Thanks for putting me staright David. I would never have picked author Arthur out. Perhaps if he'd been sporting a beard ..........?
I heard that Raymond Tanner transferrd to the other side a couple of years ago.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1945-50

Current location (optional) Norfolk UK

Yes- Sad about Raymond, wasn't it? I remember walking along Skipton Main St. some 4 years or so ago, with brother Arthur, when I spotted Raymond a short distance away. "Isn't that Bob Tanner down there?", I said. ( we always called him 'Bob', after a comic book character 'Bob Tanner and his Lucky Sixpence'). "Looks like him, let's go and see",said Arthur. Sure enough it was 'the lad 'imself'. We stood and talked with him for 10/15 minutes before going our separate ways. He admitted that he would not have recognised either of us, posssibly due to our 'high foreheads'; but he was pretty much how we both remembered him from our schooldays.
As you say Denis, he has sadly now 'transferred to the other side' along with Colin 'Ezra' Daniels, Neil Caley, Trevor Driver and other rugby playing lads from our era. David

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1945-50

Current location (optional) Keighley

Since it is some time since I submitted a blog and since this blog is about the party scene here, I have to make sure there is no misunderstanding and the forum must not think that I am so totally immersed in the party scene that I have neglected my blog.
I am not nor have I ever been a party animal. Watching sensible people under the influence of alcohol and the encouragement of unkind friends make fools of themselves I have never considered as being a worthwhile way to pass one’s time. Apart from which I hate the music.
However, while spending an evening in the Cocos Amigos, a bar on the sea-front boulevard I have referred to in earlier blogs, we met Bill Best and his Filipina wife Cathy. Bill is a retired US Navy Commodore, a construction engineer. He now lives here in a quite palatial house on the other side of Dumaguete from us. His wife, Cathy, invited us to their birthday party (they share the same birthday) and Independence Day party, too. It was from that that Sione and I were introduced to the Ex-pats party scene and we have been now to three such parties although Sione has been to two more all-girls parties, a Hawaiian evening and a bathing party.
The ex-pats here are Australian, American, German and British mainly, with the odd Irishman or Rumanian thrown in. They all have Filipina wives and in truth the party is really for them since none of the men dance but gradually sink all the beer there is to hand.
The parties are generally organized on, what they call, a pot-luck basis but what I remember as a faith supper. Anyway, everyone is expected to bring something partyish and edible and the drink is provided by whoever is providing the premises for the dance/party.
As we arrive there is a separation takes place where the girls retire and pretty themselves, the men say hello and crack a bottle.
Then there is the food and everyone eats.
There is an American who has a disco outfit and he is at all the parties so since the music is always the same and the lighting is the same drifting green and red lights making stars and galaxies on the tiled floor, every party is pretty much like the last one.
Since the men do little or no dancing a pair of dancing Instructors is hired. Referred to as DI’s, they are nothing like the red faced, screaming DI’s I knew and hated at RAF Bridgnorth. These are ladyboys.
They are, and have been for longer than our own society, tolerant of these effeminates. I am not sure of their sexual proclivities, but they are quite openly effeminate and, more often, outrageously camp. They are more than tolerated by Philippine society and more often than not they are frontmen to shows and presentations and they are loved and admired. Pretty much like our own BBC!!
These are excellent dancers and one of them gets on with his job which is to incite dancing and to partner the different ladies. The other is a show-off!! He wears Cuban heels and his hair is carried back into a matador’s knot at the back of his head. He struts and preens, pouts and wiggles, flutters his hands and fingers and beckons dancing partners with extravagant, grand gestures. He is more camp than Kirkcudbright!!
They are acceptable because a) they are good at their jobs and b) the present no threat to established relationships which is to say they are not going to steal any women’s hearts.
They graqdually work up from individual dancers and then as the might and alcohol works their magic the dance becomes communal and there is much squealing and giggling as the girls follow the DI’s each move and mirror them.
All the time cameras flash and flicker for tomorrows Facebook.
There was at one time a stupid habit that seemed to have been imported from holidays in Ibiza that when a photograph was taken it was expected that those being should evince their happiness at being on holiday by lurching towards the camera and giving the ‘thumbs up’ sign. This was so ingrained in some of my children that it was well nigh impossible to get a class photo without some idiot giving the thumbs up. This is true and is one of the reasons I hate Jamie Tordoff for the sin. He was like a Pavlovian dog whenever he saw a camera pointing his way. Big grin and thumbs up!! Stupid boy.
Here it is the V sign. Not the insulting one but first two fingers split into a V and held against the eyes horizontal not the more insulting vertical gesture we know and love. This also involves the group twisting their bodies into grotesque tableaus. Also only take out your camera and point it at say two people and suddenly there is a pyramid of V signing squealing girls all trying to be in the picture.
Alright the first couple of times but bloody irritating after that.
The parties go on and on and I get tired and feel my years burden my eyes and I have had enough to drink.
Time to go home and to hell with the resultant Tampo.

