What I did on my holidays

The imminence of my first foreign work trip, and a guilty feeling that it’s an awfully long time since my last transmission has inspired a last minute attempt to catch up. The title seems broadly appropriate since academic endeavours have taken a back seat these last few weeks. But of course one can never get away from them altogether. I usually have to spend one to two hours every day going through my feeds. What with the Ukraine and Iran wars  going on, there’s a lot of the maritime to keep up with, and one must keep current. Plus academic discourse with colleagues around the world. Plus the completion of a book chapter on the maritime dynamics of North East Asia. Even so this has taken up a much smaller proportion of my waking time than usual and so constitutes a ‘holiday’ of a sort.

I have partly justified this by the need to correct the cumulative neglect of virtually every aspect of my domestic circumstances that has built up over the past few years  when my flitting about all over the place, and of course, the absence of Cherry to keep an eye of things, meant letting things drift along without checking. I hadn’t quite realised quite how bad things had got until mid Summer. 

Take the garden for example. My disappearing gardeners, my absences and the drought had turned parts of the garden into a version of Borneo and others into the Sahara. The weight of the overgrown and untrimmed roses and clematis on the pond pergola was starting to destroy it, cutting it back is difficult because the boarding underneath has rotted putting one at high risk of falling into a pond, now low and covered in green slime. Soil shrinkage under many of the brick walling in the kitchen garden has collapsed much of it, fences are rotten, gates won’t open, parts of the garden frankly impenetrable. I could go on. Not all bad of course, leeks, carrots and tomatoes doing well, and the various wild animals inhabiting the garden seem happy enough. 

The Cross-in-Hand gang did most of the grafting in turning at least some of my apples into juice. It’s been a weird season with weird apples and we ended up with nearly 10 big bottles of what can only be called apple juice concentrate ! Never was a celebratory supper in the King’s Arms more deserved. The standard walk round the village was included in their visit and a close encounter with some very curious cows.

My business arrangements have been in much the same state. Issues slowly being knocked off one by one. Apart from Income tax, the biggest issue now remaining is gouging a fee I am owed out of the Pentagon  an operation which I regard as something of a forlorn hope.

So, much to do in this holiday, and much has been done. The acquisition of a gardener who actually turns up when he is supposed to has made a tremendous difference and the Garden Restoration Project is now well underway and things are beginning to look very different. New fencing installed. Major works on-going around and between the ponds etc. Etc etc. Likewise the house. I was forced to shift house insurance when my current insurer which had been taken over by one of the big companies said they couldn’t cover me any more. Finding a new one led to the discovery that these days one has to have one’s electricity system checked for conformity with current regulations every 5 years. Ours hadn’t been since 1997 when we moved in ! The check revealed 48 major faults which it took two very obliging young men a week to fix, crawling and hammering all over the place. With success, and I was presented with a 52 page certificate of compliance – and a big bill at the end of it all. Having thatch and a wood-burner also freaks some insurers out. The relevant chimney has to be 1.4 m above the thatch. Proving this meant taking a good picture of the chimney counting up the layers of bricks and showing that it was amply tall enough. The picture also showed that I did not have a spark guard ( a bad thing apparently) but did have an anti-bird guard (a good thing). You learn something every day. And of course, a bit of the thatch does need doing, so that’s all arranged too ! But for that to feasible some serious tree clearing will be necessary. One thing leading to another.....

A variety of minor works as well. Simon managed to get into the apex of the kids’ room to paint over an objectionable bit of bodging by the previous owner which has been bothering me for the last 29 years. Also,  a  long time ago a friend of mine sold me some 16^th Century linenfold panelling, which we got installed very nicely in various parts of the house. What he didn’t tell me was that he had a few more bits left over which he gave me on his last visit. For the last five years or so they’ve been knocking around in my garage. I can’t bear the thought of them being burnt or chucked away by any future owner of the house. But now, at last I’ve found someone who can renovate and install them and the process is underway. And so on and so forth.

Much the same with my health. All manner of the kind of issues that ancients like me suffer from, being given their equivalent of a MOT. Blood, eyes, turbulent tum, feet etc etc all now being attended to in order to delay my shuffling off this mortal coil quite yet.

