We decided to go away for a few days around Christmas and booked three nights in a smart hotel in Kuching, the regional capital and three nights at a small beach resort, Sematan, in the far west of Sarawak. The Pullman in Kuching was much as one would expect.  Nice rooms, big bathrooms, big breakfast buffets and lots of affluent looking people traipsing up and down.  It was OK but not an experience either of us feel in a hurry to repeat.  I like smartish hotels but I don't feel so comfortable in them here, maybe because they make me feel more part of an affluent elite that I don't want to admit to belonging to.  If so, this is probably hypocrisy. On 27 December we drove to the Sematan Beach resort, which was much more fun.  A collection of chalets on the edge of the South China sea facing a massive sandy beach where the tide goes out by about half a kilometre.  Our booking included a buffet breakfast and evening meal and the resort was packed with mainl...

Sue does not have to be back at work until early January and so we have a total of four or five weeks together to travel and allow me to acclimatise.  Last weekend we went to Sibu, the nearest large town, some two hours drive from Saratok.  Sibu lies on the Rejang river and from there we took a day trip on the river ferries to Kapit, a small town in the interior which can only be reached by river I believe. The ferries travel at 20-30 knots and the journey to Kapit takes about two and a half hours.  We travelled "business class", which is one step down from "first class" and entitled us to air conditioning and a flickering film on DVD which could barely be heard above the roar of the engine.  During the trip a man wandered round with a large bin liner full of crisps and other packet snacks for sale. As we hammered our way up river I scanned the shoreline for crocodiles and, out of the corner of my eye briefly glimpsed a large one basking on a log with its legs d...

We went last Sunday to a wedding in Kabong, the village and district in which Sue works.  It was about a thirty minute drive from Saratok and my first opportunity to get a feel for the area that Sue travels to most working days. Stopping to ask directions some way from our destination it was clear that a large section of the local community already knew who we were and why we were there.  Central Kabong is a collection of houses on stilts over a salt marsh linked by a network of wooden walkways. The wedding was for the brother of Nora one of the teachers of English with whom Sue works.  This was the second ceremony, the first having been held in the regional capital Kuching. They are a large, sophisticated and well travelled family and as a result I felt both very welcome and remarkably at ease in a setting like nothing else I have ever experienced.  We joined in the ceremony, took photos, ate, danced and relaxed in a palpable atmosphere of hospitality and good...

I've been here twelve days I realised checking my diary.  What have I done?  Where has it gone?  I feel like I've been on one of those kids roundabouts which you suddenly step off and stagger drunkenly away from, slowly regaining your balance. I shook hands with young Paolo at Bari Airport then stepped on an Alitalia flight to Rome.  At Rome I got a Malaysian Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur.  It was half empty and I had a window seat right at the back.  The time drifted away eating airline curries and catching up on films I'd missed, "Rise of Planet of the Apes" and "the King's Speech".  Beneath me drifted Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India.  It got dark, then we dropped down towards KL over the Malacca Strait at dawn.  The light in KL was liquid gold, but my plane for Borneo it seemed left from a different airport.  Dazed I found my way to the bus station and was hurried onto a bus dragging my luggage behind me. The bus tore round a ring...

I'm just waiting for Cosimo our wireless internet man to come and disconnect our service, so it seemed like a good moment to send a last message from Puglia, at least for now. Everything is pretty much stowed away and my bags are packed.  It's a fantastic sunny day here as if to mock my leaving.  For most of the past ten days since I returned from the UK its been wet and horrible, making it difficult to do much outside. Looking back over the past few months I've got a lot done, including late last week showing a prospective buyer over La Fulica and agreeing a deal, which I hope will be finalised before Christmas. I leave tomorrow morning at 4.00am for Bari Airport, to where our neighbour Paolo is very kindly giving me a lift.  Erminia has been pretty good about all our comings and goings.  I've only had one "of course I'll probably be dead by the time you return" and even that was said with a twinkle in her eye.  But then southern Italians understand...

I’m writing this on board the plane to Bari – a first for me.  I’m so tired I can’t sleep, stuck in limbo between places, anxious, as ever about what I’ll find when I arrive.  A dread instilled in me by a worrying Mother who was capable of working herself into frenzy if I was even a few minutes late.   Even if I wasn’t late come to think of it. On Friday and Saturday I attended the last two days of my Humanist funerals course, during which we trainee celebrants each conducted “mock” funerals.  I presided over the burial of fiesty motorcycle riding, drug abusing Kellie in the grounds of the St John’s hotel, Solihull, on Friday afternoon as the sun went down.  Having done four burials on the Friday we sat through nine cremations at the Robin Hood Crematorium on the Saturday.  The day began with a tour of the “backstage” areas, including the ovens and a collection of blackened artificial hips and knee joints, by a lugubrious Brummie with a beergut and a...

