I managed to sharpen the knives

My dog and I have been ill like “baton touch” as the Japanese would say, which means, as if we were running a relay race and passing on the baton of illness to one another. 

First it was my dog’s ears, I believe. They became infected after she scratched them to bits, possibly because she had an allergic reaction brought on by the summer’s heat. Ah – the summer. 

Yet even though it’s October the warm sunny days seem to be here to stay. Nothing wrong with that, apart from when I was ill and bed bound, I was forced to watch the beautiful blue sky days pass by through my windows. 

In the garden I felt the warm summer breeze caress my dry skin, my tan already faded to old terracotta. In the bathroom I squirted aloe vera gel onto my arms and legs and wondered when did summer happen, exactly?

When I talk with my Obaachan in Japan the summer has definitely been happening. Too much, too hot – unbearable. 

People ask me how is your grandmother doing? I tell them, well, she’s doing well but she’s almost ninety and we’re going back to Japan to see her for her 90th birthday. Then I follow up with the caveat that because Japan’s summer has been so hot, so humid, she’s housebound. Everyone needs an air-conditioner to survive; she can’t get out to walk to the shops or meet her friends, so she feels weaker. Also, bored. The old people in her area are all locked up in cooled rooms, like during lockdown.

I’m getting married next year. Which is why I’m going to Japan for Obaachan’s birthday and also taking an entourage of English folk with me who are all related to my husband-to-be. There will surely be a lot of culture-shocks form both family clans. I’ll have to be the translator. The lone translator between ten people all of whom want to understand one another – I’ll not think about how difficult or fundamentally impossible this task may be until I’m on the very expensive flight to Haneda, to save my wits.

The reason I got ill is because I was trying to be good at all my jobs and it took its toll. I have my paid job then my charity job then my wedding job then my house job – all the while pulling along my little brown dog ROLO with me wherever’s dog friendly. (I also think I have an aversion to rest, or I’ve taught myself how to tolerate being too busy, whichever it is, my habits aren’t great.) No wonder the two of us get ill together.

Here's how it went: I was thinking about different people and languages, and working to a school calendar at the same time as the standard calendar, and then my dog hurt her paw, so she was a hob-along in bandages wearing dumb paw-boots; I did First Aid Training which made me afraid of everything killing everyone, specifically through catastrophic blood loss, then I gave a speech in front of an audience at a Japanese festival on an unseasonably hot day and cried in front of everyone when I mentioned my dead mother, then a girl wearing a green headscarf and pink kimono (rad combo) handed me a tissue from the crowd; I got thrush and back at home I curled up in a heap under a cheap blue velvet duvet with my dog and slept for 80 hours. 

The torrent of activities made me miss summer, during which I had this strong desire to use my whetstone I had bought a year ago to sharpen the kitchen knives. I was slicing some chilies and realised the knives were blunt – right after my First Aid Training course – and freaked out about the dangers of blunt knives, so became determined to sharpen them. 

But alas, I went to Norfolk to visit friends who have a little girl and live next to the ruin of a Norman castle. Then I went to my fiancée’s family home to help clear the garden because they’re hosting our wedding next year. I also went to Oxford to walk through ancient Wytham woods with a friend. 

The rail strikes finally put an end to my weekends away. Once the plug got pulled on my adrenaline, I got ill and then all my other inane worldly tasks were forgotten too, like updating Instagram or boiling eggs.

It then became October and half-term was being mentioned and it was still unseasonably warm. The charity has finally begun to close down, and I’ve had some rest, and I’ve even stopped drinking alcohol to give my immune system the helping-hand it was crying out for.

I’ve spoken to my Obaachan, and she says it’s finally started to cool down in Japan as well. She tells me she is able to go outside again; she is so grateful for Autumn. 

I have noticed the immense number of spiders living in and around my house. Munching flies and leaving their corpses dangling by threads like mobiles from my ceiling. They’re fattening themselves up and I say go ahead, just please don’t be poisonous. ROLO ate some poisonous red berries from a yew tree, and I had to go to an emergency vet to get her stomach pumped. I wish she had more canine street-smarts, but in good news, I am no longer ill.

Today I have turned a momentous corner in my life. I managed to sharpen the knives. I know that the seasons are turning, and I’m pleased with the way things are going. Even though, when I look at my garden the tulip bulbs I planted three days ago have been unearthed by some squirrel (or my dog), I know I’ll live to fight another day.