I don’t want to give the impression of unrelieved industry during this holiday period of course. I have met up with a number of old friends including an ex-naval type who once hosted us for several glorious days in Hawaii. We lunched at Polly’s in Marlborough which Cherry and I patronised when passing through at the end of our honeymoon 58 years ago for heaven’s sake. Several village events and a whisky party over the road with my ancient ex SBS colleague and two lady police officers. (Too complicated to explain !)

 A local church tour for which as usual I was the unofficial photographer – providing pics for their magazine. A highlight of this was a visit to the chapel at the College where No 2 son resided for his A levels. His former history master was the guide. Also got to see the neolithic mound in the grounds and this seriously weird beech tree.

And, later in a busy day when I was chauffeuring a friend from the village on the tour,  a handless Tudor family after an attack on their tomb by a parliamentary fanatic during the Civil War. What strange things activists do !

And then of course there was the Clovelly week with Team Powell. I had my reservations about whether I would be able to keep up with their high-powered operational tempo, but all was well as it turned out. I went a day early to revisit the church and the court gardens and do the walk down to Marsland mouth  right on the Cornish/Devon border. It was where an excellent TV version of Sense and Sensibility was filmed. I actually prefer it to the famous one with Emma Thompson, but haven’t yet seen the very latest version.

I also managed the long slog back up to the cottage in the dark after supper at the Red Lion, pictured here. Every where was very quiet as though we were the only visitors. Magical.

I was also pleased to do some surfing with the traditional wooden board. Got some good runs too, but ignominiously had sometimes to be helped up after I had ‘grounded’ ! Of course, I tailored my efforts carefully. Didn’t follow them out to the sand at Buck’s Mill at low tide which meant scrambling over several hundred yards of slippery rock, but even so was able to keep my eye on them from the high-tide line. My quite modest  telephoto lens helped. Look at these two pics. One of the general scene. The second shows them at the base of the square looking rock in the middle of the first pic on the sea horizon. You can just make out  Grandaughter No 1, reading ‘The Origin of Species ‘ in preparation for her debut at Oxford the following week. Cameras still do have some advantages over phones !

My trips to and from Clovelly usually involve a nostalgic visit to Dulverton starting with a morning cappuccino at a very nice coffee shop and of course the marvellous second-hand book shop, where I was delighted to find a book listing all the Sussex holdings in the Domesday book. On the way back I came across Knighton Combe one of those entrancing hidden little wooded valleys where the deer hide - Knighton combe.

 So actually, there was actually quite a bit of holiday ! Maybe it also explains why I think I need another one. 

An Addendum

 

The queued pictures finally arrived several days after the despatch of the last blog, and the much debated caricature turned up as well, so here they are. You must surely conclude that by showing this caricature I have at least demonstrated that I have no illusions about myself ! And I can’t think they meant it nastily as I was very well treated by my hosts indeed. The wrinkled throat was particularly perceptive I thought

They couldn’t of course have done anything about the weather at the monsoon time of the year when my visit took place. Continuous and dramatically high winds, bending the palm trees over, and churning the sea white. So I didn’t spend much time on my balcony sun lounger. All the Churches were all shut too. Was taken to a very special local restaurant under one arch of the main river bridge.  After dark, it seemed in the middle of a rubbish dump in the jungle - but the food was excellent.

Before that I had visited Newport, Rhode Island, the first of two 'naval war colleges' this month. Completely different experience. Much of this glorious 18th Century port comprises whole sections of weatherboarded houses of the period, now commanding fantastic prices, and some of the being elevated to cope with rising sea-levels. All charm and graciousness. one of favourite places is the Redwood Library founded in the 1730s and free to enter - real elegance. Nice collection of leather-bound books of the period, survivors after we raided the town during the War of American Independence and liberated a lot of them. Its churches are much the same. This one especially with an unusual  central pulpit for an Anglican church. Went to a service there with a friend It has a Washington pew; I don't know what he would have thought had he seen Queen Elizabeth using it 180 years or so later.

Later, in Singapore,  I attended a very jolly evening at the British high commission with a couple of friends. I only record this as evidence that these things can be fun but that I was very lucky. It was a very naval occasion, with ceremonial flag lowering and all the trimmings. The canapes were supplied by the crew of a small visiting warship. In retrospect – maybe not so good as both my companions went down almost immediately with really ferocious food poisoning, not hospitalisation but doctors called. Even though I went out of my way to wolf the canapés down ( as I didn’t want to bother getting a late supper afterwards) I got away with it. Really lucky there I think.

