Want of Dexterity

When I was blogging more frequently, all those joyous years ago, my not-so-subtle (and no-so-secret, and not-at-all-unique) plan was get a grunch (new word) of posts together with a similarity of theme and tone that I could put into a coherent order, so that I'd have less of the discontinuous non-narrative that blogs inevitably are - rants, pseudo-essays, and shady stories all over the place - and with a little bit of fiddling and tweaking and filling in of gaps, I'd create a readable, unitary, written/typed object - aka a book.

Sigh.

~~~~~~~

Still on about The Trip TV show... In the second series, in Italy, Rob Bryden is forever chasing "Byron slept (well, he went to bed) here", and "Shelley punched someone out here" landmarks for him to be photographed at, and I was wondering where he found his information on this their last, epic Grand Tour (which included Lausanne, as mentioned in the previous post).

So I searched for a book about those rapscallion poets on the loose.

The book that Rob had most likely read was Edward John Trelawny's 1858 first hand account, Recollections From The Last Days Of Shelley And Byron. There is a NYRB edition out, but they don't have it, or any other edition, in stock in Singapore at the moment*. I was thinking to pick it up this weekend, before I fly off again: Tokyo this time (I'm currently in KL). I searched for an eBook to hold me over, but none is available.

It is not on Gutenberg Press either.

But there is a scanned copy at Scribd, the on-line eBook library, but that requires a subsription to read off-line or on a mobile app.

ANYWAY, point of story...

One the first page of the preface I found this:

"I wrote what is now printed, not systematically, but just as the incidents occurred to me, thinking that with the rough draft before me it would be an easy, if not agreeable, task to re-write the whole in a connected form; but my plan is marred by my idleness or want of literary dexterity."

~~~~~

Idle and wanting literary dexterity. So it's not just

E@L


* This is the sort of book you'd be rummaging for ceaselessly in dusty second-hand bookstores, and loving every minute of it.

Gimme One Reason...

Here's a line from the TV series, The Trip, with Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan (Series 2, Italy), which works well for expats in Asia. As it does for comedians in Italy, I guess:

- She only wants to sleep with you because you're rich.
- I only want to sleep with her because she is young and beautiful.

Steve throws arms up in air... implying one reason is as good as another.

E@L

(Don't have a clip of this, but they are hilarious.)

Savoyard - ambiguation

Interesting. Not ironic, merely coincidental. Merely an example of Littlewood's Law, roughly: "A person can expect what appears to be a "miracle", that is, something with odds of around a million to one, to happen to them about once a month."

What is this rare, nay, semi-miraculous proto-religico/mathematico occurrence, you ask. What has brought once prolific and popular blogger E@L back from the brink, yea, from staring into the blind, echoless abyss of not writing much these days?

E@L has come across the word "Savoyard" twice in as many weeks. It was a new one on him, as are most references to cultural things.

Wow! hey?

~~~~~~

In his semi-autobiographical 1964 novel My Brother Jack, the Australian writer George Johnston* has his proto-self, proto-agonist David Meredith, working at an elite printing firm in Melbourne (as did Johnston). The printers were more than mere craftsmen: they were also artists, designing and etching the posters and advertisements themselves, as commissioned.

But they had other, dare I say cultural** interests:

"... because every one of them was a fanatical Savoyard, and at any hour of the working day would be as likely as not to burst into a chorus from HMS Pinafore or Yeomen of the Guard or Pirates of Penzance, then everyone would join and the whole studio would rock to Gilbert and Sullivan airs..."
(approx location 1210 of 6276 on Kindle)


Savoyard: 2: a person enthusiastic about or connected with Gilbert and Sullivan operas: so called from the Savoy Theater in London, where the operas were first presented. (Dictionary.com)

~~~~~~~

In her most-amusing 2004 novel (and aren't they all?) The Finishing School", Muriel Spark arranges it so that the students of College Sunrise in Ouchy, a lakeside town just out of Lausanne, leave their laptops and knapsacks behind and head off on a ferry down Lake Geneva to the Chateau of Chillon.

It was while he was in Ouchy itself, in 1816, that Lord Byron, who was with Shelley on holidays [i.e. fucking whomever they could catch], wrote an allegedly well-know poem [not to E@L] about a certain prisoner who was kept in a dungeon there (Chillon) for six years. François Bonivard, the Prisoner of Chillon, was imprisoned (with his two brothers, according to Byron) in an underground cell because of his radical political views, espousing the independence of the Genevese area from The Duchy of Savoy. The Duchy at the time of Bonivard's incarceration [1530's or so] included a chunk of what is now eastern Switzerland: all the shores of Lake Geneva, from Geneva around to Lausanne, and then to Montreux. Chambery, in what is now France (Savoie or Haute-Savoie, can't be fucked looking it up - E@L is 6hrs into this post already) was then the capital, but Savoy included the Piedmontese area around Turin, and down to the Mediterranean at Nice. Lots of geo-politics going on as you would imagine. But of that, more later.

OK, so the students are told to ponder on Byron's poem while they were at the Chillon chateau.

What next befell me then and there
I know not well—I never knew—
First came the loss of light, and air,
And then of darkness too:
I had no thought, no feeling—none—
Among the stones I stood a stone,
And was, scarce conscious what I wist,
As shrubless crags within the mist;
For all was blank, and bleak, and grey;
It was not night—it was not day;
It was not even the dungeon-light,
So hateful to my heavy sight,
But vacancy absorbing space,
And fixedness—without a place;
There were no stars, no earth, no time,
No check, no change, no good, no crime
But silence, and a stirless breath
Which neither was of life nor death;
A sea of stagnant idleness,
Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless!...

Listen: Chris, one of the more precocious students is writing a novel about Mary Queen of Scots, the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, and the assassination of her recently repositioned personal seckertary and alleged boy-toy, David Rizzio, formerly of, wait for it, the Duchy of Savoy - he was born near Turin. When Rizzio was stabbed 56 times in 1566, Lord Darnley was then estranged from Mary, an 'orrible 'usband [marry in haste, repent in hell not long after] who had been buggering none other than Rizzio for many a moon previously. He feared most murderously that his (Rizzio's) ascendancy in her (Mary's) eyes threatened him (Darnley) both politically and romantically. [E@L is toying most flagrantly with history here, having only half-remembered pieces of the story from a recent Melvyn Bragg podcast, and less-than-half-read Googled snippets to go on]. After Rizzio's body is disposed of, Darnley, King of Scotland, gets, naturally enough for those days, back with his once-hated and conspired-against Queen. But he is murdered himself next year by the Earl of Bothwell, who marries MQoS after raping her [rape in haste, marry and murder at leisure], and the rest is history. But Chris's "excitingly written" twist on the story is that Darnley was in fact murdered by assassins sent from Savoy by Rizzio's family of diplomats (aka spies). Whoof.