“Same day vaccinations” it said on the internet.  The clinic was in a big Victorian terrace on a main road near Leicester city centre.   I had to negotiate an entry phone and was then let into to a very smart suite of offices with soft carpets, swirling feature wallpaper and chandeliers.  The attractive young asian PA told me to fix myself a coffee and the Doctor would see me shortly.  Sure enough I was shown into the surgery a few minutes later, coffee in hand.  Behind an imposing desk lounged a young asian guy with slick black hair, an expensive shirt and a very personable manner. Talking through the options for vaccination he made me feel relaxed, despite the subject matter.  “Yes, I’d definitely get a rabies vaccination.  Trouble is there is not much of the post infection vaccine available these days and without you are dead, no question.”   Actually we couldn’t do that one as it needs a jab a week for three weeks.  But I settl...

This is Denise, my landlady during my four weeks in Brighton doing the “CELTA” English language teaching course.  The three people gathered with me round the dinner table are my fellow students: Ali from Dubai; Enrico from Trento in Northern Italy and; Natalia from Mexico. It seems strange to think that I knew none of these people four short weeks ago and now I feel like I’m leaving my surrogate family.  Denise is a devout Catholic with a mixed English/French background and political views somewhere to the right of Pope John Paul II.  She also has the proverbial “heart of gold”.  At seventy seven years of age and with a hip operation due in a few days, she looks after four students, including giving us all a hearty breakfast and a solid supper and doing our washing.  On top of this she has that wonderful knack of creating a chaotic, welcoming and homely atmosphere where people feel free to do as they wish.  And all for £115 per week.   She insisted o...

There’s been a long gap in this blog while I went to the UK to study for my Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA).  Four weeks of twelve-hour days seven days a week.  Before the course I laughingly thought that I would have a little time and space to write my blog and have the odd day out.  Instead it’s been: get up; go for a run along the Brighton seafront; finish the lesson plan for that day’s teaching; discuss the lesson plan with my tutor and fellow trainees; give the lesson; analyse the lesson; have a sandwich and talk about teaching; go to training sessions on how to teach; go home and work on an assignment about teaching; look at watch; say “good God is that the time?” And; go to bed. Twelve of us started this intellectual and emotional assault course and eleven of us finished.  Most of the others are twenty somethings looking to travel or just to get a job in this increasingly tough economic climate.  Decent people and ...

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 ...

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 b...

The day after my last post Sue got confirmation of her job in Borneo along with a whole raft of information, so we are now running around like maniacs. Sue sets off for Kota Kinabalu from Bari Airport on Friday.  Last weekend we spent booking tickets and pouring over Google Earth at the 20 possible postings Sue had to chose from.  She finally settled on Mukah a small fishing town in Sarawak. Originally I planned to join her before Christmas, but already I can feel the pull of a new adventure and hope to depart by the end of November if possible.  This would mean leaving Puglia in mid October to go to the UK where my current plan is to do my British Humanist Society celebrant training and a one month Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in Brighton. I feel scared and disorientated by the speed with which all this is happening and I will be sad to see Sue off on Friday, even though we will hopefully see each other again before November is out. The local spe...

Ha, ha!  Nearly two weeks ago I expected that our lives would by now have some shape and clarity.  Well not quite.  Sue had her interview and on Monday was made a provisional job offer by the British Council in Borneo.  However, since then we have heard nothing further despite the fact that the job is meant to start in less than two weeks.  Knowing how Byzantine the processes are for this kind of overseas aid work Sue can’t yet be sure that the job is in the bag and therefore can’t really begin preparing to go.  I know she is excited about the job and in her head she is already driving around remote village schools, but she is also conflicted about leaving our home.  Over the last couple of days she has been taking pot plants from off our terrace and planting them on our land – as if she is releasing them into the wild, which made me sad. I heard nothing about the interim management job I went for and sent an email to the agency last Friday when the ...

Considering it's the dog days of high summer our lives have been very stressful waiting for things to happen.  Usually I write about this stuff after the event, but this time I'm in the middle of it.  Last Thursday I was accepted onto a training course to become a "celebrant" at humanist funerals.  It's a short course, but after it I will be able to officiate in crematoria and other places in the UK where people want a non-religious funeral or memorial service.  Last Wednesday I sent my CV off to an agency for a well paid interim management job in London.  I know that I would be very good at this particular job, but that because of my age and (for an accountant) "exotic" lifestyle I don't stand much chance of getting an interview.  Realistically, if I don't hear today I can forget it and I will need to start accepting that the chances of finding well paid consultancy work in the UK are getting increasingly remote.  As a fall-back I am considerin...

