What a terribly strange month this has been... For just a couple of days of it, we were still on the Isle of Man. Which, as I write, I can't quite believe, as that seems so long ago now...



Then we were in England for about a week:





Since the middle of the month, we've been back in Sarawak.

It has been one of those months with no major problems, but an endless line-up of irritating and time-consuming challenges.

The website has been (and still is) malfunctioning, which is why there have been very few Purple Tern posts for November (The Velvet Cushion fares better, as the posts there tend to have fewer photos).

So all I can offer you is a monster catch-up post that whizzes us from the Isle of Man to Sarawak, and then a couple of things on Kuching's Christmas decorations (where I burble about baubles), and our trip to the Rajah Charles Brooke Memorial Hospital (which turned out to be really interesting).


We hadn't been back long before I copped some sort of bug (almost certainly another round of covid), and Nigel sprained his ankle, so he was hobbling for a while.

Plus, there has been a ton of tedious admin, much of it related to our projected house purchase.

However...






Since being back, I'm more determined than ever to make this dividing-our-time thing work. Much as I'm looking forward to being based in my homeland again, I definitely don't want to lose all the good things we have here.

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The Velvet Cushion has really been back in business this month, partly because I've had a bit more time to catch up with writing-about-reading, and partly because Purple Tern has been in the wars. It's a particularly disparate crop of books this month, though, and very hard to corral into themes:

-- November's Book notes post focused on remembering (which seems to be a bit of a go-to area for me).

-- I don't read that much non-fiction, but this month I benefited from Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, a moving memoir by Matthew Perry, and Black Spartacus, Sudhir Hazareesingh's very readable biography of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture.

-- I finished two book club reads: The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton (absolutely brilliant); and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima (beautiful and thoroughly disturbing in equal measure).

-- Dead Lions by Mick Herron is the second in the Slough House spy series, and every bit as entertaining as its predecessor.

-- Hilary Mantel's Fludd was a throw-back to our Derbyshire trip, with an extra bit of magic tossed in (Mantel is never anything other than good).


-- There were two to file under "early 20th century": Louis Bromfield's Early Autumn is a poignant study of the decline of a well-established family; and Vita Sackville-West's Heritage is intriguing as a bit of covert autobiography even though it doesn't work that well as a novel.

-- Oh William!, by Elizabeth Strout, is a much better book than its really lame title would suggest.

-- I appreciated the message of Hernan Diaz's Trust (that you can't -- ahem -- "trust" people's rendition of anything, especially themselves), but remained unconvinced by the unconventional structure.

-- And completely sui generis was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Wow, is that a bleak, dark, powerful read... Let's try harder, people. It would be terrible to end up here...

So, there we are: All over the place. Not even the pretence of rhyme or reason... How I treasure reading, though. All these words from all these minds are such a precious gift.



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A couple of links to share:

-- Roberta Hill talks about the power of curiosity: "How travel, wonder, and a little discomfort keep your mind younger than you think." She's specifically applied the source article to travel (which is her particular thing), but you don't have to travel to follow these prompts. I hope she's right, because curiosity is definitely not something I'm short of (although I'm not sure I pass the test in No. 3...)

-- Skeealyn Vannin Story is an enjoyable little performance that captures lots of the ancient lore and stories of the Isle of Man.

-- If you love trains, you'll love this map...

-- And if you need cheering up, look no further than these awfully cool animals...

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So, it's Advent tomorrow. Which makes it formally Christmas. As my bauble post indicates, I've kind of given up resisting since we've been back in Kuching, and have just resigned myself to drifting along with the festive current. But tomorrow's the real deal.

Happy Advent!