Perfumed

Before I started attending Friday Prayers at the mosque I had no idea about the place of perfume in Islam. I found out something of this one memorable day when, to my enormous surprise, I found myself daubed with a fair amount of the stuff on the way into prayers. I returned home rather perplexed, and it took the missus to enlighten me that there was nothing terribly iffy, or personal, about my experience and that getting a fair helping of perfume was quite a common phenomenon when visiting a mosque.

After that I found myself on the receiving end of similar doses on odd occasions, though by no means regularly. However, since I've been attending the mesjid at Clementi it's pretty much every Friday that the elderly pakcik on the door makes sure my right hand, or arm, becomes enticingly aromatic, and remains so for the afternoon. Today the aroma is still strong as we approach the late evening. I think today I got a double helping.

As far as I can figure this out the tradition relates to a wonderful hadith in which the Prophet - peace be upon him - said that God had placed love in his heart for three things of this lower world: women, perfume and prayer. Isn't that lovely? Tradition has it that his favourite perfume was essence of rose - and, of course, the rose is frequently used as a symbol for the Prophet himself.

I've now come to rather look forward to being scented, though I do wonder if the kids I come into contact with on Friday afternoons when I'm back at work ever catch a whiff and, rightly, wonder.

Going Nuts

Bought all sorts of bags of nuts at work today from the healthy nuts vendor (or should that be the vendor of healthy nuts?) who sometimes sets up stall outside the staffroom - unsalted peanuts, brazils, hazelnuts, cashews. As I was greedily surveying my cache on the kitchen top after getting it home it occurred to me that as a kid I didn't like nuts at all - apart from salted peanuts, of course. And even fifteen or so years back it would have been bags of crisps and the like that would have got me excited, stuff I hardly look at now.

One of the fascinations of aging is being witness to one's own changing tastes. It reminds me of Benedick's line in Much Ado: A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age. Mind you I don't think he had nuts in mind. Or meat for that matter.

Funnily enough fifteen years ago I wouldn't have been able to end a paragraph with a sentence fragment as I do above either.

guitar/vocal

Got home to bang on Small Town Romance, featuring Richard Thompson live back in 1982 in New York City. It's just him and his trusty guitar in a master class of how to really play for an audience. Great songs delivered, well, greatly.

Apart from the fact that it makes for wonderful listening I had two particular reasons for airing this old favourite. The first was that I've been listening quite a bit recently to some of the students of the school at which I teach playing live and it's been a wonderfully refreshing experience reminding me of just how good it is to listen to the real, simple thing: guitar/vocals.

Secondly I just found out that the great man was awarded a gong, an OBE if I'm not mistaken, in the New Year's Honours list. Actually I don't care at all for such nonsense normally (so it's no good looking in my direction, Your Majesty) but it's a measure of my respect and admiration for our songster that for him I make an exception. Finally someone worth rewarding. (Him and Ryan Giggs. Knighthoods for both next time round, I reckon.)

Getting The Picture

It's surprising, and disconcerting, what turns up when you move house. Proof, if it were needed, that whatever talents I possess lie not in a visual direction.

Ten Years After

I was just checking my journal of 10 years back for this date and found a reference to Mum arriving here, on what happened to be Hari Raya Haji that year, and looking in fine fettle. 'Sprightly' was the word I used. My entry for the next day read:

Took Mum to the library - a successful trip with no fewer than four murders now for her to enjoy. We've just come back from dinner at Geylang where she polished off a chicken chop at rapid speed.

I think that was the beginning of her last visit to Singapore, the culmination of an almost unbroken run from 1989 onwards, if I'm not mistaken. The following year featured a bit of a scare, at this time of year also, regarding the possibility of a cancerous growth on her lungs - fortunately a false alarm - but she never visited again.

I don't recall that specific chicken chop, or the murders she was going to polish off in the days ahead, but I do recall the sheer fun of the times we were able to have her with us. Priceless.

