It has been a Good Month.

I'm Manx, and not only do we not count our chickens before they're hatched, but we tend to assume that they'll emerge from the hen dead in the shell.

So I'm not trumpeting this from the rooftops, in order not to attract another drubbing from Fortuna.

But (quietly) it has been a Good Month.

For a start, Malaysia has a new prime minister, and most of our Malaysian friends seem to be reasonably happy with the result. Of course, the difficult part is still to come. But that sounds a bit chicken-sensitive already.

On a personal level, Nigel's doing really well, and is pretty much back to normal.

We also managed to come back from an excellent road trip on schedule and without covid, thus distinctly improving on our performance in July. (We based ourselves in Sri Aman and Sibu. For more details, start here, and work your way forward. And don't miss Nigel's awesome bore video.) Meanwhile, smaller trips took us to Buntal and Serikin.









Plus, we've moved on from last month's vague travel-plotting to something a little more concrete. To make the most of the time available between Nigel's specialist appointment and mine, we're heading for Japan next month. Kyushu Island, to be precise (a choice partly inspired, I have to confess, by my interest in Japanese author Seicho Matsumoto...)

I feel a bit guilty about this trip, especially as this month was also COP month... In an attempt to fly less, we'd kind of reached the conclusion that one big trip a year (rolling family travel and exploration travel into the same itinerary) was the way to go. But this coming year, that just doesn't work for us. And mega-trips -- like this year's, which was over six months long -- are monumental to organize, especially when there are health check-ups to factor in. A tedious constraint, but there we are. Anyway, we've made our contribution to a carbon offset fund (although I don't really believe in those, to be honest). And once we're there, it's all going to be trains and feet; we're aiming to cover only a relatively small area, in our normal slow fashion; and we're going for several weeks, thus making the most of our carbon expenditure. Nevertheless... A bit guilty.


It has also been a good month for movies (though not for languages...). And I've read some fascinating books: The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness by Shin Kyung-sook; The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers; The Dervish Gate by Ahmet Umit; and The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.

And Kuching -- well, Kuching's always pussy-cat-lovely, and (so far) the rainy season is not proving too inconvenient:





To return to my chickens theme -- and, by the way, we have a new neighbourhood chicken, who seems to have an even more inappropriate idea of "dawn" than our current hero -- I'm still trying to sit loose to all plans. Covid cases are rising again here. And the spiffy new boosters we were told would be arriving this month haven't... So I don't know what next month will bring, or next year.

But November has been Good.