It's mid-winter here in Puglia and life has settled into a quiet routine.  I'm teaching three days per week now in Ostuni and work is building up.  On my non-teaching days I'm continuing my desultory decluttering campaign, filling a bin liner most days with grimy unwanted junk, much of it coated in dust and hairs from our little dog Milly, who died three years ago.  With each sack dragged to the communal refuse bin, three hundred metres up the road, I feel a bit lighter. I feel like I'm lying fallow, hunkering down in our little stone house recharging my batteries for some new and as yet unspecified expedition into the outside world.  Sue is studying hard for her Masters and with not much money coming in we're leading a frugal lifestyle with our main outings being country walks and Friday trips to Locorotondo market.  It's been good to renew our relationship with the countryside around here, which after ten years still continues to grow on me.  Even in...

Living in Malaysia has taught us one major lesson - most of the junk you accumulate through life has no utility whatsoever and is not missed when you can't get at it.  We arrived in Sarawak with a suitcase each plus three air-freighted cardboard boxes and not once in two years did I think "oh, if only I'd packed that handy plastic ice cream tub crammed with old keys, badges, coins and fluff". As well as being glad to be back home in Puglia I also felt I'd returned to a mountain of dusty and useless junk.  Disposal has however been another matter.  Books have been the toughest challenge, nobody wants grimy and mildewed English language tomes in the South of Italy.  They're probably not wildly popular in Sutton come to think of it. Sue was all for sticking the lot on a big bonfire, but for me the connotations were just too strong and after a lot of aversion therapy I finally managed to train myself to throw them in the paper recycling container next to ...

Back in Puglia after an exhausting Christmas in the UK.  Stansted - Lincoln - London - Devon - London - Lincoln - Stansted.  After so long away in Malaysia duty and a degree of guilt called and by the time we put all our commitments together the schedule was complicated.  For Christmas itself we were in Devon with Sue's sister Julie and her family and Jim and Audrey who we drove from London.  The Devon countryside was wet and wild, the woodland bare and the streams and rivers in flood.  For the first time I looked at the picturesque country cottages and imagined what a hard life it would have been to live in a small English village a hundred years ago, when money and food were often short and the weather harsh. We saw Dad at the beginning and end of our trip and for the first time in many years he seemed accepting of his lot.  Homecarers come in four times a day, to get him out of bed, toilet him and put him back to bed.  Not much of a life on...

I'm writing this in bed with Sue snuggled up next to me reading.  In the living room next door our new pellet stove is hissing gently and pumping hot water around our central heating system.  For the first time since we moved to Puglia in 2004 it's winter and the house is thoroughly warm, instead of comprising a small island of heat in a cold sea.  It's life-changing, I feel relaxed as I wander around the place and the smell of mould is retreating daily.  I now think of taking a shower with pleasurable anticipation instead of it being an unpleasant and goose-pimple inducing chore.  The paper on my desk is crisp and firm to the touch and no longer droops flacidly when I pick it up. On top of that we have satellite TV and I can write this in bed thanks to our new ADSL internet connection.   It seems a long way from the house we bought in the wilds of Puglia nine years ago, when we had no electricity for the first couple of weeks and were dra...

After leaving my hotel in Bari on the morning of 22nd September I drove home in brilliant sunshine with my heart thumping with a mixture of joy and anxiety.  Being a pessimist I half expected to see a smoking ruin with pigs rootling in the blackened foundations.  In fact, the place looked little different  to how we'd left it.  Our neighbour Paolo did a great job keeping an eye on things and maintaining the land, including pruning many of the olive trees, which was way beyond what I'd asked him to do. I had two weeks to smarten the place up before Sue arrived and I worked hard to get rid of as much of the accumulated grime as I could, with the help of Paolo's wife Elizabet and his mum Palma. The last few weeks have flown by and my sense of time now feels strangely distorted.  So little has changed here in Puglia that it doesn't feel as if we've been gone for two years, but then when I look back on Borneo our time there seems to have lasted forever. Ov...

The last few days in Saratok passed in a whirl of packing and ticking off jobs on lists, all the time my view of our little town shifting from the present to the past.  On Sunday 22nd September Sue drove me to Sarikei to get the boat to Kuching.  I looked out of the window at the jungle, the banana plants and the roadside shops and longhouses thinking this may well be the last time I see them.  As the boat surged up to the pontoon I said my goodbyes to Sue and passed my luggage (a rucksack and my bicycle encased in a large cardboard box) up to some helping hands on the rear deck. This was the start of three days of relentless travel by boat to Kuching, then a plane the next morning to Kuala Lumpur followed by a dash across the airport to catch my flight to Heathrow.  At Heathrow I got a taxi to Sue's brother Mike's house in Uxbridge where I left the bike.  After a pleasant night catching up with news from Mike, Tina, Adam and Tim, I got the bus on Tuesday t...

After three wonderful days at Batu Ritung Homestay I really felt sad to leave.  Supang gave me a farewell present of Bario rice and a rice scoop and showed me, William and Michele around the family museum, a room where Supang and her husband keep heirlooms and mementos.  Including the battered old leather briefcase her father used to use. After saying our goodbyes Matteo came to guide us back to Bario.  Instead of walking the water buffalo trail it had been decided we would travel by canoe.  This is the route most supplies take to get to Pa Lungan and still involves a fifty minute walk before reaching the boat, then a two kilometre drive at the other end. It turned out to be an eventful trip as the river level was very low and instead of a thirty minute journey we bumped and ground our way over shallows and half submerged trees for about an hour and a half. At the end of our river journey we were met by Stephen Baya of the Junglebluesdream Homestay, where w...