The luck held when I got back, because as I reached the house I found a message from my cleaning lady saying she had got word of a new gardener setting up business. There and then, suitcase in hand, I phoned him up, he came for a look round that afternoon, pursed his lips at the state of things, and I hired him straightaway. This, plus the onset of a few showers and some things I have been able to get on with, have improved prospects for the garden immensely. In fact improvements are already evident, though there’s still a huge amount to do. At least I managed to mow the paddock, reducing the fire-risk somewhat. Getting the potato crop up was instructive. The drought meant no pest damage at all but a small yield of small but perfectly dry potatoes needing no washing. So not all is gloom and doom !

This time I also spent a jolly family weekend away at Cross-in-Hand for No 2 grandaughter’s 8^th. How she is growing up ! Gandaughter No 1 just got her results, excellent as expected,  so off to Oxford to do archaeology and anthropology. Nice to see the historical genes surviving ! More hopeful vibes were also reinforced by a visit to the absolutely charming Ightham Mote, in Kent.

One of those extraordinary buildings that have been made use of instead of converted into contemporary living. Full of ancient quirks and oddities. An inspiration, although I think granddaughter number 2 was more interested in the archery and table tennis in the play area. Not only did she hit the target with her arrow, it was with such force that she knocked the board over. Great stuff !  She had already demonstrated her athletic prowess by successively knocking two coconuts out of their holders at a local coconut shy, to the amazement of her parents who had signally failed to hit anything. A future Olympian maybe.

So, this much delayed quiet draw down period is finally off to a good start. Hopefully a calmer time will reduce some of the lines noted by my Indian caricaturist, though it's not likely to much for the ears.    

Apologia

 

This something as a time placing apologia. The last few weeks have been hectic with three separate trips to India, Newport and Singapore. The notion of a relaxed  Summer to get on top of things hasn’t happened yet but now will, since I have no foreign commitments until October. And as I will show later there is a lot to catch up with. I am also stymied by the fact that, whatever I try I just cannot get either of my phones to send on the photos I took – they stay resolutely in the queued box. As a result I will not be able to conceal the fact that this transmission is as dull as ditchwater by some nice illustrations ! On top of that the prize exhibit,  a caricature of me drawn by one of my Indian students, has gone missing

So here we go, with apologies. The first trip was a last (?) venture to Newport. Much less arduous and good fun. My hotel overlooked the sea. It was an opportunity to see old friends and familiar places again. It was very nice to meet up with former colleagues but a bit sad to hear the news about how badly they have been affected by the various “reforms” being introduced by the terrible Pete Hegseth. The current President of the Naval War College, is energetic, committed and able – but black so he’s being retired. Surprise, surprise. It’s all so stupid, as the College is an enormous source of ‘soft power’ for American interests and disembowelling it like it is totally counter-productive. I doubt the programme I’m associated with will survive.

But one bonus of the Newport trip was that it also allowed me to tie off – at long last -  the task of recovering the contents of a closed HSBC bank account which got transferred to the State of Rhode Island’s ‘Unclaimed Property Division.’ Registering a claim to get it back and finally achieving this took nearly a year and a half ! It made a big difference when I was finally able to establish a personal relationship with one of their people, but their procedures were glacial. So many precautions against fraud and money-laundering and a banking system that still prefers cheques over electronic transfer, and even that is done by wire not SWIFT. Oh, and we never send cheques abroad ! Still it’s done now and safely tucked up in my US bank. I also spend a couple of hours there inside the naval base transferring the equivalent by wire to the UK with a very helpful young lady and a very large desk-top. Complicated stuff.

A few days later there was India, another in a flurry of surprise invitations. It’s as though the word has got around that I am down-sizing and people conclude I am bowing out and want a swan song. This is kind-of half true. So I don’t mind being seen this way if they do !

           One unexpected 'freebie' from it - and there were lots of them, all good to decorate the garage with - was that caricature of me drawn by a student, I mentioned earlier. The directing staff thought it so unfair they debated getting rid of it ! An uncanny resemblance to Yoda, but with bigger ears. Despite that the whole trip went off very well and I was thoroughly looked after throughout. The only issue was the overnight flights out and back with brief stopovers in Qatar - a war zone, though once there you would never think it.

