When Come Husband?

This is what Sue is constantly being asked in Borneo.  When indeed.  My life right now is made of lists.  I spend my days ticking things off, adding new things and studying.  Studying English, trying to get to grips with stuff which for some reason I never learned when I acquired the language in the first place: adverbs; clauses; perfect tenses and; past participles.  Studying funerals, I've now written my first Humanist funeral service for my course.

Also trying to sell the boat.  I've slashed the price and four people were interested at the last count.

On my laptop I have two countdown clocks: one showing how long before I return to the UK for my teaching English as a foreign language course and to finish my funeral celebrant course (14 days, 1 hour and 56 minutes) and; one showing my deadline for leaving for Borneo (64 days, 2 hours and 55 minutes).  Why the extra hour?  Of course, the clocks change.

Sue meanwhile is having a fascinating time in Borneo.  Her posting is now Kabong, not Mukah which we originally selected.  It's a rural coastal area and two of the schools are by idyllic beaches on the South China Sea.  On the downside you can't swim because of the jellyfish and three people have been eaten by crocodiles in the last year.  She is going to rent a big house in the small town of Saratok.  The picture is of the Saratok town clock, which sadly doesn't work.  The Saratok clock ain't got no tock.

I suspect none of this is going seem real until I finally step on the plane for Borneo, not that I am at all clear where I will actually be getting it from right now.

Gas Street Basin blues

God I feel old today.  I flew from Bari to Birmingham via Zurich this morning, so I could attend the first day of my Celebrant course.  Having checked into my hotel I took a stroll around the city centre.  I have been coming here since the early seventies.  First as a schoolboy in a canal boat and later as a stressed executive in a company car.  As I walked around layer after layer of memories began to be peeled away.

On the way back to the hotel I dropped into an Indian restaurant and found myself in a building over the canal that you can see in both these photos, looking out over Gas Street Basin.  When I first came here forty years ago the Basin was derelict and forgotten and the only way to get into it was through a gap in the fence of the ATV Television Centre car park.  Now it's a fashionable post-industrial residential and shopping zone.  In the intervening period there has even been time for a new pub to be built and fall derelict, now boarded up and awaiting further redevelopment.

I remember spending a night in the Basin on a canal holiday with my friend Ken and our English teacher Mr Topless.  Were we woken up by the slap-slapping of a towrope passing over the roof of the boat as a horse-drawn barge passed by?  Or was that another time, or never, just a borrowing from someone else's memories?  It's all such a long time ago.