Heath stop

I had a GP’s appointment in South End Green for my eczema which, annoyingly, has cleared up completely since I made the appointment and apparently the NHS doesn’t prescribe emolients any more anyway, so it was rather frustrating. South End Green is nearer Belsize Park than Hampstead, and I strolled there a good hour early […]

Party flags II

Some more Barisan flags here, mostly from East Malaysia where they go in for certain iconography: outline maps, outlines of Mt Kinabalu, and handshakes. I like the MyPPP flag the best on this page; it’s basically a superhero insignia.

Party flags I

I collected images of all the Malaysian party flags before the election, but my snide commentary on them was promptly rendered outdated by the election result. However, the flags are generally of a very high standard (and some of an exceptionally low standard), so I might as well start posting them for posterity’s sake. We’ll […]

Brexit march

I wish I could have gone to the Brexit march in Central London today. It’s something I feel very strongly about, and also entirely disempowered about, so it would have been good to have made that small gesture. But today was the day that someone’s ashes were to be confined to the ground, in the […]

Ending

I redid much of The Astrolabe today and am generally happy if not enthusiastic about it. The one major bit that remains is the very ending. I know where it finishes and what I would like to convey but it’s not particularly striking or interesting, and perhaps a bit abrupt. Hopefully it’ll just come to […]

End of Europe

The only thing to do was to flee Skibbereen, so the next morning we took a taxi down to Baltimore (a fishing village whose claim to fame is that a few centuries ago its entire population was abducted by Barbary pirates). There was a ferry coming in as we arrived, so we hopped on it […]

House on Jalan Pimping

I have just woken up in a house on Jalan Pimping which, despite its name, is a quiet, wealthy street in Ampang, with largish houses set along the lines of one of KL’s many low hills. It is the home of a friend and we are staying here after having moved out from our KLCC […]

Face of defeat

I’m watching Najib’s press conference. He looks a wreck. He has conceded defeat while saying, basically, that ‘we might have lost but no one else won’ – presumably this is due to a technicality in that the opposition PH coalition is not registered as a coalition and none of its component parties by themselves form […]

Things change

I started following the election results from around 7, with the Star newspaper’s live feed in a background window. Later I added Malaysiakini, which had less conservative estimates, as well. Through the evening, as I had dinner and did some work, the numbers kept ticking up, mostly the ruling Barisan Nasional to begin with (there […]