Travels: Malaysia (Part 1)

Day 4. 16/4/19

Melaka

Catching the bus out of Singapore was needlessly a faff and Chewy’s mum helped every step of the way. She drove us to the bus station then worried thoroughly as the bus company altered the pick-up point last minute and booked us a complimentary cab. As we left, she handed us a pink envelope with Ringgit in to get us started in Malaysia, which was far too kind. The plush silky envelope was prettily embroidered with red flowers.

The bus ride to Melaka was pleasant, a long journey with comfy seats and large ones at that. We had to cross the border and I saw how the traffic leaving Singapore was flowing quickly, while there was a traffic jam on the other side entering the country. They have really strict laws in Singapore and rely on a lot of imports, so most of the vehicles in the tailback were vans, lorries and cargo crates. I felt sorry for the odd Honda Civic with a lone passenger in it stuck in the sun-blasted queue.

Aidan encountered a stranded singer of a band, who had a sorry tale about being left behind by a bus and her musician partner in Johor. She’d had quite a day of it. Hungover from a party the night before, now strapped for cash and running low on battery, she had no idea where her belongings or bandmate were and needed to get to Melaka to save her ill, incarcerated brother from his evil wife. I think she needed to get a load off her chest and Aidan was a good listener.

We got to Melaka. It was hot. I was already really sweaty the moment we stepped off the bus on to the busy main road. We walked carrying our rucksacks through the centre of town, like a couple of snails. Melaka has a central tourist spot with a replica of a Portuguese Galleon and an ornate fountain for Queen Victoria; echoes of colonisation the city has been through. It used to be the most important port town in the Straits of Malacca (that bit of sea between Malaysia and Singapore, which actually links the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, making it one of the most lucrative trade routes), so everyone wanted a bit of Melaka. The sea, however, is no longer near the city because of re-claimed land although the river still runs through it.

We were passed by a line of pimped out trishaws, which are hideous for the ears and abrasive for the eyes decorated in flashy colours, toys, glitter; banging out bass-heavy, catchy pop tunes like Gangnam Style or Baby Shark. Real tacky. We got to Omni Hostel where we were staying and Yalu met us, the earnest, considerate hostel owner. He gave us a photocopied map of local places then showed us to our neat little square white room. It was perfect, with an en suite shower, which we never needed to run hot water from because Melaka was so damn hot.

(Later that night we would be an audience to a spectacle of a storm. Lightning criss-crossing the sky, thunder that shuddered the walls and dragon-like streaks that clapped when they hit the ground. So dramatic. The rain lashed down for ages – at least two hours – the river looked swollen and buildings close by disappeared behind rainwater. But we were both perfectly cool and dry inside our room, lying on our backs watching it all happen through the window. It was fantastic, although Yalu’s hostel suffered some leaks because of it.)

The first day was spent walking around and stumbling on stuff. We stumbled on the Dutch cemetery. [Colonisation history of Melaka goes Portuguese to Dutch to English] Then walked up a great big hill to St. Paul’s: the ruins of a Portuguese church that the Dutch took over and used as a military store. Historically there was also a Portuguese fortress built around the old town of Melaka called La Famosa, but when the English East India Company ruled, they demolished it to gain greater control over the city and to persuade its inhabitants to move to Penang instead (a more favourable and strategic port for them.) I imagine La Famosa would have looked rustic and grand walled around the dusty, hot city of old Melaka.

Swallows dipped in and out of St. Paul’s Church, a few stray cats ambled about and I caught a cooling breeze on top of the hill from the relentless heat. We crossed the river and wandered over to “China Town” otherwise known as Jonker Street, which is actually the old name for it, but the new name is difficult to remember, it’s something like Jalan Hang Jebat. In China Town there were temples mixed in with old colonial style shopfronts, worn, flaking paintwork amidst brightly licked jobs. Cats were sleeping in the shadows away from the heat and those annoying tuk-tuks came past again, but the city is patently beautiful.

We found “Harmony Street” where three religious buildings co-exist together on the same street: Buddhist, Islam and Hindu. Aidan was most inspired by the mosque. The ablution pool was serene with plastic scoops on the side to wash your hands and feet with. There were ceramic tiles by made Dutch artists from the 18^th century decorating the steps and pillars of the mosque. The colour of the tiles and its copper domed roof was light green, which gave it a watery quality. At night the few bare lightbulbs that were working on the outer-side of the mosque shone bright green like dusty gemstones.