Also the weather wasn’t what I expected. Grey skies, heavy rain and strong Monsoon winds, blowing the sea white and madly tossing the palms around. It was very humid too. It was a very posh hotel full of locals taking advantage of the off-season rates and watching the waves crashing against the defended dockside jetty of the old Portuguese fort. I was the only non Indian there. This should have been the view from my balcony. Although I had a large sheltered protected balcony, it was only equipped with two recliners which were the most fiendishly uncomfortable I have ever come across with all the bends in quite the wrong places, so I couldn’t spend much time there.

I was royally entertained and taken for a trip to another fort nearby and several churches. Sadly two were closed and the third jam-packed for the funeral of someone who was obviously very popular. Just a quick peak inside, full of bells and smells, a large traditional choir – all very Portuguese, of course.

Finally Singapore, helping run a course on Maritime Security for getting on for 150 naval/coastguard officers mainly from Southeast Asia but other parts of the world as well. Totally painless with eating out, a nice hotel and a very enjoyable couple of days in the Singapore National Archive reading up on the 1930s. Fascinating stuff. Most of the week was at the naval base, but I also had a few days at the RSIS for meetings and giving a staff presentation.

So, naturally tired, what did I come home to ?

A lot of domestic business, getting the house insured . and its ancient electrics tested, the car serviced, doctor’s appointments sorted – no easy task these days, etc etc,  all behind schedule and in part a justification for cutting down. Worst of all the view of the garden from all my windows. The combination of weeks without rain, my absence and a totally invisible gardener who doesn’t do phone calls or emails has reduced it to the worst it’s ever been, with dead and dying things wherever one looks. These two dystopian pictures of our once elegant gravel garden and breakfast patio gives you some indication of the focus of my attention over the next couple of months – I hope.

There's no place like home ?

 

 

When I got back from my last long teaching spell in Singapore, I rather thought that I would have  a lot more time and opportunity to correct the cumulative neglect of house and garden that has been the inevitable consequence of so much time away. My first sight of home indeed underlined the point that such tasks were eminently worthwhile and urgent. After an over-enthusiastic adhesion to ‘no-mow-May’ by my gardening team (in a state of transition because Nathan my original after 15 years or so had selfishly decided to get married and move to the New Forest) the house and garden looked abandoned. I was pleased to find there were no squatters in it. Perhaps that was because as I gather one passer-by in the All Cannings Gardening Club reportedly said ‘you can’t see Geoff’s house anymore.'

Lest I be drummed out of the Club, things had to be done.  For a few days all went very well on both fronts, house business and garden. . I was both surprised and delighted to hear that the State of Rhode Island had at last got its act together and sent a cheque covering the contents of my closed down American HSBC bank account to my poste restante in Newport. That took over a year of sometimes quite consolidated effort- and I’ve still got to find a way of cashing in a paper check now that UK banks have stopped doing so for ones in foreign currencies. Another complication is that my US bank is on the naval base at Newport and I don’t have access to it anymore. But I’ll cross that bridge shortly when I go there in a week or so’s time.

The peripatetic academic life style which this illustrates for some reason seems to be accelerating rather than winding down. The invitations keep coming; it’s as though they have heard that I am down-sizing and want a last chance to get me before I finally go gaga. It’s not the travel so much, but all the administrative nausea that goes with it, which I find so time-consuming and sometimes get badly wrong. But one completely out-of-the-blue example was a bit of an exception in some ways. The Tug Owners of Europe had got wind of me through an ex-Marine Colonel I knew from Greenwich days whose son worked for them and who thought I would be a good choice for a talk on the background to a recent European Union directive for them to think about their security in a time of much enhanced risk. .

They were preparing a big conference in Istanbul, which I like and so jumped at. It was held in a pretty spectacular hotel on the Bosphorus. An ex-palace actually, the sort of place where they give you 8 different choices of the kind of pillow you want. My balcony was right beside one of its Arc de Triomphe type entrances.

