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We land in Lombok. There’s a long car journey transfer from the airport to Bangsal harbour, in which both cranky, tired children’s devices eventually pack it in and we’re all left looking at the inky black night and wishing away the minutes to the boat. It’s a windy road.

We board a boat. We unzip the water in less than fifteen minutes. White tipped black water swells behind us and the engine roars.

There’s a permanent smell of woodsmoke across the island. Pony and traps clatter by, with clown horns, clip clops and jingle bells signaling their approach. Dusty, sandy paths run round the island. The islanders water the dust. We ride bicycles, the kids sat on beach towels on the back until we hit patches of soft sand and we push instead.

We take a glass bottomed boat trip to snorkel in three different locations. The reef is further down than shore snorkeling and from there it drops off into a deep blue gloom. There are coral vistas beneath us that stretch further than I’ve ever been able to see under sea. A guide spot turtles. Kit floats on a life vest rather than wear it when it rides up to his chin. We spot turtles for fun. Swimming near the drop. Once, startled by a boat and finning off in a bolt. Beneath us, carapace round and patterned. A baby one that surfaced near the boat for a breath of air in between locations. And not a soul except for us, the guide and the boatman. I hold Kit’s hand and steer him, push him or point out fish for him while Steph does the same for Gwen. It’s nothing short of magical. Previously Gwen has been scared of fish coming up to her face while snorkeling, but these fears are swept away on the trip like a scream in a gale.

We eat in a gluten free cafe bar called Barefoot Blondie a lot, cycling there and back.

There is time spent lying on beaten up rattan loungers beneath a tamarind tree, overlooking the muddy, coral strewn beach as the tide washes out.

I spot a polka dot grouper, legions of small trigger fish, flicking their triggers. We eat barbecue on the beach. I watch Arsenal beat Man City late in the night and then wander to the beach to pick out bioluminescence in the surf that washes up.

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Back date 24/12/21:

Thanks Langkawi for another great time and for all the weird and wonderful creatures we saw:

One half dead sea urchin

One half dead starfish

Hermit crabs

Normal crabs

Sea eagles

Sun birds

Myna birds

Zebra doves

Spotted doves

Munia birds

Asian koel

Black naped orioles

A whole bunch of water buffalo

Their mates, the egrets

Loads of dead jellyfish

Loads of live ones bobbin about too

Stripy fish

Needle fish

Squirrels

Lizards

Barnacles

Monitor lizards

Dragonflies

Mosquitos

A solitary mouse

Cockroaches

Bees

Bats

A toad

Macaques

Dusty leaf monkeys

A tiny baby preying mantis

A wall of geckos chasing bugs AND

A squashed snake.

Roll on Christmas.

[gmtpluseight]

Summer holz

We make it to the airport. 

There’s a terrifying moment when the lady at the check-in desk for Malaysian Airlines asks to see Kit’s negative Covid test. He doesn’t have one. He doesn’t require one. The news he does require one makes everything go a bit wobbly for a second.

Of course he doesn’t require one. Not someone 3 years old, not travelling to the UK. Other destinations: maybe. 

The lady laughs it off. I swallow my heart back down. Our baggage is over-sized so we trundle it off to excess baggage.

On the flight, Gwen sleeps some and Kit sleeps none. 

We get to Heathrow. None of us know which way is up. It’s cool, it’s day time, it’s totally not like Malaysia. We wait for a lift to get to the carpark. Kit asks which floor Aunty Miri (quarantine destination) lives on. He seems to think the airport is one giant condo building and that we can simply take a lift to where we need to get to.

A large taxi picks us up. Kit screams for 20 minutes to be allowed to clamber over the seats to sit next to Steph. He is not allowed to clamber over the seats. He then collapses on top of an already-sleeping-Gwen, fast asleep. 

We stare groggily at people wandering around, going about their every day business like the pandemic has passed us all by. It’s truly something to behold, having been under a curfew and restricted to minimal movements in Malaysia, compulsory mask-wearing everywhere, any time and a general atmosphere of Doom.

At Miri’s house, in SE London, the kids instantly fall into playing with Miri’s kids. It’s delightful. It’s why we came back.

There’s all sorts of things I’d forgotten about. The smell of lavender from the garden. Then the smell of a garden. The sound of an airplane above, on the Gatwick or the Heathrow or the City airport flight path. Neighbours over fences. Cats on walls. Agapanthus and broken tiling and great big sticky spider webs. Brickwork. English dirt and grass. Home.

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The way to the airport

We head back to the UK.

It's a tricky process. There are many documents required, simply in order to be permitted to travel from our home to the airport: copies of our passports, copies of our visas, copies of a special entry/exit letter, copies of negative Covid tests, all in a neat little bundle.

We take separate taxis to the police station for the permission letter One taxi = one passenger. We therefore double our exposure. If we only consider the drivers. Bit more if we consider all the passengers in each taxi. Hey. Ho.

As we leave the police station, we spot a mound of bundles of paperwork from previous applicants in the corner of the room the police use for the processing, which looks remarkably like it might be the party room for the police (police living quarters are found within police station complexes everywhere). The pile must be 4ft tall. 6ft deep. By another 6ft the other way. You get the picture. Big pile of paper.

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Time passes. The pandemic doesn’t.

The school year begins according to plan. 2020-2021, here we go.

Everything free and easy. Do as darn well pleasey. 

Then around mid October, it all kicks off again and we all flip up laptops, pull on shirts and shorts and settle into barefoot teaching once again.

At first, the Virtual School Experience is just for two weeks, but we’re wise to it this time around. Things drag on until the Christmas break, when, miraculously, we’re able to travel within Malaysia and all zip off to Langkawi for some RnR.

We spot a drongo bird flying about the swamp at the bottom of the garden by the resort we stay at, La Pari Pari. 

A large group of us visits a very high-end 5* resort on the north coast of the island with day passes. Nobody seems to have heard of day passes when we try to buy them at the reception. Everything is on tap for the day. We even arrange for take-away food. The seasport equipment is thrown in too, so I paddle off to a nearby island on a kayak. It’s sheer, silent bliss, aside from the water and a monkey making a meal of a coconut. 

A friend meets some other considerably wealthier friends from KL along the beach, as we walk back from the seaport equipment shack. He shows off his day pass bracelets. And the (comparatively inexpensive) price. Word spreads quick. Management appear, to fend off complaints from guests. Shortly after, we scarper. A week later, the place all but burns down. 

We move for a few nights (including NYE) to the posh place up the road, spending NYE back with friends at Pari Pari. Gwen makes it to midnight for the first time and we have to beg a ride from the management as there’s no cabs around. 

The chef drives us the mile and a half back in the end. Poor timekeeping remains a theme of the trip. New Year’s Day and we make it to the airport by the time check-in has already closed. The lady at the counter whatsapps someone on the other side, we get allowed through and for the second time within 24 hours, we count my lucky stars.

There’s a false start in January, pretty much nearly the day we’re back to work, but it comes to nothing and we continue the virtual thing until early March. We don’t spend a lot of money. I spend a lot of savings on a new mountain bike, rather than anything else. Things at home are ever so slightly tense for a while. It’s a beautiful bike, though.

The children are giddy to be back in school when we make it back. It’s not quite the same- there’s a lot of procedures, a lot of duties, a lot of indoors time and we eat school lunch in the classroom, which takes me back to time in Japan- but at least we see each other in three dimensions. Gwen basically bosses it at school on World Book Day as a very convincing ‘Ada Twist, Scientist’. To the costume, her mother contributes a hand-stitched red dress with giant white polka dots, the goggles, the gloves, the works. I go for a run and hand her my sweaty socks to box up with a bio-hazard warning label. That and a banana skin. It’s all about the details. Oh, I also place a pillow case over a tiger’s tail from the costume box and secure it with loom bands for Kit’s costume: skeleton dog from Funny Bones.

We make it all the way to the Easter break in physical school. We spend the break in the post-apocalyptically named Cyberjaya, alternating pools in a three tier system that croaks with toads by night, sustaining ourselves with Zus coffees. 

We spend a few nights in a hotel right in the thick of Chinatown. There’s a pool, a view and we have two rooms with an adjoining door. Not that it makes much difference. The kids seem to pile into our room at any opportunity.

We’re good to go for another couple of weeks until early May before the powers that be impose themselves once again and, first, a positive case in school, then another lock down comes into force. We manage to get an INSET together, socially distanced, in the school theatre. Then, back home to teach. It lasts for 4 weeks before the numbers spike considerably. Cases hit 5 figures for the first time ever in Malaysia. It roughly coincides with Eid, just like the January spike did with Christmas. 