We stumbled across a miniature Chinese temple on the side of a road. It didn’t look like much but while we were admiring its brash colours and basic swirling dragons, an old man rode up in his ice-cream cone trike. He was a vendor and it was probably the end of his working day. He bowed and made a prayer with his hands together at the shrine, as we two tourists faced him, watching. It was resounding to see him in that moment because I appreciated that these relics weren’t relics, they were being used. I guess that’s also the “old Melaka” that travel blogs say is fast disappearing.

There was another appealing moment when one of those awful pimped out trishaws was driving towards us down Harmony Street. As the driver passed the Hindu temple, he switched off his shit banging music, to switch it back on again further up the street. I can only assume he was doing it out of respect.

After enough wandering and me whining for food we ended up at the Geographer’s Café. I had beef ho fun that was so fresh and tasty, a clear broth soup with glass noodles and slices of beef and leaves including my favourite summer time thing: bittergourd. Aidan had yummy satay chicken on skewers with rice. There was a Mister Universe memorial garden that we passed on the way home, which featured an enormous carved stone statue of a muscle-man, next to a smaller statue of a deer and a cockerel. It was sort of surprising to see, but there had been a Mister Universe from Melaka in 1956 and it turns out Malaysians seem to do pretty well in the body-building field.

On the opposite side of the riverbank from our hostel, there was a local family taking their pet tortoises out for exercise and feeding. The largest tortoise, probably weighing in at about 250 kg and generations old, plodded towards its owner who fed him spinach leaves folded over to make a kind of dense spinach sandwich. The giant tortoise snapped at her wads of spinach cleanly biting through it and munching. The middle-sized tortoise ate loose stems of spinach scattered all around lovingly watched over by children, and the littlest tortoise didn’t move at all and stood still on the grassy patch. When the tortoise family left, the owner led the largest one by clicking her fingers and the tortoise responded to her movements following her slowly down the road. A child picked up the middle-sized tortoise by holding it carefully under its soft belly, while the littlest tortoise was placed on a red trolley with the leftover spinach and wheeled back home.

Day 5. 17/4/19

Melaka

The morning was great! We went to Dim Sum Garden on the outskirts of town for breakfast, a twenty minute walk over streets that were heating up steadily. I walked over cracked tarmac with shoots of grass poking through, passed many a stray cat with spindly legs and scrawny stomachs. Hungry cat eyes. All the jungle cats have stumpy bushy tails and the most colourful eyes, yellow like shining gold or bright lively turquoise.

Dim Sum Garden was super. The staff showed us to a large round teak table and immediately offered up many types of dumplings! Baskets with steaming little buns that looked like jewels in clouds of mist were opened before for us and we pointed and picked out which ones to devour. I also had conghee, a Chinese breakfast porridge with crunchy onions sprinkled on top and a tasty rice gruel with coriander, mushrooms and egg. Delicious. The prawn dumplings were my favourite, I gobbled them up washing it down with my jasmine tea and was satisfied.

The proprietor looked like a cool and friendly mama, stylishly dressed, watching over her restaurant and her kid eating breakfast and playing on her iPhone at the table. So many women look stylish and graceful in Melaka. They wear well-tailored clothes and fitted drapery in different materials and colours that compliment each other. Headscarves and shirts and flowing skirts, also brooches and hair pins. Beautifully applied make-up, while I grossly sweat from all pores on my body and face, how do they do it?

Going back through the centre of town, we stepped in to a proper market where they were preparing food for sale. A dude was cleanly de-scaling a fish with the back of his knife, the slivers of fish-scale fell to the ground like sprinklings of snow. I saw a basket on the ground filled with sooty black eggs. There was the animated smell of raw meat. It was all happening. Outside people were selling cabbages and stems and leaves and bowls of nuts, maybe? One dog was sleeping in the shade to escape from the dire heat. So, we did the same and drank ice kopi (extremely sweetened milky coffee) in a shop. The back of my legs trickled down with sweat and my forearms and face were constantly moist.

The Sultanate’s Palace is where we were heading but for a while, we couldn’t find its entrance. When we finally did it was the hottest, most clammy part of the day, so I was ecstatic to go inside this replica Sultanate’s Palace museum, made of dark wood with barefoot entry. Yes, cooling planks, fans and a/c. There were panoramas and mannequins of the legendary princes of Melaka. An epic tale of honour, brotherhood and loyalty. A tale of a queen who gave herself up to protect her country. Heroism, tragedy, dynasty. These were the themes of the ancient culture here, when the sultan ruled in the 15^th century.

