This month will go down in our little personal history as one that marked a major loss.

Bereavement always brings a feeling of irrevocability that sits like a weight in the pit of your stomach. This time, it was compounded by a feeling of complete helplessness (here we are, stuck a long way away, with no means to get where we could perhaps be useful), and by the tyranny of self-questioning (should we have stayed longer last year; but where would we have lived, and how would we have managed, with all our infrastructure half a world away; but SHOULD we have stayed; etc -- endless loop).

The helplessness was assuaged in some measure by the family's generosity in involving us in the arrangements for the funeral, which took place in the week just gone by.

For the self-questioning, though, there is no hope of resolution.

Otherwise, this month brought the Year of the Ox, amid celebrations that were much toned down for all the usual reasons.


And so we turn, as we do every month, to the Thing that's still dominating all our lives a whole year after I spoke in my monthly review of the growing uncertainty and anxiety the then-new menace was creating.

We have spent the entire month of February under the confines of the CMCO, which started on 13 January. Sarawak's covid situation has not yet taken a turn for the better, so restrictions have been extended at least until mid-March.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Purple Tern's monthly post count (seven) is the lowest ever, February's 1SE compilation is distinctly low-key, and purple highlights are few and far between.



(The Velvet Cushion has seen some action, with reviews of The Mountains Sing and Empire of the Sun, as well as reflections on film material featuring Latin America and/or indigenous peoples. I managed another Vintage Travel post, too, with a look back at our scanty Scandinavian experiences, prompted by all the Scandi TV we watch.)

We had a little hopeful news last week as vaccination kicked off in Sarawak, and registration opened to the public. Don't know when they'll get round to us, though...

So it's still hard to see anything changing very much over the next few months.

"Despair deepens for young people as pandemic drags on": thus the title of a New York Times article in the middle of the month. Of course, it's not only young people... I feel for them, especially as those worst affected are -- as always -- from poorer households. But they are not the only ones, I think, who are "suffering from a gnawing sense that they are losing precious time in their prime years", and from the anxiety induced by being in control of nothing -- nothing at all.

Like it or not, we have to keep finding new ways to cope.

Yesterday, we watched Arctic, a survival movie. It features a man we know only as Overgard, whose plane has been wrecked in the cold wastes at the top end of the world (the movie was actually filmed in Iceland, so they must have photoshopped in the polar bear). Like it or not, he has to find ways to keep himself and his unexpected visitor in the land of the living. I don't normally like movies with so few words in them, but this was good, and somehow timely. To survive, you need an iron will. You need to be meticulously organized. And you have to adamantly keep believing that you'll get through it: "It'll be OK", in Overgard's oft-repeated phrase.

I was also quite struck by an article on the benefits of gratitude when you're living with a chronic illness.

I think it helps to think of the bundle of ways this pandemic is affecting all our lives as a chronic illness. It's something we have no choice but to live with. There may be a miracle that will eventually take it away, but actually it may never go away.

“Living gratefully is an inside job,” says one respondent, diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer 27 years ago, and still going strong... “Gratefulness is gratitude from the inside out, not waiting for circumstances to be grateful for.” In other words, we have to shift our focus from the god-awful shitstorm of things around us that are obviously going wrong to the things that are still going right.

Now, I don't know how far this can take us -- or rather, take me. I tried really hard to practise gratitude last year, and ended up at the beginning of this one feeling worn out, as though my resilience muscles had just seized up from too much use for too long.

But here's some stuff I am grateful for (apart from the mangoes in eggcups featured at the top):