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...

The night in the hostel on Mount Kinabalu was my second in a dormitory and therefore my second with virtually no sleep.  I just can't get off when I'm surrounded by others shifting, snoring and farting into the small hours.  Well, maybe it was me farting.  I rose at two and dressed in warm clothes and a head torch hired from the hostel and at 3.00am I and my climbing companion Glynn, joined the throng for the procession to the summit.  I'd met Glynn two days before and we'd decided to hire a Guide together, for companionship and to save costs.  Glynn lives in Greenwich in London, near Sue and my old stamping ground Blackheath.  In his early forties he'd casually mentioned he'd had a hip replacement only a few months back following a kick boxing injury.  Glynn was one of many interesting folk I bumped into on the mountain, including Wally and Faye a retired couple from Australia and a strapping pair of Scandinavian girls, one from Finland and one ...

It's been the school holidays in Sarawak this week and while Sue was busy writing an essay I took myself off to Sabah with the aim of climbing Mount Kinabalu, at 4,000 metres the highest thing in southeast asia.  It's a well-worn track being on quite a few peoples' list of things to do before they die. Even before starting there is a bureaucratic mountain to be climbed, permits to be bought and hostels booked, insurance forms completed and guides hired.  Once arranged most people are committed to climbing with a Guide over two days.  On day one you climb a steep path for about 1,400 metres to a hostel below the summit.  On day two you rise at 2.00am and climb another 800 metres to catch the obligatory sunrise, before descending the 2,200 metres back to the starting point.  The descent is the killer with one's knees and thighs getting a relentless pounding down the steep path. Most of the climb on day one was through cloud and mist in dripping forest and lat...

A tragedy looks like it's unfolding in Sabah, the Malaysian province in the north of Borneo, about 900 kilometres from us here in Saratok.  If you don't live in the region you probably won't hear of it, unless the death toll gets large enough.  How many will that need to be?  The news agencies must use a formula - anything above ten in the so-called developed world seems to get a mention on CNN and the likes, but here in Borneo?  A hundred?  A thousand? The story in brief is that a couple of hundred armed Filipinos arrived in a remote coastal area of Sabah a few weeks ago to pursue a claim to the province by the Sultan of Sulu, himself a Filipino citizen.  For a few days there was an uneasy stand-off between the "invaders" and the Malaysian police, then the police and army went in and to date there are sixty-odd people reported dead, about ten Malaysian soldiers and police, the rest Filipinos.  The latest information is that the remaining Filipinos...

It's the dog days in Saratok after the Chinese New Year and I had to drag myself out for a run this evening. As usual I went to the running track a couple of kilometres out of town where the car park was full.  Several people were walking or running around the track and a football match was in progress in the middle.  I did a slow warm up, nodding every now and then to one of the regulars, then launched myself onto the track for a five kilometre trot, which my GPS watch tells me is just under eleven circuits in the outside lane. Whenever I begin a run I have this anxiety that my body won't carry me, that this is the day when my old legs just refuse to budge and I stop immediately or fall flat on my face.  It never happens, muscle memory kicks in and the body just goes through the motions.  People seem surprised that I don't get bored, running round and round in circles, but there's a surprising amount of stimulation.  I have my MP3 player, on which I listen...