All guests are gone, and the cousin with COVID is quite self-sufficient, hurrah. He is in very strict lockdown indeed – when I went to drop off his instant coffee, a man rushed out of the building shouting ‘very bad, your friend, very bad!’ At first I worried that the cousin had developed bad symptoms […]
The trial
Another relative has arrived, this one staying with us on her way to Lahore. It is a relative I am fond of, but she is undoubtedly a bit of a trial and I have to remember each time I see her that one doesn’t need to engage with the stream of consciousness. She is a […]
The virtues of lockdown
I have been mulling for some time now, perhaps since the start of the pandemic, on the moral attached to being in lockdown. The GF and I were talking about it this morning, of how locking down, of shutting down, was given a sort of moral weight, and more a political weight: we care for […]
To the palace
Sunday was at Topkapi. As before, easy to get to, a simple tram ride across the Golden Horn, to the domes and towers we see every day from our window. I had thought it might be relatively empty but it really wasn’t, though most of the other visitors were Turks, Iranis, South Asians, etc. Turkey […]
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Pakistan is doing well on the coronavirus front, much to the befuddlement of all. Hard to say if it will last, but for now. In the meantime, I happened to be at the birth of a meme. One of the people I follow on Twitter lives in Karachi and with the devastating monsoon rain there […]
Job not done
After yesterday, today I signally failed to send off the documents back to Pakistan, as well as to do any work. Instead, I joined the GF (whp had the day off) on a trip to the other side of the Golden Horn. First was lunch in the Grand Bazaar, where I went for a grilled […]
Bean counters
Taiwan appears to have a surprisingly large number of people for whom a major part of their job description is to sift dust out of coffee beans, pick through them (in extreme cases with chopsticks), roast them in batches of about a half cup each, empty them into a little jug covered with a loose […]
Week of silence
No particular reason – I had plenty of time, plenty of interesting things happened, wasn’t feeling particularly loathe to engage with the world (at least after I decided to stop reading MetaTalk), I just… didn’t. We have finally made our plans for our next destination in August. East and SE Asia are not really opening […]
City life
Today, Saturday. A searing hot afternoon, and we went off to the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art. There was an exhibition on, called City Life, with the low entrance fee that is usual in this country, a pleasant change from London museums and galleries. It turned out to be one of the best contemporary art […]
Ultras
The article for today is this short piece about Moroccan ultras. Football fans are hardly the most inspiring of people, but I do wonder why there is not more effort in modern societies to create such spaces for solidarity, carefully overseen, except by armies and fascists. And Scouts, I suppose, though it is hard to […]