A full-on, 2 week lockdown comes into force and there’s the usual u-turning about what you can and can’t do. 

Cycling is not permitted. I spend hours at home staring longingly at my bike, visualising the wheels spinning, the dirt spitting up and the trees rushing past. Nothing is allowed after 8pm. Essentially it’s a curfew. I run a little late one night and along the 2km long stretch out the front of our condo block, I get flagged down by the police. I hear their motorbikes behind me before they pull up alongside me, easily distinguishable from the scooters the Grab food delivery drivers zip about on. A policeman keeps pace with me and mutters just two words, whilst staring ahead: ‘Run faster.’

The haze returns, unseasonably. Some days it’s horrendous and doesn’t lift until it rains. Some days it doesn’t rain. It drags on and on. It lacks the predictability of the regular, autumn haze season. 

2 weeks turns into another 2 weeks and suddenly we are staring down the barrel of the end of the academic year, seeing it out from behind a screen once again. People pack up. Farewells are nigh on impossible- nobody can move about much. We decide to head home, counting the eye-watering cost of processing administrative passes and quarantine hotel fees as a foreigner returning to Malaysia. We pack three suitcases, leaving one half empty to bring back English treats, and birthday presents for Gwen, who’ll spend her 6th birthday in a quarantine hotel.

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Blowing bubbles

SEPTEMBER

Well here we are. 

Knee-deep in Standard Operating Procedures, post-summer hols back at school, but at least back at school, rather than confined to a wardrobe (admittedly, a large wardrobe) trying to teach virtually, locked-down, doubled down, terrorised by my own children. The horror, the horror. 

Briefly, the Virtual School Experience flickered back to life this week as a local water contamination that affected the entire Klang Valley dragged its heels. The taps in the classrooms sputtered. Talk was we wouldn’t be able to flush the loos. Giant water tankers delivered so much, but not possibly enough. 

The last thing you need during a pandemic: a lack of means of washing hands. 

Thankfully, it lasted a day before it was resolved.

What a summer it was, though. Not the one we expected, although we can’t be alone in that. Instead of returning home, we made a new home, moving from one enormous condo unit to another. Less than 100m as the crow flies. 

Still a job to pack up. 

JULY

We trolley boxes across the basement carparks, dodging speed bumps and squealing slow-moving cars. 

We buy enormous plants at ridiculously cheap prices to pad out the space a bit. 

I spend close to two hours with the owner of our previous condo unit and the housing agents, arguing over imagined damage to the property. 

In the end I win. But everyone also loses. It’s a compromise.

I meet one of the agents later that afternoon out front, jumping into a cab. I need a drink she says. I know the feeling.

In between before and after packing up and down, we master short hops to impossibly beautiful destinations. 

JULY-AUGUST--ISH

We spend several hundred ringgos in Decathlon in preparation. We visit a dive shop in a mall beside a purpose built Scuba diving-training-swimming pool. Two men, one bare-chested, sit at a table beside, swigging from a bottle of whisky. I guess lockdown affected some businesses more than others.

First up, Perhentian Besar, where friends John and Christine make friends with everyone. 

Where the kids take telly breaks inside, sheltered from the lapis blue skies. We use dive mask boxes as crisp buckets. 

I take trips to the peer to eyeball the local triggerfish as it nibbles at barnacles. 

We take a boat trip to neighbouring Perhentian Kecil and walk past one of our neighbours from KL. A storm creeps over the hill as we sip cocktails and attempt to distract the children from their boredom. We nearly get stranded but our boatman basically decides to roll the dice with our lives and before long we’re bouncing off the waves with hair-shredding winds whipping across and sea spray more like shower spray dousing us. No more boats travel that evening as the waves grow even bigger.

THE THIRD TRIP - PENANG

We check in to a lovely hotel with hands-down the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in. Several other friends and their children from KL are all in the same hotel. 

By day we take in local sites along and about the Batu Ferringhi stretch. Penang Butterfly Farm is vast, and predictably, it is filled with butterflies.

It’s also filled with other things.

Spiders, scorpions and a toad, I kid yeeeee not, as big as a melon. Not quite a watermelon, but a very decently sized cantaloupe.

Most of the spiders are behind glass. Amazingly, one enclosure has no glass. Just a big empty space. Couple wispy bits of spiderweb reach right out into the corridor. I practically walk through them as I approach to see what’s inside. Nothing, apparently.

