holiday Reading

After I'd finished cleaning the bookshelves here earlier in the week I took down one of several novels and short-story collections by P.G. Wodehouse residing thereon, Jeeves in the Offing. Much as I'm enjoying Zola's Germinal I felt the need for something lighter in mood, and Wodehouse, of course, is just the ticket in such circumstances. I could have raced through Bertie's adventures at Brinkley Court - the first time I read it was in a single sitting on a flight back to the UK in the 1990s. But I decided to take it slowly and relish the wonderful craft of Wodehouse's creation of Bertie's voice, and that unhurriedness proved wise, adding to the sense of happy holiday enjoyment. 

So much that is seen as humorous these days is possessed of a kind of cruel delight in man's folly. (And woman's, I hasten to add.) But Wodehouse somehow pulls off a supremely charitable, good-natured kind of comedy, which strikes me as utterly sui generis. The reader is led to see the world as, not exactly a better place, but somewhere a lot funnier than it usually appears to be.

Stormy Weather

Am gazing out upon a distinctly righteous storm that hit Bukit Antarabangsa some thirty minutes ago. It began fiercely and has kept up its intensity. When it suddenly broke our excellent gardener-cum-termite-treatment-guy-cum-general-helper-out Devan was doing his thing in the garden, but he's now set off home, having borrowed an umbrella from us so he could get back to his car without looking like he's been wading through a river. Not sure how the monkeys are faring in all this. Presumably they consider the sudden flood all part of life's rich tapestry even when they're stuck out in the foliage taking cover.

Of course, it's easy for us to contemplate the rich tapestry of it all, being as we are delightfully dry in the shelter of the house. Life here has proved wonderfully easy over the last couple of weeks and it's going to be difficult to break the spell when work starts again. When your fridge & oven & air-conditioning & solar panels & lights & stuff are all working and no leaks are being sprung, it's worth celebrating a bit on the inside, and a storm somehow seems an appropriate time to do so.

Epically Failing

Engaged in some pointless browsing of YouTube videos earlier today, I was struck by the number that enjoy pointing out major failures, ranging from individuals screwing up at the personal level to corporations getting it wrong on a scale that can transcend all reasonable sense of value. I suppose there's a sardonic comfort to be gained from the realisation that others are, astonishingly, even more idiotic than oneself, but it's also more than a bit depressing to be given a handle on how much we are able to waste of our resources.

Prominent in my earlier viewing were videos detailing the catastrophic demise of what was known as the metaverse. Funnily enough this sad tale was something I had some awareness of. I was involved in a visit to the Meta headquarters in Singapore back in March 2023 as one of those odd 'learning journeys' my employers think do me some good. This would have been a few months after Facebook's big announcement of its virtual reality world as detailed in the link above. I sort of enjoyed the trip simply because it was so obvious to me (and, I think, to all in attendance) that the concept just wasn't going to work. Even the guys tasked to introduce to their visitors the Horizon World (I think it was) clearly thought it didn't stand any chance of success such that they won sympathy by manfully covering up their doubts.

In its way it feels good to know that my scepticism was entirely warranted. But the sort of sadness of all the wasted talent & effort involved makes it difficult to laugh too loud even at the funniest of the videos that take delight in celebrating the off-the-scale-stupidity of it all. Though I must say the narrator of How Did The Metaverse Fail So Badly? elicited more than a few guffaws, to emerge as my favourite of the bunch.

Just hope all the folks we met back in March 2023 who got retrenched later, were able to get decent jobs after being sent on their ways doing something that actually benefits people.

That's Entertainment

We are definitely getting value for money out of the telly we brought for Maison KL last December. The only streaming service we've got is Apple tv, but that's quite enough for our needs, thank you. Having completed all four seasons of the increasingly unlikely but highly entertaining The Morning Show we embarked this week on Down Cemetery Road which has a high enough body count to keep us interested. Not sure I follow the plot, but that's been true of almost everything I've watched over the last decade. I've come to assume that not really grasping what's going on is the point of most tv dramas these days and I'm quite okay with that as long as no one expects me to take the contents seriously.

I suppose the programmes we watch these days hold up a mirror to nature as it manifests itself somewhere in the world, but it's not the sort of quiet, easy-going, uneventful nature we spend our lives coming into contact with. 

Distinctly Aching

I'm not sure why I thought it was a good idea to set about cleaning all the downstairs windows at the homestead this afternoon (of which there are plenty.) I managed to complete the job by the late afternoon, at which point I knew it wasn't a good idea at all. Of course, the fact that the windows are now clear and sparkly in a quiet way is a distinct positive. But not as distinct as the aching of this frail old body of mine, an aching that is at this point in time wholly negative, with nothing remotely sparkly about it. Sparkly, I'm afraid, is over for me.