Anyway, [are you still with me?] Chris, the aforesaid precocious student and inchoate novelist at the Swiss finishing school of the novel's (Spark's) title, was on the ferry, thinking of Bonivard and Rizzio, who were, #foreheadslap, roughly contemporaries:

"They might have met. They lived in different worlds yet it was not impossible that the lordly Savoyard should encounter the young Piedmontese diplomat who won his way into the courts of Europe." (Pg 23.)


Savoyard: 1: a native or inhabitant of Savoy. (Dictionary.com)

~~~~~~

But of course, checking the maps of the region, although it was difficult to pin down exactly the gerrymandering going on over the centuries with Google and not a proper historical atlas, E@L has discovered a possible misfiring in Spark's research/reasoning.

Turin was, as mentioned, in the Duchy of Savoy during the 16th century, and became the capital in 1563. It had been part of Savoy for six centuries and would remain so for two or more, um, more. Rizzio would have considered himself as much a Savoyard as Bonivard, rather than just a Piedmontese. [Perhaps, but for the sake of spectacularly iconoclastic blogging, let's say, Yes]. And, more controversially, Bonivard, imprisoned as a Genovese secessionist, might justly bristle at being called a Savoyard, when he most devoutly wished to be anything but one.

The history of the area is complex, to say the least at this time of night. Lausanne and Geneva did not remain in Savoy much longer. Those of the House Savoy became, firstly, the Kings of Sardinia (which included a state of Savoy that commenced below Lake Geneva, and had Piemonte as a separate state), and then the Kings of Italy, reigning from Turin, after the unification (also once called the "Piedmontisation") of Italy.

~~~~~~~

As another aside, while Muriel was writing this, her last novel, in a little village in Tuscany (about 60km from where E@L experienced the infamous "angina incident" of 2012), a political group in Savoie and Haute Savoie, the areas of France around Chambery (former capital of the Duchy, remember?), The Savoyan League, were calling for the unification and independence of the French speaking regions of l'ancien duché de Savoie. They gained 5.39% of the vote in the area in 1998, but failed to turn up at the 2004 elections.

~~~~~~~

Fascinating. Maybe not in your opinion, certainly in the opinion of

E@L



[Footnotes]

* E@L is reading My Brother Jack (he should have done so many years ago) because George Johnston is mentioned, photographed even, with his wife Charmian Clift, in
So Long, Marianne: A Love Story, the bio-story of the muse of Leonard Cohen's classic song, which E@L found in Kinokuniya and still hasn't started reading because: see above.

This had prompted E@L to pull out his almost as unread copy of Garry Kinnane's wonderfully titled 1986 biography of George Johnston, George Johnston: A Biography. Inside of which, E@L found four mysterious pressed flowers.

After some Facebook sleuthing, it turns out that it was the Ex who had placed the flowers there when she was reading the book back in the day - we are talking nearly 30 years ago.


** "Culture" and "Gilbert and Sullivan" - uncomfortable bedfellows, some snobs might say.

Soon. Surely.

I'm just gonna haveta start writing up here again. Not writing is stopping me from writing.

Not tonight though, I have a bastard behind the eyes.

Siderses blott up and a sort trote.

~~~~~~~~~

Watch this spot.

.

And that one.

E@L

That In Aleppo Once or Twice...

E@L's father was a damn good cricketer. E@L's No1 son is a damn good cricketer when his back and his knee don't take him down. E@L was a damned cricketer, and a laughing stock on occasion (wrong shoes for turf, slipped over when delivering the first ball, etc...).

For the 1952-53 season, E@L's dad won the batting averages for the PMG (Post-Master General, now split into Australia Post and Telecom) cricket team in a town in country Victoria. No doubt a social level competition. But hey. E@L's son has more information on his cricketing prowess. On one particularly splendid day he bowled out the other team almost single-handedly, and then won the match with his batting - 106 not out!

They gave a him book, called Dust On My Shoes, by Peter Pinney. It was published in 1948 by the great Australian house of Angus and Robertson (still going on) and purchased at a salubrious bookstore named Cowans Newsagent in the lakeside town of Colac. (Where E@L was born.) The story is of a young Australian man, something of a rake E@L gathers, making his way, single-handed, across the Middle East and South Asia, from Greece to Burma just after the end of WWII. E@L hasn't read the book, though as a child he always wondered at in his mother's small library (the remnants of his father's, he presumes, plus some childhood books for E@L's sister) and was particularly entranced by the photos. His late father-in-law had read it, and given it the thumbs up. How it got to his place is unknown. No1 son?)

Opposite the title page of his dad's prize copy is a photograph of Pinney looking from a window in the Great Citadel of Aleppo, in Syria, a view that show a minaret, the large dome of a mosque, five smaller domes on the structure next to it, and the city in the distance. It looks dusty, and E@L bets it was.

~~~~~~~~~

Interestingly, the photograph of Pinney in the window has been reversed, presumably for symmetry's sake. The actual view from a vantage similar to that window is this:

~~~~~~~~~

Aleppo is having the crap bombed out of it during the current Syrian civil[sic] war. E@L thought the view might be different now, for obvious reasons so he did the G thing, (search "Aleppo bombing" - there's no need for E@L to show them here). He saw photos of destroyed houses, dead babies, men screaming, rubble on the streets from smashed houses, terrified children running, massive bursts of earth, fire, and stone from bombs caught at the instant of exploding, grieving fathers holding their dead children on their laps, blood-stained cobbled streets, burnt-out vehicles, exhausted refugees squatting with stacks of their belongings at the side of the road. Humans in the midst of a modern tragedy, the weapons of mass and individual destruction built and supplied by our countries of course. Horrifying, heart-breaking, unnecessary, and completely avoidable. We are a fucked species.

~~~~~~~~

Anyway, he found this:

Wondering if this is indeed the same mosque - those smaller domes smashed, the minaret luckily intact - and thinking he should read that book is

E@L

Anchor

I used to love sitting here, settled in my comfy home-office-chair, banging away, letting the words flow as my ideas, like the soft inflated things they are, bounced off walls and down along strange dark pathways I might once have had the wisdom to not take. Before blogging.

Now, there never seems to be the time to blog. Hours have evaporated as I've distracted myself with FB and disgraced myself with porn and ended up lost in a labyrinth of click-on and click-backs, and I am eye-fuzzy and brain-glazed, yet fighting valiantly/foolishly against the call of the sleep faeries and a very very comfortable bed. And a very quiet CPAP machine.

Has the therapeutic catharsis which maybe fuelled them, departed from those confessions and musings? Let's see.