Last night there was a cacophonous thunderstorm. Magic to watch the lighning dance across the dark window, the rain clattering down and the thunder rolling boulders around the mountains.
When morning came there was a watery dawn with a pale sun and then the air filled with butterflies, patterned and colourful or pure sulphur winged. Fluttering splinters of light filling the morning air. They danced to the metallic chorous of frogs singing in their damp heavens.

Since it is some time since I submitted a blog and since this blog is about the party scene here, I have to make sure there is no misunderstanding and the forum must not think that I am so totally immersed in the party scene that I have neglected my blog.
I am not nor have I ever been a party animal. Watching sensible people under the influence of alcohol and the encouragement of unkind friends make fools of themselves I have never considered as being a worthwhile way to pass one’s time. Apart from which I hate the music.
However, while spending an evening in the Cocos Amigos, a bar on the sea-front boulevard I have referred to in earlier blogs, we met Bill Best and his Filipina wife Cathy. Bill is a retired US Navy Commodore, a construction engineer. He now lives here in a quite palatial house on the other side of Dumaguete from us. His wife, Cathy, invited us to their birthday party (they share the same birthday) and Independence Day party, too. It was from that that Sione and I were introduced to the Ex-pats party scene and we have been now to three such parties although Sione has been to two more all-girls parties, a Hawaiian evening and a bathing party.
The ex-pats here are Australian, American, German and British mainly, with the odd Irishman or Rumanian thrown in. They all have Filipina wives and in truth the party is really for them since none of the men dance but gradually sink all the beer there is to hand.
The parties are generally organized on, what they call, a pot-luck basis but what I remember as a faith supper. Anyway, everyone is expected to bring something partyish and edible and the drink is provided by whoever is providing the premises for the dance/party.
As we arrive there is a separation takes place where the girls retire and pretty themselves, the men say hello and crack a bottle.
Then there is the food and everyone eats.
There is an American who has a disco outfit and he is at all the parties so since the music is always the same and the lighting is the same drifting green and red lights making stars and galaxies on the tiled floor, every party is pretty much like the last one.
Since the men do little or no dancing a pair of dancing Instructors is hired. Referred to as DI’s, they are nothing like the red faced, screaming DI’s I knew and hated at RAF Bridgnorth. These are ladyboys.
They are, and have been for longer than our own society, tolerant of these effeminates. I am not sure of their sexual proclivities, but they are quite openly effeminate and, more often, outrageously camp. They are more than tolerated by Philippine society and more often than not they are frontmen to shows and presentations and they are loved and admired. Pretty much like our own BBC!!
These are excellent dancers and one of them gets on with his job which is to incite dancing and to partner the different ladies. The other is a show-off!! He wears Cuban heels and his hair is carried back into a matador’s knot at the back of his head. He struts and preens, pouts and wiggles, flutters his hands and fingers and beckons dancing partners with extravagant, grand gestures. He is more camp than Kirkcudbright!!
They are acceptable because a) they are good at their jobs and b) the present no threat to established relationships which is to say they are not going to steal any women’s hearts.
They gradually work up from individual dancers and then as the night and alcohol works their magic the dance becomes communal and there is much squealing and giggling as the girls follow the DI’s each move and mirror them.
All the time cameras flash and flicker for tomorrows Facebook.
There was at one time a stupid habit that seemed to have been imported from holidays in Ibiza that when a photograph was taken it was expected that those being should evince their happiness at being on holiday by lurching towards the camera and giving the ‘thumbs up’ sign. This was so ingrained in some of my children that it was well nigh impossible to get a class photo without some idiot giving the thumbs up. This is true and is one of the reasons I hate Jamie Tordoff for the sin. He was like a Pavlovian dog whenever he saw a camera pointing his way. Big grin and thumbs up!! Stupid boy.
Here it is the V sign. Not the insulting one but first two fingers split into a V and held against the eyes horizontal not the more insulting vertical gesture we know and love. This also involves the group twisting their bodies into grotesque tableaus. Also only take out your camera and point it at say two people and suddenly there is a pyramid of V signing squealing girls all trying to be in the picture.
Alright the first couple of times but bloody irritating after that.
The parties go on and on and I get tired and feel my years burden my eyes and I have had enough to drink.
Time to go home and to hell with the resultant Tampo.