It was all very grand, with a Dinner Jacketed, gala dinner on the waterside, an opportunity to sail the startlingly blue Bosphorus and another dinner in another ex-palace. An Army colleague and I managed to squeeze in a grockling trip to yet a third one with lovely waterside grounds. All very over-the top and Trumpian. The Sultans did like their palaces. The conference was interesting too, and I found I knew several of the attendees. I learned a lot more about tugs than I had known before. Here’s me pontificating.

On the gardening front, a major achievement was finally to secure the services of Martin my new part-time gardener. So far so good. I also had time to engage in some useful wilderness-taming, especially hacking into shape my roadside hedge, replacing long-withered bean plants and putting in new ones to get the veggie garden back on track. Things are now looking a lot more reasonable. Indeed over my now customary breakfast or evening G&T spot in the pond-side mini patio recently I suddenly thought how nice everything was now looking. Admittedly from here you can't see that the pond has a leak and is full of pondweed that I need to get rid of. Moreover my memory for plant names is almost as bad as my memory for peoples' so I don't know what I'm looking at, more a question of wild geraniums, white things, poppies, robinia, purple things, yellow things and ornamental grasses. Most I don't remember planting. They are just there. 

All the same, though, perhaps something of a response to the jaundiced view of my barber recently, who said that after foreign travel, you realised ‘how rubbish everything was in this country.’ She was a very nice lady (even using the air blower down my shirt because I was so hot) but I forbore to ask what she had in mind, fearing political discord with someone with scissors in her hand. I merely said that wasn’t how I felt, mentioning the general look of the place and our much more gracious driving standards than, say, Singapore. But I guess I’m lucky living where and as I do, and so not in the best position to judge. So far, my home is still my castle and sanctuary, if not quite on the scale of the Sultan's.

Farewell drinkies in a shop-house

 

Farewell drinkies in a shop house

This month in Singapore has just whizzed by and was much busier frankly than I had anticipated. Usefully and enjoyably so, though. Part of this was the fact that I got in a bit of teaching at SAFTI, the Singapore Staff college. I do actually enjoy teaching – one of the reasons why I was  bit sad to say I definitely wasn’t going to do my 4 month Elective again last time. I’ll still have my so-called ‘Advisor’ role, though. Because it takes so long for Elective courses to go through the Approval process, a new colleague has been drafted to teach it as well as set up his alternative course for later. He’s panicking a bit and I will probably be doing a bit of the ‘teach the teacher’ work the next time I come in July.

But this time in addition to doing all the usual things, I’ve been particularly engaged with Singapore’s wild-life this time around. When he set up Singapore as an independent state in 1965, he was determined to make the place a ‘green city’.  In addition to the usual feng shui reasons of appeasing the gods and trying to make the place a nice one to live in, he wanted everyone to see that Singapore, was enlightened, rich and sufficiently organised to engage in and maintain parks and streets thickly lined with attractive trees and bushes. This is in striking contrast to other cities in Southeast Asia where if there are any green spaces at all they often look accidental, stunted and neglected. One of the most striking examples of this is Bidari park, which a couple of my colleagues took me to one weekend. This is a relatively new development in part based on a Japanese Garden created in the British era and an old cemetery. It’s quite extraordinary and although closely surrounded by tall apartment blocks and shopping malls on every side, you are plunged into kind of manicured rain forest absolutely packed with exotic birds, lizards, squirrels and most amazing of all otters which you see splashing around in the small lake catching and eating fish. It was a terrific visit. The challenge for Singapore is how to keep going with a rapidly expanding population, with new building going on everywhere. The population has got half as big again since 2000 and is still rising. Necessary but difficult to cope with. Maybe a third are temporary workers from overseas, especially southern Asia.

There was a downside to my green adventure though. It was blisteringly hot and extremely humid. Glasses, binoculars and camera kept fogging up  and I was absolutely dripping so trying to capture humming birds fluttering about in the leaves was a real challenge. Even my colleagues (Indonesian and Singaporean) had a definite sheen to them. There are less exotic things to see in the UK, but climate is not such a problem. 

Another problem aspect of the climate is sudden little warning torrential and often very loud thunderstorms. Really ferocious as these two shots taken out of my window suggest. Caught outside and even with an umbrella you can be completely soaked in a minute.