~~~~~~

When I am back in Australia, I try to follow my regime of, every other day at least, taking my cardiologist's strong recommendation for a one hour, or longer, walk. I go in the morning there (everyone else is still asleep, even if I set off at 9). Despite listening to podcasts or music, my mind looks for observations and reflections that might make me feel like I am not brain dead, that might sound good in, say, a blog. Walserian note-taking: of the way roses on a bush wilt here, yet bloom there, the way a large black dog tugs on the leash and pulls its small female walker to one side of the path and her scarf billows up.

I question myself, but on trivial things these days. Where will I end up? Where will I retire, should I live that long? The brooding navel-gazing of the man who nearly died three years ago has lightened somewhat - the soundtrack of my blog would no longer be Bjork's Anchor Song. Or would it?

~~~~~~~

In the time when I used to set off from my mother's house, I would take part of the route that brought me home from my primary school (imagine letting an 8 year old walk 2 miles home by themselves these days). And I walk up past the town's main cemetery and the stone-masons, and look for name I recognise in their windows. The past, in those paddocks (now low-rent housing estates - Commission Homes) where a friend saw a stallion with an erection and wouldn't stop talking about it for weeks. The past, in these houses nearer to school which are weatherboard, tiny, with knee-height steel bar and mesh fences, houses that never will be worthy of gentrification, house where school-friends, enemies, and bullies, liars, cheats and other genuinely bad people - both children and adults - once lived, perhaps still do, tragically trapped in small minds and small rooms. The past, now at the war-memorial in the middle of the roundabout, where up float thoughts of my father, a soldier in WWII, who served in Borneo, who died 58 years ago, allegedly from war-related malarial heart damage. I follow my shadow to the breakfast cafe, shut on Sundays, and enjoy toast and coffee when I can. That was a more sentimental journey.

~~~~~

Instead, now that mum's house has been sold, she and I stay in my sister's house in slightly a more rural environment (still there are paddocks of massive penises in nearby agistment properties), and my walks have no memories attached - I avoid the street where an ex-girlfriend lived. I pluck at one or two stiff leaves from various types of native trees that loom over the footpaths and snap them horizontally at small intervals. I smell them absently. I order a flat white from the cafe near the Coles supermarket, where two pleasant ladies serve me and we joke a bit, or from the McDonalds McCafe, where I am just a number to the busy, underpaid young girls who don't know that a Medium flat white is the same size as a Venti (and does not contain 20oz), if the other is closed.

I walk past the fading white fences of the horse farms and past the For Sale sign on a fire engine, mysteriously in an otherwise empty paddock, sipping away. Others are out walking. Many are overweight, some as big as me. They might have "heart conditions", too. They might be walking their dogs. They might be wearing annotated jerseys and be on bikes. I wonder at how many paces distant will the other morning walkers lift their head and greet me - a nod, a grimace-like smile, a barely audible "'Ning", or "'Day". FYI, it measures out fairly consistently at ten paces. Twelve paces seems like you're looking at them too observantly for comfort. Eight paces, and it's like you were thinking of ignoring them, or vice versa, with a sudden decision to recognise their humanity at the last minute.

Many other thoughts. Many other observations. Wind, clouds, trees, dogs, bitumen snakes that writhe in repaired cracks of the asphalt walking path that is the old Queenscliff railway cutting. Life, death, and other minor distractions. I buy the newspaper at the Chinese-run small supermarket - I'm almost back home now. We all read different papers - local, right-wing, left-wing. 谢谢, I try to say, but the owner never seems to hear or understand.

Eighteen years living in Chinese-speaking Asian countries and I can't even say "thank you."

~~~~~~


E@L

Surrender

I picked this book up recently in Kinokuniya, the second book about war refugees I bought that day.

The Girl With The White Flag

I just tried to start reading it tonight but I haven't been able able to get past the cover without sobbing like a, well I would say child, but here is this seven year old Japanese girl, separated from her family during the American storming of Okinawa...

From what I gather from the cover blurb, she had to survive alone on the island, to hide out from the battling troops during the invasion, and here she is on the cover, having made such a momentous decision on her own - my god what thoughts were in her head - to make and carry a white flag of surrender over her shoulder... Don't shoot me just because I am Japanese. I'm just a child.

She makes a mockery of our privileged lives.

Oh the things we warring adults do to children, the resilience of these children, the growing up they do in the heart-beats between bombs and bullets...

What's is going on in Syria, Africa, everywhere?

~~~~~~~~

I'm still crying. I don't think I can stop until wars stop.

I have no idea if the book is any good, or indeed if it justifies these emotions, but does it matter?

E@L

Disquiet

I wasn't sure what to do, or whether I was hungry or thirsty, sad or happy. I was tired from walking the streets of Lisbon on a warm, unpleasantly sunny day, for I had lost my hat in the train from Sintra and the fragile skin on my bare skull was broiling steadily. The crowd in the Museu de Cerveja looked to be straight off that floating city in port. I looked at the empty chairs in the place next door, older, hardly gentrified yet. Perfectly indicative of the struggle of Portugal to move slowly forward. So I finally settled on a table and chair that were the least unattractive to me, except that the table was unsteady after all, and I looked down at the restaurant menu, by the corner of the square. I turned the meagre menu (fish, more fish, fish) this way and that, but the food seemed to offer nothing but nausea and a repulsive end-product. I glanced at a sign on the wall. It was a line drawing of a thin-faced man with a moustache and those round glasses of old Europeans, and below this paltry representation were a few lines of self-deprecrating poetry. How he must feel on the wall. Like a fly, only unable to crawl, or indeed, to fly. Fernando Pessoa.

I opened my Kindle in a mood of resignation, for although I was unsatisfied with everything, I also felt the need to make a gesture, hopefully one that would take me away from my gloomy thoughts. Let me run my retinae over this array of pixels. Let someone else put the vibrations in my brain. I tossed the menu aside made the waiter (who had been hovering, and then had eventually moved away after observing my sour uncertainty and inability to commit) bring me a maio de liete and a quejada de villa francecso de campo, for that perfect cake would ruin my mood even further when I considered that it would not only not be fresh (flown in from the Azores who knows when) but my last one ever.

I read several pages of my book...


I had forgotten - it was uncanny, yet coincidences rarely excites me. I was reading The Book of Disquiet at that time. Short pieces, almost epigrams, paragraphs, a few pages. Everyone one of them ironic, bitter and dissatisfied, yet it was amazing - uplifting at the same time. It is so sad and negative, it is immensely enjoyable. The phrases are poems, not a cliche touches the paper for him.

And so my poor (transcribed above) blackness of the world lifted from my shoulders and a much BETTER blackness of the world settled instead. A black joy. Pessoa's perennial mood. I was elated at his contrariness and the refusal to enjoy life in evidence. Fernando Pessoa told me exactly and with unparalleled clarity how I felt, at that exact time. The word for my mood was "disquiet".

In short, with The Book Of Disquiet is perfect for those times when you are sitting in the restaurant where Pessoa himself used to sit and write (as he got drunk), and you feel happy to be feeling grumpy, which is 90% of the time for me, so I'm rating it 5 stars!

