I started my monthly review last August with these words: "Possibly no month since Purple Tern began has ended so differently from the way it started..."

Well, this month has beaten last August into a cocked hat...

(If you want a 1 Second Everyday preview of the changes, click here.)

The start of July saw us still living our quiet lives in beautiful Cromer, while anxiously following the constantly shifting edicts from Malaysian immigration.



We had a really lovely visit to Newark.

And then we moved to Norwich, our first staging post on the way home.




As this was the first "new" place we'd been for a while, we very much enjoyed pacing it out (early in the morning before too many people were about).





This was also where we had the cast-removal experience. And all the time we were sucking up yet more rule changes on immigration.







Towards the end of our time there, we did a dash to London to have the covid tests that were necessary for us to board the plane.


Compared with the previous three months, this is an AWFUL lot of movement.

And we weren't finished yet...

It wasn't exactly an enjoyable journey, but we finally made it back to Sarawak, where, as expected, we were put in quarantine in a hotel.

Which is where we tested positive for covid.

AweSOME...

We're still symptom-free, for which I'm massively grateful, but we're trying not to get our hopes up too much, as symptoms can take as long as 14 days to kick in. Still, every day is a gain.


In our "step-down" facility, we have twice-daily check-ups to monitor our temperature, blood pressure, oxygen levels, and pulse, and the doctor pops round on a regular basis. So if things start to go downhill, the medical staff will be on top of it pretty quickly.

I was also impressed that we received a phone call yesterday from the hospital's psychological support unit, checking up on our mental state, and arranging to send us some little items like tea and cups.




Our room is fairly spartan, but it has two beds, a kettle, a decent aircon, a ceiling fan, a bathroom, and -- very precious, this -- a tiny, tiny balcony, so that we can "take the air" on a regular basis.

The food is a little rice-heavy and vegetable-light for our optimum wellbeing.

But all that really matters at the moment is staying symptom-free...

There are lots of wonderful things about being back, even though we're stuck in the most confined space we've ever experienced on a medium-term basis.

We love again hearing the call to prayer regularly sounding out across the city. It's Hari Raya Haji today (the festival that commemorates Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice his son, Ismail, and marks the end of the Hajj), and we could hear someone chanting -- always so calming -- early this morning.

The morning birds are different birds from the ones we've heard for so many months: ooh-ooh birds (as we call them, because that's the sound they make), and little green birds that look and sound like bell miners, but may not be.

Depending on the time of day, the soundscape also includes the chirp of crickets and geckos, the puttering of distant motorbikes, and the shouts of local lads playing volleyball on the court just to our right.

The flame trees are flowering down the drive. And the big tropical clouds come and go.

As we're more grounded than we've ever been, it's a good thing I invented shadow journeys... July has been focused on Greece, and Velvet Cushion has also sprouted three posts associated with shadow journeys.

This kind of reading, plus my ongoing language-learning, keeps me mentally occupied. Nigel, meanwhile, continues his shares research, and his Forth Bridge software.

And quarantine, if we stay well, will be an apt opportunity for learning to think small-scale. The kind of thing Ross Gay so memorably evokes in his Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt:

No one knew or at least
I didn’t know
they knew
what the thin disks
threaded here
on my shirt
might give me
in terms of joy
this is not something to be taken lightly
the gift
of buttoning one’s shirt
slowly
top to bottom
or bottom
to top...

I'm hoping we will find lots of little gifts like that.

If only we stay well...

My hope is that we'll have very little to report by the end of next month.