             

I  encountered another local challenge when walking alongside the river another day, not doing any harm to anyone. All of a sudden there was a big bang on the top of my head. I had been dive-bombed from behind by a crow. It did it a second time, until I turned on it and in an undignified way chased it away from its perch. The ‘attack’ was quite painful, but there didn’t seem to be any blood. I suppose it must have taken exception to my white hair, because you don’t see a lot of it in Singapore. Sunday is the day when hordes of Philippine and Burmese maids congregate for pic-nic get-togethers in the public parks and there was a group nearby; they were very concerned and sympathetic to a poor old chap being attacked like that. It was in the bunch of trees on the other side of the river, opposite the famous Fullerton Hotel/Old Post office and by the-almost- as-famous Glaswegian built Cavenagh bridge of 1869 which takes you over to the splendid Asian Civilisations Museum.

The other commitment has been a sometimes hectic series of social engagements in striking contrast to my normal life at home. Last week there were six of them ! One of the most interesting of these was a visit to a hawker centre where one of the stalls was run by the auntie-in-law of my colleague Jane. First time I’ve eaten pig-tail, shrimp and noodles – it wasn’t too bad, but I’m not sure I would go out of my way to choose it again.

In fact I didn’t choose it this time ! The whole thing was really interesting, especially chatting to Auntie. The stall was in Chinatown and as it turns out directly above the place where I get my Lapsang Souchong tea. Auntie and her family have been running the stall for 40 years, but it’s  a hard life. She gets up at 0200 to prepare everything and works until about 1400 on her feet all the time. She had a friend even older than she was helping out. Some of these stalls have a 3000 dollar rental per month. Since the average price of her meals is less than 10 dollars, and she has food, costs, staff, transport, and energy costs as well it’s not an easy way to make a living.

     The centre is one of many in Singapore and also one of the biggest. At a Monday lunchtime it was absolutely packed with office and others queuing for their delicacies, but the government is concerned that this distinctive aspect of Singapore life is getting harder to sustain. They provide subsidies to help keep it going. There must have been hundreds of locals there, (I didn’t see a single non-local) of all ages; they love eating there but don’t want to undertake such responsibilities themselves. A familiar problem. Like every other developed country they have a labour shortage in such jobs and often employ temporary immigrants from the area, though Auntie doesn’t. Real old school. Appropriate since one of the diners was Singapore’s leading historian, sitting opposite me.

Talking of heritage, a very different experience was attending a farewell drinkies part at one of Singapore's iconic shop-houses. Built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they have very narrow frontages but go back a long way. The shop would be in the front room, with an open air fountain or water source in the middle and accommodation and storage rooms behind. This one was converted into five mini-flats one of which was being rented by a departing colleague of mine who I have known for decades. Nowadays highly valued as heritage, they have a price to match. This one is worth about five million Sing dollars. Very enviable. Singapore like us went through a bad period in the late 1960s and 1970s in disregarding heritage, but they now protect it scrupulously. 

Since this is my last week here for a while I have been finishing things off and starting to pack up. A bigger job than usual since I am taking back the stuff I needed for the apartment I needed for longer stays and have left here for the past couple of years. I shall need to abandon some it though.  I thought I should show a picture of my main place of work at NTU. My office is quite a posh one reserved for visitors and overlooking the greenery and the trees on the other side of the building.

And talking of greenery again, I have squeezed in some more walking trips to the Botanic Gardens and got some nice shots of birds and general views, but they are all on a camera disc which I can’t currently access as I forgot to bring any of my disc readers and couldn’t face buying yet another one. Getting them will be a job for later this week when I get back to the UK. I did however manage to record a cooperative monitor lizard on my phone. Modestly sized he or she ( I don’t know how you sex a monitor) is one of hundreds at the gardens   

 

Oh to be in England, now that May is there

 

And yes, I know it’s really April, but it will do. Before departing for Singapore for a month, I managed to squeeze in a trip to the New Forest. Then the muted browns and dark greens of winter still predominated, but in the garden spring was bursting out all over and floppy bright light greens were everywhere. May is my favourite month and it’s a shame that my teaching at the Singapore staff college always appears at that time, but I’ll be back soon and hope that by the time I am the late ash and oak will be out as well. However my two (! ) temporary gardeners will have been observing ‘no mow May’ so it will look very lush and abandoned I expect.