And I gave the waiter a 50c tip for his surly service!

~~~~~~~~~~~

Goodreads Review. No-one has liked it yet. I am expecting a lot of crap to be brought down on me.

E@L

Very Meta, as in Physical

As E@L is wont to do after an evening of imbibing (beers, sake), he sits on the Toto arse-washing toilet seat in his tiny hotel room with a certain type of book (or his Kindle) on his bare lap.

Poetry. And he reads it out loud.

As a young man, a teenager even, E@L did not "get" poetry the way he did as a ten year old - when Sr Mary Brega praised his verses on cats and dogs being "cuddly and wuddly," and awarded them a gold star. No, sad to say, nothing had progressed much, until Year 12, when, not "allowed" to do Chemistry (but begrudgingly permitted to continue Physics), he chose English Literature as his fifth subject. He was told to buy a book by some Metaphysical Poets. John Donne, Andrew Marvell, etc... You know the crowd.

E@L didn't understand a word of the complicated rhyming and obscure references and awkward syntax - more truthfully, he didn't even try - but he passed EngLit somehow, perhaps on the strength of an essay on Crime And Punishment in which Raskolnikov was, he suggested, a precursor to Albert Camus's Stranger: cliches, that was all it took.

There is a short set of Poetic Best Ofs on his Kindle, and this includes some poems of Donne's. So, being in a declaiming mood, needing to blow off yakitori steam, E@L unfolds his Kindle's new book-like protective cover (Y2000 in BIC Camera, Shinjuku) and finds "Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going To Bed" awaiting.

He declaims to the limits of his plastic one-piece toilet/bath cubicle's acoustics:

Whoever LOVES [he over-emphasised], if he do not propose
The right TRUE end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for NOTHing but to make him sick[!!]."

Hang on. Does that mean what E@L thinks it means? That if you are going to start, you should make a concerted effort to finish, when it comes to wooing the ladies? An effort, close associates know, E@L cannot always lay (ho ho) claim to.

Soon enough E@L gets back to declaiming, but now with an ear more open to not only the sing-song sound of the words (he wants to be able to read like Tom Hiddleston), but also the rather rude connotations, the dooble ontondurs, and the copious and amusing naughty bits. This is getting sticky, this poem, he feels. This Donne is quite the rake.

E@L wonders, after 30 lines or so, if he ought not have brought some more traditionally (i.e. modern) risque material into the dunny (ho ho) with him, instead of works by this outrageously crude, famous, hence charming and sophisticated, poet - E@L means, you don't want to read dirty poetry, do you? Or do you? E@L will have to look it up.

Perhaps he feels a bit guilty for finding such stuff in his toilet-based situation, for expecting seriousness and elegance and chuffy ruffled-collared wit whilst taking a dump, rather than enjoying (and he was enjoying it now) 300 year old fun and frankness and nudge-nudge honesty, from back before sex was invented, a guilt he might not have felt with internet access to a local (Japanese - E@L is in Tokyo for a week more) pron site or other, probably involving tentacles, and/or enemas, etc... (You've seen the pics, you know how weird this country gets...)

But when E@L gets to the end of the pome, reading in more hushed tones now in case someone beyond the cardboards walls complains about the metaphysical language, it quickly becomes very un-meta in its physicality:...

Rich Nature in women wisely made
TWO purses, and their mouths aversely laid. [Purses!]
They then which to the LOWER tribute owe, [Uh-huh...]
That way which that exchequer looks must go ; [Huh?]
He which doth NOT, his error is great,
As who by CLYSTER gives the stomach [pause] meat.

So that means, E@L translates prosaically (literally), that if the gent is only going to kiss his lady's upper "purse", he may as well have a clyster (look it up) instead of dinner and expect hearty sustenance...

And that's when E@L realises that he IS reading enema porn.

E@L

Giraffe

Sigh.

6 Sentences Per Day: Day 3 and still nothing...

~~~~~~~~

Writing Rules: It pays to have a BOOM opening sentence...

~~~~~~~~

Why is it that now I like living in Singapore, whereas my first few years were traumatic and irritating? Have I become a more forgiving person, or is it Singapore that has lifted its game?

I admit that the medication I have been taking for chronic neuropathy (off-label), is in fact a "mood stabiliser", so perhaps I am less grumpy, less irascible, less irritable, less easily pissed off. But people in Singaporeans stand aside at the train doors now (mostly); they don't run you over with their shopping trolleys (as often); they don't spit at your feet or squat on the toilet seat; they move to the back of... OK, I'll stop stretching it: they don't move to the back of the bus, but in my international experience (I used to catch the school-bus in Australia), no-one does.

One might get the feeling that Singaporean are more polite than they used to be. Or is that there are heroes out there...?

~~~~~~

I bring this up because I was approached in the street by two high-school-aged kids, a boy and a girl. The boy held his arms bent up, palms out towards me at chest height, and moved them slightly as the two walked in my direction. I was a bit taken aback, as you would be, but realised that he was just asking me to slow down, to stop, indeed, for they wanted to chat with me. It reminded me of the time in Beijing that a young Chinese person, innocently enough, asked me if they could practice their English by talking to me - it used to happen to tourists in Tienanmen Square all the time.

These kids had no clipboards or badges with IDs, but they wore tee-shirts which had an illustration of a giraffe's heads on the front. The girl was quiet and said nothing, but smiled brightly. The boy took the lead.

First of all he told me that they were not selling anything, nor asking anything special of me, but one thing.

He began to explain what the giraffe's head meant. I saw that a web address, giraffe.org, was printed underneath.

As you would as well, I expected this to be a wildlife, endangered species, don't shoot lions, or giraffes for that matter doorstopper. The sort of faux-interview and the hit-up for funding support thing.

How gentle, wrong reader, was I.

~~~~~~

"Giraffe.org", he said, "is a sort of movement. You how, like, for a giraffe, it's stick your neck out for things? To do things?"

I nodded "Mm-hmm."

"We are looking for stories. Of people who you have seen stick their necks out to help other people. You know, like random acts of help and good things. Kindness, like that."

Impressed that he hadn't mentioned religion so far (he never did), I raised my eyebrows (in a good way).

He continued: "So if you have recently seen, or even heard of, normal people helping people they didn't need to help, you know like someone was in trouble. Good people..."

"You shouldn't ask me that," I said, smiling. "I am as close to evil as you've ever come." (Thinking of Pete Cook's Mephistopheles in "Bedazzled". Cheeky and mischievous, rather than actual evil, while still being The Devil.)

The girl continued her cheery smile and the boy gave a chuckle. "I don't think so, sir. We are always trying to show to the public the helpful people, like they are heroes to others, small heroes in everyday things. If you can think of any incident, or anyone you know like that..."