Last night there was a cacophonous thunderstorm. Magic to watch the lighning dance across the dark window, the rain clattering down and the thunder rolling boulders around the mountains.
When morning came there was a watery dawn with a pale sun and then the air filled with butterflies, patterned and colourful or pure sulphur winged. Fluttering splinters of light filling the morning air. They danced to the metallic chorous of frogs singing in their damp heavens.

Denis . Many thanks for your kind remarks. I am glad you found me on the big picture. I have taken a risk but it has proved worth the while in so many ways.

The only path is a steep dry shaded gully
where the clatter of loosened stones
precedes me down the gloomy way.
Then, suddenly, a meadow
bright with the scattered sunshine
of a field of yellow flowers.
Hah! Not flowers! Butterflies!
My feet throw up their startled thousands
to spill their glory on the air; a giddy cloud swirls.

The sun silently splinters around me.

Ahead they billow up in shining escort,
while where I have passed they settle back
to bloom and fool again.

Hi Arthur,
As an old hand in Philippines I am curious how often you cosmopolitan guys escape Dumaguete to go to Manila or over to Cebu City,
Or is everything so fine and dandy in Negros that the bright lights is not an issue. There have been a few murders of Brits in Mindanao and Pampanga recently do you old boys discuss that or put it down to bad locations compared to gentle Dumaguete?

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1961-1969

Current location (optional) Bradford

Dumaguete is well blessed with its own bright lights. It is well to avoid Cebu and Manila for the reasons you quote. Dumaguete is the least crime ridden place in the Philippines-statistical fact! The Boulevard and Robinson's and environs the least crime ridden place in Dumaguete. It is reasonably quiet in the evenings and I have had no trouble yet. I have been to Manila for a couple of days and it is way too big for me. Thanks for asking though.

Yes I cant say I take to Manila , and Greater Manila (Ortegas, Makati , Quezon I have visited on business)
It seems much nicer on the one occasion I flew down to Cagayan de Oro (Mindanao), and drove up the coast to a chemical factory for whom I am the UK agent. I remember passing miles and miles of pineapple plantations, at the end of which was the Del Monte canning factory

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 58-64

Current location (optional) Wirral

And what did the Man from Del Monte say?

In Lincolnshire it used to be said ......"Ross the Boss"!