That spider could be anywhere in the entire Butterfly Farm. 

I spend the rest of the visit with that thought on my mind.

By late afternoon/evening, we hit the beach bars. 

The beach keeps the kids happy. 

The bar keeps the adults happy. Everyone’s a winn-

KIT GET OUT OF THE SEA! KIT! KI- 

He’s deliberately ignoring me. He’s started doing this loads.

KIT! KIT! KI-IIIIIT!

Now his shorts and t-shirt are soaking. Great. Soon his nappy will be hanging round his knees, soaked with seawater.

One night, we witness a proposal at the beach bar.

The eagle-eyed can tell something is afoot from the moment we arrive- there’s pink balloons, fake flower petals and candles set out in front of the VIP booth bit. No future groom no bride to speak of yet though. 

Clearly, balloons are interesting to small children.

It’s a job keeping them away from the flower petals too. Let alone the candles. Eventually they start splashing about in the water instead. 

Inside, there’s at least three photographers circling. 

There’s a change in music. 

Someone Has Arrived. 

There’s a general movement towards the balloons and flower petals and candles at which point the children regain an interest in it all. They gambol over in the end-of-the-day, anything could happen, I’m-on-holiday-too and if-you’re-not-going-to-provide-entertainment-I’ll-make-my-own sort of way.

One photographer shoots me a look of sheer, unbridled terror. 

I do my best cat-herding, distract and befuddle the children with a mixture of unfulfilled offers, bribes and bird noise imitation. It works.

Moments later the bride-to-be saunters through with a friend. 

Then, all the bits you’d expect. Hands on mouth. Gasps. Grins. Searching the faces in the crowd for her suitor.

He’s not there.

A band emerges from around the corner. Actually, no, a group of her friends. One has a boom box and they’re all singing terribly, kicking sand playfully and moving slowly. I don’t recognise the tune. But that could be down to their singing.

A few more moments later, and from behind us a horse jerkily walks towards this scene. On top, a man dressed in an oversize Mickey Mouse costume, who clearly has never ridden a horse in his life. 

I’m no Frankie Dettori, but I can tell this guy doesn’t know the front end from the back of a horse.

He struggles to dismount. 

He’s got these giant clown-shoes on and he gets them caught in the stirrups, then his head lolls forward as he tries to look down at the snag. Eventually, he makes it onto one knee. Later the kids squabble over balloons and Kit is beyond inconsolable when they are released to the sky. It’s a clear night, which makes it worse. He watches them sail away for ages.

We while away the rest of the night to the sound of the house band. Two guys. A guitar and a drum set made of old tins, teapots and gas cans. It’s a marvel to behold.

THE FOURTH TRIP - PANGKOR LAUT

Now this place. This place really take the biscuit. 

The last hurrah of the summer holidays before back to work. A private friggin island. When else can I say I have visited a private island.

There’s hornbills everywhere.There’s infinity pools. There’s a massive tree filled with flying foxes that sweep across the sky at night. There’s a little minibus that takes you to the other side of the island, to a secluded bay and another gorgeous beach. It’s simply idyllic.

There’s also a pack of marauding macaques that sniff out the packet of dried apricots that the ants had already sniffed out. Left outside our room door, they come hungry for it. By that point we’d already gone to the beach. The Mutters, next door, hadn’t though. They ended up barricaded in for a while as the macaques descended.

The clientele at the island is not what we’ve experienced so far. Comes with a place like that I guess. Everyone is visibly less patient, less enamoured with and less pleased by our children. I mean. I don’t really blame them.

THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT TRIP / THE THIRD TRIP

Langkawi. Ah, Langkawi. 

West coast beaches are definitely not east coast beaches. But it’s still a giant playground for an under 5. Bliss.

Our hotel has the world’s most incredible swimming pools (yes, pools) with slides and bridges and water spouts and people who give you ginormous towels and a 5 foot monitor lizard, one day, who decided to take a dip.

We watch a parent eagle teaching its young to fly. We watch coconut tree shimmiers machete off coconuts and leaves. We zip off to the other side of the island and Stanley Mutter, aka Crab God, charms the local fauna. Then we go home, unpack, wash everything and start thinking about what to pack for the next trip.