~~~~~~~

Thinks:
* Indy bought me a beer the other day... nah, we're probably even by now.
* Bruce took me to new club in the 4FoWs and offered to shout a round of tequilas to the six girls who were hanging off me... but that was the year before last, hardly "recently". (Tempus fugit like the fuck!)
* My maid took my suit to the laundry to be dry-cleaned... Nah, that's her job.

Well, maybe I should branch out and think of what I have seen people do for people other than myself... But no, nothing comes.

"Sorry," I said. "I can't think of anything right now. But I do like your programme, it sounds... nice."

The boy pulled his a face into a resigned-but-not-yet-exhausted-by-rejection smile and the girl's smile started to wilt, but I gave them one of my patented Chin UP! smiles and they brightened again (or made an effort to).

"Thank you, sir," they said.

"You are entirely welcome." What a nice cause, what polite children, thought

E@L

Not Writing Enough

E@L has fallen out of the habit of writing; but haven't we all.

He is not sure what habit might have supplanted it (for him at least - whatever nefarious alternatives you might have found are matters for your own conscience and the ability of the neighbours to get a good night's sleep), but he is certain it is a bad one, not worthy of spending any time on, and not productive of anywhere near the enjoyment he used obtain by pressing "Publish" (followed by three hours of correcting typos and blind links) and thereby pushing his bullshit into this isolated and brackish backwater of the Web to be ignored by the billions of people who might conceivably benefit by the experience.

Wouldn't it be good if he could throw Famebook out the fucking window and let his communications open up in this antient forum, at least to the four* people in the world who might possibly still read his rambles, as opposed to those few of the 246 "friends" who have not Blocked or Ignored him (there's probably about eight as well) on Flakebook.

Wouldn't it be good if everyday he could achieve what Michel Faber managed to do in order to write his most recent novel (while his wife was dying); just write six sentences (at least) a day.

Every word of every sentence is a step in the right direction because... because what?; a sense fulfillment; the exclusion of boredom; a way to prevent eyelocking the abyss... because blogging used to be the way we'd get our opinions, feeling, frustration, thoughts and exploits out there and maybe even contemplate turning the output (or deflecting that energy and enthusiasm) into something more substsantial, and make money and find eternal fame and undying adulation, as some, and others seemed to have done, back in the day.

So here we go - let's see how long this latest promise to himself lasts.

~~~~~~~~~~

E@L is back on a bad-food restriction programme - no-one says "diet" anymore - with added calorific expenditure augmentation - no-one says "exercise" anymore - motivated by the fact that E@L has a Dr's appointment in a coupla weeks and that he had promised the good Medico that 5kgs of ugly/fair-to-middling fat would be converted into CO2 and H2O over the three months since his previous visit.

The authorities at E@LGHQ have, under the exigencies of reality, recently reset that goal to a barely feasible 4kgs in 2 weeks. Hmmm. E@L do be looking for a dose of some gastro-intestinal disaster to drop the reading dramatically. Any suggestions? KFC? Pizza? Newton Food Court?

It is now, what, just over 3 years since his dramatic IAI (Italian Angina Incident - no-one says "heart attack" anymore), and the Caring and Supportive Cardiologist (perceptive and perspicacious E@L can tell) is on the verge of dumping E@L because he have only put on weight, and dropped off to lower degee of exercise since they joined forces in this battle against arterial plaque. He said, mustering an impression of involvment, "Well, mmm, I guess we should do another test of some sort. It's been a while. Um. I think that maybe we should try another ECG stress test, see if anything has, you know, gotten worse." "But you said last time that nothing was wrong on the stress test! How can anything get worse when it is good!" "Um, yes, that's right, I think; I meant, um, you know, changed."

And as, persistent reader, you no doubt realize, an exercise test involves, um, you know, exercise, E@L is back on the treadmill in his gym in anticipation of that momentous treadmill test in the Good Doctor's office.

Walking uphill, a bit of jogging, getting the pulse up there... It all reminds E@L of the high level of cardio-vascular, umm, fitness he had achieved in the months leading up to the IAI...!

Having had a normal PET stress test two weeks before the IAI, plus his own experience of patients he has seen or people he has known, E@L realises that things happen, no matter what. Normal everything, healthy everything, but you can still just...

... just obssess about it.

E@L

* Quote from Colin Farrell's character in True Detective, on why he has so few friends" "I like to limit the number of people I disappoint.")

You Can Access My Old Blog! Like You Care...

The vast programming skills (persistence, mainly) of No1 Son have resurrected the link to my prior blog. He has shown me (sort of, c.f nictatating membrane) how to do this - and it was in fact what I had been trying do all along (I gave up in Jan last year according to the time-stamp on the Error _Log) only with more guesswork, and had partial success, short of making the blog, um, you know, visible.

It all was to do with some changes to the PHP language. Small things like square brackets ( [ ) being required around certain strings in certain commands, etc, ad tedium... He'd try to do something, like find previous entry and it would call up a PHP redacted (or whatever) error. He'd find the bad line in the named file, find the solution on an online PHP forum, correct it, test it, move on to the next topic. Stuff programmers love and their fathers detest. He didn't finish though, as we went to dinner at an execellent restaurant (Umberto Espresso Bar) on High St Northcote, not too far from his/our new place.

So, unfortunately - HA! like a) anyone will go back through it, and b) care nough to make a comment - you currently can't make comments. I'll work on that using the technique mentioned above during my continuing weeks of travel.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Segueing in which topic: I have just left Australia after three (3, count 'em) weeks, and am in New Zealand now, Sydney Friday, then I will fly back to Singapore for two nights, then go to Bangers for a week, come back to Singers for three (3, etc...) days then go to KL for three more. Then, it's Japan. All work.

But, bless my blessed life, it's Portugal and the Azores with the bestest people, the good old SPG and her Gandalf: to whit, Izzy and Danijel from Madhouse Heaven and points in between. (BTW Izzy's latest blog is here.)

After a brief spell so I can get my washing done, it's off to Hawaii for a wedding. Not mine, phew. These things are happening all over the place these days, with notable exceptions - c.f. No1 Son and partner).

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The link to the archives is at the bottom of the side-bar on the right, but here it as again anyway: Expat-At-Large.

cheers

E@L

Inspiring Nexts

Unusually for him [cough], E@L was a little bit muddled a few weeks ago, somewhere in a foreign country in the middle of a conversation with someone he can't recall for legal reasons.

Hmm.

Anyway, point of story: E@L had stated that Hitachi, the company with which E@L may or not have a passing employment-oriented relationship, made Japan's Shinkansen trains.

And the other guy said, "Yeah, along with Toshiba."

E@L was certain he was unsure about this, but being always polite, did not challenge this assertion. More than that, he assented to it. "Yeah..." he said, semi-agreeing enthusiastically (beers had been consumed and the mood of the moment was positive) but quickly changed to a subject he felt he might be certain about being certain about - which is to say he shut-up and glugged another beer.

E@L's First Trip To Japan, contemporaneous with his First Fuck-up In Photoshop
~~~~~~~

It's been bothering him though, because he had probably looked this up years ago. Fuck, the past is a foreign country, which is fair enough, as most of it happens in foreign countries. And besides... He has a vague memory of someone in Japan telling him about the Shinkansen, perhaps on the ride from Tokyo to Osaka.