Great Moments In Literature No. 1

Making wonderfully slow, plodding progress on this reading of Anna Karenina. Just passed the bit near the opening of Part 2 when Tolstoy tells us what Laska, Levin's dog, is thinking as Levin and Oblonsky take their minds off their hunting for a moment as the sticky subject of Levin's proposal to Kitty is raised. Marvelously goofy stuff - almost childish. Fortunately my memory's so bad I completely forgot it was coming and laughed out loud, just as I did the last time I read the book.

Just how does Tolstoy manage to know everything about everyone? And, considering this, why was he so dopey about his own life?

All In The Timing

Huge good fortune fell my way earlier today when I managed to get myself to the mosque at Clementi without getting extremely wet in the process. I only noticed the darkness of the clouds over the area as I drove into the car park nearby, when it occurred to me that the heavens were likely to declare themselves open sometime soon. It takes me about three minutes to walk from the spot I park in to the mosque entrance - actually the back way, next to the HDB car park, of which about a minute is in the open, the last stretch to the mosque. I calculated that I would get there without any real problem and was very, very wrong.

Just as I stepped into the uncovered area the rain started, and it was obvious it was very quickly going to be of that monsoon quality that renders one soaked in two or three seconds. The three guys ahead of me also recognised the obvious signs and we suddenly became a small team of ungainly sprinters in a comical surge across the space. We made it with around three seconds to spare, getting quite, but not violently, wet in the process.

The monsoon lasted some thirty-five minutes, just slightly less than it took for the prayers to be concluded, and I stepped out into a newly-washed, rainless world. Lovely. Lucky.

Still In The Family

A couple of days back I wrote about not having major chest-related health problems as an adult despite my fears related to this in very early childhood. Today my focus is on not having to walk on crutches or get around in a wheelchair. I have never seriously considered the possibility of having to deal with such a situation - well, not until last December. I don't think it's likely to happen at this point in my life, but I'm now aware that I should have been considering the strong possibility of such for many years previously and it looks like I've been very lucky in this regard. The strange thing is that it took me until December to realise the obvious, which tends to suggest some sort of denial mechanism was operating - or that I'm fabulously obtuse.

The moment of realisation came in a conversation with Bob and Cynthia, when Noi and I popped in on them just before Christmas. Bob, who I always called Billy as a child, is a sort of cousin, but not really, for complicated and unimportant reasons I've never entirely understood. I've never actually wanted to understand them, the simple fact being he's a great bloke, with a much better understanding of the Connor family history than I have.

He was telling me about my late Uncle Jim's family and how they are faring - very sadly, not too well. Uncle Jim, by the way, was my Dad's twin brother. They were not identical twins though, fortunately for me, as I'll try to explain. Uncle Jim was a really nice guy with a much more obvious sense of humour than my Dad, and all the time I knew him was crippled. The family had it that this was a result of his experiences during the war in the Burmese jungle. (A terrifying place by the way for the ordinary English soldier of the period.) In fact, I think I still vaguely believed this prior to talking to Bob, though I'm pretty sure I'd been put right years ago.

Eventually it was determined that the problem was Multiple Sclerosis. Except it now turns out it wasn't.

My Uncle Bert, the elder brother of Jim and Jack, also developed problems walking and was eventually confined to a wheelchair. At this point more perceptive readers will have figured out the cases were most likely connected. But the family didn't, not for quite a while. Peter, my Uncle Bert's only son, who was a bit older than me and went to the same grammar school, died tragically young, in his thirties I think, following a terrible accident. Uncle Jim's children, four of them, are all alive today. But cousin David, the eldest, is crippled, as is cousin Martin, who's a bit younger than me. And recently cousin Margaret, who was in the same class as I was in primary school, has also had to start using crutches. According to Bob that came as a big surprise as it was obvious to all and sundry (except me) that something very nasty was being carried in the genes of the male branch of the family (which the docs had figured wasn't M.S., which is generally seen as non-hereditary despite the genetic factors involved) but the female side appeared to be safe. Until now.