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Easter Break

I’m meant to be bragging about our second trip to the Perhentian islands in the space of 6 weeks. Writing about the night skies, a clutter of pinprick stars and watching the International Space Station sail round on its ninety minute orbit.  Posting pictures like those I took at the end of February. Like these ones:

Or this one.

Showing off the view from our beach hut:

Right now it seems like a dream holiday to just leave the flat and go for a walk, or a jog, or ride a bike somewhere, let alone hop on a plane for an hour to a sun-drenched paradise on remote islands surrounded by turquoise, crystal-clear water filled to the gills with tropical fish. 

Instead, everyone is stuck indoors and the world is hurting. The numbers climb daily. 

We all engage in lockdown teaching. A virtual school experience.

We learn at a phenomenal rate about video-technology. I spend probably too long on the fun bits

Kit can’t believe his luck. He spends every day with his big sister, instead of her heading off to school.

We have regular messy play, featuring everything humanly makeable with corn flour. Squishy soap. Oobleck. Fake snow. 

We spend hours on the balcony with the tap on, covering the drain with a plastic pallette to prevent the water disappearing.

We have indoor races with balloons. Races with the scooters. Timed races to the door and back. I tuck socks into my belt and the kids chase me, pulling them off.

Kit regresses in his toilet training. He seems to protest going to the potty just to spite us sometimes. Most of the time, actually. Mopping up puddles ain’t so bad. Cleaning a filled pair of pants...that’s a different story. It’s definitely no messy play.

The Malaysian lockdown is ti-ight. Alongside the police, the military man road blocks. With guns. They ask me where I’m going. On the way back they ask me where I’m going, too. I stop short of showing them the contents of my shopping bag- tape, paper, sticky notes, toys, bribes, three bags of corn flour. All the essentials to keep two under fives occupied. 

I jog around the golf course at the foot of our condo complex a couple of times. It’s utterly deserted. Except for the wildlife. Especially birds. There’s a flash of electric blue that sweeps from tree to tree across the green at hole number 6. Next time, I get a much better look: white-throated kingfishers. A few of them.

Four or five days later, 11 joggers are arrested in a well-heeled neighbourhood nearby called Mont Kiara for violating the Movement Control Order. A friend of a colleague I play football with is banged up in a cell for eleven hours. I think of the white-throated kingfishers. I think of the immaculate calm of the course. Then I think of a Malaysian police cell. I stick to Davina McCall, POPSUGAR fitness and an LA trainer called Jeanette Jenkins who really has my backside hurting.

Speaking of football, I really miss Friday afternoon football. In what would be the last time we play before the Movement Control Order, I score two and make two. It’s virtually a man of the match performance. I’m not even kidding. One of the assists is a perfect punt from behind the halfway line to the back stick, that a friend buries on the volley. It doesn’t get better in kickabout football. Just when I was coming into form. I really miss football. But then there’s a bigger picture to consider.

The day before we go back to virtual school, Kit finally decides he’ll take himself to the toilet. No bribery. No tough talk. No comparisons with other two year olds. Progress. 

He walks there himself, turns to look at a headband wrapped around a soft toy wombat’s bottom on the table, and walks head-bang into the wall, bouncing off. At leat he holds it ‘til he makes it to the potty ten minutes later, when his head’s not hurting quite so much.

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Welcome to the jungle

Welcome to the jungle, we take it day by day If you want it you're gonna bleed but it's the price to pay And you're a very sexy girl, very hard to please You can taste the bright lights, but you won't get there for free In the jungle, welcome to the jungle Feel my, my, my serpentine Uh, I, I want to hear you scream

...said a monkey, when we took a trip to the jungle-ish.

Well. Of course he didn’t say all of that. He sang it.

Mm. He didn’t do that either.

But his eyes definitely communicated the part about me bleeding. 

Plus he definitely wanted me to scream. And that, I duly did. Like the terrified, fully grown man I was and still am, I guess. At any moment awaiting the clench and sink of monkey teeth on my shoulder / face / back of head (I was running away at at the time- flight won the day over fight or, thankfully, freeze).

Perhaps we need to establish some context.

Firstly: location. When I say jungle, I pretty much mean that. A hop, skip and a 40 minute drive from our front door. Seems to be bits of jungle in between all the bits of KL. You don’t have to go far to feel like you’ve gone further than you have, but not quite so far that the climate has changed.