Certainly Hitachi made the early models, as organised by Japan Rail, he is sure about that, but did they make ALL of them. Did Toshiba kick in at some point in time and go into a joint venture, or did Toshiba even make one or more of them completely?

JFGI. JFWI.

Well yeah, screw you, Hitachi made them, along with Kawasaki and Japan Rail. All of the mainstream models are Hitachi.

Toshiba didn't get a fucking look in.

~~~~~~~

E@L thinks he's mentioned this aside before: Each year, Hitachi sponsor the Christmas lights on Orchard Rd.

And each time E@L goes through the gaudy (Singapore is nothing if not meretricious) show in a taxi, he asks the uncle if he knows who sponsors the lights. Do they even notice?

If they don't know, he tells them. If they do know, he asks them what products Hitachi make. They usually don't know any, or they say things like, "Toaster?"

One uncle said, "Diggers", which is true. "Very good. But Komatsu* better."

Going...

...going...

...gone.

Hard work that, getting out of bloody pond. Think I need a lie down."

As does

E@L

* Not that Komatsu don't get into their own spots of bother...

Louie Louie Kaphooie!

Jack Ely, the lead singer of The Kingsmen, most well-known for their 1963 seminal hit, Louie Louie, sadly passed away on the 27th of April. RIP.

In case you didn't know (like, by not having read E@L's FB post, or the link above to the Wikipedia page) this song was investigated by no other just arbiter of morality, niceness, appropriateness, and generally good social behaviour than the FBI, for being a menace to society!

"This land of ours [USA?] is headed for an extreme state of degradation what with this record, the biggest hit movies and the sex and violence on T.V." said a concerned father in a letter to the Attorney General, no less. Gee willikers, you don't hear that exact complaint almost word for word anymore, do you? Right...?

The FBI file is most entertaining. E@L wonders what importance there could possibly be in the redacted sections.

~~~~~~~~~~
*The Controversy*



Listen to this song while you read the "explicit lyrics" dear old dad found buried in there.

E@L is certain that you too are outraged!

~~~~~~~~~~~

Now listen to again again while you read the actual lyrics...

Oh. Pretty tame really, but Jack Ely, man, what a brilliant performance he slurs out. It really does sound like he should be singing bawdy, subversive lyrics! E@L reckons he's been smokin' serious amounts of those Jamaican tea leaves prior to the recording session... E@L wishes he had been there! Except he would have been 6yo at the time, andy don't smoke.

~~~~~~~~~~~

OK, great, but apart from being famous for Ely's obviously almost unintelligble singing, the song has had quite a seminal role in what became what we know as rock music, influencing strongly The Kinks' You Really Got Me, which in E@L's opinion is the first truly modern rock song.



Brilliant. Especially the flag-waving at the end!

~~~~~~~~~~~

Louie Louie has been in a squidillion movies and TV shows (see the Wikipedia link, above).

For an example, making the most of the incompehensible lyrics with their drunken slurring, John Belushi at al have a great go at it in National Lampoon's Animal House... (set in 1962, although The Kingmen's version that's playing on the juke-box wasn't released until 1963).



Awesome!

E@L

Battleship Vietnam

E@L is not at all qualified to speak in any depth about war.

He knows very little about either the mutiny of the sailors on the Battleship Potemkin in 1905, or the non Apocalypse Now / Deer Hunter / Casualities of War parts of the Vietnam War, but when he was looking at a series of photos a while back in, was it, The Atlantic, about the Vietnam "conflict", (which failed to mentioned its prehistory with the War of Independence against France) he came across this pic of a farmer displaying his dead son to a tank-load of South Vietnamese soldiers, which triggered something in E@L's memory of Film Appreciation 101, back in his brief fling with higher education at Uni in 1976.

Ah, of course, that's right. There is a scene at the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein's film that is for all intents, identical.

Draw whatever conclusion you like about any similarities between the Russian Revolution and the Vietnam War, but killing children seems to be what war is all about these days. What with ISIS decapitating children and killing children in schools, and Boko Haram kidnapping school-children for who knows what nefarious purpose, we have to wonder what else we are capable of.

Could it get any worse, or has it always, in reality, been like this?

~~~~~~~~~~

Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke gives ample support for this observation, that civilians have increasingly become the specified targets for warring nations during the twentieth century. Sure there has been raping and pillaging since tribes marked out boundaries, and since armies trampled through civilian areas on their way to the next staged battle, but it is the power of films and photography and YouTube that stamp these concepts into our minds today. We can see it everywhere, everyday, we don't have to look hard. Our minds explode with these images.

Soldiers might go to war, but that war comes to us, with a camera.

As Trotsky said, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

~~~~~~~~~~

Some targeted children have names:

Kim Phuc (note the photographer changing film next to her in this uncropped shot)
"Colonel Alles added that napalm had a ”big psychological effect” on an enemy. ”The generals love napalm,” he said." (Lindsay Murdoch, The Age, March 19, 2013)
~~~~~~~~~

Muhammad al-Durrah
~~~~~~~~~~

Some don't.

~~~~~~~~~~

We lament our young soldiers today, the 100th Aniversary of ANZAC Day. We should mourn for everyone who has died in "conflicts": man, woman, and child.

We should wring our hands and hang our heads in shame for the human race.


E@L

Back to Black (Benjamin)

I am doing VERY poorly on my Goodreads promise of three books a month - I keep jumping from book to book halfway through and never seem to finish one. Perhaps because I keep buying more of the fuckers, and faster than any human can read.

~~~~~

I was in Folio Books in Brisbane last week (Archives Rare Books secondhand store was earlier in the week, no Oakley Hall in the Westerns section, damn) and, while I was buying the new biography of Stefan Zweig, I saw the latest Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) on the shelf, with a picture of Gabriel Byrne on the cover, dressed up in period costume almost as he was in the movie Miller's Crossing. Obviously they (who? BBC One and RTÉ One) have started placing the shambling Dublin pathologist, Dr Quirke, into a TV series! But I realised when I looked inside the cover that I was several books behind. I thought, hey, I won't buy it now anyway because bought-too-many-books-already/overweight-luggage/double-stacked-shelves/too-small-apartment (Ha, say my friends).

Back in Singers I go to check the last of the dour Quirke sagas I have read, the fourth - A Death in Summer. There it is, correctly sited in Fiction, alphabetical Author, publishing date order... with a bookmark poking forlornly out the top between pages 220 and 221. One third through. I didn't finish it. Oh, well there are a plethora (veritable, literal, actual) of other unfinished dusty* old tomes here, no great surprise there. I was no doubt enchantedly distracted by fresh pastures of augmented literary verdancy then as I still succumb to now.

I decided to restart it on the spot, catch up to the latest in the series and then download, ahem, purchase the TV shows.

