Interesting expression that, isn't it? A fly in the ointment...

The original thought behind it, according to language experts O'Conner and Kellerman, is probably the Old Testament. Ecclesiastes 10:1, to be precise, which the King James Version translates as: "Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour."

But the way in which we generally use the expression -- in the sense of a negative factor that spoils something that is otherwise good -- crops up in a collection of 17th-century sermons. And the earliest Oxford English Dictionary reference draws on Charles Lamb, whose 1823 essay Poor Relations compares an impoverished and importunate relative with "a lion in your path, a frog in your chamber, a fly in your ointment..., the one thing not needful..., the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet". (You can read the whole thing here. It's a bit mean, but quite funny.)

Anyway, this is my long-winded way of advertising the fact that August brought an awful lot of good stuff, but also some lions/frogs/flies and puckery-mouthed sourness.

Ointment first:

Today is Merdeka Day, which commemorates the Malayan Declaration of Independence of 1957. Malaysia per se didn't exist at that point, so over in Sarawak, we tend to keep our major celebrations for Sarawak Day (July) and Malaysia Day (September).


But today is also the day after Ghost Day, which some sections of the community here celebrate very enthusiastically with various kinds of offerings and fireworks:




August has been very interesting. We did a couple of day trips earlier in the month, to Serian, Ranchan, and Musi.



But otherwise, we've very much been around town, and it has been a culture-rich period, with boat lutes, an amazing temple procession, and a night of Chinese Opera.


Plus lots of good food and coffee, of course. There's always lots of good food and coffee...



August was also a fabulous reading month. Vintage crime was represented by Louis Weinert-Wilton's The Chinese Carnation (the world of Edgar Wallace, but seen through the eyes of a German-speaker from the Sudetenland). There were two nicely suspenseful stories by contemporary authors new to me (Smaller and Smaller Circles by Filipina F.H. Batacan, and Tell Me Lies by Kiwi J.P. Pomare). Also new to me, though classics, were The Last Summer by Ricarda Huch, and Nothing, aka Nada, by Carmen Laforet, both very twistily psychological in their different ways. I carried on my Henry James thing with The Europeans, and launched an Edith Wharton thing with The Touchstone. August also included two action-packed but sharply political contemporary novels, Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha, and Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (both great as audio-books). My absolute standout audio-book, though, in the never-listened-to-anything-like-this-before category, has to be The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. Tragic, gripping, imaginative, and funny. Awesome.

So, all told, what with the real world and the book world, that's an awful lot of ointment, and I'm duly grateful.

And the flies? Well, the air pollution that I moaned about last month (caused by the combination of an El Nino weather pattern and agricultural burning) is still lurking. We had a couple of weeks' respite when the rains came and cleared the air, but the last couple of days have been pretty horrible.


And my hospital checkup didn't go that well... You know how you always want them to say, "All good, nothing to worry about, see you in six months"? Well, they didn't... So what was supposed to be a routine checkup turned into an extended series of consultations and tests.

There's more here, but you have to scroll down past acres of food to get to the relevant bit at the bottom (still getting my priorities right, you see). The TL;DR version, however, is that my cancer might be coming back... MIGHT. Too soon to know for sure. I could have opted for a preemptive operation, which was one of the courses of action they suggested, but instead, I chose their alternative option: Wait six months, at which point we'll reassess. It was a horrible weekend while I worked through what I felt right about doing, and I thought the whole thing would carry on bugging me even after I'd made my mind up. But actually I've felt surprisingly peaceful since deciding. We'll see what February brings...


Given that February is now getting very crowded (medical checkups, visa renewal...), we've brought forward our next European odyssey. Watch this space...

In the meantime, I'll sign off with a couple of lines from Maria Popova's lovely Spell Against Indifference (but do read it all...):

The rain falls and falls...
just a small reason...
to remember
we are still here
with our love songs and our wars,
our space telescopes and our table tennis...