Dad rang me last Monday from A&E to say he had had a fall. Since then I’ve been putting in calls to try to piece together what actually happened.  Not easy as he is pathologically incapable of telling the truth about himself and even at the best of times the NHS has trouble getting its story straight. If I took the various things he has told me at face value then his strength has been failing rapidly over the last few weeks leading to a fall in which he probably broke his hip and he is now awaiting a “special scan”, which will determine if he has a fracture and possibly the extent to which he is riddled with bone cancer.  Following the “special scan” the doctors will finally realise how badly they have misdiagnosed his increasing mobility problems and will operate on his hip or his knee or both, leading to death on the operating table or a “cure”. Reading between the lines a more believable storyline might read:  Dad is obese and has bad arthritis in several joint...

I was 56 on Friday and it’s more or less a year since I started this blog. When I began I was unsure what I was writing for. Looking at the stuff I’ve written since I find much of it seems self-satisfied and self-justificatory. Actually, paging at random through the blogs of others, the majority of whom seem to be female christians of various ages from the mid west of the United States, I am clearly not alone. In my case I guess it comes with the territory. Brought up by a controlling Mother who used her anxiety to keep me constantly accountable, it’s like a part of me is for ever engaged in the process of answering the question “where have you been, I’ve been worried sick about you.” Over time, the process of creating a bland and positive narrative becomes ingrained. So, as I approach a second year of blogging about myself, I think it’s time to become a bit more real and a bit more interesting, if I can. Starting with the question “why am I writing this blog?” The answer is...

Sue and I took a day trip to Brindisi last week to fulfil a promise we made five years ago to visit the Archeological Museum.  There were only a handful of people there, all foreigners, wandering around the pottery shards and broken statues.  You are left with the impression that Brindisi was less a Roman town, than a Roman occupied town, building on Greek civilisations that were many centuries older.  Also one gets a feel for the tremendous strategic importance of this natural galley harbour, which was the gateway to Greece and the Eastern Mediteranean. When we first came to the Museum five years ago, on a similarly hot Summer day, it was shut for renovation.  If I'm honest I was in a bad way at the time, in the grip of depression, struggling to see anything good in anything, more interested in the shade than the light.  Now life seems a lot better, if a bit uncertain.  Sue has finished work for the Summer and is now casting around for what to do next. ...

High summer has arrived and it's hot, hot, hot here in Puglia - pushing forty centigrade on our terrace at lunchtime.  Too hot to do much during the middle of the day except try to sleep. For a few days we had a sirocco, the wind out of the south that blows from the deserts of North Africa.  Everyone here hates the sirocco - in the winter it brings humid air that feels muggy and unpleasant and breeds mould and in the summer it's like living in a fan oven, cooking the poor tomatoes and aubergines on the vine and making the lettuces wilt and flop onto the parched earth.  The only defence is to shut all the doors and windows in the middle of the day to stop the heat invading the house.  Then all one can do is lie down next to a fan feeling the sweat congeal on one's skin and look anxiously at the thermometer, hoping is doesn't climb above thirty, when things start to get really unbearable. But now the sirocco has ceased blowing and conditions are hot, still and dry....

Dad asked me to take his typewriter to the local hospice charity shop yesterday.  It’s a fairly new electric one.  Lifting it from his desk made me feel sad this morning.  Writing carefully crafted letters to authority about this and that has always been such a part of him and his sense of himself and now he seems happy to casually cast this tool away.  “Are you sure you want me to take it?” I asked a couple of times and “yes” he was quite sure.   He told me to take its PVC dustcover as well – “I made that myself” he said proudly.  I could tell he had, he has always been a dedicated adapter of his possessions to make them more “practical” as he might say. The charity shop is in a little row in the local shopping centre, dominated by a Coop, a chippy and a Mobility shop with a line of electric buggies outside.  The man at the counter looked at me blankly as I handed over the machine, “the manageress said yesterday I should bring it in” I said and...

We went to Umbria last weekend to see our good friends Carole and Kevin.  Summer has arrived with a vengeance in the South and it was a hot drive north up the motorway that runs along the Adriatic coast.  Finally we turned left and wound our way up into the Appenines, to the small hill town of Nocera Umbra in the mountainous heartland of Italy.  We stayed in an apartment in an old farmhouse outside the town and this was the view from our window. Carole and Kevin have recently returned to their town house here after an absence of fourteen years.  They bought the place in the late 80s and then were forced out when a series of earthquakes in September 1997 made most of the old town centre uninhabitable.  Now they are the first people to move back to their street, surrounded by scaffolding and building work and a network of improvised water pipes and electricity cables. The restoration of Nocera Umbra following the quakes is a very Italian story of graft and ine...

