vertigo nuisance

26 October 2009


Sorry for the silence I have been laid low by vertigo a nuisance but I am defying it and sending this off while I can concentrate.

I find from Word that there are all sorts of English to choose from: - there is even one version for Malaysia and one for Singapore!

Plumber came. Talked from the moment he came through the door until he left!

Garrison Keilor in a piece in the International Herald Tribune tells us of a sign in the backseat of a London cab which reads: APlease keep your feet off the seats.@ In America, he claims, such a sign would only stimulate certain people to plant their shoes directly on the seats. Here such a sign would simply be ignored.

It rained so heavily just a day before Hari Raya that river behind La Salle School overflowed its banks and long roads of cars were stranded wet in Green Lane and the area around the Mesjid Negara. They have been promising the past umpteen years to deepen the river but it=s just all talk.

There is a golden aureole that has chosen the born again rambutan tree to sing from. It comes in the morning and again in the late afternoon about 6 when I am in the garden. A fearless troubadour.

Today is the last day of kiu ong iar (the nine goods festival) and true to form it rained like hell. Next month will be November when we are dry and Kota Bharu is flooded

More later when and if I recover

More blackouts

Here is another page from the New York Herald Tribune. You can see from the photos what the censor tolerates and what immorality invokes his anger.

The other day we made monkeys of ourselves when guests were here. The electricity was out and I cursed corruption, inefficiency - the whole string of usual curses. We waited 4 hours and yet the air con still remained silent. Our neighbour was out so we couldnt check with her. Then we phoned to complain and the woman at the other end said they had not received any complaints. That should have alerted us but I think we were so full of prejudice that we blamed Tenaga for everything. Then one of the guests noticed that the fuse box switch was down. Should be up she said. Yes the washing machine had indeed done the blackout. The air con came one again.

Car repairer Ah Aun told me that his customers have discovered that when they went to the dealers workshop for servicing the workers in fact did not change the engine oil but charge him for the oil which they stole and sold. So they go to him for servicing which he is reluctant to do.

I saw the gardener at one of the houses on the hill opposite throwing rubbish into the garden of the house No 3 opposite and told him about it. He says he knows who the man is – he is a lawyer.

The censor's brush

The censors are so busy (overworked?) they have even blacked out the chest of a male dancer in this photo from an issue of the New York Herald Tribune.

Very busy with visitors from US, Italy, Johore, Malacca and Singapore, hence the delay with this blog.

Lucky May came from 40 degrees in Rome to our rain soaked 26 and was delighted. It was a great feeling with these few cool days when one slept without the air con. And it was really chilly by the sea at Northern Beach hawkers complex.

KH came back with a lot of Laurel and Hardy. It was amusing to see the beautiful lady in the 1936 car armed with a parasol; I saw the girls carrying parasols in Thailand in a new light, gutsy things braving a speed much faster than Laurel’s open carriage and not being carried off.

My dinner at Nyonya Breeze was spoilt by the din created by much shouting augmented by the very low ceiling. The following night we went to the other Nyonya place at New World Park thinking we would have a quiet dinner but, alas, a fellow giving a lesson in hip hop to some girls and boys at the theatre next door had his amplifiers on full blast.

I have just finished reading Tash Aw, When his book first came out it was cooly received then it stunned the world when it won the Whitbread first novel prize. I thought it deserved the Doris Lessing endorsement of him as a good story teller. He has an inventiveness for fantasy. But it is less close to realty than Han Su Yin’s ‘And the Rain My Drink’.

I am glad they are reprinting Anthony Burgess’ great ‘Malayan Trilogy’ which originally came out as ‘Time for Tiger’. It was from one of the stories that I learnt that Chinese are “shits in the head” because they ate prawn heads. Another great book reprinted is Farrell’s ‘Singapore Grip’. I have introduced these two books to many friends. I am now reading Xan Ran’s interviews with Chinese in China, a fascinating, free of propaganda series of very detailed interviews which gives one some idea of life in China before and after the Cultural Revolution.

Eric Came with a bottle of 30 year old Glenfiddich. A great gift!

The exercise bicycle broke down the other day and we rang the shop. A man came round. He was a free lance and repaired exercise machines in hotels and sports centres. I was pleased to see that he was a young Indian and also he knew Malay but not English.

Rose came from Singapore the other day and was very pleased that in Penang the young called their elders Uncle and Auntie. In Singapore, she grumbled, the women would be offended if you said “hullo Auntie “ to them.

Firefly and Greta Garbo

Betong boasts an enormous statue of Buddha which was a donation from China, I am told.

At Albert’s place the other night we saw a dvd of nine year old Niu Niu playing Mozart. I liked the way he played Mozart. Unlike others who perform as if they were deep into Beethoven such as Ridi Lupu he smiled and looked around as he played, a real entertainer. I wonder why his parents call him Niu Niu (bull bull). Reminds me of the old song Abdul and Bull bull le mare (not sure of the last two words though).

I was astonished to see a bright light coming from the bathroom floor one night. As is usual when one is completely astonished it never occurred to me that what shone like a lighthouse in the darkness was but a firefly until KH came in and identified it. The creature was however dead. I havent seen any fireflies around here and indeed none since I was a kid.