Next: the whys. Birthdays. Three of them. All parents, like us, so kiddies in tow. It was a great night away, bar the monkey threat. Sunday morning and they definitely began to edge closer to the small container-complex we were staying in. 

Everyone scarpers to the pool, along the driveway from the containers. I double back with Kit in my arms to our room for something. Suddenly there’re monkeys everywhere. The place is crawling with them. They’re on the tables. Strolling along brick ledges above the cookers. Waltzing through the open areas. The stuffed toy tigers don’t seem to be scaring them off anymore. It feels a little dicey.

There were some other monkeys too. Nice ones. Like this one:

Anyway. We get to the steps. Half way up, a corrugated aluminium roof is at eye level, with what is clearly one of the mean daddy monkeys with the biggest kahunas padding across. He sees me. He bares his fangs. Then he starts gambolling towards me. It’s bloody terrifying. I turn, scream, remember not to drop Kit and vault down the steps, expecting at any moment to be torn to shreds by a monkey. 

It never happens. I grab a stuffed toy tiger and start wiggling it at them. We escape. 

Later, we get rushed by the same monkey when it seems to think we’re after the jackfruit they’re tearing apart and gobbling down.

A week or two later I try some jackfruit. 

I can see why they’d want to defend it. 

It’s delicious.

We all pack up and go home. 

I shake my fist at the monkey that made me scream.

[gmtpluseight]

Christmas in KL

Christmas. Seems a while ago now, doesn’t it. Well, it was. How January accelerates the year. Try living with two under 5s who insist on continuing to sing ‘Dancing in the straw’ and ‘Jingle Bells’. And demand Christmas TV every morning. Makes the school run tri-cky.

Anyway. Back to mid-December. The silliest of the season, when everyone’s already warmed up. I wear a dress and make a prat of myself in a panto. Very shortly after, mercifully, we break up for a three week Christmas break. Yeh you read right. 3 weeks. We celebrate with a dip in the pool.

Later, we disappear, destination Georgetown, Penang. We leave Kit’s elephant rucksack filled with his toys in the taxi en route to the airport. A week later the kindest taxi driver returns it directly and insists on no payment whatsoever as his wife waits in the front passenger seat. During the trip, Kit misses his toys. He is less easily distractible without them. Very much so.

We get about town a little. For the duration of a trishaw ride around, Kit fiddles with a Malaysian flag attached to the chassis. I’m just glad he doesn’t try to clamber out as we snake through the traffic at roughly exhaust pipe level. Swings and roundabouts.

We try to walk somewhere. I forget where. It seems like a decade ago now. We very quickly abort walking anywhere in Georgetown. The pavements in Georgetown make KL look positively pedestrian. 

Kit uses wax crayons to draw on a variety of surfaces in an expensive and unique, historically important mansion hotel we stay in. I ask him to stop, he looks at me like ‘whatever dad’.

We visit an upside-down house. There’s one in KL too. It seems to be a thing in Malaysia. People physically arrange us clinging on to tables bolted to ceilings or posing legs akimbo. 

Kit decides he does not want to wait for any meal we have for the duration of our 3 day stay, instead wandering to other people’s tables, up staircases, towards Christmas trees, flashing lights, or anyone that smiles at him. Miraculously, he avoids serious injury or kidnapping.

We take a trip up Penang Hill. Take the jeep ride up, our taxi driver tells us, the cable car will be too busy by now. It’s cheaper too, he says. He doesn’t mention the hairpin turns, sheer drop on one side, falling rock, broken roads, construction sites or onrushing 4 x 4 cars returning visitors to the bottom of the hill, of course. That we all find out, smoodjed all together in the back and front of the car, some seat-belted, some not (a recurring theme).

Pre-holidays, Friday football, I make a goal. Then I score a goal. For only the third time in my life. The first was more like a lucky cross, the second, barely a toe-poke. Those were both literally decades ago. I feel like I should mark the occasion, but instead we all just trudge back to our half.

Post-holidays and back in the groove. There’s loads of people. Clearly missed their football over the festive break. We pick teams. We never usually pick teams. Why start now. Childhood memories come flooding back back. None of them welcome. Suddenly I can see the future. Or, just a small part of it. 

Everyone gets picked. 

Then I get picked. 

Guys. 

Come on. I made a goal and scored a goal before Christmas. 

Guys.

Don’t you remember?

I score another goal. This time I get to belt it. I belt it pretty hard and it flies into the net. 