~~~~~~

Straight away, just a few pages in, I knew why I had not finished it. It was not that I had been distracted by something else. I think instead I had consciously decided not to finish it. I didn't enjoy it, it was too light (despite the grisly death) for what I was expecting from the early books. Too much sunshine, or something (not even sure if it mentions sunshine, but...). I'd given up on it. When the author is named Black, you expect darkness. Perhaps the women are too beautiful, too photogenic, and that is where the sunshine comes from. But Quirke in love with that snooty-French bitch, the gorgeous, newly widowed (Femme Fatale alert) Francoise? You've got to be joking.

Sigh. Well... The plot also seemed (and still seems) terribly formulaic, something of a pastiche, a parody, an Agatha Christie-like passionless, vaguely intriguing mystery to read on the train. It seems to steal something from every other crime mystery ever written. Oh no, it's not suicide after all! The usual suspects; the rival blustery businessman fresh from verbal with the deceased; the surly, estranged daughter; the sensitive ex-con estate manager; the ice-hearted widow due for the inheritance; the businessman's mysterious son just back from (shades of Inspector Hound) Canada... This feeling was so strong, I recall I could almost see Banville/Black surrendering to a How To Write A Crime Mystery Writer's Workshop rigidity. The mindset that forces him to use hoary old tricks to keep us reading on past the chapter breaks. Perhaps they're not so much a cliff on which to hang, as a street gutter outside a pub to stumble over, but I hate that type of overly dramatic pause with a finishing sentence that doesn't finish anything. I might just be me, I despise airport (or train journey) thrillers because of it. It's an hiatus that clangs of ad-breaks for the TV shows (ironically), so that you can rush to the toilet... I fight against it. I prefer closure to the Perils of Pauline while I hold my piss. I much prefer watching cable-TV shows or movies that are edited to be watched all the way through, rather than to the fifteen minute ad-cycle of free-to-air TV I am forced to sit through with the FLOs in Australia. And it is the same with books.

Meanwhile other novels I have dug my head into lately (and not finished either, mostly) include ones by Thomas Bernhard, Jose Saramago, and Låszlo Krasznahorkai, writers who confront you with great slabs of un-paragraphed text for many, many pages, and even in Bernhard's case a whole novel, and when so the break does come, it comes not with a short gasp of suspense, but with a sigh of completeness. That's that part of the story done, OK? Now let me tell you the next bit...

Well yes, this ad-break method is inherent in the style of the genre Black/Banville's chosen to write, that of the unputdownable (take it to the loo with you) thriller, but it makes you wonder why he is just following someone else's sclerotic old rules half-heartedly, only half-seriously when he is such a master. He still writes as well as you'd expect of a Booker winning author (maybe Noble Prize short-listed?) and has sent me to dictionary.com now and then ("louring turrets" - louring: lowering, looming, threatening, as in dark storm clouds louring. As in turrets. A very Thomas Hardy word, don't you think?), and I think back on the masterly works of Banville as Banville, how Kepler captivated me, etc...

The title of the book itself:A Death In Summer**, it reeks of a TV show, doesn't it? Mid-summer. Murder. Sort of thing. From the start you know there's only going to be one corpse. There's a bit of mystery already gone. And it is not to be confused with the more Hemingwayesque title of William Trevor's Death In Summer. Death as a concept, as an abstraction, as a slaughterhouse. (Is Midsomer Murders about a serial killer?)

B/B's going to have to do something special to get this penny dreadful plot to rise above a Dame Agatha level of two-dimensionality. The sad fact is those cliffhanger devices work best when the story is thrilling already, but the intrigue of whether Sinclair will bang Quirke's daughter or not hardly moves me to insomnia. (Of course he will. Or maybe not.)

Having said all that, we know and love the man with more troubles than all the other crime mystery heroes combined, the multi-troubled, diffident but determined, the grown man still tormented by memories of a childhood in those horrific Irish orphanages, the poorly-reformed alcoholic, chain-smoking, overly curious Dr Quirke, surely enough.

~~~~~~

- Is it himself in this one?
- Aye, it surely is.
- And is he worth the flamin' effort? Just for himself, the man, at all?
- Aye, to be sure.

~~~~

Ah well, I keep pushing on... There's sure bound to be more about child-abusing priests, and the stories of other victims of the horror orphanages who had made it out even more negatively affected than did Dr Quirke. And Sinclair will bonk Phoebe. Or if not, definitely in the next book - I can wait to find out.

I'm sure blacker things will lour up suitably turret-like and ominous once I push past last time's point of abandonment. Then I can get on with rest of them.


E@L


* NTS: must berate the FDW for insufficient "attention to detail". (The catch-phrase of my old Chief Radiographer, who'd sweep every horizontal surface of your monthly allocated x-ray room for any particles of germ carrying dust: "Attention to detail, Mr E@L, is the hallmark of the good radiographer." As it is for almost every occupation, E@L kept muttering under his breath.)

** I wrote this before I read the much, much better informed and more forgiving Guardian review - I see cliché, he sees homage and due respect. The reviewer seems at least to have finished it before putting fingertips to keyboard.

Put Your Feet Up, Not Your Socks

E@L was in Australia, 8 - Feb 2015 - 13 Mar 2015. Phew, glad that's over. Working mostly, but 10 days off as well. Perth, Townsville(!?), Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane.

To have paid so much for every drink and every meal (chicken parmagiana [sic], three types!) for all that time. Man, that country is expensive.

Expenses: big bill...

~~~~~

And then, woah, E@L comes back to pay a mere $23 for his share of a massive feast of Schezuan specialities and loads of beer (with ice) on the streets of Chinatown, Singapore. OK a lot of the dishes were vegetarian (or close to, but hey, we are talking volume here.) Awesome! Man, this country is cheap.

And the few the remaining Dionysians walk up to Ang Sang Hill Rd and E@L pays $15 for that yap for doh (one for the road). Outrageous! Man, this country is expensive.

~~~~~

Meanwhile, on the plane back, earlier that day, IKYN, he's eating his dinner of eye filet, roasted root vegetables and creamy mash with a glass of Bordeaux (what, you good people of Singapore, etc, don't think E@L flies cattle class on long hops do you?), when a sense of nausea creeps up on E@L, a slowly enfolding miasma of awful, permeating stink... It takes a minute or so to register that something is wrong in fact. E@L is just sitting there, and the meal doesn't taste right, the wine lacklustre (it is only French).