Funny how the mind works. It was hot and sunny when I set off for my run this morning. On the way back, sweat dripping off my forehead, my MP3 player ran out of podcasts and flipped on to John Martyn's album "Grace and Danger". Suddenly I was back in Doha where I first heard it in April 2009. He recorded the album in 1980 as a way of dealing with the break up of his marriage. It was so raw that Island Records didn't want to release it. It was the album I should have listened to when my marriage broke up in 1989. I had decided to walk from Sue's apartment to the "Oasis" leisure club in the height of the midday sun. I took my MP3 player and selected "Grace and Danger", which I had just downloaded, to keep me company. I was well covered up, but even so I could feel the odd patch of exposed skin stinging with the intensity of the sun's rays. During my hour or so out on the streets I was the only person I saw actually walking. By the ...

The seasons in Puglia are incredibly distinct and when the Summer arrives it's like God, or Silvio Berlusconi, has flipped a switch. The switch got flipped this week, sending the temperatures above 30 centigrade and making us realise that olive pruning can be postponed no longer. Actually Erminia has been dropping hints for weeks. Until three years ago her husband, old Paolo, would come over to supervise. This involved me holding the ladder while he wobbled at the top of it, pruning, swigging wine and farting by turns or (infinitely preferable) me at the top of the ladder while Paolo hollered instructions and poked me with a long stick from below - "taglia! (cut) "lascia!" (leave). The old bugger's been dead a while now, but those words still ring in my ears while I am pruning. Now we are left to our own devices as Erminia's arthritic hips means she no longer ventures far into our fields either. Every part of the Mediterranean has its own pruning techniq...

Once a week when I am home I usually take a morning ride to this lighthouse. I have to drop down about 1000 feet off the ridge on which we live, then across the coastal plain to the little resort of Torre Canne. This only takes about half an hour, but it then takes me over an hour to grind my way back up again. During the ride I travel through three different worlds. The limestone plateau called the Murghe, which is a patchwork quilt of little stone houses and small holdings, the plain below, a good five centigrade warmer most of the year and dominated by large estates of majestic olive trees, then the coastal strip, full of camper vans and holiday makers in the Summer season. The climb back is a good antidote to life's petty frustrations such as "will the part I have ordered from the UK to get my motorbike back on the road ever arrive?" I seem to spend a lot of my life waiting for things at the moment, but out on the bike there is just the one hill to climb. From t...

This is my motorbike, gassed up and ready to go to England yesterday morning. I'd been dithering for several days about whether to ride back to the UK for the bike's annual inspection and finally got my act together after Sue and her friend Barbara set off for a weekend in Prague. It was a lovely sunny morning when I set off with the intention of staying in Rimini on Friday evening before tackling the Alps. I took a scenic road to Bari and was tooling along happily when bam, the bike lost all power and glided to halt on the roadside with all the electrics dead. After a desultory attempt to find the problem, with trucks and lorries thundering past within a few inches, I gave it up as a bad job and hitched a lift to the nearest town. I was picked up by the classic Pugliese peasant farmer or "contadino" driving a battered hatchback. "Where are you from then?" "London eh? My son lives in Manchester." "So you've got a place here in Pugli...

Sue's Australian friend Barbara came to stay this week and so we did the sightseeing thing. I'm proud of my adopted home and enjoy showing people around, especially as it allows one to look with fresh eyes at familiar things. Today we went to the "White City" of Ostuni, which sits on the edge of the limestone plateau on which we live, surveying the Adriatic Sea and the coastal plain several hundred feet below. Your man on the left is Saint Oronzo, who stands on a tall column in the town centre. He's the local early Christian martyr and miracle worker credited with saving a nearby town from the plague. Ostuni is a tourist ghetto, but it also has a sleepy southern italian dignity. After wandering around the gift shops we climbed up the hill to the medieval cathedral. Barbara is a catholic and so I guess it had a special resonance for her. I mooched around on my own, playing with my camera, while Sue and Barbara read the guide and peered quizzically at the arte...

Rereading my last post it looks like my attempt to put Dad back in the box of his bungalow. But Dad wouldn’t go back so easily. He said he wanted to return home and he did get discharged there from hospital eventually. But, I wonder if it was what he really wanted or whether he thought it was what he was expected to want. A lot of pressure is put on older people by the caring professions to seek to live an “independent” life. Children as well, I guess, generally want their parents to behave as if they are going to live for ever. The truth is Dad was scared of going home and it was a hard struggle for him when he got there. When you are overweight and have very limited mobility even the floor is a scary place and gravity is your enemy, trying to put you there, unable to get up again, at every opportunity. For a while Dad experimented with simply giving up the fight and on two occasions he got me or his friend Bernie to lower him to the floor, complaining hysterically that his knee...