It's been a trying month, this one. Full of ups and downs.

There's been discouragement and breakage -- the latter, most ironically, the day before we were given permission to return to Sarawak...


Then again, we now have a plan...

So, although the end of June finds us still in Cromer (as the ends of March, April, and May had also done), there is now the hope that by the end of next month we'll be back in Malaysia, and by the end of the one after that, back in Sarawak.

May it be... This is certainly not a time for prematurely counting chickens.


(For a 1 Second Everyday take on the month, click here.)

Much though I'm looking forward to getting home, I'm aware that there's going to be a lot of difficult digestion to do.

The main aim of this trip was to see family. And that has really not happened in any meaningful way. So an air of frustration -- the feeling that we're dealing with something uncompleted and aborted -- hangs over the year to date.

We both struggle with the unsettling feeling that the last few months have been a big, amorphous blur. Normally, there are events to hang things on -- we did this after we did that, and before we did the other -- but from March to June, there have been no events... Our days have been rich and full, and far from boring. But they've been uniform. There's been nothing to provide a chronology, a narrative, a meaningful sequence.

And, given that I've long wanted to introduce more quietness into my life, I'm surprised that these restricted months have found me busier than ever... I wonder whether I actually fear contemplation at the moment, because if I don't keep my mind and body active -- active, active, active -- there are too many interstices into which the bleakness of the world can creep and expand.




On the other hand, I can't not be grateful. The UK death toll from coronavirus today stands at 43,575. This week, global deaths passed the half-million mark. NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pithily sums up the dangerous place the world currently finds itself in. We're just not reliably getting a grip on this virus.



So life seems extraordinarily fragile and precious at the moment...

There's also plenty of food for thought as to how we -- and I mean that "we" very personally -- might do things differently and better, going forward. For sure, when this pandemic hit, we were well overdue a planetary rethink on the whole business of mobility... (Pursuing this theme, I've recently been remembering and reimagining movement.)

I certainly struggle at the moment with a loss of raison d'etre. I am a traveller. It's part of my identity. To date, I've survived, by:

a) plunging into a deep and local version of "travel" (all my Purple Tern posts from Cromer, at the end of the day, have been expositions on this theme);

b) embarking on what I have called "shadow journeys" (there have been four instalments of these in June, as I've read, listened, nostalged, walked, and eaten my way round various aspects of France and Italy; I particularly enjoyed researching the story about my grandfather).

At least in the mid-term, it seems to me, we're going to be doing a whole lot more of these kinds of "travel"...




But first we need to get back to our moorings in Kuching. Via Norwich and Kuala Lumpur. Then we can reassess.