Tales from the Gael

We are just back from a week in Cyprus, and now the apartment here in Doha is sadly bereft. So much is packed or has been taken away already and there is a hollow echoing feel to it. I have just cooked the last meal (tomorrow we are going out), using up the last of this and the last of that, and taken so many half empty bottles and thrown them down the rubbish chute.

The week in Cyprus flew, and each magical morning I vowed that this one was the best breakfast ever! The table on the balcony was a riot of colour with cherries, peaches, yellow melon and figs, and lording over it all was the honeycomb from the hills around Kantara. Oh it was as though I was Aphrodite, who had just walked ashore and found a paradise of good things. Probably nearer to the truth would be I was more like Pooh Bear, with his clock permanently set at 11, so that it was ALWAYS time for honey!

We lolled by the pool, taking in the Russian invasion, and John’s eyes were spinning in their sockets as the thin android like creatures started their yoga – pigeon poses, and downward facing dogs wearing little more than a flimsy bikini. He later found an abandoned tractor and stood around hopefully; waiting for a babushka, (hah!) but the grannies must have all been left behind. Mr Putin’s plan of taking over Europe is much more subtle!

Sitting on our balcony each day we became like super spies, watching the other residents come and go. We were enthralled with an English lady living with her daughter and granddaughter. She had a walking stick and sarong, and walked back to the apartment several times in the hour. She didn’t go upstairs, but instead went into a ground floor cupboard. John keeps the bike in our cupboard, plus flippers and snorkels and useful things like that, so we couldn’t believe that this poor woman had been relegated to sleep amongst the spiders. So, with a large brandy and coke consumed, and the sun safely gone for another day, I crept down when the coast was clear to see what state their cupboard was in. There was no camp bed and side table; it was just full of cases and boxes, absolutely crammed to the ceiling. We came to the conclusion that she may have had a secret stash of something addictive to keep her going back. It was so enthralling!

Each day we revisited our old haunts that we saw first in winter, in spring, and then in autumn, now we saw them in the full sun-baked glory of summer. The golden sands beach on the Karpaz was beautiful, and we found strange table-like sunshade structures to sit under to eat our beetroot and hummus and what not. We were a little cautious when we saw the warning sign, but thankfully we could relax and just enjoy the day.


Later it was all so biblical as we came across the sheep and donkeys, huddled under an old olive tree.

We visited Famagusta and drank brandy sours, and then Kyrenia where we ate fish by the harbour, and wished we hadn’t ventured anywhere as it was just so hot.

Bellapais was nice and we sat under the Tree of Idleness, and felt very much at home.

On the way back we stopped off to look at the carob trees, and the ground was cracked and dry, almost like a desert. The cicadas were out in full force and we walked down a track and found an abandoned house, so quaint and so perfectly placed, beneath the mighty fortress of Kantara, and looking out at the royal blue Med. We stood and savoured the smells amidst the rough grasses and for a few seconds tried to imagine a life there. Not a tourist settlement in sight.

But best of all was just hanging out near the apartment, walking along the beach as the sun set over the Kyrenia hills,

and sipping beers at the Cyprus Gardens hotel.


On one visit there, sitting in the mid-day sun, I was woken up from my gentle reveries, when I felt something tickle my back. I absently put my hand round to scratch, when I suddenly felt these miniature little hairy legs grab my finger. Aaaaargh. It was a big beetle, and quite alarming!

The final day in the north, we trudged through the fields like a mad dog and an English man, out in the mid-day sun (yet again), to the little village of Iskele. We ate wild prickly pears on the way, and saw strange snails hugging the most arid-like bushes, and finally we sat down with a large gathering of ‘men-folk’ and to eat doner chicken with RELISH. They were the most delicious things, and worth getting sunstroke for.

Whilst in the village we did pay the electric and water bills and it was just such a pleasant experience. The official was just so relaxed, and stamped our receipt, and then brandished a box of chocolates and begged us to have one. How charming. Maybe it is just the custom. I wonder what happens if you don’t pay! NO CHOCOLATES FOR YOU! Ha Ha.

We had a night in Larnaca before flying back to Doha, so we went to fine-dine at the Art Restaurant and met the proprietor, Maria, who fed us food that was just oozing with flavour, and as we drank our wine and felt full of the joys, she remarked how nice it was to see a couple hold hands and have such respect for one another (!). I must remind John of this in the future.

She says there are so many Russian women who are coming and bamboozling the local Cypriot men, marrying and breeding and then complaining. Poor Cyprus, first it was the Venetians, then the Romans, then the Ottomans and then the Brits, and now it seems Russia is taking over.
Maria herself is originally from Famagusta but had to run with her family when the Turks invaded in 1974. She has been back, as they still have north Cyprus friends, and she drives past her house where she lived with her family. It is of course now occupied, but the present people close the shutters when the see a car with Greek number plates. She says the police harass anyone going north of the border and make demands for speeding fines (that don’t exist). It is criminal. It is interesting to hear another point of view from this troubled country. I fear there will never be a coming together of the two sides. Still, she was such a nice person, and the restaurant is so beautiful, with so many paintings and collections of knick-knacks, it must take hours to dust.

Talking of collections, I did love the trip round the museum, where things were just so OLD, and so odd. We found a very quaint man, in the throes of sexual happiness, OR he was just straining on the toilet, we weren’t very sure, but he has a hole in his head. Maybe he was an olden-day watering can, or a fertility symbol… goodness knows. He is 4,000 years old.

I particularly liked a Roman fish made from green glass, and also a poem found on a headstone in a field. Quite sobering and a sad reminder of our own mortality.

So goodbye from me from the Middle East. A new chapter begins, and John will at last be free from stress and deadlines, and we can do all the things we daydream about here.
I read somewhere about some woman’s philosophy, after having been uprooted so many times:

‘Wherever you plant me, there shall I grow’.

Nice.

Adieu.

‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.’

(Oberon in Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare)

I’ve been thinking a lot about pain these last few weeks, what with root canals and drilling, and what we do to separate ourselves from the horrid attack on our precious nerves. Apart from Panadol Extra and Ibuprofen, there are lovely things like massage and darkened rooms that help with headaches, and hot water bottles that soothe a sore tum, but lately for me, when I am closing my eyes tight against the high pitched squeal of the drill, I remember the old childbirth exercises, ‘breathe, lift yourself out of your body, travel away,’ and that is what I have been doing. I visualise Bonnie shaking her maracas, I see the colours coming together in a quilt, and I give thanks to the wonders of the brain. As Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, ‘The mind is its own place; it can make a Heaven of Hell and a Hell of Heaven.
Some of us are born with the gift of seeing the glass half full, and some are like poor Eeyore, the funny old donkey in Winnie the Pooh, who lives under a perpetual black cloud of gloom. When we were at school, I remember being frog-marched to church every Sunday, and for the most part we endured and daydreamed and studied the boys from the boarding house who sat across from us. But I do remember one term quite clearly. Each week the minister chose to summarise a chapter of Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. It was all very dramatic and we learnt about Christian and Hopeful making their way through the city of Vanity, and visiting Doubting Castle and meeting with the Giant Despair, and getting stuck in the Slough of Despond.

It was all so graphic, and later we laughed and laughed and teased each other about having the look of having been in the cupboard with the giant all day or whatever. Wonderful words can make sense of blackness, of doubt and hopelessness.
Recently an old friend of mine in Scotland had to have ten toe nails removed, and I cannot imagine how excruciatingly painful that must have been. I remember a similar fate befell Odette Churchill, who worked for the French Resistance during the war. I was absolutely traumatised when I read of her story. And night after night we watch the atrocities around the world.
John and I were reminiscing the other day whilst driving back from the beach. Not of a world that was better, but about TV programmes that depicted a gentler telling of life as we grew up. Dixon of Dock Green, a copper that said ‘Evening All’, and seemed a person that was a true guardian and friend. Nowadays we don’t know if the cops are for or against us. TV shows are terrifying now in that they depict reality.

I loved a post from an old school friend the other day. She was remembering her English lessons, and how the teacher was considerate of her sensibilities: ‘I had to be Edmund in King Lear once and had to say, “God stand up for bastards!”’… Mrs C said, ‘Now Elaine, you can say ‘illegitimate sons,’ if you’d prefer.’ Ha ha ha! Ah yes, those were the days!

Here in Doha it is now a real offence to show one’s shoulders or knees. You may get six months in prison, or a HUGE fine. I think we should all be given an abaya and that would sort everything out. Some of the clothes for sale in the malls are little short of pornography, so obviously the abaya covers the true taste of Qatari women!

It is almost Ramadan again, and then we are really on the count down and our time here will come to an end. John is feeling quite the superstar at the moment, as all the dentists were examining his miraculous surgery and wonderful new implant and bone graft. He said he felt like a celebrity as they were busy photographing his mouth. That and the fact that three men have been employed to replace him in the office have done his ego no end of good! A nice note to end on!


And finally here is the Sunbonnet Sue quilt all pieced together, ready to be quilted and perhaps have another border added. I so loved doing this one.

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.

Sabah – The Land Below The Wind

Sabah is the northern state of the island of Borneo, and ancient mariners sailing in the surrounding waters once described all the lands south of the typhoon belt as the “land below the wind”. I am now reading the book of that title, written by an American lady, Agnes Newton Keith, who lived in Sandaken from 1935-39. She captures a time that is gone, destroyed by war and the politics that followed. I too was fortunate to have lived in Kota Kinabalu in the early 1980s, a golden time in my life and where Natasha was born. It was good to go back. I was a little afraid it would all be changed and of course it is, but as the Asians say…same same but different!

John and I walked along the beach at Tanjong Aru and sat under the casuarina trees of the Yacht club where once I played mah-jong with my baby tucked under the table in her bassinette, with some bride’s veil secured over the top to protect her from mosquitos. It was where Gerry and Nick spent their child hoods, on the great play ground of the beach, and where we sat with friends and drank as the sun set.

This time, John and I also watched the sun set, but further along, in the Shangri La, and drank margueritas with a charming Australian couple. He was a gold miner. I’ve never met a gold miner before.

We drove for 2 hours up to see Mount Kinabalu… we did see it for a while, rising dramatically out of the clouds to its grand height of 14.000 ft until the clouds gathered again and the strange serrated top with its rabbit ear formations were hidden.


Our guide talked and talked till I was ready to climb the mountain and jump. He enthused madly about the tiniest orchid in the world that was smaller than a baby’s finger nail. Actually it left me cold, but apparently the botanists from Kew spend about 3 hours just staring at it. For all his verbosity we did learn that the Borneo rainforest was 130 million years old, compared to the Amazon that is just a mere 70 million, and he showed us the Rothschild orchid that crazy people pay $10,000 for (US) It was kept behind bars…wicked people may have had bad intentions. And hanging proudly next to the orchid jail were the King Edward monkey cups… so named after the king’s private parts.

Our guide just went off on a fit of laughing about that. Once he started to laugh, he relaxed and it was as though his brain stopped being a computer and he told us about his marriage instead. Much more interesting. He had to buy 2 water buffalo to present to his father in law, in order to secure his wife. He was as proud as punch when he told us he got a really good bargain and only paid 500 ringgit each, instead of 1200ringit for one. He was doubled up laughing. We began to like him.
The mountain is full of superstition and each month a shaman or holy person goes up and slaughters 7 white chickens and spreads the blood. She didn’t do it in January this year, and a German girl fell to her death from the summit.
Also you must never take any stones from the mountain. Only bad things will happen. Worth knowing.
And so we left Kota Kinabalu, with our driver, Charlie. He had absorbed all his lessons at English school, he greeted us with, ‘how are you? Tickety Boo?’ ‘I’m just a proper Charlie, ha ha ha! And I’m as sound as a pound!’
We flew to Sandakan.
First stop for all travellers to Sandakan is Sepilok, the orang utan sanctuary.

It is a wonderful home for orphans, injured or sick animals. If you don’t see these amazing monkeys in the wild, you are almost 100% sure of seeing them here. They are fed milk and bananas at 10 am and 3pm, every day until they are so sick of it, they hopefully return to the wild. The babies are taught skills like swinging on ropes etc that their mothers would have taught them, and we were so lucky to see five come to the feeding table. About 12 years ago Natasha visited Sepilok on her world travels, and a ranger named a baby after her. I asked about ‘Natasha’ and they knew her well. She was the daughter of Mariko, but sadly she died about 2 years ago. Mariko has had about 4 babies, but none have survived. We did see her with her current ‘toddler’.
And then … it was the highlight of the whole adventure.
The trip up the Kinabatangan River, Borneo’s second longest river, at 560km. It coils like the serpents that swim its length far into the Borneo interior. Forests line its sides, swarming with wild life that flee the ever-encroaching palm-oil plantations.

We stayed in an idyllic, luxurious (!) lodge with polished wooden floors, crisp white sheets and hot shower, we went out for early morning and sunset cruises to look for wild monkeys and birds, and we were not disappointed.
Rhinoceros hornbills, Brahmin kites, giant wood peckers, storm storks that are so endangered there are only 43 left in the world. We saw 5.

As the sun was rising we saw the stark bare branches of a tree that rose higher than the canopy, and birds sat like notes on a musical stave.
In the evening as we nosed our way up a tributary we caught sight of a 5m long dead python which had died in a fisherman’s net. A monitor lizard was hauling it up the bank into a hole. It was enough to give you the shivers. Abbas our guide showed us a picture that he took of a python eating a wild pig.

He also told us that pythons often sleep in the bird’s nest ferns high up in the tree branches…I felt just a little afraid when walking beneath them. It has been known they will slither down and wrap themselves around a sleeping farmer. Best to choose your tree with care, if you feel like a rest.

But it was the monkeys that were the stars of the show. Red tail and silver langors,
the cheeky macaques, and best of all the proboscis, leaping from branches in death defying jumps, and the Big Daddy male sitting back on his branch with his huge pregnant-like belly and his large sexually attractive nose (to some) and his strange fur that looks like he is wearing a bomber jacket over ballet tights.

It was sad to leave the paradise of swallow tail moths, and butterflies that stopped to sip the trails of the salty urine of passing animals. I felt as though I was in a Disney film when all the butterflies rose and fluttered around me.

I already miss the exotic blooms, the wide brown river and even the huge salt water crocodiles.

They live side by side with humans, who seemed to have no fears as they lathered up with Head and Shoulders, whilst only 100m down river a 5 m croc was sunning itself on the bank. We even saw a pygmy elephant, and heard the honking of his friends urging him to hurry and catch up. I think Abbas our guide must have a job made in heaven.
When we left Sandakan I was quite bemused by the security guy putting our luggage through the scanner…he was wearing bright orange nail polish. Hmmm. I wonder if it was medicinal, maybe he had ring worm or something. And so we arrived back in KL, revisited Marie, and then went to see Petaling Street in China Town, and ended up in a dark massage parlour, where John was pulled and stretched and pummelled and I was oiled and kneaded and all the aches and pains in both our bodies just vanished.
We returned to our hotel and drank white fizzy wine and admired the stunning art that we bought as a memory of our trip to the beautiful Far East.