On EU referendum day I had my first funeral at Boston Crematorium, the English heartland of Brexit, with a higher percentage of people who want Britain out of the EU than anywhere else in the country.  It was a damp, grey morning as I drove from Newark across miles of largely empty farmland.  As I pulled into the car park of a large Asda, the Boston Stump loomed out of the mist.  Driving on through the town I saw rows of neat terraced houses interspersed with Eastern European food stores. The crem. is a grim fifties edifice in some well-kept parkland.  I was shown into the Vestry and later given a quick tour of the chapel and shown the buttons for changing the music and closing the curtains.  I drove back to Newark at lunchtime, and in the afternoon picked up my motorbike from the garage and had a nice chat with the garage owner about bikes and touring and double-checking the bill he even found a mistake and knocked a few quid off.  Then I went to the P...

"It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in."  I don't know where I picked up that bit of wisdom from, a toilet door possibly, but it lodged in my mind because of its obvious truth.  Even when the "opposition" win they soon become the "government", taking to the trappings of power like ducks to water.  Not that in Malaysia the "opposition" has ever got a chance to savour the taste of victory. I stayed up until midnight on 5th May to watch the election results trickle in and went to bed when the outcome was certain - a win for Barisan Nasional, the ruling coalition.  Over the following days the implications of the "victory" became more clear.  Far from being triumphal, the leading BN politicians have been grim faced, aware that in the last two general elections their hold on power has been steadily loosened.  In 2008 they lost their traditional two thirds parliamentary majority.  This time the oppositio...

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...