I really need to remember just how demanding these household tasks are and how I've reached an age when it's best to parcel them out over time.

Plodding On

Bloomsday

Thought I'd read a slab of the greatest novel of the twentieth century in view of this being a special day in the calendar. Chose the Eumaeus episode. At a superficial level it's easy to follow (especially after the fireworks of Nighttown) and if you enjoy ponderous cliché - and I do - it's hilarious and sort of addictive.

Also a suitable reminder of Joyce's concern with the ordinariness of it all, with his mock-heroes plodding towards whatever apotheosis Number 7 Eccles Street has to offer.

Under Protest

Forced myself to start cleaning the bookshelves here at Maison KL. This is the  best way I know to shake off the heavy lethargy that descends on my shoulders during vacations. Apart from the practical usefulness of helping keep the homestead clean it serves as a reminder of fruitful hours of reading in the past. The implication being that I'd better keep things up in the (possible) years ahead. 

The problem is the increasing feeling that it would be so easy just not to bother doing much of anything. A sort of anomie of the aged.

Not Exactly On The Ball

Am trying to muster some kind of enthusiasm for the World Cup, but failing miserably. Odd really since the 3 Lions came so close in Euro 2024 and the squad has done so well in qualifying for these finals. I've got a feeling that if the team really plays at the group stage I'll stir myself to take an interest. Not sure I'll be bothering about securing any tv coverage as things stand though.

All this seems mysteriously connected to my cynicism regarding Modern Life in general. Once you've decided It All Sucks it's tricky to garner enthusiasm for anything outside the joys of domesticity.

Visitors

15.54

We're playing host to Hamzah et al later this afternoon. Noi is busy making sure that our guests will be well fed and I'm endeavoring to free myself from the pleasant torpor that has gripped me for the past week or so. It will be good to get back fully to the land of the living.

12.00 midnight & beyond

Our guests are, happily, in no hurry to leave. Just enjoyed a pot of teh tarik with Hamzah along with on-going discussion on the state of the Malaysian economy and the changes therein being wrought by developments in AI. All the young people in the household have expressed considerable scepticism as to whether those developments will prove positive. My guess is that you'd get similar conversations in any household on the planet at this point in time. It's exciting to still be around to witness all this. But exciting in all the wrong ways.

The Wretched Of The Earth

Even as I was indulging in my bit of a moan yesterday about the stresses of home ownership I was experiencing a deeply nagging sense of guilt at doing so. This had its considerable roots in the fact that I'd been reading the opening chapters of Zola's Germinal and couldn't help but be aware of the deep disconnect between the luxury of my life here and the utter misery of that of the workers in and around the Mountsou mine that the novelist painstakingly itemises in Part One of his novel.

Zola takes his readers so fully inside the mine in terms of everyday agonising detail as to engender a painful claustrophobia. And does so in what seems to me an almost flat style, a kind of journalistic recording of the facts as they are: The mine never lay idle; night and day human insects were always down there burrowing into the rock six hundred metres beneath the fields of beet. You are forced to witness that burrowing in inescapable close-up, right next to one of the insects involved. And it's painful. In fact, more than one; making it relentless also.

Should the suffering of those working down French mines in 1866 impinge upon a twenty-first century consciousness? Well, Zola leaves the reader in no doubt of the reality of that suffering and the fact that it called for some kind of attention. And it doesn't take much to draw parallels with the equally real experiences in our time of those whose lot is similar exploitation. So I suppose I can take some solace in the fact that I have at least some awareness of my own inadequacies as a citizen of the world.

Home Improvements

Today we've had a couple of workmen around: one to install an updated filtration system for the water; the other to get Noi's oven working again. Both endeavours seem to have been successful, though it's generally best to wait for a year or so, I find, before a final declaration on this front. By which time a couple more things will have managed to go wrong about the house. As always I remind myself we're lucky to have what we've got and as long as the place remains livable there's not much point in moaning.

And perhaps I should be even more positive than that. The fact that the old fridge has kept going since we last repaired it is surely cause for great celebration. The first attempt at putting in the spare part required didn't go well and I thought we'd need to find somewhere to dump the old model and buy a new one. But it's functioned perfectly since the second attempt. Indeed, the guy who came to repair our oven remarked that we were lucky to have it since this make is no longer available despite it being known to be an excellent refrigerator. Odd that - a manufacturer discontinuing a line on the grounds that it's so good at what it does.

Running Down

We popped into the big Kinokuniya bookshop at KLCC on Monday. After our last outing there I said to Noi that I felt it was holding up quite well in terms of the quality of its display in contrast to the equivalent in Takashimaya in our usual Far Place. That is no longer the case. The literature shelves were distinctly lacking in what I'd regard as essential works. No Balzac at all being just one example.

