When you tread water, you go nowhere, and you get a bit exhausted.

But it's better than drowning, of course.

It has not been a great month. Anyone who follows this blog will know that we've been under a full Movement Control Order since 29 May. After a few days of being completely stuck at home, we were told we could do light exercise in our own neighbourhood. Which is better than no outdoor exercise at all, but rapidly gets very, very dull.

It would all be less depressing if we could clearly see things getting better. But -- although the lockdown has prevented a more dramatic worsening of the situation -- we're just not witnessing very impressive progress.

In that post quoted above, written at the beginning of this month, I talked about how Malaysia's death toll had exceeded 3,000. Now, just a few short weeks later, it has gone beyond 5,000.

Nigel compiles the moving seven-day average of the daily cases per 100,000, and here's how it looks at the moment:


The grey line at the bottom is Kuching, which shows that numbers have dropped off quite a bit. The dark blue line above that is the whole of Malaysia, which indicates a worrying plateau. The orange line is Sarawak. We were doing worse than Malaysia as a whole, but now we're doing fractionally better. The light blue line at the top is Sarawak excluding Kuching. There's a nice drop-off at the end, but it's still quite a bit worse than Malaysia as a whole.

In light of all this, the highlight of the month was our first vaccination. I'm still utterly appalled by the vaccine inequity that has so stupidly, short-sightedly, and counter-productively been created at global level, so I'm correspondingly thankful for this first shot. Billions of other human beings are still waiting. Supply here never seems entirely certain, though, so we're crossing our fingers for the successful delivery of the next one in a couple of months' time. 

Meanwhile, we try to keep up a reasonable walking and dancing schedule, although it's hard to stay enthusiastic, I have to say.

For well over a year, we've tried hard to make the most of limited environments, and nurture ourselves with the beautiful everyday, the ever-fascinating banal. And we still are managing to do that, to a degree. But it's all really wearing thin now... Every fibre of my being craves change.

We've tweaked a few habits, to suit the new constraints. We spend more time on our balcony than ever (we get up really early to enjoy the peace of the morning, and the local building site is not allowed to work, so it's quiet out there in the evenings these days). Our nearest foodcourt, which we didn't use to frequent because it tended to be too busy, is now our take-away food mainstay, because it's a short enough walk away to get the goodies home while they're still hot.

Hardly surprising, given all the limitations, that June has seen the lowest number of PT posts ever (five), and the lowest number of photos in a month (43) since September 2014, when we were busy moving from Indonesia back to Malaysia, and I was starting a demanding new job.


In my end-of-month review a year ago, I was looking forward to leaving the limbo of Cromer (delightful though it had been), and taking the first steps towards getting home. The situation was still very fluid, so it was an anxious time, but we did finally make it.

Now I really wonder if we made the right decision back then... For a start, we ended up with covid. I'm still grateful that we were among the vast armies of the asymptomatic, but it was a stressful time, and we were confined for four weeks rather than two. After that, we benefited from about four months of relative liberty. Then this year turned to custard with poisonous vengeance. Since mid-January we've not been allowed to leave our district. We lost a family member in the UK, and could do nothing at all. For over a month now, we've not been allowed to leave our neighbourhood. Should we ever have come back?

Yet what else could we have done? By the time we left, Britain was opening up to local tourists, and short-term accommodation was becoming expensive. Taking on long-term accommodation would have been a big gamble. We didn't know how long the window for returning to Malaysia would stay open, and all our stuff -- including our documentation -- was here. No medium-term accommodation possibilities appeared on our horizons. No-one fortuitously popped up with offers like "we're not using our flat, do you want to borrow it?" So what could we have done differently?

These are the questions you torment yourself with.

And there are more of them coming up. More possibilities for doing the wrong thing, or at least not being sure you're doing the right one. Once we're double-vaccinated, we really want to be able to go to the British Isles, to see family and friends (not seen for a year or more now). But we're concerned about the possibility of yet again moving from the frying pan into the fire. I don't like the way Britain's covid situation is developing at present...

Still, we don't have to worry about that yet. By the time we're up and running with our second vaccination, maybe the situation over there will have improved. I so hope so.

What a mess this all is. What an ungodly mess.


Anyway, June...

No posts on Vintage Travel this month (I'm starting to get to the point where I can't even bear to look back on my own travel).

The travel of the mind is where it's at for me, without doubt, so The Velvet Cushion has been running hot: Two screen posts (one on Chilean film-maker Sebastian Lelio, and another just rounding up a few serials we completed recently); the start of a new thread on language-learning, currently one of my mental mainstays; three posts on French author Colette, with whom I've had a bit of an obsession this month; and two other books, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, and Inspector Imanishi Investigates.

Stories are my salvation at the moment. I'm not sure quite how it happened, but I currently have four books on the go, in English, Spanish, French, and Indonesian (plus a graded reader in Russian, but I don't really count that). It's confusing but somehow exhilarating.

So things go on. I know it could be lots worse. Keep treading... Remember to breathe... Don't look down into the depths...