Today is not only the end of March. It's Hari Raya, marking the end of Ramadan:



And it's the end of the first month since last August that we've spent entirely in Kuching.

We have had three different lots of accommodation in March, mind you. We began in an Airbnb on Chonglin Park; then we transferred to a friend's place by the Sarawak River; and finally, we moved into what will be our second "real" home in Kuching.

March has also brought a welter of different experiences. We had a week of feeling like tourists, followed by a couple of weeks of very definite adulting, as we tried to digest a friend's bad news, looked for somewhere to live, and did two more rounds of medical tests (on the latter, one issue is still on the watchlist, but no worse, and another two are showing improvement, so if you add on the "no worse" for last month's appointment, that's a set of results I'm very relieved about overall).

Throw into the mix a temple procession (they're always fun):



And some inspiringly purple food:



We moved into our new place a week and a bit ago, and since then we've been busy getting it organized. It's big and light and airy, and we like it a lot. There are still a few things to do, but we're mostly there. (We generally anticipate a three-week period of activity when we move in anywhere. During that time, we run round insanely in an attempt to get things the way we want them, knowing very well that after that time has elapsed, inertia will strike, and we'll put up with everything else for the duration.)

Yesterday, we put the rucksacks away in the new storeroom... Always a slightly sad moment. Hopefully, they'll emerge again in due course. And, in the meantime, we have a nice place to make the most of.


***

I'm still not up to date with The Velvet Cushion (I'm starting to think this is always going to be the case, and I'm going to be running along behind for ever and ever). But it has been a great few weeks' reading.

A couple of travel throw-backs still lingered: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (a phantasmagorical rollercoaster of a read, to celebrate our own recent volcano experience); and Christianna Brand's Tour de Force (supposed to be a light little farewell to the Mediterranean, but actually more of a thesis on why some people shouldn't go abroad at all...). Ali Smith's Spring was just in honour of the season, but she's always worth reading.

March saw the end of three group reads: The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell (an absolutely brilliant book, funny and horrifying in equal parts); Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (a rollicking little period gem); and Jane Austen's inimitable Pride and Prejudice, which I hadn't read for more than 50 years (gulp).

I wound up a couple of books that I'd started during February (which was Black History Month in North America): Mr Lover Man by Bernardine Evaristo (funny, yet heart-breaking); and Beloved by Toni Morrison (a viscerally shocking reminder of what life was like for 19th-century slaves and ex-slaves in the United States).

Which just leaves us with Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (unnerving to see rather more of myself in Olive than I'd bargained for), and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (a particularly poignant read, given what's happening to the United States at the moment).


***

Who knows how long we'll be staying here in our new place, but if September saw the "end of Part 1", then I guess this must be "the beginning of Part 2".

I feel I need some resolutions. But all I can think of is the usual stuff: Read more, write more, swim more, walk more; worry less, eat less, judge less, procrastinate less...

Re the writing, just yesterday I read, courtesy of The Marginalian, W.S. Merwin's recapitulation of advice given to him by John Berryman:

... I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

Which is definitely food for thought...