I suppose real readers get what they need on-line. But I still cannot help but feel that something important is being lost when youngsters who are developing a sense of what it is to be genuinely literate can no longer browse shelves that seek to exemplify that state.

That sounds horribly elitist, I know. It's meant to. 

Uncertainties

Spent the last couple of days adventuring with Robert Louis Stevenson on Treasure Island. Odd that I've never read the full novel before. I seem to remember as a kid getting up to the bit where Jim is hiding in the apple barrel on board the Hispaniola and hears Long John Silver plotting mutiny and finding the whole thing pretty heavy-going. It's certainly not an easy read at any level. Silver himself is a deeply ambiguous figure and the action is often surprisingly complex. I'm still not sure exactly how Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livesey and the rest of the good guys got themselves into the abandoned stockade on the island after the mutiny. Or why Jim suddenly took himself off to sea in the coracle. But there's enough going on in terms of raw characterisation for me to have enjoyed the outing.

And it was nice to reach the final chapters not being at all sure how the story would be concluded, and then quite enjoying the good guys winning in the end, whilst still feeling more than a touch of sympathy for the mutineers left stranded on the island. Gosh, the Victorians were fierce in their sense of right & wrong, especially when calling such conventional morality into question. It's notable that Stevenson makes sure Silver gets away with it all, including a reasonable amount of the money.

More Final Thoughts

Completed my Henry Vaughan read-through yesterday. When I set out on the Penguin Collected Poems I expected it would take me around six months. If I'd known I'd be locked-in to the volume for a full year-and-a-half I suspect I might have given the project a pass. As it is, it felt a year too long. The classic poems that make it to the anthologies were excellent, but I knew them already. And there was a lot of stuff that felt distinctly routine. I don't mind a dose or two of Christian theology, but after a time I got to thinking that HV's view of the world was crushingly narrow.

So now I'm chary, to say the least, with regard to taking on another Collected. But at the same time I do feel that I should take on something meaty on the poetic front, just to enjoy soaking in something different. The solution looks to be a reading of The Prelude in the parallel texts version swinging between the 1805 and 1850 versions. That should keep me going whilst we're in Maison KL with the edition being handily on the shelves.

Final Thoughts

It's the ordinariness of the characters in The Makioka Sisters that made the novel engaging on a simple level for this reader. For example, the four sisters themselves, Tsuruko, Sachiko, Yukiko and Taeko. None of them especially impressive or special in any way. All decent enough individuals, and loving to each other, though prone to bouts of irritation given the usual points of difference likely within any family. Yukiko's passive-aggressive behaviour in the various elaborate attempts to secure a decent marriage for her as she moves into her thirties is mildly puzzling, I suppose, and it's not at all clear the extent to which the most obviously 'modern' of them, Taeko, has exploited her various boyfriends, especially the weak-minded, over-privileged Okubata. But the ladies seem likable enough such that the reader wants things to turn out well for them.

And the family's sense of the importance of following their socially-sanctioned but semi-private customs results in sequences that are easy to relate to, despite their particularity to Japanese culture: the viewing of the cherry blossoms; the capturing of the fireflies. The reader is happily drawn into the significance of it all.

But why does the writer so subtly undercut their sense of family importance? And why hint at terrible things happening at the borders of the family's reasonably comfortable lives - in China, in Germany? And why so feature so much physical illness, sometimes genuinely deeply painful, as in the case of Itakura losing his leg and, eventually, life to the gangrene that sets in as a result of a simple operation?

I just can't figure it out. But what I can say is that the blending of ordinary, everyday aches & pains & sadness & happiness is balanced against the gathering dark in a way I don't think I've come across in any other novel. Perhaps the uncertainty is the whole point?

The Big Finish

It's always slightly nerve-wracking when we arrive at the homestead here in KL as to the condition the place is in. I harbour less than fond memories of arriving here years back with various nieces in tow only to find that there was no power at all on the premises. We ended up spending the night in a hotel much to their delight. But, happily, we experienced no such trauma yesterday. Indeed, we even found ourselves with an ample supply of hot water which I'd not expected at all given what I assumed was the failure of our solar panels the last time we were here. When we departed in December last year we did so in the belief that we were lucky to have enough tepidly warm water left to allow us to shower without freezing and that we'd most likely struggle on returning until we could get the company who installed the panels to do some fixing. Mind you, the hot water we enjoyed yesterday wasn't exactly of the red-hot variety so it could be the panels have only partially failed. Or the days have been hot enough to heat whatever water is stagnant in the tank. We'll see.

