What a week – dominated by ‘Dr Roberto from Spain’ who specialises in root canals. He kindly inflicted four on me, with one more looming ahead. He gouged out all the previous errors made over the years, even finding a broken end of a needle that had been cavalierly left behind. Three teeth treated long ago hadn’t even been permeated to the bottom of the root, as though the previous dentist had got fed up and called it a day. The poor dentist from my previous life, he was a good Christian soul, working on some of the roughest mouths in Edinburgh – the drug addicts, the ex-cons, the alcoholics – and after a hard day’s drilling he would spend his leisure hours with his guitar serenading the sick in the Royal Infirmary. A modern Irish saint he is, but I wish to God I hadn’t let him do more than a filling.
So… with the vibrant young doctor from Spain, his eyes keen, his equipment all flash and up to date, I lay back and shut my eyes and tried to ignore the pressure as he twisted the long screws into my roots. I did open them at one time and saw him fiddle with a skinny needle, about an inch long, and it was the stuff of nightmares. Still, enough drama, I have had the wrongs put right, and now I await crowning. Meanwhile John is almost at the end of his tortuous journey, and will be fitted with his new and hopefully permanent front tooth in mid-June.

The days are getting hotter, and now to walk outside is like hitting a physical wall of heat. We went to the beach last Friday and floated on cushions of salty water; the breeze somehow makes it bearable.

It was 46 (C not F!) yesterday, and I can feel the heat trying to infiltrate the windows in spite of the air conditioning. I am so glad that I am not a footballer. Who would want to play in this, or indeed work on a building site building a stadium? Who indeed? And who would want to lay down mosaic tiles on newly structured pavements in overalls, headscarves and hard hats and tackity boots? Perversely, inside the shopping malls the temperature sits just above freezing.

I had the saddest news this morning from Ming in Kuching. She wrote that the Longhouse at Nanga Sumpa in Borneo has burnt down and 38 families are now homeless. It is just before Gawai, the Dayak harvest festival which is the most important festival of the year, equivalent to our Christmas. They believe the fire was started in a kitchen, due to unattended cooking. John and I had such a nice time there, crossing the bridge in the evenings from our tourist longhouse over to the REAL one, and spending time with the chief, and drinking rice wine and seeing the chairs hung above the doors (representing absentee sons), and playing with two week old Crystal as the mothers sat about on mats in their colourful sarongs. There were chickens, dogs, engines, machinery, looms, and all the day to day business of living. All gone – and 2 hours by river in long boats to the nearest village.

I also heard from Trudi, the wife of the Australian gold miner who we met in Kota Kinabalu. She told me that she was in some photographic club that give you orders by email what to ‘shoot’ every day. You submit your picture and it is like a worldwide competition. Anyway, each day you may be given the word ‘RED’ and off you go, and take something beautiful or interesting, and the next might be something ‘SHARP’ etc. Well the day I met Trudi, the word was ‘SMALL’.
She took two pictures of sand. Oh my – I had no idea. Each grain was like a snowflake, no two were alike. The colours were unsand-like, the texture so different, and it was all very thought provoking.

I thought of it as I shelled prawns and noticed that my finger nails got stained pink from the slimy grey shells. What had they eaten to get that colour?

And then I thought of Blake and his poem (or augury which means an omen) which speaks of innocence juxtaposed with evil and corruption, and how most of us don’t often notice the small things, or we may do but then do little about it:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

I am reading Doris Lessing’s ‘The Golden Notebook’ and I have to go back and re-read sentences again, not that her writing is hard, but she writes truths that I have forgotten or hadn’t thought about for a long time. She writes about cynicism, about the South African soldiers who rallied and went off to fight Hitler in WW2:

‘this war was presented to us as a crusade against the evil doctrines of Hitler, against racialism, etc., yet the whole of that enormous land-mass, about half the total area of Africa, was conducted on precisely Hitler’s assumption – that some human beings are better than others because of their race. The mass of the Africans up and down the continent were sardonically amused at the sight of their white masters crusading off to fight the racialist devil – those Africans with any education at all’.

Then later she goes off on one about communism, but encapsulates it so beautifully:

‘Imagine, Anna, that all those heroic communists have died to create a society where Comrade Irene can spit at me for wearing a very slightly better suit than her husband has.’

And while all this is zipping about in my head, I have started making a Sunbonnet Sue quilt, which is wonderful. It takes me back to when I was about seven or eight and used to get the Bunty comic. On the back page there were paper dolls that you could cut out and dress in paper clothes. Well, each Sunbonnet Sue, I can choose the fabric – ‘will it be red, or pink, or maybe green?’ Pity I didn’t have some lowly minion willing to sew them together for me. I quite like being the designer! Oh well.

Tomorrow I am off to Dubai to collect the batik quilt from Mala that I left to be machine quilted back in February, and on Saturday the Quilt Guild hold their last meeting of the year. I have so many masterpieces to take along for Show and Tell…

And finally here is my beautiful granddaughter, Bonnie.