I could tell when I went to the running track yesterday evening that something big was going down in Saratok - a marquee had been erected and a little wooden walkway from the track to the car park.  Sure enough, this morning five helicopters descended on the track, greeted by a motorcade and police motorbike escort to whisk the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak to a political rally in the centre of town.  With him was the local Barisan Nasional candidate and Abdul Taib Mahmud, the First Chief Minister of Sarawak.   I decided to follow the commotion and cycle into Saratok with my camera.  There's a general election here on 5th May and I'm increasingly curious about what will happen.  Barisan Nasional (BN or the National Front) has been in power here since Malaysia became independent in the early sixties.  It's a complex coalition of political parties representing the main ethnic groups in Malaysia, (Malay, Chinese, Indian and indigenous trib...

On 9th of March I wrote about the "invasion" of Lahad Datu in East Sabah by a group of armed Filipinos.  Things seem to have gone fairly quiet since then.  The death toll now stands at around 70 and a couple of hundred people have been arrested for helping the "invaders".  There is still some kind of security cordon around the area where the Filipinos landed and a big military presence, including naval patrols.  The British Council withdrew their staff from East Sabah in March and they are not going back. In the welter of claims and counter claims by the various parties involved I guess we may never know the full truth of what actually went down.  I suspect the biggest losers in all this are the local people of East Sabah and the nearby islands, which are part of the Philippines.  They have been used to dropping in to see one another by small boat for family weddings and the like, without the bother of going through border controls and presenti...

I applied for a job a few weeks ago, to run the British Humanist Association's network of funeral, wedding and baby naming celebrants.  They gave me a telephone interview last week, but I didn't get it.  It's the kind of job I'd love to have done and would have solved at one stroke the problem of what I do next and I was very disappointed.  It doesn't matter how old you get, it doesn't dull the pain of rejection. I know I've no right to complain, some people have to deal with this everyday.  I take my hat off to them, I don't know how they do it.  It's why I've always had the greatest respect for professional actors.  Not the lucky few who manage to get regular work, but the dedicated majority who hang in there doing a few weeks here and there, whilst filling shelves or working in a bar to keep some money coming in.  The best of them don't do this out of any real desire to be famous, although most of them wouldn't of course say "no...