This is the first month this year that we have spent completely in one place. That place is Kuching, Sarawak, aka home.



It's been an unwontedly busy and sociable month, and lots of really good food has been eaten with friends old and new.

Food always comes first, of course, but other notable highlights were Gawai; a bus trip to Bau; a visit to the Yu Lin Art Gallery; and the awe-inspiring Niti Daun parade:






We're planning to stick around Kuching and environs for another month, and then try to do some modest Borneo-based expeditions. Not always easy, mind you...

Now that we're back home, The Velvet Cushion is again working at full throttle. Despite being retired, I can just never find enough time to do all the reading I want to do...

So, in this month's historical-fiction-leavened-with-lots-of-fact category would go And Nietzsche Wept, by Irvin D. Yalom (philosophy for beginners); Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (terrifying); The Country of Others, by Leila Slimani (vivid); Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes (fascinating); and (stretching "historical" to include 1980s/90s Glasgow) Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart (poignant). In the fact-that-you-wish-were-only-fiction category, I'd put W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (beyond tragic). Then, there've been a couple of splendid vintage whodunits: An Unknown Place, by Seicho Matsumoto (Seicho gets an automatic tick from me); and The Cask, by Freeman Wills Croft (fun). In the many-aspects-of-love box, I'd put the simply titled Love, by Elizabeth von Arnim (unutterably sad); and Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata (understated and quite brilliant). Oh, and then there were a couple of online films, courtesy of the wonderful folks at the Japanese Film Festival.


I'm a great email-newsletter reader as well, and there've been a few noteworthy movements in that field this month.

New to me are From an Equatorial Lens and The Central Borneo Stories, both very much covering our neck of the woods.

Sadly, this is the last month for Between the Lines, my favourite source of Malaysian news, which is bringing down the shutters tomorrow.

And flopping into my inbox just today was this piece by Brent Hartinger, provocatively entitled: I Actually Love Getting Older, Thank You Very Much. Now, I guess you could easily slap this down by saying the tone is a bit complacent (we're definitely in privileged Westerner territory here), and I wonder if Brent will still be saying the same when he hits his sixties. BUT -- and I'm really surprised to be saying this -- I, who actually hate that I seem to be getting older way faster than I'd envisaged, found myself nodding along to many of his points...

Anything else?

Well, you know Kuching is beautiful, right? Just a reminder:





We've been excitedly(?) following the progress of Southeast Asia's tallest flagpole this month, so I feel I can't do better than sign off with one last flag photo: