Another month in which we've not moved outside Kuching... Another month in which a fair amount of rain has fallen. But a month that has been so full and busy that the days have whizzed by.

First up, we can report success on the visa front. For two years anyway.


And, of course, we've had Easter:



Plus, March brought a ton of interesting events: Not only the Tua Pek Kong temple procession, but also the amazing celebrations for the Seng Ong Deity, which included a spectacular convention of lions and another really huge procession.





These parades have a religious underpinning, but they are primarily colourful, fun, heart-warming events that draw crowds of all persuasions. I enjoy them enormously. And I'm always moved by them somehow: By the overwhelming effort that has gone into creating them; by the oceans of cooperation that must have been necessary (quarrelsome at times, no doubt); by the high degree of inclusivity (all manner of groups and ages take part, and onlookers are cheerfully waved at, posed for, and sent home with handfuls of sweets and peace bands). I think they end up doing an enormous amount of GOOD.

Aside from temple events, we also had the opportunity this month to join an informal tour of Kai Joo Lane, given by a local writer/historian. And there were other informative events on dragons and dolphins.

And, of course, there was lots of fine food -- a sine qua non of Kuching life, and especially pleasurable when enjoyed with friends.



All in all, I'd give March a big tick.


It has also been a wonderful reading month. Usually, my reading is all over the place. And I don't mind that. One of the pleasures of retirement is that you can read what you want when you want, and I see absolutely nothing wrong with tangents. But sometimes it's nice to have things tied together, however loosely, and that's what happened to happen this month.

The Fraud, by Zadie Smith, is a nice little fictional study of imposture, framed by the family of Victorian author William Harrison Ainsworth. One of the most intriguing and sympathetic characters is Jamaica-born Andrew Bogle, a former slave. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (as the terminology of the day had it) is by civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson, and is another poignant illustration of the tragic legacy of slavery. The Return of Martin Guerre, meanwhile, by Natalie Zemon Davis, also deals with the theme of imposture, this time in 16th-century France.

Also about writers -- lots of them, all clustered round Jena in Germany, as the 18th century turned the corner into the 19th -- was Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf, a very readable study of the early German Romantics. The Blue Flower, an elegant little novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, focuses specifically on Novalis, one of the best-known of those figures. The Magician, by Colm Toibin, is a fascinating fictional biography of German author Thomas Mann. And -- admittedly, there's a bigger jump here... -- if you want a bit more magic, this time from 1930s Malaya, you can't go wrong with The Night Tiger, by Malaysia-born Yangsze Choo.

Last month's Ernest Hemingway book set off a veritable cascade of related reading. In Our Time, a linked collection of short stories, turned out to be the Hemingway work I've most enjoyed. The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, gives us another angle on the first Mrs Hemingway; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, actually by Gertrude Stein, is a quirky account of a broad swathe of Parisian intellectual life before, during, and after the First World War; and Shakespeare and Company is a warm and generous memoir by Sylvia Beach about the Paris bookshop she ran from 1919 until 1941. This Must Be the Place is another Paris memoir, focusing on the mid-1920s, but this time it's the recollections of one of Montparnasse's most famous barmen, James Charters, as told to Morrill Cody. And The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald's sad account of a struggling relationship, was published in 1922, a couple of years before the Fitzgeralds also took up residence in Paris, and figured in many of those other books.

In last month's Hemingway post, I quoted his idea of living in two worlds -- in the actual place where you find yourself, and in the world that writers give you. The two can complement each other, or contrast with each other. It doesn't really matter. What matters is the additional dimension that books provide. I can't live without it.


Of course, if you throw yourself into cultural events and do lots of reading, then you fall far behind with other things you're supposed to be doing. So April might have to be payback time... But then Hari Raya is approaching. There's bound to be lots happening for that... People say Kuching is a quiet place. I disagree. There's never a dull moment...

Relatedly, I sometimes worry that I don't have a big enough piece in my life labelled "spiritual" or even "calm". I think that if I did, I would have more resilience and more optimism and generally more peace. I would perhaps get less annoyed with the dogs here, or with other people's cooking smells, or the terminal inconvenience of the layout of our apartment, or the utter unpredictability of the weather at the moment.

But actually I'm not sure that initial premise is valid. I think Barbara Brown Taylor has it right: "Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish -- separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars."

So I think what I'm lacking is not a big space called something, but the patience to linger over a book or a temple procession or a lovely sight (or even a dumpster), and let it seep in. BBT again: "I can stop what I am doing long enough to see where I am, who I am there with, and how awesome the place is. I can flag one more gate to heaven -- one more patch of ordinary earth with ladder marks on it -- where the divine traffic is heavy when I notice it and even when I do not. I can see it for once, instead of walking right past it, maybe even setting a stone or saying a blessing before I move on to wherever I am due next."

Perhaps that's a job for April...