But we were able to enjoy a reasonably seamless transition to these quarters, which meant I found myself with time enough to read the final pages of Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters. This was quite a relief, I can tell you, and not just because I was able to tick off Item 3 on yesterday's checklist. The relief stemmed from now being able to set aside a novel that paradoxically I very much enjoyed yet somehow became something of a trial for me.

When I last posted here about it at the end of April it was with some enthusiasm for a great read and I can remember thinking then that I'd probably finish the tome towards the end of a busy May by reading a few pages every evening as a way of winding down. That was not to be, and it wasn't the fault of the novel. Being impossibly busy meant not reading anything at all of literary note other than what was required for work. Which meant that I was only able to pick up the book again in late May having forgotten ninety percent of the detail I needed to remember of an extremely detailed text.

So getting going again was difficult and, unfortunately, I was still busy. And I also realised it wouldn't be wise to spread my reading over the June break since at some deep level I was fed-up with the book despite its rewards. The possibility of abandoning my reading faintly occurred to me, but I felt that would be to let Mr Tanizaki and his engaging characters down. So I got down to some deliberate, forced, I will-concentrate-and-get-through-this reading and that worked, I suppose. 

Since I've been able to close the book I've found myself considering with quite a degree of puzzlement just what kind of novel it is. At one simple easy-going level, a soap-opera-ish tale of a typical Japanese family doing what families do in a way that means the reader feels you come to know them almost as friends and want the best for them. But then there's so much to contradict that way of seeing the text, not least the implication that there's something deeply wrong with these people and they're wilfully, witlessly, walking through the years into a kind of disaster. How many stories end with a key character about to be married (finally!) yet suffering from persistent diarrhoea?

On The List

I'm continuing to operate on a checklist each day, despite now being well into holiday territory. Partly this is out of habit; but mainly it's because if I didn't it's likely that nothing would get done.

Today's list comprises three items. The first, accomplished this morning, involved completing my examiner's report for IB, rounding off my work for them in this session. It's not exactly an onerous task as I try and reduce it to statements that might be genuinely useful for all, but trying to ensure the generalisations involved have some real weight and are not just fueled by temporary irritations takes some thought. This time round I needed to ask myself was my perception that there was a distinct quantitative deterioration in the quality of handwriting real, especially since I'm well aware that I've been moaning about the challenges of reading poorly written scripts for several years. My answer to myself was, yes, it has. And I said so.

The second item, now ticked off the list, was attendance at Friday Prayers - in this case, walking down the road to the masjid at Sungai Petai. It was raining as I set out, and I expected to be a bit damp after the ten minute walk, but the rain eased and I enjoyed a refreshingly dry session.

The third task involves completing the novel I'm reading at some point in and around making our way to Maison KL. More on this tomorrow, since we're now packing up our bits & pieces here ahead of the move north. (I didn't include the big move on the checklist for some reason. Which just goes to show the limitations on lists and plans and such like, even for a semi-addicted lister like myself.) 

At Ease

16.07

We're notably in no rush to set off for Melaka today. Noi decided this morning it was better that she supplied an order of her famous curry puffs today for Kak Kia, which she's now preparing, so we'll be travelling in the evening. All very fine by me. After a month spent rushing it's time to ease up as much as possible.

Mind you, if we end up in a jam later on we might regret this display of insouciance.

23.30

As it turned out, no regrets at all. Now safely ensconced at Mak’s house, munching pizza (me) & mee goreng (Noi.) Easy journey - for a change.

Almost There

Just three scripts left to mark and I'll have cleared my allocation for this May. But I'm not rushing these since I'm still within the deadline, something I didn't really expect when I set out, given the number I needed to deal with, the tightness of the deadline, and the concern that my team of examiners might need lots of help along the way. Happily I've rarely had to deal with issues arising, which helps to account for the fact I've managed my load with a reasonable amount of sweat rather than the bucketfuls I was nervously expecting to shed.

And I've just completed the digital arrival card the immigration authorities will be checking on tomorrow as we make our way north yet again. I'm hoping to grab some degree of R&R in the next couple of weeks. But I'm not counting on smooth-sailing all the way. Too old & wise (sort of) for that.

Simplicity

Just drank a glass of deliciously cold water. A kind of perfection. Sometimes that's all you need.

Real Weakness

Now back into my regular routine at the gym after the hiatus resulting from my cranky back (left side of). On a hot & sweaty day it was all predictably hot & sweaty and I didn't enjoy it one bit, except for being able to stop. But I managed the full hour on the trainer at full resistance without real strain.

Unfortunately I can't say the same for my routine on the weights. Whatever upper body strength I manage to build up over a few weeks rapidly dissipates as soon as I stop working out. It's pretty depressing to be confronted by one's weakness, I can tell you. But all part of keeping it real, I suppose.