Apart from today (which has been one of those days when EVERYTHING goes wrong), June has been our calmest month for a long, long time...

It has been a really busy period, with extensive lists of jobs to do (which is why PT has come up with a mere nine offerings this month).

But it has been peaceful and pleasant. It's now several weeks since Nigel had a headache, which in itself equates to a massive uptick in terms of quality of life. And the mostly decent weather and low covid case-load have allowed us to get out and about pretty freely. So we've been catching up with friends, and making the most of local food and drink outlets; we've had a couple of little excursions (to Paku and Muara Tebas), and done a little local sightseeing; and we visited (twice) the brand-new Borneo Cultures Museum.

All in all, then, busy, but also relaxing.

Of course, this could all change in an instant. There are mutterings of new covid waves. And we both have hospital check-ups in the offing, so there's plenty of scope there for things to go south again... But for the moment, we're just enjoying the respite.




We've moved getting-up time forward to 4.30, as the lifting of the outdoor masking requirement means that we're slightly less sun-shy than we used to be. Depending on the agenda, we either head straight off for a walk; or we spend the first few hours of the day on the balcony, and go walking after that.


And I now have a Balcony Bag...

Tired of jumping up and down to get things that I needed on the balcony but never had with me, I decided that I would have a kit ready packed. A bit like the kit you take to the beach... Initially I just coopted a cloth bag, but then we acquired this spiffing purple number (with separate front pocket), which came free with a pack of toilet roll:


It houses:

-- Glasses, phone, and earbuds (in the front pocket);
-- Insect repellent (usually not needed, but sometimes has to be pressed into service)
-- Wrap (ditto)
-- Notebook and pen
-- Tissues
-- Wet wipes

Nigel laughs at my Balcony Bag. I think it's great. As my friends in the British Army used to say, back in my north German days, "Any fool can be uncomfortable."

Six Velvet Cushion posts have seen the light of day this month: a couple of entries on movies, which are again forming part of our evening routine; a long-overdue post on interesting songs; a monumental languages update; and discussions of two Turkish detective novels (The Bellini Card and The Gardens of Istanbul).

Even though our little world has expanded, I still value the time I spend with books and movies and languages. These activities offer insights into a complexity that is way beyond what I will ever be able to personally experience.

And the sense of complexity is surely what we most need to conserve in this often pig-headed age of stupid binaries.


I was very struck recently by this essay by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft). It's expansive and thought-provoking, but the major thrust is, precisely, complexity.

The complexity that is our bodies (did you KNOW that only 43 per cent of the body's total cell count is human...?) leads her on to a superb critique of our mania for separation:

"I believe that the sin for which we were exiled from paradise was not sex, nor disobedience, nor even finding out God’s secrets, but rather considering ourselves to be separate from the rest of the world, to be individual and monolithic. We simply refused to be in relationships. We left paradise under the watch of a God who was equally separate from the world, monolithic, monotheistic (I can’t shake the image of a God in gloves and a mask), and from then on, we began to cultivate the values of that state: striving for mythologized integration, for totality, egoization, monolithic monism, analytic thinking, divisive, on the basis of either-or (thou shalt have no other gods before me), a monotheistic religion, discrimination, valuation, hierarchy, fencing off, separation, sharp black-and-white divisions and, finally, a narcissism of the species. We formed a limited liability corporation with God that monopolized and destroyed the world and our conscience. Thanks to which we totally stopped being able to understand the astonishing complexity of the world...

"We’ve put off general knowledge and lost our sense of holistic perception somewhere... Once, at least, we tried to comprehend the world as a whole, building its cosmogonic and ontological visions, asking questions about its meaning. But somewhere along the way we became compartmentalized in much the same way that the capitalist factory proletarianized artisans who could still produce a whole product, turning them into laborers making only one component of it, unaware of the whole...

"It strikes me that literature, as a never-ending process of telling stories about the world, has a greater capacity than anything else to show the world with a totality of the perspective of mutual influences and connections. Understood broadly, as broadly as possible, it is in its nature a network that connects and shows the enormity of the correspondence between all the participants of being..."

Here's to July. May life stay calm, but not simple.