Literally, the atmosphere here is bad. It dawns eventually that he is becoming enwrapped in a fearful cloud of noisome wrongness and that something really smells!

He doesn't know where the smell is coming from initially, whom is the source, the culprit, except that stench is of human origin. No shit not, piss... FEET. Like his own feet get when he has been wearing old sandals in the rain. Pong. Pure and simple, sickening and foul.

And a roll of fawn cotton socks, monogrammed with a brand if not the owner's name, strikes him as incongruous.

Swear to God, the guys sitting next to him has taken the complementary pair of useless sock/slippers they give you in long hauls in Business Class, but rather than place them over his socks, he has taken the socks off, tucked them into a ball and plonked them ... wait for it ... on the tray for the small storage slot on the back of the seat in front of him. Right out in the open, up high.

Here: to give you an idea.

What the bromodrotic fuck?

What sort of ignorant creature would do this, you ask of E@L?

Let's test E@L's powers of description. Well, first of all he's a man a bit older than E@L (past middle-age by now); pale skin, loose around the jawline; light hair, curly and thinning; a bit of a paunch but no more than you'd expect; steel-glasses; well-dressed (second time in a few days well-dressed men have offended E@L: another story in Brisbane re: locked keys in car, need bus fare) in pale slacks and two-tone polo shirt; and he's eating the crispy skinned cod filet. Perhaps that's why he doesn't notice?

But when you think about it, why wouldn't a man who looks intelligent enough, mature enough, successful enough, why wouldn't he realise that it is simply rude, inconsiderate, and woefully ignorant to place your socks up somewhere in view while you and others are eating. This is the sort of thing a mother should have whupped out of him as a youngster.

Manners. This man is bereft of manners.

~~~~~~

The feet can be a source of great offense in Asia as you know, even beyond power to demolish the olfactory aesthetics of the moment. Typically people have outside shoes which they leave at the door, and inside shoes, or they go besocked or barefoot. Dirty, profane, disgusting, bad luck. You shouldn't point with your toes, or place your soles of your feet (or shoes) in the direction of certain South-East Asians, particularly those who are Buddhist.

[There is some interesting (to some) Japanese porn about feet - footjobs, enejaculated toes, the like. What is it with the Japanese?]

~~~~~~

E@L shakes his head. It must be the socks, of course. Yes, no doubt: This nauseating fog is a characteristic of a uniquely sock/foot emanation.

He doesn't get angry, he gets mildly offended - hey, he IS mildly offended. "Excuses me sir, are they your socks?" With a slight twist of bitter disgust at the end.

Untaken aback, he leans forward, pops them under his nose, and says, very convinced, "They don't smell."

E@L only partially stifles a guffaw of incredulity. "I beg to differ," counters E@L.

The man drops his socks to the floor, and as if to dismiss E@L, continues to eat and watch his movie.

So, E@L shakes his head again. And slowly, his appetite challenged, he chews into a chunk steak as it were cardboard, orders another vin cru bourgeois, ignores the ignorant savage right back at (or away from, it would have to be) him.

Well, yes, of course it was the socks. With them out of public view the foul air gradually dissipates and, E@L presumes, is recycled - to offend someone else in the plane, probably down at the rear end where lighter gases, such as body odour and (once upon a time) cigarette smoke, slowly driven back with the plane's slight accelerations, gather. Back where you'd think the unwashed and malodorous would typically reside and not up in the classy end where businessmen, and E@L, not to mention the jerk who was beside him, prefer to sit. Safely ensconced, unassailed by fell aromas. You'd think.

~~~~~~

After the meal, the man unapologetically but not rudely it must be said, gathered his stuff, stepped over E@L's discretely shod feet and moved to an unoccupied seat by the window at the rear of the section. Open the window man, let the stink out.

Fuck him, smelly old twat man.

E@L

Jasons

The Singapore food market for expats and Mercedes-driving locals is Cold Storage. It's run by Dairy Farm Holdings. Now Dairy Farm is a place in Singapore, so that makes us think that it is a local company, right? But people, it's, um, not really. Not at all in fact.

It is managed out of Bermuda (as if Singapore's taxes weren't low enough), and uber-owned, surprise-surprise, by the Jardine Matheson group. Those are the charming fuckers who made it big by sneaking around and eventually usurping British East India Company's monopoly on trade (in particular opium) with the Chinese in the early-mid C19th. The drug trade caused the death and suffering of countless Chinese and was threatening to bankrupt their place, but it was raking back in all the silver the English had paid for tea and silk, so England didn't seem to care.

All this triggered the Opium Wars and, as they say, to the victor go the spoils, such as Hong Kong, and J-M haven't looked back since. Well maybe they were glancing back a little bit in the lead-up to 1997's Handover. However, to put them in perspective, it's probably accurate enough to consider them the Mexican drug cartels of those heady (woozy) times.

~~~~~~~

Cold Storage's specialty, top-end, Australians only/mostly, woah-expensive, organic only/mostly supermarket brand is Jasons Marketplace, or in some manifestations, Jasons The Gourmet Grocer. Jasons it is, note, in a Finnegans Wake sort of mythical plurality of Joyce's here comes everybody trope, calling upon the Platonic concept of the ideal Jason, not Jason's.

They now have stores in Taiwan as well.

~~~~~~

FYI, Dairy Farms' low-end, peasant-level consumables are slapped up at Seven-Eleven, and cheap, peasant-level consumable furniture at their IKEA stores.

Singapore expats, being equal with HK expats (often indistinguishable, often the same individuals) as the world's most conspicuously conspicuous consumers, love throwing away their money at the place. S$19 for a tub of strawberries? You beaut!

There's a new Jasons opening around the corner from E@LGHQ vewwwy vewwwy soon. You can bet E@L will be there whenever his recipes call for organic fennel bulbs (which used to be a giant weed growing free and untended along the riverbanks of the Barwon River in Geelong) and biodynamic rhubarb, chia seeds, or gluten free peanut butter.

BTW, the Hong Kong brand equivalent Cold Storage is Wellcome, and Jasons is known in HK, I believe, if I believe Wikipaedia that is, as MarketPlace By Jason.

They all seem to be doing very well, with 2013's world-wide total sales "in excess" (redundant*) of US$11Billion, thank you very much.

~~~~~~

However, on another little island with a more celebrated military history**, Jasons didn't really work out all that well...

Valletta, Malta

E@L

* since when has $11Billion NOT been an excess.

** the whole frackin' island was awarded the St George Cross! I bet the Maltese people, 1,300*** of whom had died as the Italians and then the Germans carpet bombed the place, were satisfied with that...

*** just over half of the number of people in the Nigerian towns around Baga killed by Boko Haram Islamists two weeks ago. (No medal awarded.)



(Point of this post? These photos of course.)