[gmtpluseight]

First visitor. Thinks she’s over the jet lag.. ha

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World’s most unbelievable kids’ birthday party

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Happy freekin Deepavali

[gmtpluseight]

Into injury time

Rainy season. Bang on the beak.

The first time it rained before rainy season, it still looked like rainy season rain. Straight. Heavy. Impossible to miss.

I’d never seen it before, of course. Nobody else at school seemed to pay the blindest bit of difference to the hammering cats and dogs though. HAVE YOU SEEN THE RAIN?!?? I wanted to shout above it but like I say. Not so much as a Wouldyalookatthat.

Tuesday I get called in for my health check. Friday I get my health check  results back. It’s thorough. It’s like nothing I’ve had before. The blood test results are detailed- no wonder they needed four different vials of my blood. Week 6 and I’ve already bled for my position. Teaching’s a tough game, don’t let any mug tell you different.

Cholesterols is high.. what can I say. I’m eating well. KL is not a runner-friendly city, as I later discover. I haven’t the Ringo Stars for a bike yet, although I’m desperate. I need to move my legs more.

Friday afternoon. I go to play football.  Gotta keep that cholesterol count down. Around 25 of us, chasing and belting a ball up and down an astro pitch. What I lack in skill, stamina, teamwork, vision, strength or communication, I like to say I more than make up for in commitment. Yes- my movement on the pitch might not resemble that of your average kick-a-bout player. And that’s because if I’m anything, it’s not average. Maybe not far off average though.

I slide in after conceding possession once (commitment).

Only once.

Astro is not forgiving. It burns the bajesus.

And the shin.

And the shin skin.

Most of all the shin skin.

Not like the sweet green grass of home where the very worst you’d end up with after committing to a slide tackle is a leg-long smear of day-old dog $hit at your kick-a-bout in the park.

Could be worse.

That’s what you tell yourself.

Elsewhere, it’s the usual mix of brilliance and buffoonery from me- my signature football playing style. Several short passes don’t travel the distance, but wobble and limp half way. I rue missing the chance to really belt the ball.

Next time I’ll belt it. 

If I’m able to stand when the time comes; it’s freakin’ hot.

Some poor bloke goes down right next to (wasn’t me) under an innocuous challenge (not mine). Face down. Head pops up. Looks at his wrist / forearm. Starts screaming. Loud. In pain, or shock, I don’t know. I was beside him- the only thing louder than the scream, was the crack moments before.

He catches a taxi to the hospital. Jeez I think. Imagine that. Ending up in hospital.

Wouldn’t that just 

up 

your 

apple cart.

The next Tuesday, night time. I decide to move my legs a bit more. I go for a run. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

The wider Kuala Lumpur area is not well known for its easily navigable pavements. Nor, apparently, for it’s smooth running surfaces devoid of loose bricks, sudden ends, surface grit, large trees consuming the width of the pavement, nor indeed for that matter is it known for its pavements themselves. There aren’t many.

It’s dark out. It starts to rain. Then thunder and lightening. I continue. As well as being a committed football player, I am also a committed runner. When I can be ar$ed. Which is mostly before a half marathon. There’s one coming up in a week and a half, so, pressure’s on. But mostly it’s my commitment that keeps me out in stair rod rain. Besides. The lightening and thunder makes it way exciting.

I cross a six lane road. Only three of them have a pedestrian crossing. There’s a large tree taking up the entire pavement on the other side. On the other side of that, large hole in the ground, hidden. 

That’s the hole I put my left foot in. 

Down we go, like a sack of spuds, glasses spilling forwards a yard. It’s definitely a graze, I think, but it can’t be as bad as that astro burn.

It’s worse than the astro burn.

My goodness it’s worse.

The cut on my left pin is deep. So deep it’s already pouring blood.

Later the doc says (mum stop reading) the bone is visible as he cleans the wound with water. He won’t stitch it. Needs a specialist. By which he means surgery. Risk I’ve cut through the muscle. 

For the second time in a week, I discover the thoroughness of our medical care package. I have four x-rays done before an hour has passed. They even give me a CD of them, two days later when I’m discharged from hospital.

The anaesthetist comes round. He mentions a general anaesthetic, operating theatre, overnight stays... surely it’s just a flesh wound? I say local anaesthetic, he says loco. Crazy man talk. This will hurt.

So off I trundle, hours later, to get my leg patched up.