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1952-1960

Current location (optional) Lincoln

This blog will be an eclectic collection of science religion, dog breeding, culinary practices and soap opera. Being of a rather interesting perhaps even salacious nature I will leave the soap opera bit for the last.
So the science first.
I often have a glass or beaker of iced tea beside me as I work on my computer and have over a period observed a strange phenomenon. If I leave the container a while then when I return to it there is a small pool/ ring of water gathered at the base. I thought at first it was a leak in the container but there was none and the level of iced tea had not dropped at all.
One afternoon I left my beaker standing and watched and slowly this pool of water gathered.
I opine that the chilled surface of the glass/beaker is in fact extracting water from the heavily moisture laden air. Rather like the frosting that can appear on a cold glass (referred to in a previous blog, when I recalled ‘Ice Cold in Alex’) Humidity is very high here particularly since we are in the rainy season. It needs little persuasion to precipitate these days. In the Solomons one could put out a wash in the morning of a bright sunny day and find it still moist when collecting it in the evening. The air being so saturated it could hold no more.
Forum members now living in similar tropical conditions or recently returned from such, might confirm my observations and agree with or refute my explanation.
Sione, my mountain girl, has a favourite dish she prepares. She will carefully select a collection of beef bones at the butcher’s counter in the super-market. The pressure cooker is charged with these bones along with garlic, lemon grass, onions and bay leaf. This is allowed to hiss patiently for about 90 minutes all the time spraying a savoury steam into the air. Removed from the heat, taro, alugbati and Chinese lettuce is added and cooked until the taro is tender. The whole meal is rural, hearty, delicious and nutritious.My old Grannie used to tell me to '..get it down me its good for thi and tha needs some meat on those ribs'
They pick the scant but sweet and tender meat from every nook and crevice and suck the marrow from the bones. I enjoy the ‘soup’/ gravy with the veg. and some noodles. By the way they do not have gravy here only ‘soup’.
Snowie shares the bones with the ants out on the patio. He is a small white miracle. What was once a cuddly, white, plump, wobbly- legged puppy is now a lean, muscular, long legged, bouncing whippet. The miracle? Well the conditions followed here with dogs are designed for the production of mongrels only. Dogs and bitches wander freely and copulate indiscriminately. (No, we are not to the soap opera bit yet. Goodness me, be patient please)
I have watched this slim, lithe whippet –like dog emerge and checked the breed points on the Kennel club. He is at least 90% whippet, if not more than 90%. He is playful, alert, barks well as my alarm dog, obeys me and is well disciplined despite the example set by the rest of the neighbourhood pack. He has one further delightful quality. He understands English. Goodness knows where he has learned it.
Tonight there is a huge full moon. It holds hands with a brilliant Venus for a short while then begins its long journey alone across the night sky, trailing a long skein of grey cloud behind it. A witches’ moon! One might almost expect to see a hunched, black, steeple-hatted silhouette, cackling hideously, as she bestrides her broomstick and rides the night about her wicked business with eldritch shrieks and curses.
O, yes, here be ghosts and witches, I am assured in gasped whispers accompanied by wide eyes.
“Yes there are witches. No. I have not seen one but I know someone who has seen one. Auntie Shirley saw a lady in white in her house, which used to be a small church. No. I have not seen her. I felt her though.’
I shared tales like this when I was a boy sat around small fires beside a bonfire in Bradford Street. The cynicism of years allows me to sleep without let or hindrance these days.
Auntie Shirley now dresses in white and attends the congregation of Pastor Apollo who is the Second Coming of Christ, the Appointed Son of God, and he assures us he will sit in judgment of us all along with God on Judgment Day. Auntie Shirley believes this all quite devoutly. His congregation has entered the Rapture and now awaits the Last Days patiently singing all the way.
