Looking back over this blog I realise that a landmark in my life has passed almost without a mention - at the end of December 2011 I finalised the deal to sell "La Fulica", so I am without a boat for the first time in about twenty-five years.  She's going to a good home I hope - a British engineer working in Montenegro, just across the water from Brindisi.  I bought her in late 1999 with the intention of using her for long-term cruising in the Mediterranean.  With her very traditional gaff cutter rig she was hardly the most practical choice, but she looked so pretty sat in the boatyard in the shadow of the Humber Bridge. She became our home when we sold our house in Blackheath in May 2002.  They were exciting and anxious times, preparing for our journey and trying to squeeze in as many of our possessions as we could into her slim eleven metre hull.  She looked after us well over the next two and a half years before we moved into our house in Puglia.  We...

There is no getting away it - I am an "orang putih".  Occasionally I recognise these words when I overhear Malaysians talking together.  My Malay dictionary tells me that "orang"means "man" and "putih" means white.  So I am a "white man".  "Hutan" means jungle, so in the same way an "orangutan" is a "jungle man".  "Putih" sounds like "putty" which is not a bad description of the skin of the average Caucasian.  Out of curiosity I searched on "orang putih" in Google images and found these rather neat cartoons.  They seem to give a reasonably affectionate view of how some Malaysians may see white folk. I don't usually sense hostility from local people, more curiosity because they see so few "orang putih".  Sometimes I see someone do a double-take - "did I really just see a white man in Saratok, what on earth is he doing here?"  Even in the days of Bri...

Before we left the UK in 2002 we used to do our shopping at a big new Sainsburys supermarket near the Millennium Dome by the Thames in Greenwich.  I remember walking round the aisles and thinking that it was a cornucopia of foods from all over the world and how lucky we were to have such quality and choice.  Had I seen Saratok market then it would have appeared to me a hot, confusing and fly-blown place, smelling of open drains and rotting fish.  But it's been a long journey since then and that Sainsburys seems to me now like a tomb for dead food, shrunk-wrapped, frozen, labelled and bullied into uniform ranks.  A place where words have taken over from taste, where we are endlessly told how good things are and the same head of broccoli can be badge-engineered as "basic" or of "taste the difference" quality. My education began in the food markets of Italy, especially our weekly market in Locorotondo.  It took me two years to begin weaning myself off regular...

You can't spend much time in Borneo without becoming aware of palm oil and its implications.  There are plantations everywhere and the roads are full of trucks loaded with oil palm fruit for processing at one of the many mills on the island.  And, you don't have to drive far to find an area of forest being bulldozed into terraces to make way for new plantations.  In the West this activity is almost universally reviled: rainforest is being destroyed to make way for new plantations; if you have too many plantations you create a "monoculture" which reduces biodiversity and increases vulnerability to disease and disaster and; the oil itself is not as good for you as many other vegetable oils. There is a large area of mature plantations a few kilometres from Saratok in which we have begun to walk and bicycle.  I've also talked to a few local people about the issue and as a result things seem to be far less clear cut than I had thought.  A mature oil palm plantati...