There's been a fair amount of disruption again this month (another reno broke out upstairs...). But May also brought the Wesak parade; a memorable trip to the Hindu temple at Matang; plenty of interesting walks; and -- definitely worth highlighting in the monthly review -- the discovery of Sam's Ice Cream.



To escape some of the noise from the latest reno, we decided to bring forward our projected trip to Sibu. We've been many times before, but still found new things to do, and enjoyed hanging out in a slightly different scene. Whenever we move out of Kuching these days, we're struck by how unjammed other places are, and how much easier it is to get Grabs there...



It's always a tad difficult to get reliable advance travel information in Sarawak, but after snooping around down at the wharf in Sibu, we discovered that a boat to Dalat still runs (so does a boat to Daro, actually, but that's logistically a bit more awkward if you don't have your own wheels). We'd been to Dalat before, but the river trip (along three different waterways) was a good example of a journey that's worth at least as much as the destination.

Then, from Dalat, we trundled home, via Mukah. Most of our bus journeys were absolutely fine (and Kapit Express especially deserves to be mentioned in dispatches). I'd been put off buses by some really rough journeys in Europe (and, let's face it, the train is ALWAYS better). But this little expedition has definitely put buses back on the list of possibilities, at least in this part of the world. All our conveyances were at least comfortable enough to allow you to just sit back and listen to an audio-book while the scenery slides by.



The Velvet Cushion kept busy, despite the various journeyings. Book notes had something on Viet Nam and human evolution. But May wasn't short of novels:

First, Colm Toibin. It's unusual for me to read an original and a sequel consecutively. (After all, why not wait until you've forgotten absolutely all the details of the characters, and then have to scrabble around reminding yourself...?) But this month I listened back-to-back to the highly atmospheric Brooklyn and Long Island. There are definitely enough loose ends for another volume, I would say...

There were a couple of book disappointments this month, though. I'd already tut-tutted about Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) last time I visited him/her, but Troubled Blood really made me feel I won't be following this series any further. More surprisingly, because Penelope Fitzgerald is an author I like very much, I also found I didn't get on that well with The Gate of Angels. In this case, the fault is almost certainly mine.

For some reason, a few good but highly troubling books clustered together in my reading pile this month. Black and bleak it was... A Burning, by Megha Majumdar, is about injustice in India, but honestly, this stuff is happening everywhere now; Yonnondio, by Tillie Olsen, is set in the 1930s, but already the death of the American Dream is wreaking havoc with lives; Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch, is set in the near future, when a brutal dictatorship has taken over Ireland, but these days, of course, it's really hard to say, "Oh, that could never happen here." Then there was Punching the World, by Lukas Rietzschel, a narrative that surveys the scary appeal of the right wing to young males in a part of former East Germany.

In light of all this, We Are Free To Change the World, Lyndsey Stonebridge's magisterial survey of the life and work of Hannah Arendt, while underlining yet again all the terrifying parallels between 1930s Europe and the world today, actually made me doubt that I have any freedom at all to change the world... I never used to think, as so many "older" people do, that the present is by definition worse than the past. It isn't. But this particular global present is bad on so many levels that it's hard to retain any degree of optimism.

Fortunately, I rounded out the month with My Name Is Maame, by Jessica George, which actually deals with some pretty sad events, but has a hopeful trajectory, and at least gives the heroine the prospect of a happy ending. Ideal listening for the bus to and from Sibu.




What else? Well, a few animal stories have created waves in my inbox over the course of the month. Most locally, there has been the Big Hornbill Controversy. But a bit further afield, it would be hard to beat this cat story for a chilling segue from warm fuzzies to investigative intrigue and political machinations. (That's a great Substack, by the way. Always interesting, and you can subscribe for free.) On a less heart-rending note, I hope it will make your day, as it made mine, to discover that sea otters have pockets... But you probably knew that already...

On the subject of the human animal, I found masses of food for thought in an article by Derek Thompson called The Anti-Social Century (my intro was via Dense Discovery, another really good newsletter). Quick quote: "Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over..."

I'm still musing on the extent to which Thompson's more general observations apply to our context here in Kuching, Sarawak. Some do, some don't, I think. But as a bit of insight into our global political predicament, it's well worth reading.

Finally, today is very auspicious. First, it's the Dragon Boat Festival (chiefly notable here for glutinous rice dumplings, but also, we were told by a friend, for offering an opportunity to make energy-changing Wu Shi Water):


And today is also the eve of the Harvest Festival. So... Selamat Hari Gawai, everyone!