Monday, January 13, 2003

The Left Foot
Back at work at Lilydale today still smarting about the loss of our holiday in China but greatly relieved to hear that SR has gone to Kuching to take care of User Ed and the cataloguing backlog. I spoke to her on the phone and it was really weird to visualise her sitting at 'my' desk while I was alone in our usually shared office. My Kuching adventure is over but I was thinking of them all today and suppose I will for quite some time. I hope the first hand experience I had will have long-term benefits for the library there and for me as well.

This will be the last blog from the Frontier Librarians as we return to the normal pattern of our lives, beginning with the celebration of our 33rd wedding anniversary on Thursday 16th. We will take the blog down in early February. Thank-you for all the positive feedback we received: the number of readers made us aware of our wider audience and changed the nature of our entries from the family orientation we had anticipated. Our daughter, Meredith, aka Grumpy Girl set up the page for us so we could easily keep in touch with her and our other daughter, Hilary, aka Petite Soeur.

When Hil was studying German in secondary school she learnt that the word for mother was 'mutter' and began calling me that, soon abbreviating it to Moot. By extension, that made her father 'Foot' and the plural obviously 'Feet'. I am left-handed and left-footed so it was not hard to tell who was who. None of you guys ever needed to know this piece of family lore but as some have been curious, it was time to explain.

I will miss the blogging experience but there is nothing more to say except maybe Salamat Datang or should that be Auf Weidersien (or something).
The Right Foot:
For me, KL will forever be associated with the mystical law of Bad Things that Come in Threes (See the preceding Tale of Woe from the Left Foot) - I must do a Google search and see if there is a proper name for this phenomenon. But no doubt my rather jaundiced view of KL is also profoundly coloured by the (misplaced) perception of Eastern Malaysians that KL is a fabulous city whose nature is compounded from the essences of those great trading centres like Baghdad, Rome and Tyre. And I must admit it really is an attractive place with vibrant and often admirable architecture, really efficient services and lots of bustling life wherever you care to look. It is a fine city, but after Kuching, you really couldn't live there.

After sampling life in Kuching, KL looks too much like your standard wanna-be modern identikit Southeast Asian city, secure in its very own economic miracle and keen to emulate Singapore or Hong Kong in outward and visible display, high energy output and general brouhaha. To that end, it is busily knocking over whole streets of charming shophouses, replacing them with mega-malls and ever-larger extensions to existing mega-malls and carving freeways through its parklands. I really can't imagine its inhabitants slowing down at sunset to walk along the riverfront - after all, there are still several hours left of quality shopping time left! The nice thing about Kuching was the sense that a visitor from 1850 would feel pretty much at home there today - water taxis still criss-cross the Sungai Sarawak (even if they now advertise Lipton's admirable Yellow Label tea); while the river pirates are still kept at bay by the White Rajah's toy fort, peeping over the feathery trees that line the river. Real shopping still goes on in the markets and carpenters still work in Jalan Carpenter. Real life goes on in the kampongs all along the river banks; fishermen fish right under the hugh sign proclaiming that fishing is prohibited at this point and you can still meet and greet kingfishers lording over the secondary jungle not ten k. from the city centre. People stop wherever the mood strikes them to appraise the durians and debate the merits of red or white garlic. Moreover, cats really still rule in Kuching! Long may it remain that way!