John Hartley was a big man in every sense of the word.  A man with a big appetite for life, lunch, booze and cigarettes.  He was my acting tutor at drama school in the early nineties.  John would sit, chain-smoking in the rehearsal room at East 15 watching our attempts at Chekhov with an expression both intense and inscrutable.  On one occasion one of us fluffed a line and John exclaimed exultantly: "At last something f*****g interesting's happened.  Just for a moment I actually got the impression that you weren't reading from a f*****g script!" John could be a harsh critic, although I think he saw it as being kind.  Acting is a brutal profession and if you can't embrace criticism and carry on in the face of near constant rejection you are dead.  He was especially eloquent on the subject of praise: "Praise f***ks you up darlings."  (Pause to take a deep drag on cigarette and exhale filling the room  with a yellow smog).  "Critici...

If the Hilton hotels chain needed to send an executive into exile they would almost certainly chose Batang Ai.  This massive Longhouse Resort on the edge of a reservoir in the middle of nowhere is slowly dying on its feet.  It was built for hundreds of guests, but usually accommodates only a handful.  The fact that you have to get a ferry across the reservoir to reach it adds to the sense of sleepy isolation. It has however become a kind of country club for British Council mentors in need of peace, quiet, club sandwiches and an "international" buffet. For local people the idea of going to Batang Ai is insane, why go to a fake longhouse when you can get the real thing for literally a fraction of the cost?  But for mentors it's the tourist ambiance that is so attractive, because it makes no demands and can make you feel for a while that you are one with the pink kneed, camera bejewelled holidaymakers that roll up from time to time. Last weekend we went there to cel...

This is what I believe: 1. We are born, some time passes and then we die. 2. Death is what makes us who we are. 3. Death teaches us to tell the time. 4. Death shows us how to live and love. 5. Without death we could not tell a story or make a journey. 6. The last thing on our CV is a death certificate. 7. Death makes life a precious commodity. 8. Death is proud, mighty and dreadful. Now I am getting old I’ve come to feel that my purpose is to come to terms with death and thus wring the most out of life. I’ve got a long way to go. I want to be a funeral celebrant, so I can help people face death and value life and make progress on my own journey. Some people call death “god” and worship it. I don’t agree, but I can see where they are coming from and I’m happy to be on the journey with them, provided they don’t try to force their beliefs on me or insist that their sacred writings are anything more than beautiful allegories. The older I get the more I see people as eith...

Borneo is famous for being the home of the orang-utan and last Saturday I finally got round to seeing some.  Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, outside Kuching, is a shelter for injured, orphaned and kidnapped orang-utans, where they are rehabilitated to go back in the wild. We gathered at the Centre in the morning with maybe fifty other tourists and, after a briefing, walked a couple of hundred metres through the jungle to the feeding station.  As we filed down the path, cameras in hand, the orang-utans made their way through the forest canopy.  We could hear the odd crash above us and every now and then see a wise, hairy, quizzical face looking down at us through the foliage.  Orang-utans move very slowly.  They hang from one branch then carefully test the next before swinging across and stopping to check out their next handhold.  Sometimes they will test a rope or a creeper several times before trusting their weight to it.  They eat lugubriously, like a...

"Rainforest" is such an emotive word.  In ecospeak it's collocated with "depredation" and "global warming".  Seemingly it contains all that's good, including a few naked, pot-bellied humans, so wise they hide from the rest of humanity, apart from the odd photo opportunity with Sting (by these standards I must be very bad, liking humanity and only wanting to hide from Sting).  Apparently, chopping rainforest down is a wholly evil act, akin to rape, worse even than plagiarism, in the minds of middle-class western liberals. Before I got to Borneo I learned that it has one of the largest areas of rainforest in the world and also one of the fastest shrinking.  Since I arrived I've kept my eye out for it, not sure exactly what I'm looking for.  It's so warm and humid here everything that isn't dead is green and if you concentrate hard enough you can actually see things grow.  Can these trees next to the main road be rainforest?  Sure...

Tell a malaysian you've been to Singapore and you always get the same response - "ah Singapore, it's so clean."  This is said with an approving nod, but there is something at the back of the eyes that betrays a different emotion, something like "how the hell do you keep a country that clean?"  For malaysians going to Singapore is like visiting the home of an obsessive and domineering housewife, where you are scared to sit down in case you ruffle the cushions.  The feeling is definitely mutual - try reading the reviews on "trip adviser" of malaysian hotels by singaporean visitors, they are usually patronising and plaintive - "the room was dirty", "the service was poor", "there was mould in the bathroom", etc, etc. Sue and I spent a few days there last week before travelling on to the malaysian island of Tioman.  I wanted to go more for its connection to the British Empire than for the shopping.  Singapore was the ...

I said in my last post I was on a steep learning curve when it came to using the internet for teaching.  I was obviously not as far up the curve as I thought.  As I started making friends with my students I began to feel less and less comfortable about the amount of information that it gave me about these young peoples' lives and Sue made it clear that she had serious misgivings about the way I was going about things. So, I started to do some more extensive reading about Facebook's policies and their advice to educators.  I had not even realised that Facebook require you to be at least 13 years old before you can set up an account.  Many of my students ignore this by making themselves out to be older.  This also has implications because Facebook restrict the access people can have to the timelines of children aged 13-17, so by making yourself, say, eighteen when actually you are twelve, you over-ride all this stuff. Anyway I've put my own house in order by...