Of course, Auntie Shirley saw a lady in white and she probably sees ladies in white all the time.
Pastor Apollo is mildly spoken, confident, well-rehearsed and smilingly presentable. He is also a glib charlatan. I would not have bought lion from him in John Street market.
O alright then, you have been patient, so the soap opera.
Well, I am not given to being nosey or indulging in gossip. You know me. The soul of discretion, not one to take two and two and make five but…..
When we moved into this house we had a neighbor, a young girl, who went missing each evening but hung about the house during the day.
We have two gardens between our homes, not like Bradford Street. We are completely detached and insulated and so much might take place without my witnessing anything. We learned from our landlady that she was a student at night and her rent was paid by an American from Los Angeles.
As I say I did not spy but occasionally I would witness romping and sporting in the garden as young men visited and there was music and laughter into the early hours. Not intrusive but there all the same. Life went on then until last week a white man walked past my fence and said ‘Hi! We have a drink later’, in a thick East European accent. I nodded my agreement, my interest caught in a moment.
This was Anton, a Rumanian from Los Angeles whose work was to massage the necks and backs of card players in a big casino there. No, no, I do not make this up.
Wait, there’s more.
He did come for a drink and asked if we could help to tidy the house.’ She is a pig.’ he explained. Fascinated we went and if one had deliberately scattered things about the house, clothes, empty bottles and paper one could not have made a better job of it. To think that anyone could enjoy sitting in this mess was unbelievable. Sione is meticulous and spotless and she, like me, was appalled.
We helped bring some order to the place and came back home. We heard raised voices and then some peace and quiet. Next morning Toni, short for Anton, knocked at my door. Had I heard anything suspicious last night? No. I told him. Well last night he heard a noise in the front room and he got up and there were two young men there. They laughed and shouted and ran out of the house and into the dark. How did they get in? I asked. He locked all the doors, he told me. Ah. So they had a key. I kept my silence. They had stolen the girl’s cell phone. He had ringed the number and the boys had been insulting and dirty mouthed and offered to return the phone for 1000pesos.
Toni called the police. The girl sat pale and quiet. I was sure she knew more than she was saying.
We left.
Later Toni came to see me again. He had a tale to tell.
He had suspected she was cheating on him but could prove nothing. So he had borrowed a friend’s identity on Yahoo! and got in touch with the girl via the internet, pretending to be the friend. He made arrangements for a hot sexual encounter with him and a friend and asked her to meet him at Dumaguete Airport at such and such a time. She had turned up expecting two rich Americans and there was Toni!! I swear this is true. I am not one to enjoy another’s discomfort but I really would like to have seen her face.
Anyway there were more bad tempered exchanges and Toni said he was closing the house. We had been kind and supportive and he gave us bits and pieces including a laptop and an outside alarm light, both of which are in perfect working condition.
The girl and her sister have returned to their mountain village, the girl to face a prison sentence for I don’t know what crime, but Toni had been paying to keep her out of jail. The sister got married to her boyfriend who probably stole the cell phone. Toni has gone back to Cebu and met another girl. “She is very nice girl. Educated and her brother is a lawyer’. The stupidity and the Saga continue. Toni is now returned to LA pummeling the necks of inveterate gamblers. The compound is nice and quiet now except for the little fat boy who doesn’t like Snowie and the French Filipina in the end house who is going to live in Valencia.
By the way Toni slept with her that night and told me, ’Well, I had paid for it.’

