It's hard to recall a year that turned to custard quite so quickly as this one...

None of us was naive enough to think everything would magically improve once 2021 rolled round. But I don't think many of us predicted that things would get quite so dramatically worse...

We've had some horrific milestones this month:

The covid death toll in Britain went over 100,000, while the number of deaths in the world as a whole passed two million. Indonesia's cases passed the one-million mark. Malaysia, which registered some terrifying figures in the last couple of days, breached the 200,000 mark. In Viet Nam, such a model of control, the beast is back. And this chart from The Economist predicts we won't achieve widespread vaccination coverage in Malaysia until late 2022...

On 13 January another CMCO kicked in for Kuching. It will last at least until 14 February. But as things aren't going particularly well in Sarawak either, it's unlikely to be eased.

Plus there's been a lot of rain, with flooding in places.


All in all, there's not been much January purple (as is also apparent in the month's 1SE compilation).







Rather, this is what encapsulates most of life at the moment:


On the blog front, Purple Tern is attempting to go in a new, tighter direction. Accordingly, we had the last of the shadow-journey posts this month. And I kicked off a series called The Friday Gazette (first posts here and here), which attempts to round up anything remotely worth saying about the week gone by.

The Velvet Cushion -- not surprisingly, given the number of books I read/listen to, and the number of things I watch on screen -- has been quite busy. I've continued my mini-review series, with posts on gender-based violence; ambition, dedication, and regret; screens; and women's lives. I also wrote about Tash Aw's masterly We, The Survivors.

There's even been a Vintage Travel post (on Nouvelle-Caledonie).

That pretty much sums up the month.

I've tried to remain hopeful all this miserable time since the end of last February. But it gets harder and harder. Nothing seems to get better; many things get much worse. There is absolutely no end in sight.

As part of my Greek shadow-journey last year, I read Stephen Fry's Mythos. He retells the story of Pandora's jar (no, it wasn't a box, it was a jar -- a pithos). Pandora's curiosity, as we know, lets loose hardship, starvation, pain, anarchy, quarrels, wars, and other miseries.

But there's a kicker: "What Pandora did not know was that, when she shut the lid of the jar so hastily, she for ever imprisoned inside one last daughter of Nyx. One last little creature was left behind to beat its wings hopelessly in the jar for ever. Its name was Elpis, Hope."

Fry discusses this further in an appendix, laying out three rival interpretations:

Some argue that the entrapment of Elpis reinforces all the other evils by denying us even the consolation of hope.

Others argue that Elpis stands not so much for hope as for foreboding or dread, and it's actually a mercy that it remains locked up: "With Elpis locked away, in other words, we are ... capable of living from day to day, blithely ignorant of, or at least ignoring, the shadow of pain, death and ultimate failure that looms over us all." Not that this studied ignorance is particularly easy these days...

For Nietzsche, thirdly, Elpis does represent hope, but hope is not necessarily a positive thing. "For him hope was the most pernicious of all the creatures in the jar because hope prolongs the agony of man's existence. Zeus had included it in the jar because he wanted it to escape and torment mankind every day with the false promise of something good to come. Pandora's imprisonment of it was a triumphant act that saved us from Zeus's worst cruelty. With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise. Without it we can at least try to get on and live free of delusional aspiration."

As far as the current hell is concerned, I'm going with Nietzsche. I'm going to "try to get on and live free of delusional aspiration".

I guess I've just come to accept that this year too will be blighted, just like last year. It's a year to read books and learn languages. There were all those years when I bemoaned the fact that I had no time to read books and learn languages. Well, now I do. Last year I was still making the attempt to be proactive and jolly and we-can-crack-this. I'm not any more. It all sucks. It's all scary.

So just keep your head down, read books, and learn languages.

Oh, and try not to get too fat... (In case anyone is wondering, in the picture at the top we have chicken and green olive salad, with roasted red cabbage, carrot, and walnuts. A highly recommendable little combination.)