It's been a strange month. Doubly "liminal".

Liminal? Well, apparently, we're all living in liminality at the moment: we're wedged between two states -- behind us is the life we knew, once, pre-pandemic; and ahead of us, somewhere, is the world we'll ultimately emerge into; but the "now" we are currently stuck in is full of uncertainty; it's a "foggy, ambiguous space". Those of us who like to plan and look forward don't flourish in this kind of limbo. But we just have to suck it up: "Not knowing what next week will look like and finding ways to 'tolerate ambiguity' is where we're at right now."

Yep, that pretty much sums it up...

And we've been here for a while, no? A year ago, in last September's review of the month, I wrote: "Ultimately, we're all struggling to make the most of a second-best at the moment. No-one wants the world to be like this. We're all just trying to figure out how to make do." It was probably a good thing I didn't realize how bad it was going to get, and how long it was going to go on...

On the subject of going on (and on and on), I so empathized with this post by Pam Mandel the other week. I think she beautifully captures that we're tired, angry, frustrated, sad, and anxious -- and yet we know that we have no alternative but to somehow hang on to the hope that we will emerge somewhere better one day. (And of course, as always, we here in Ternville realize how lucky we are, compared with so many others. Since the pandemic began, according to the UN Brief sent out by Robbie Gramer and Colum Lynch on 24 September, the number of people around the world facing food insecurity and extreme poverty has increased by 18% and 11.7% respectively; global debt has increased by 13.8%; and 158 countries have reported pandemic-related violence. Our frustrations are small by comparison with those of so many of our fellow-humans.)


But aside from this shared existential liminality, the Tern household is now also in the period between the old, locked-down life in which we had very few choices, and departure at the beginning of November for a few months in the British Isles.

We're still locked down here to some degree (dine-in is now back, and -- as of tomorrow -- "tourism" will be back, but we still can't travel outside our home district, and we still can't leave home before 5 am), and we're also restricted by our own common sense, which sees the covid numbers in Sarawak staying stubbornly elevated, knows that the headline figures would be way worse if we were actually testing all close contacts (25% of tests are coming back positive), and therefore desists from taking part in many of the activities that are now officially permitted...

A quick digression on the covid front... I'm looking at the Malaysian government's covid website. Specifically, at the chart that shows cases per 1,000 people based on data for the past two weeks. And Sarawak is WAY WORSE than any of the other states... (The number of cases is 14.2; the next in line is Pulau Pinang with 9.3; Malaysia as a whole is 6.2...) Yet we're in the top five in terms of vaccination progress (65.2% of the total population fully vaccinated). I was talking to my doctor yesterday, and she commented that this just doesn't add up. Sarawak has a very strange covid profile, and the people who know stuff don't totally understand why. Hmmm... There's nothing like living in the middle of a medical anomaly... On a brighter note, though, having shared my terror of "covid camps" a couple of times in past posts, I do need to reiterate that the vast majority of cases are in home quarantine.

(Fortunately, Sarawak still registers disproportionately few deaths, although the number has been creeping up lately. As of yesterday, the total covid death toll for Malaysia as a whole stood at 26,143. At the equivalent time last month, it was 16,382... Tragic. So many families affected. Requiescant in pace...)


Anyway, back to liminality. I was saying that we were now wedged between the lock-down and the journey.

Most of September has been quiet. There's been Malaysia Day; there's been the Mid-Autumn Festival; there's been lots of good food; there's been lots of good reading (see below). But little else.

As of this week, though, we're in the "activity phase". When we planned all this, at the end of August, we realized that we'd probably need four weeks of ultra-low contact in order to have any chance of passing the covid test that is necessary to board the plane. But there would also be a number of jobs that just had to be done before we left. So we scheduled them for this week and next week, on the grounds that "surely the covid wave would have receded a bit by then". Well, it hasn't. But the jobs have to be done anyway. And the four-week period is non-negotiable. So it's a case of double masks on, and fingers crossed...

We've had ups and downs with the journey already. UK regulations have relaxed somewhat, but we're not 100% sure that our Malaysian digital vaccination certificates conform with what the authorities over there want. The flight to London that we booked ourselves onto was cancelled almost instantly, and the one we're rebooked onto gives us a long layover at Changi. I'm sure there's more of this to come... But we press on.


Nor, at the moment, can we plan any destination other than the British Isles. It's just a case of waiting and seeing. But any small endeavour will be a welcome change. It's December since we have set foot outside Kuching... At the beginning of the year, we had been hoping that the rains would permit a little road trip by the end of January, but by the time we got that far, the movement restrictions had arrived, and they stayed and stayed. So I'm good with modest. Old churches or canal walks or industrial heritage in Nottinghamshire? Excellent. A month back on the Isle of Man? Fantastic. If we can do more, we will. But anything is good already.

I'm certainly not planning a blitz of "revenge travel". Even when we're free of covid restrictions, if we ever are, there's still, more than ever, a sense of the need for environment-sparing restrictions.


The quiescent part of the month was very good for the Velvet Cushion, which sprouted more posts than appeared in the whole of its first year... There have been three screen entries, on different kinds of education; different kinds of trauma; and different kinds of problematic love affairs. There's been another contribution to the language log, on comprehensible input in German, French, Italian, and Indonesian. And there have been discussions of five really excellent books (three novels: Tokyo Express; Sankofa; and The Death of Vivek Oji; and two from the history/autobiography category: City of Devils; and Strangers on a Pier). I still don't know how I would have survived the last year without books...

And there's been another Vintage Travel post, in memory of Mercy, the friend I made all those years ago in Cote d'Ivoire.

Anyway, back to "liminality": "The space between the life we had and the life we potentially will be able to live can cause us distress... But the liminal space can also provide breathing room to learn to live with uncertainty and overcome what scares us." Frankly, I can't see our mid-term future looking more certain or less scary, so maybe this training is standing us in good stead.