February has been good to us.

It started in our home city, and the Kuching diary this month discussed food (when does it not?); preparations for going away (ostensibly -- actually, it's mainly food again...); and notable achievements (it's not often you get to Sort Out the Bank).

Super-memorable was our visit with friends to the Chap Goh Mei procession in Bau. I think we're still running off the energy from that.

Plenty of purple in Sarawak, then:







But then we began another journey (rationale here).

And today is Day 10.


We started off in Turkey. We found plenty of things to do in Kadikoy, in the Asian bit of Istanbul. And we had a trip across the Bosphorus to visit two museums in Beyoglu. Loved it all.

Turkey is INCREDIBLY purple:








At the moment, we're in Sofia.

We got here via the night train, and since arriving on Friday morning, we've been doing what we mostly do when we travel, which is poke around parks, sculptures, and churches, try the local food, and go on quests, some of which turn out more successful than others...

We really don't like to hack around. In our view, it's much better to leave things unseen than to pound the streets ticking off supposedly "must-see" items. So we walk (a good deal), and then we withdraw somewhere quiet to just chill.

Purple in Bulgaria:



In case you follow The Velvet Cushion, my other blog, I'll just round up the month's entries on that. There was a compilation post on movies featuring odd relationships; there were two posts on individual movies, both of which I watched on planes, and found wonderful: The Snow Leopard and Nomadland. Oh, and there was a post on an audio adaptation of Oliver Twist. In non-fiction, I commented on an excellent biography of Montaigne, called How To Live?, by Sarah Bakewell; plus a record of one family's experiences in a wartime internment camp for Japanese in America, called Silver Like Dust, by Kimi Cunningham Grant. I don't normally read short stories, but I somehow got inveigled into looking at a selection of ghost stories by Dickens and associates. And there were four novels: Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh; It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (very scary, this one); Stamboul Train by Graham Greene (how could I not?); and I Am a Cat by Natsume Soseki (super-quirky but very rewarding).

That's a good 28 days, I reckon.



Of course, the month also brought a horrible anniversary. I know there are plenty of foul conflicts grinding on in the world, and many of them barely get any attention, which is really not fair (Myanmar is the one that springs to mind first in our neck of the woods). But I am a European by origin, and I just can't not be horrified by the fact that there's a war happening in Europe, and it has been going on for a year now...

Here's an excerpt from a poem by Iryna Shuvalova, translated from Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker. It is called "a moving grove":

...go and don’t come back have no doubts that’s how it is
to fall into the bottomless well of a body
to throw yourself like a comb over your shoulder
to sow yourself across a field so that a host
of warriors might grow...

In the Cathedral this morning -- the one specifically built to remember soldiers who died during a war -- I prayed for a safe journey. But most of all I prayed for peace. For restraint. For a way forward in a world where too many people are painting themselves into ever-tighter corners.

I'll close with some more Turkish purple: