This is the first day in months that I don’t have a pile of work to do or think about. Not that there’s no work this weekend, but it’s not urgent. A strange feeling, hanging in between. Physically tired whilst mentally racing and feeling that there is something I should be doing. This is not the best frame of mind for writing or working on comics either. Moreover the gentleman friend is unwell and his restless sleep, along with my own racing mind, kept me up for much of the night.
We did go to the KL Aquarium this morning, where the highlight was the garden eel display, one of my favourite sea creatures. How I would like an aquarium with both garden eels and seahorses, and maybe one of those scuttling, busy looking shrimp.
There is also a tunnel through the shark and ray tank, which was fun to walk through. Odd that most of the fish, even the large and ugly ones, left the children unmoved, but the very large shark had them screaming in terror, even the tiniest of toddlers. I wanted to scream when they passed slowly overhead, their toothy jaws flexing.
And rays – how alien they are. The configuration of their features feels so wrong. The gentleman friend and I went swimming after manta rays off Flores in Indonesia last year and they were, if anything, even more alien in the wild, flying over the seabed like something in a dream. And in the Philippines, when I went to get my diving certification in January, I encountered a very peculiar ray, a small one turning somersaults underwater at great speed. Even my diving instructor, an Aryan-looking German fellow, was taken aback.