In fact I had to leave a bit earlier than usual as I had been invited by the High Commission to an engagement session of the Five Power Defence Arrangements in Malaysia, at the enormous Butterworth air force base near Penang. Penang was one of our favourite places in the old days especially the truly iconic E&O (Eastern and Oriental) Hotel – which is Penang’s answer to Singapore’s Raffles and originally operated by the same entrepreneurial pair of Armenian brothers back in the late 19^th Century. Really stylish and surely one of the nicest swimming pools anywhere.  The old city itself is fascinating too redolent of the same period and predominantly Chinese in atmosphere. Not quite so well-manicured as Singapore with bits of romantic decay here and there – especially the local cemetery. Unfortunately, I wasn’t housed there and only drove through it en route from and to the airport. Instead, I was in another ultramodern hotel (but much less offensive than the Rotterdam one) still on the island rather than the mainland but quite far away. In an any case it was all jam-packed so not much time either. See if you can pick me out in the inevitable closing session.

Otherwise, I had a much more leisurely trip over to Jakarta to perform for their naval staff college and the University of Indonesia, plus meeting some colleagues, now known for sometime and having a number of interesting meals as usual.

Here's me looking rather serious. Limited didn't refer to my expertise (or at least I don't think so) It meant by invitation only. It was all very informal and I wore my blue batik shirt for the occasion. 

At the former I was presented with yet another shield that I inadvertently left on the returning aircraft. I had some excuse for this as most unusually for Singapore Airlines it didn’t go like clockwork. For a start, the RSIS team jumped into a flight earlier than booked. Then just as we were about to take-off the news came in that Changi airport was closed because of bad weather. So we had to sit tight on the tarmac for a couple of hours waiting for it to clear. Fortunately, I was able to keep myself entertained by plugging into 5 episodes of HBO’s ‘Veep,’  profane but funny. We eventually made it, still an hour ahead of that originally planned. It really had been a heavy storm, with a fair amount of flooding. Its unusually hot and muggy here at the moment 33-37 and really, really humid. What some ex-pats call ‘three shirt weather’. Heaven only knows how our Victorian predecessors – who made absolutely no concession to the climate – bore it with their elaborate dresses, ties, frock and waist coats. No wonder they died early. The following two shots taken from my window perhaps 5 minutes apart capture the spirit of a the tropical downpours usual in the afternoon accompanied of course by loud cracks of thunder and lightening. So that’s another reason for wistful thoughts about the crisper English versions of May.

Even so, I’ve had one or two minor excursions to favoured places, that have to be planned around the ferocious and torrential showers that happen most days . Almost everywhere there’s construction going on reducing the green spaces that Lee Kwan Yew insisted on as a visible emphasis of building his Singapore. Despite a hugely inflated population, they just about manage an impressive balance – between the green and the concrete, the old and new. The potential threat is illustrated by this slightly skewed shot of the out of window of a MRT carriage window of new-building cranes crowding around the Chinese Gardens.

It looks terrible but will probably be OK in the end. All the same Singapore is a lot better designed and built than either Jakarta or KL, but it’s not easy or free. A tribute towards the concept of ‘guided democracy’ perhaps ! Certainly, that’s how it seems given the crazy consequences of the unguided versions in the US and Europe. It all contributes to the widespread gloom about the state of things globally, that I encounter amongst my colleagues everywhere I go. 

But the best way of looking on the brighter side is indeed to plunge into nature, whether to grow cabbages, spot birds, supervise the cutting down of dead trees or just wander about enjoying it in the Botanic gardens here or back home next month.  Something else to keep one going and to look forward to.    

Grandfather's back

 

But no I don’t mean me, Instead I’m referring to the family longcase clock. About 6 months ago, ‘his’ rope broke. This is a circular loop of rope used to wind he mechanism. To make  the required loop , one end has to be spliced with the other. This is a skilled and lengthy process but always produces a join which inevitably acts as  a critical point of failure however well done. For this reason more modern long case clocks have chains rather than ropes. When it finally went, I had to dismantle the clock and take his innards to a very traditional clock doctor in Salisbury whose family have been looking after him since the 1950s. I remember the first time that I assumed responsibility for arranging his care when they came to my mother’s house in the mid 1970s. ‘Ooo’ they said ‘this an oldie….look an external striking mechanism.’ Soon after I did some research on the maker – a John Price of Chichester who was active for a brief period in the 1780s, when the clock probably came into the family, then living at West Dean five miles north of Chichester. Anyhow, he’s now back tick-tocking away remarkably accurately despite his 250 years. Not worth much, as such clock aren’t in fashion but very nice for someone like me to have around still. I really missed him.