Melaka’s origin story is that Parameswara, a Javanese prince (who may also have been the last king of Singapore) met a white deer fawn one day whilst out hunting. He ordered his hunting dogs to get it and during the chase they reached the Melaka River, whence the white deer fawn bucked with agility and kicked the king’s hunting dog in to the river. Parameswara saw this and thought it was a good omen of tenacity and fighting spirit; a tiny but mighty ideal, and so built Melaka here.

It was still too hot outside, so I persuaded Aidan to stay put and play a game of mancala with me at the museum, so we sat on a grass-mat while I whopped him at the counting-beans strategy game. Then we ventured outside in to the blistering heat and A walked around admiring the gardens, while I waited under the shade of a tree fighting off mosquitoes.

To kill some time before the Baba Nonya Museum opened after lunch, Aidan and I hopped on a Melaka rivercruise. It was a nice way to pass the time. Not very eventful as we rode on a boat up the river one way, then back down again. On the return leg there was some tour guide information spoken over the built-in speakers about various architectural features of Melaka, street-art (nothing special, though there was good graffiti of an orangutan) and it pointed to some Melaka trees on the riverside, though I’m still not sure what they look like.

I infinitely preferred the jangly music they played on the way up the river and watching the gaggle of grandma/obaachan tourists in the boat, who were the best dressed people I’d seen so far on the trip. They were making each other laugh and taking group selfies. One obaachan wore a hot pink sun-visor with frills on it like a sea anemone that matched her lipstick. Tinted shades, powdered skin, bleach-white clothing, leopard print scarves, these were the ultimate grannies on tour.

In China Town there is the Baba & Nonya heritage house, which is a family-run museum with personalised descriptions of artefacts, all from the same Peranakan family (half Hokkien and half Malay.) They owned a plantation and so were important people, and Baba means the father of the house and Nonya refers to the woman. I quite liked the Baba Nonya Museum because it was idiosyncratic. Interesting labels telling personal stories of the family.

The bridal bed story was vivid, where they would get a young boy with a compatible zodiac sign to the newlyweds, to roll over the bed three times to ensure the nuptials went well and the first-born child would be a son. Or, the superstition about the length of time it takes for the wedding candles to burn down to their bases at the newlyweds’ table, prophesying who will die first, although out of respect for the couple the servants would snuff the candles at the same time.

The Baba Nonya house had two enormous courtyards in the back letting all sunlight and rain pour in to their parlour, which would neatly drain underground. There were colourfully painted window shutters and cool to the touch stone masonry, wooden ornately carved staircases, which did not use any nails because of the old superstition; the only nail you’d ever want in your home is the nail in a coffin. Classic Baba Nonya homes had small fronts facing the street, but super large and deep at the back. I also heard that the sea air used to rush in through the house when it was built, showing how far the city had retreated from its shores.

We then ate a late lunch of chicken rice balls, a Melaka speciality, at Hoe Kee. It was delicious and really simple. Small round balls of rice steamed in a light chicken stock, served with tender juicy chicken parts and slices of fresh cucumber. That’s it. Simple flavours but a rich taste, sort of perfect for the hot weather conditions. We returned to Omni Hostel and had a shower, then got a Grab (Malaysia’s answer to Uber) to the Mosque by the Sea aka. Melaka Straits Mosque. A majestic mosque built on stilts out in to the sea, so it looks like it’s floating – pretty cool.

White and very simple, with stained glass windows running around the top of the building below the great bulbous domed roof. There were tour guides who were very interested in Aidan, asking him questions about Islam like, ‘Who is Mohammed?’ and ‘Did he write the Qur’an?’ Aidan answered scholarly like, ‘He was a prophet’ and ‘No, I think it was Allah’, and the tour guides were so impressed they asked to get a selfie with him. Whilst all this was going on, I had to go and get changed in to a robe so I was fully covered up. They provide you with a nice selection of hijabs at the mosque in synthetic silks and floral patterns.

We walked the mosque perimeter over the lapping water, viewing the vast ocean in front of us and feeling the cool breeze rush in through the wide open doors. I watched a bunch of school boys in matching red and black sports kit, wearing their skull caps, facing the same direction; praying, kneeling, kissing the floor together. I see why the ablutions are so important now. There’s a guy out here on the mosque perimeter taking a time-lapse of the setting sun. It’s becalming. More tourists arrive as the sun sets and we make our journey plans for the next day, when we’ll be heading to KL.

Estonia & Finland

Finally feel like being back and who would have thought it memory wears thin. 