It looks as if my sister and myself have been spared. So, again, I'm writing about a kind of non-experience, and gratefully so. Except that somehow in blithely ignoring the threat to myself I've contrived not to care enough for those who have and are suffering from the terrible reality of that experience.

Feeling Superior

For connoisseurs of the monkey mind out there, I caught mine engaged in an interestingly shifty mental-cum-moral manoeuvre earlier this evening. This was in relation to the unfortunate Charlie Sheen, a celebrity who's in the process of messing up his life in full public view. I happened to catch the last five minutes of a piece on his case on one of the news channels. Actually it wasn't so much about him as about the morality of allowing, nay encouraging him to screw up so spectacularly on air, as it seems he is doing. (I haven't seen any of this, and I don't want to, but his story has featured enough in the papers over here for me to know the broad outlines thereof.)

The programme made the dilemma quite clear: there's an impeccable logic to allowing this sort of thing (a celebrity painfully going to pieces in full view, as it were) to happen, but those involved are not behaving with any sense of decency at all. And that's about as far as you can go, other than to feel, as I did, morally superior for not wanting to watch or get involved in any of this.

At that point I got involved in a little thought experiment. Let's say I had a particularly compromising photo of the actor and could sell this to a newspaper. At what point would I be tempted to actually do the dirty deed? I got to the answer quite quickly. Not a thousand. Not ten thousand. But as soon as the money became 'life-changing' I knew I was more than likely to bite. I reckon two hundred thousand might well do it - especially after a bad day at work.

Now here's the point. In the middle of all this I was still managing to feel morally superior. Here's how it went: not being tempted by relatively small amounts was proof that I wasn't greedy as such amounts involved greed. Larger amounts went beyond greed into new territory - a fine concern with one's actual quality of life - and such temptation was, thus, quite laudable really. I know this utterly specious reasoning is daft, but I equally know that something suspiciously like it was in my mind.

So it's quite simple really. If I have my price, and I rather suspect I have (though I hope I don't) I'd better get off my high horse and onto the same low one that your average gossip columnist rides on. Meantime I'd better pray that temptation doesn't come my way.

In The Family

When I was a little lad, a very little lad, I think, I formed the assumption that I would be something of an invalid when I grew up. It wasn't that I was a particularly gloomy child, but I was being sent to hospital with what seemed like reasonable regularity for some kind of checks on my chest, so I assumed I had a poorly chest and this was likely to have a marked effect on me eventually. This never came to pass and as I continued in the usual rude health of childhood I put such thoughts behind me. I almost said such anxieties, but they weren't really. I don't recall ever being at all worried over the possibility of some kind of invalidism Adulthood was a long way off and, if anything, I think I thought being ill when you grew up was quite interesting.

When we were in Manchester last December I asked my sister about all this and what she made of it. She's some seven years older than me and I needed some light shed on what I've been wondering was some kind of false memory. I think I'm talking about events, the hospital visits, that took place when I was around three or four years old. She was hazy about it all herself but reckoned it was somehow connected to Dad's emphysema, which had been diagnosed at some time earlier than this. The family seemed to blame his poor health on his experiences in the war, but it may have been suggested that it was some kind of hereditary condition and so they were running tests on me. Oddly we couldn't recall them checking my sister. And we guessed that the tests on me had been by no means extensive. Far from being subjected to a series of hospital visits we suspected there my have been just two or three and these had quickly given me the all-clear. I suppose the impact on me had been great enough in its little way to have seemed a lot more substantial than that.

Thinking about this - which I have rarely done over the years, the past being a very different place for me where they really, really do things differently - I feel lucky and mildly guilty. Which is strange because I'm writing about a sort of non-experience: the ties that didn't bind, as it were. Sometimes not being a chip off the old block can be very useful.