The other night I made laksa, well when I say I made laksa, I opened a packet that I purchased in Sarawak before I left after our last visit. You add the bean sprouts, noodles, prawns, chicken and egg then add the packaged ingredients. The smell was wonderful and the taste just whips you back and you are sitting not in a kitchen overlooking the Firth of Forth but in a café, restaurant or market stall in Kuching. We spent nearly three months in Kuching in 2023 and then again in 2024.

It had been so long since we strolled down the streets of South East Asia; so much had changed, we had got older and the cities were more modern but the smells are always the same, the heat and colour and vibrancy are the same, so in many ways it felt comforting to be back amongst the familiar.

We arrived in Kuching and waltzed into our hotel room. A giant picture window framed the Sarawak River and the pineapple dome of the Sarawak State Assembly Building and also Fort Margherita, named after the wife of the white Rajah, Charles  Brook. In the distance, balancing a fluffy cloud on its head, is the giant Mount Santubong.

It was just magical, as well as the crazy kitschy cat monuments featured on roundabouts as we approached our hotel. The Malay word for cat is Kuching, and my word, they really milk it.

John and I went exploring, naturally in the midday sun, along the promenade by the river to Old China town and Jalan India. We posed by displays of spices – the colours of a painter’s palette, turmeric, chili, cumin and the rest, and the smells rose up and tickled our fancies. We ate roti paratha freshly made with a bowl of chicken curry sitting alongside lots of Malay ladies, obviously out for lunch and a good blether.

We were invited to dinner with Ming and Frances (friends from Hanoi days) and Philip Wong and two others… it was a meal to die for, exquisite Chinese fare and very funny conversation. Philip was a master story-teller, and we were in stitches with his story of a baby orangutan rescued from the forest by ‘Caroline’ who instead of passing him to the rescue centre kept him for herself. She kept him for a few days, then a few weeks then a few years. By this stage the orangutan was getting big, and James, a colleague of Philip’s, said he should take him instead. So the orangutan moved in with James Ritchie for a few weeks and then a few months. Finally Philip insisted that the animal really needed to be reinstated into the rescue centre and learn to live with his own kind. So there he went, but James insisted that the animal would be called Ritchie after himself. The orangutan is still there and is now the Alpha Male, but has been known to terrorise his keepers and is very unpredictable. John and I  visited him at the Semenggoh Nature Reserve.

We eventually moved into an apartment, right on the river bank. That was our home for the duration of our visits. We did spend a couple of weeks in the Permai Rainforest, high up in a tree house overlooking  the beach and under the magnificent Mount Santubong. We woke up each morning to the hairy faces of the proboscis monkeys and walked up the scary mountain trails in the scorching heat to visit the waterfalls.

After visiting the Borneo Cultures Museum and the Ethnology Museum we learnt what is around. Exciting stuff. These are the skeletons of orangutans and proboscis monkeys. Hopefully not Ritchie – yet.

During both of our visits I wrote my book The Fish in the Tree in a windowless spare room in our apartment. There was a dressing table where I had my laptop and we covered the mirror with a patterned ceremonial cloth called a Pua Kumbu that we bought from the longhouse at Batang Ai. The cloth was woven in the traditional style by an old Dayak lady and would have been used as a ceremonial receptacle for severed heads in the time of the headhunters.

The story I wrote has similarities with my own life in the sense that I am torn between two countries and the love that I feel for the worlds that have influenced me the most: Scotland and Malaysia.

Every morning John would swim or shop for papaya and dragon fruit while I typed madly in my tiny space.

I would come out at lunch time, blinking into the sun and watch sampans drifting down the brown river. ‘Where were you today?’ John would ask me and I would tell him that I had been describing the cold wind and the lashing waves of the North Sea or the smell of gorse and the feel of the course grain of an ancient stone dyke on Scotland’s east coast.

But now, we are home here in Scotland, and I just count the months until we can go back and eat roti canai and smell the spices as we walk down the crowded pavement of the Grand Bazaar.

John and I have talked of joining the expatriates who have chosen to make Malaysia their home, but it always comes back to family. How could we not be in Scotland for so long, to watch grandchildren grow and be part of their lives? We have been over to Ireland to visit daughter Gerry in her new house and to help her hang pictures and plant trees, and I have just come back from Wales where I was in charge of my two granddaughters for nearly two weeks. (Natasha and Leo were in Vietnam). I was nearly worn out, but I haven’t laughed so much for ages. It was just me and Bonnie and Hazel, and every day was an adventure.

Spring has sprung and yes, the gorse is in full bloom and the apple and cherry blossom are like white puffy clouds along the pathways.

I am happy, but yet – the smell of laksa is so powerful.  I wonder how Ming and Francis are, I wonder if James, Linda and Robyn are meeting at the Bing Café, and wonder if the monsoon has passed yet? Are the seas still stormy at Damai Beach and have there been any crocodiles venturing up the river?

Rice and noodles. Always the conundrum. You choose one, but you want the other.