Last Sunday I returned from a trip to Estonia and Finland, the Nordic lands. It was a great escape, the highlight being driving out to the country through the straight-laced woods; pin-prick after pin-prick made up of silver birch and pine, their stiff standing-to-attention silhouettes and trim waistlines flitted past my passenger-seat car window as we pelted across chilled tarmac to the western most tip of Estonia. 

By the Baltic Sea. 

The wind started to pick up and we had no fire to cook the meat on. The massive man in lumberjack wear with bounding Alsatian dog in tow told us the hob wasn’t meant for steaks only porridge, so, my friends seized the outdoor barbecue and lit it in a brewing storm for the dozen spare ribs we had bought for seven Euros. The fire lit and the wind picked up. We had arrived at a wooden bird watchtower a shade of emerald green, a two-story Scandinavian designed beauty with an outdoor spiral staircase that led to the upstairs where the three beds lay and the downstairs held a kitchenettete and sauna. The next day I appreciated the heat from the sauna rose to warm the top room - everything here is well designed.

The sauna was hot. The wood-burning stove was made of heavy black hunks of metal and burned soundly, the coals atop were charcoal and sizzled when any touch of moisture happened. Lifting out ladles of water and splashing the rocks made the hot little wooden room's temperature rise by ten degrees to reach 80. Sweat spilled like water. We took it in turns to jump outside from the sauna to the world, where there was now a mighty gale whipping round the edges. The rush of the sea wind through invisible dark trees made the whole experience bewildering and so did the vodka. There were dares to run out to the Baltic Sea, which were completed by others (some twice dunking his whole head under like what I can only imagine a drunken beluga whale) and we raced back to the heat of the sauna across grass and moss and nettles and guzzled more beer. It was something between a frolic and a frenzy and the next day we all paid for it, me especially, with a hangover that silenced. 

Photo credit: Aidan Clifford

Heatwave and more fish

I had thought about buying another bowl for the boat. At the moment we can’t both eat soup at the same time, nor anything else that requires a bowl, for that matter. I had thought about buying another bowl for the boat but I had thought about many things since walking aimlessly around this store because the heat had made me go insane. I gladly stood still in the milk and cheese aisle for 10 minutes considering my options about a bowl and then bought a cucumber and left.

Heat brings it out of people. Crying (a woman outside the Tube station, into her hands with a friend stooped low to help), fighting (beefcake boys on bikes skidding and smacking), cavorting, frolicking, rollicking, shouting with jubilation at passers-by because they’re happy or sad or mad. It’s a bad rad heat that’s struck London this week. Tubes like slums, pubs like slums, everywhere like slums, with temporary shacks along the pavement springing up comprised of pimms-in-a-can or slimline-gin-and-tonic-in-a-can or something else that clatters. I bought a can of coconut juice which instantly became tepid when I left the coolness of the newsagents. 

‘Excuse me!’

I don’t hear a thing because I’m miles away sitting on my boat rooftop, my thoughts are like smudges.

‘Excuse me! Hey there miss!’

Oh it’s a child. On a bike. With a friend. What does he want… ‘Yeah?’

‘Do you know where you can buy fishing stuff around here?’

‘Not really.’ I go back to my staring out across water at nothing. But they’re still there waiting expectantly on their tiny bikes. I have no clue how old they are but I don’t think they could mug me because their bikes are so small.

‘I thought because you live on a boat you’d know where to buy the stuff.’

He said “stuff” with this inflection that made it sound like drugs and I’m no dealer, of fishing stuff or any stuff. ‘What sort of stuff?’ I calmly ask because it’s just so very hot.

‘Fishing stuff.’

I feel like we’re going in circles. Then the other one perks up, he’s on the small red bike.

‘Oi, do you reckon there’s fish in here bruv?’

‘Yeah I reckon so.’

‘I saw a massive carp get caught the other day, so sure there’s fish in the canal.’ I’d apparently decided to be part of their conversation.

‘So you do fish!’

‘No. A man was fishing.’

‘Where’s this man then?’

‘I don’t know.’ I stayed still and quiet but they still noticed me and looked in my direction expectantly so I shrugged and pointed and said: ‘He went that way’. 

And with that they left. 

I heard a crash of breaking glass hitting pavement, a roar of applause and some ensuing argument or other dissipating from the pub in the opposite direction to where the two boys headed. They hadn’t caused the commotion but the sounds of laughter and braying of men and women wafted over the river for eternity in this heat. I bet they’re cycling extravagantly towards Mile End.