I went crazy the other day at the music shop and bought dvds of Soviet and Russian ballet, of masters of the cinema like Fellini, Kurosawa, Renoir, stars like Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, and a complete BBC Shakespeare. That should keep me occupied for a long time.

I’m afraid I have neglected the blog again and for the same reasons - visitors, dinners, concerts, a very good local film, “Gadoh” which I think might win first prize at this year’s Freedom Film Festival, and Marion D’Cruz’s Retrospective Dance which showed what a fine dancer she is.

However the August 5th NY Herald Tribune prompted me to make a complaint rightaway and it is this - seeing the part where the legs meet of a female ballet dancer blacked out and - surprise - the chest of her male partner !

You see here the photo of the Mango Tree eating place in Betong which is our favourite. The woman there is a very special person who can turn out an amazing variety of dishes. Food is always fresh because her assistant simply gets on her motor cycle and collects what ever the cook wants from the market just round the corner. Luckily I had some years before photographed the place, because now the landmark Tree is no more.

I forgot to mention the last blog that the rich yachtsman from Langkawi stumbled on a Tune Hotel and spent the night there. It was good value he said, and showed us photos of the MR17 a night air con room with bathroom attached, Amazing!

We had pork knuckles at Ingolf’s Kneoper the other night, our guest being lucky that there was a table available. We three shared one dish and you can imagine what big eaters the Germans must be.

Just dug up from my computer a BBC story about an African parrot called N’Kisis with a 950 word vocab.

Last night we were at the Wind Orchestra concert (Woon’s group), an impressive crisp playing demonstrating what great strides have been made in music making in Penang. Then to the North Beach Café to be greeted by a storm of rain which forced us from the sea front to the not so welcome covered space where, we saw two women eating mashed potatoes from the German sausage man. They looked like Filippinos.

Pig's ears & fried grasshoppers

At the goo bar koay tiau t’ng place I was astonished to see a man in a tie serving coffee. KH thought that he must be the man who used to be at the back of the shop making coffee. This we confirmed when the woman answered my question as to why the poster on the wall announcing English breakfast had disappeared. Here answer was: “Because my husband is no longer helping me in the morning.” Shortly afterwards he hopped into a car and went off. He must have got a job and visited the coffee shop when he had a break, This, by the way, is the only coffee shop in Penang where the proprietors are English educated.

The goo bar koay tiau t’ng woman is busier then before and even at 3.30 pm the coffee shop is full with her customers. Chen’s friend from Langkawi fell in love with her beef soup and had two bowls. He thought the beef was superbly cooked. Chen had made friends with the old English man whose yacht was tied up next to his in Langkawi. They were in ecstasies over the Thai food at Sebai Sebai and so we started talking about food in other countries. The man told me that the fried grasshoppers in Cambodia were “lovely” which led me to telling him about Lao which I was sure produced better fried grasshoppers and cicadas and better still, hornet’s grub. I told him why Lao was shangri-la and he has decided to sail there.
The boss came to greet them with her bottle of whisky and we had a round with her.

By the way, the old man was adamant that the tim sun he had at Cintra Street (?) was one of the best in the world. I had never even heard of the restaurant and never heard that our tim sum was first class. The Cantonese who should know better, call Ipoh is “little Hong Kong” and Cintra Street “little Ipoh” anad it was never promoted.

We learnt something new from the old man’s visit. That we have a string of hotels called Tune which charge MR17 a night with air con. He was in the one in Burma Road and showed us photos of the room and shower to convince us that what he said was true; Chen must have regretted putting his younger friends into the E&O.

Chen’s younger visitors were friends from the days when he was a student in England. We gave Trevor and his wife pig’s ears at North Beach Café at 1.30 am and they liked it. They were also lucky with the ch’i - flower crabs just landed by the fishermen down on the beach which we had steamed at Hai Wei restaurant. We explained the special sweetness in the meat of the Penang crabs and their habit of staying high on coconut trees. Chen disdained the nutcracker and cracked the soft shells with his teeth the old fashioned way. Talking of crabs those writing about food in Penang do not seem to know that Penang people eat only ch’i and not cheem - rock crabs, which are tasteless to them.

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Parasol and motor bike

I’m afraid that dinners, visitors have made me ignore the garden, The Penang File and this blog. But I have at last managed to publish The Penang File and now turn my attention to the blog and jot down what’s been going on in my head since the last issue.

Yes this photo of a woman with a parasol on a motor bike in Betong has been waiting to be publicised. It was the same in Lao. I wondered how they kept their balance and why they were not swept away by the wind while holding the parasol in one hand.

Thinking that STRADA meant an Italian restaurant we went there to find that it is Canadian owned (two flags inside betrayed its origins). It’s been operating in Burma Road for a year and we failed to notice it. The man inside explained they had good business lunch time with Malay women customers - that explained why they served no pork. I liked the New York cheese cake which the manager, who looked as if he were the cook, said was made by the boss’s wife. The braised lamb shank was good too and the coffee was American. So now we have a Canadian place in addition to a Bulgarian restaurant, German pub and a Serb pub.

The censors are still at it. This time the victim is Durga, the Hindu goddess. In Off the Edge she suffered the indignity of her breasts being blacked out. Imagine how much it cost us to maintain hundreds of government staff with their brushes ready when the magazines are opened and scrutinised.