Six days on the supposedly paradisiacal island of Bali and I'm a nervous twitching wreck.  This is not entirely Bali's fault, but it hasn't exactly helped either.  We didn't get off to a good start when we arrived on an evening flight from Singapore to find Air Asia had left everyone's baggage at Changi.  In the confusion I forget to take my debit card out of the ATM I was drawing cash from, which I didn't discover until two days later. Fast forward to a hideously overpriced beach restaurant where we were presented with the first bill I've ever had that came to over a million.  One and a half million Indonesian rupiah to be exact, admittedly this is only about £100, but that's still a lot for a dodgy lobster and some fish.  Out came the credit card, which didn't work, followed by my debit card, not my proper one but my previous one which I'd stupidly forgotten to destroy and now thought was my current card.  Obviously this didn't work eith...

It's just been one long social whirl this week as I host a series of farewell soirees for my English students. For the teenagers it's been Sprite, sandwiches and games based around Taylor Swift lyrics and I actually got some of my big, tough, thirteen year olds singing.  Yesterday, I was sad to say goodbye to my ten year olds.  I had got more sandwich stuff in, but I needn't have bothered as they trotted in happily with plastic carriers bags full of cake, curry, chicken frankfurters and other goodies.  Most of them also brought gifts.  I have been inundated with presents, including diaries, pens, key rings and even a powder compact from Shanghai, from this lot since we started in May last year.  During our last lesson we sang songs, had a treasure hunt around the ground floor of the house, ate all the food and played games.  After a final game of "killer shark" ("hangman" without the capital punishment overtones) I stood outside in the warm night a...

"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...

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 ...