It’s the family associations as much as anything of course. My father, an engineer, did much too reconstitute his workings and polish him up apparently, so family lore says after a couple of decades of black-faced silence, propped up against an angled floor in a Portsmouth house condemned as it was sliding into a bog ! And that sort of association goes for much else in the house that many others might well regard as clutter.

I was thinking about his on my latest foreign trip, a brief hop-over o Rotterdam where the conference organisers have put me up – and I do mean ‘up’ – on the top 23^rd  floor of an uncompromisingly modern hotel by the harbour. It’s one of those pretentious places I most dislike. It could be anywhere, its avowedly minimalist, with no handles to the drawers, the cupboard doors or the coffee mug. In its desire to be different even the wood in the three cornered pencil is black. There’s no place to put anything, or even to work despite the generous size of the room. The coffee set is crammed onto a tiny space too small to operate it in. You have to take stuff out and put it on the floor. For all its determined stylishness, the whole place is ridiculous  - and I daresay not cheap. Give me my clutter anyday !

This break in the UK has been almost free of academic endeavour and very refreshing too, though equally busy. Lots of family events (including family trips to Bodiam castle and Bowood House and adventure playground)  which I won’t recount as many of my audience have participated in them but a joy for me having been away from them all so long. All sorts of other little things too, like being reminded that it’s not just Singapore that has fantastic trees – this 

‘weeping plane’ was amazing.

 

Some family history of course, especially in the form of side-trips when going to, and returning from, Burgess Hill which provides options for explorations of different  bits of ‘Till Country’. On one of them I even managed a walk in the New Forest and seeing signs of in-coming spring all around.

More recently, when returning from shopping in Devizes, I saw that I still had 12 ‘free’ electric miles on the clock and on an impulse decided to visit Adam’s grave on the hills behind the house. Partly to see whether I could make it, when feeling slightly under the weather. Pleased to say I could. Threading my way through thousands of cow-slips  I got to the top. Magnificent views all around and apart from the wind I had it all to myself. A first encounter with larks ascending. Downland is my favourite country I think, perhaps not surprising since the family seems to have lived in it for a thousand years !

It was all very quiet and peaceful – in strong contrast to the roar of battle here back in 715 when the Mercians first attacked and defeated the forces of Wessex. Looking north it was easy to see the way they would have come following the little modern road snaking its way through a valley in the downs. From there it was only a gentle though long rise to the earthen fortifications around the Adam’s grave burial mound where the Wessex force had probably established themselves. Behind the Wessex forces a steep drop down into Pewsey vale, awful country for a retreat after defeat. Wessex got its revenge however a century later in 825 at nearby Wroughton.

Then there were two exhibitions at the British Museum one on the Samurai (with a dramatic battle rendition clearly echoing the first one in the Tom Cruise film) and another on Hawaii (with a cloak made of the feathers of what must have been thousands of little birds) .

Add to that an ‘Old Boys’ session at a village pub south of Salisbury, a Friends of Wiltshire Churches meeting, checking on one’s various life support systems, linking up with long-term colleague etc, together with  restoring the garden, getting the tractor mended, arranging for a new gardener and having some tree surgeons in, I haven’t been idle. Less constructively but equally necessary, a huge variety of dangerously overdue business affairs, not least of which has been trying to access a long closed bank account in the US. The byzantine convolutions one has to go through in order to lay one’s hands on one’s own money is quite staggering. Much more pleasant to potter about in the garden building up collapsed brick vegetable patch surrounds, get things mowed, feeding the birds, putting in more beans,  and so on. 

But I have to say that this little trip to Rotterdam illustrates the point that the academics haven’t entirely gone away. Stuff is still coming in on the internet and always in the background Ukraine and Trump’s ‘Epic Fury’ against Iran (or Epic something else – a 6 lettered hyphenated word with the same first two letters, as its known in the Washington think-tank community.)  It won’t be long before I’m fully immersed in such stuff again as I return to Singapore, if only for quite a brief while.