No Deal

I'm ill at the moment - sore throat, aching head - and behaving, as usual, like the world's worst patient: self-pitying, sullen, generally a bad lot to be around. Fortunately my wife is possibly the world's finest nurse, so it sort of balances out.

At the moment she's watching the new programme on Channel 5 here: Deal or No Deal. It's a sort of game show, with which we are very familiar having watched it a lot in December when we were in England, Mum being a huge fan. The English version is so much more palatable than the one here that it's embarrassing. I never thought I'd think of Noel Edmonds as something of a sophisticate, but that's what local tv does to you.

Why do gameshow contestants here feel obliged to shout all the time?

Music in Mind

One of the several advantages of having a CD changer in the car is that, if your memory is as porous as mine, you forget what you've loaded and can be pleasantly surprised when something new and unexpected kicks in. Thus it was that yesterday morning, while driving into work to coach some of the scholars for a competition coming up for them, I was joyfully pinned back into the driver's seat by the body blow of King Crinson's Vrooom played live from the B'Boom album (the official bootleg, live in Argentina set.) On a weekend that has consisted largely, almost solely, of getting work done it was a reminder of a bigger, better world out there.

Dance Fever

I found myself suggesting to a couple of classes this week that learning to dance might be of more educational value than doing mathematics. Both groups looked mildly bemused and have no doubt decided I'm pretty much certifiable. The odd thing is that what started as a flippant off-hand suggestion grew steadily more attractive the more I turned it over in my mind. The joys of Theory of Knowledge!

Fully Occupied

At the moment work is relentlessly, ferociously busy and it looks as if it will stay that way for at least a couple of weeks. Teaching used to be a demanding job; it's now impossible. The foolishness of this is that stretching teachers (or any workers for that matter) to their limits does not make for good teaching. Another aspect of the foolishness is that it's not the teaching that makes the job such a busy one. The teaching is actually the enjoyable bit. But it's only a bit.

Feeling Champion

A particularly demanding day at work, balanced by the peculiarly rewarding knowledge that Chelsea blew it at the Emirates Stadium and United once again have their collective hands on the prize that really counts.

And to think that Sir Alex was once rumoured to be as close as one game to the sack. Why don't clubs persist with their managers and actually let them build something? Haven't Newcastle learnt anything from the failure of their constantly revolving door?

Not Exactly Fashionable

In between my marking of scripts & preparing stuff for next week, my multi-talented wife gave me a rather spiffing haircut, and I listened to John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, the piece he wrote for the New York Philharmonic after 9/11. I think Transmigration will live beyond its immediate historical circumstances as a powerful threnody for all times. The local detail, like the intoning, if that's the right word, of the names of the dead, as is so often the case, plugs into a kind of universality. There are no tunes to hum but, somehow, the music has got soul.

I've also found myself dipping into The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan by Nigel Williamson, which I picked up at the library yesterday. For a little book it's surprisingly informative & seems pretty sensible in its judgements. The great man's blunders are admitted but Williamson's always on the look out for what actually makes him great, and there's more than plenty of that.

Golden Days

I spent part of this morning in school coaching a team of our scholars for a competition and realising how wonderful Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 and Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud are. One of the guys started the session by commenting how simple the latter is, in the sense of it not having that much to it, but by the time we finished I think we'd all discovered the real gold of those daffodils.

We were at the library this afternoon, followed by dinner at Dadi's (they actually gave us some free curry puffs as we left as we were the final customers) and back home, through a happeningly crowded Katong, to a gritty United victory over City. (What was the ref thinking giving that penalty to City?) It really doesn't get much better than this.

Auntie Bet

I came home to some sad news yesterday - Mum phoned to tell me that Auntie Bet had died, I think yesterday morning. She passed away in hospital, I believe, I assume having been taken there because of difficulties breathing and getting around. Noi & I last saw her in December at Uncle Peter's funeral. I was glad we were there to say a kind of good-bye to Uncle and feel bad about not being home at the moment. It was the same when Auntie Norah died and we were stuck here. But this is one of the penalties of a life lived overseas.

Oddly I found Uncle Peter's funeral a bit difficult to deal with emotionally. This was odd in the sense that he'd been very ill for so long, and we'd not seen him during that time, and there was a sense in which his death was a kind of release. Yet I felt extraordinarily sad that day. I think part of that was seeing Auntie so frail, and Mum struggling to keep up with things. In a curious way I felt part of my life was closing down.

I suppose this is because I associate Auntie Bet & Uncle Peter with so much that was so good in my life. I'm extraordinarily lucky in being able to remember my childhood with almost unalloyed happiness, and our time living near them, on Guide Lane, seems now a kind of golden period. Thinking of them, something I've been doing much of the day, I can't recall anything except the warmth & happiness I felt being at their house (where, as far as I can remember, I seemed to spend a good deal of time.) They were just lovely people. Auntie Bet seemed to encapsulate a kind of joy in living, a vibrant yes to life. Even though Noi met her only when Auntie was already well on in years I think she sensed that about her also. Noi loved going to visit them.

We'll never visit again, but it was great while it lasted. We're so lucky to have had that.

Reduced to Beggary

Had an interesting conversation with Noi today about beggars in Singapore. There are frequently beggars outside mosques - lots, for example, can be found round & about Mesjid Sultan. Noi is, rightly, dubious about who these people are and where they come from and was saying that a column in Berita Harian recently raised similar questions. She pointed out that you just don't see beggars outside mosques in Malaysia, or at least we don't. She's right (observant as ever) and that seems extraordinary given the degree of genuine need in Malaysia.

An important idea in Islam is the need to give charity open-handedly and not question the circumstances of the recipient too much. In a sense our concern is a selfish one, for the good of our souls, and since the giving of charity automatically does us good we shouldn't be overly concerned with where it's going. I like that paradoxical sense of the selfishness of charity - it's somehow more attuned to the reality of human nature and it's hard to feel superior to others when you know that, in some way, you're doing what you're doing for yourself. So we'll certainly continue to (selfishly) give, but I still find myself fascinated by the question of who the money is going to and for what real purpose. There's so much I feel I don't know about simple things in this society, just on the level of how it all works, and what people's lives are really like, the kind of people I don't know and don't get to talk to. For all its affluence Singapore is full of people on the margins - the maids, the building workers - and I sometimes think that margins are the places of deepest interest, and possibly a kind of truth, in a society.

Hard Labour

An excellent night's sleep was the result of knowing I could lie-in this morning. But it's not been all beer and skittles - I got quite a lot of marking done. Then it was off to the gym at Katong where Noi overdid it a little, feeling dizzy after getting off the exercise bike, and I tried to take it easy after a run yesterday. I'm not sure I took it easy enough though. Time, that great narrator, will tell.

The marking concerned a rather tasty passage from The Great Gatsby. This, of course, has triggered a desire to read it again. In fact, I've got a whole bunch of Fitzgerald in KL (though not Tender is the Night which seems to have disappeared) and I really must give the early novels another go. I remember thinking they were not up to much, but that was years ago and age begets charity (or possibly clarity) and tempers arrogance (at least I hope it does.) I suppose this might account for why over the years I've come to pretty much loathe critics - paradoxically a most uncharitable, rather arrogant, viewpoint, I suppose.

Most of the students came down rather hard on poor Gatsby and his parties. I suppose that's a good sign really: the admirable puritanism of youth. But anyone with "blue gardens" surely couldn't have been all bad?