This month we actually prised ourselves out of our little Kuching oyster.

In the early days of April, we had a bit of beach time in Sematan (for Nigel, this included an unwelcome encounter with a centipede...).


We also did a little excursion with friends back to the dragon at Musi:


And we're currently in Kapit, two days into our latest road trip:


In Kuching, meanwhile, it was a good month for temples, both Thai and Chinese.


April brought Hari Raya, marking the end of the Muslim fasting period:


And we had another birthday to celebrate.


I'm still wrestling with the UK pension authorities, and I'm sure there are many rounds still ahead, but there was one tiny glimmer of hope this month.


So, all things considered, I think April scores quite highly in the purple stakes:





My reading has not been as splendidly coherent as last month, but there were a couple of coalescences. Two of my books concerned South Asia: Amnesty, Aravind Adiga's moving story of an undocumented migrant in Sydney; and The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese's monumental family chronicle of Kerala (only suitable for those who can deal with medical detail...). Two were further offshoots from my fetish for Hemingway contemporaries: Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald (a poignant testimony to what could have been); and The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (wacky and well worth reading). And three had strong religious motifs: Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok (a dark and brooding study of growing up Jewish in America in the turbulent 1930s/40s); Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (a Christian-rooted story of fathers and sons, race and violence); and That Can Be Arranged by Huda Fahmy (a light-hearted look at love and courtship in a conservative Muslim context). After that, we were into the one-offs: Another World by Pat Barker, a good-in-parts study of memory; Secret Asset by former MI5 DG Stella Rimington, a good-in-parts spy story; Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata, which moved me rather less than it moved others; and Dark Shops Street by Patrick Modiano, a hauntingly beautiful, richly atmospheric quest for the past in the Paris of the early 1960s.



All this busyness is welcome, but it doesn't stop the endless questions...

Maria Popova pointed me recently to a really striking poem by Dorianne Laux called Facts About the Moon. It starts out with the statement that the moon is moving further away from us every year (I didn't know that, but then I am scientifically challenged). Then it hauls you into its beauty, before leaving you with a sharp, gritty tug to your heartstrings at the end. It concludes:

... you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.


Grace...