New years definitely make you think about things, and here we get more than one. (The photo above shows the dismantling of the Christmas/New Year banner at the end of Jalan Padungan -- which we personally hadn't seen lit up until yesterday evening -- in preparation for the coming of the Year of the Ox.)

One of the many topics I've been pondering in recent days is the future of the Purple Tern blog.

If you've ever looked in the "About" section, you will have found the following:

"The Purple Tern blog documents the unfolding experiment of a purpler post-work life. It's a twofold endeavour. There's the local element, as we explore our new home, Sarawak. And there's the more ambitious side, where we see how far we can travel with a finite amount of all the things that are needed for a Big OE."

Well, it's patently obvious that those two strands have at the moment been reduced to just one, and even that is really not particularly purple...

We all knew that 2021 was not going to magically change everything. We really did all know that.

But I guess, a week into the year, that certainty has been borne in upon us with renewed vigour. I don't know how long it will be before we get vaccinated. I don't know how long after that it will be before it is safe to travel again. I don't know how long after that it will be before the Sarawakian and Malaysian governments give us free right of passage in and out. 

(James  Clark, a very seasoned traveller and astute observer of infrastructural trends, wrote on the first day of the year: "I’m not making any predictions for a recovery timeline. My only travel goal is for Australia by Christmas." Even that might prove optimistic.) 

So that first strand is aborted for the duration.

Travel within Sarawak is also not problem-free. Even if there are no restrictions in place, you need to be responsible, and you need to be careful. For short journeys, we're still limiting ourselves to walking, or taking Grab rides. For longer journeys, we intermittently hire a car. Given that this is not an inexpensive business, and the pandemic thing complicates logistics, we don't do it that often.

I'm not going to rehash the whole "grateful-but-frustrated/sad-but-conscious-of-privilege" rigmarole that is my mental state at the moment. (For the latest articulation of that hotchpotch of emotions, see December's review.)

What I am going to to do, though, is stop writing about it.


When I recently expressed the view that the blog had been pretty much a waste of time for the last few months, Nigel was kind enough to point out that the day might come when we'll look back on these months (years?) with a mixture of curiosity, disbelief, even amusement, and it might be valuable to have (along with the jottings of all the other millions who have no doubt done this) a record of these strange times, and what they felt like week by week.

So I'm not going to do the electronic equivalent of tearing everything up.

And I'm not going to stop writing, because at the end of the day I like writing, and there are still interesting things to write about in Sarawak, and the idea of the Big OE has not gone away (it's just in cold storage at the moment).

But I am going to deliberately focus on what's new for us here in our home state. Things we've not done before, eaten before, understood before, or seen before. That kind of thing.

There'll be one final "shadow journeys" post, and then that type of entry will be relegated to The Velvet Cushion or Vintage Travel.

There'll be less day-to-day stuff. 



In this transition post, let me just review the state of play. The despicable Spikes still dominates our lives. We look every day at the case numbers in Sarawak (still quite good, but not as good as we would want); the numbers in the rest of Malaysia (currently catastrophic); the numbers in the UK (unspeakably awful); and the general trends around the world. Like everyone else's, my spirits fluctuate in line with these figures, so they're not too buoyant at the moment.

When I started writing Purple Tern, with less idea than ever before about what the future held, and already with the sneaking suspicion that the years ahead were likely to be more prosaic than I had looked forward to back in the heady days of OE planning, I consoled myself with the thought: "Something will be possible. A journey of some sort will happen. And I'm damned if it won't be interesting, because that bit IS within my control..."

At least that has not changed.

I just need to work harder to uncover the interesting stories that are all around us.

So, I hope this will be a cleaner, leaner (but not meaner) blog from this day forward.

Hold me to it.