A good story Arthur.
Yes I have witnessed the formation of condensation on the outside of the glass when in warm humid countries, inclding the Philippines, probably even worse in Malaysia . I expect our Webmaster also gets it in Singapore

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 58-64

Current location (optional) Wirral

Hells bells, guys, I get myself a cold beer out of the fridge and condensation forms on the glass. You don't need to be an intellectual giant to figure it out.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 55-60

Current location (optional) Harrogate

Yes Alec the answer is trite and obvious . What confused me was no formation of frosting or dew on the surface of the glass just the pool gathering at the base which quite honestly looked like a leak.

"Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play"
Emmanuel Kant !

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 55-60

Current location (optional) Harrogate

When I leave our compound I can turn left at the gate and head to the National Highway, less than 20 yards away, loud with the throaty cough of two-strokes and the indignant piping of a thousand horns. If I turn right I must pass the big house that boasts a manic Rottweiler that waits, lurks there, then hurls its whole body crashing against the gate that bellies under the charge, his mouth like an open piano, with a harsh vindictive bark. It has a buddy, a diminutive terrier that, spurred on by his big friend, thrusts his tiny snout through any aperture and threatens, with his querulous yelp, to disembowel you with a swipe. Snowie has a nice line when ignoring this pantomime which involves cocking his leg and weeing against the gate, inches from the snapping jaws. Mind you a month ago it was hasty retreat time with tail firmly tucked and ears down, closely followed by me , I might add.. He learns fast and he knows that the gate will hold. He even stops to witness the performance and give it marks out of ten with a squirt of urine.
A short walk along the broken-metalled road brings us to a large open field with unkempt grass and half-started, ragged shrubs straggling by an unruly avenue of trees with clothes drying on a wire and beyond the trees the remains of an old house, a square of tumbled hollow bricks, threaded with weeds. One senses an air of death, failure and despair, a giving-up.
A trodden path of flattened grass wends from the houses on my right across the field to the wall surrounding the High School on my left.
This evening the sky is like a glass of rose wine, thin translucent veils of rosy clouds hang motionless in the breathless heavy air and a sky that fades from pale blue through all the palette of a rainbow.
Suddenly, I note a swift flight of something black and streamlined, a flying thing but not a bird. A bat! Now one, and then many, dart up over the trees and across the sky. Snowie explores a clump of grass and blesses it with a jet of piss.
D H Lawrence in his poem ‘ Bats’ describes them:

‘Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back. ‘

O my, but he got it so right.
He found them disgusting.
For me they are insectivorous and a winged blessing. I muse that were it not for the constant attendance of birds, geckoes and bats, along with other insectivores we would be knee-deep in creepy crawlies.
I watch them weaving and skimming, wefting the warps of light with sharp curved wings and thin shrieks.
I watch their steady devouring of winged insects and bless their swift wings for the relief of an irritation I will not suffer. Insects I abhor, bats I can live with.
My elder brother once kept a Tate and Lyle treacle tin with sawdust and maggots therein when he was interested in fishing. One day, down our cellar, I was looking for nails and found the tin. I prised the partly rusted lid free and found to my horror the dried bodies of a unrealized swarm of bluebottles with shining wings, folded, with iridescent abdomens and blind dead eyes.
My horror was not the sight of all those dead flies, in my book the world was a better place without them and the possibility of their progeny. My horror was felt when, for one brief moment, I imagined what it must have been like to have emerged from my pupa into a darkness of dense intensity, airless and filled with other moving things beside me, feeling and probing in their blindness as I, too, felt and probed in mine. Was this a promise of some Gehenna?
It was the first and only, albeit brief, time I felt a pang of sympathy for the six legged ones. There has been no such pang since.
I watch Snowie wander through this mini wilderness following the white flashes of his body through the mesh of grass, his tail a banner and a signal of his presence. I have hinted elsewhere at the discipline and obedience he gives me. He is a good dog. He draws close to me and I look at him and say quietly, ‘Time for us to head home I think.’ He looks at me with his bright black eyes, his mouth agape with heat, his tongue a long pink strop, and turns and heads for home without a another word from me. I am sure he uses telepathy !!
Later that night the distant southern sky dances and glows with flickers of silent lightning but no storm comes our way. I would have welcomed the blessed relief of rain after a day of brown-outs, bereft of cooling aids, sweating quietly in the shaded gloom of my bedroom waiting for the fans to rouse and stir.

We have a television and we are supplied by cable and we get a pretty comprehensive range of programmes. For instance I watch BBC World News and I get to see Premier League football albeit a couple of days old. We have some imported American comedy programmes and the plethora of religious programmes one would expect from a devoutly Catholic nation.
There is one channel, channel 26, which is entirely devoted to Filipino films.
I notice that these films fall into domestic comedy, the horror/ supernatural and love films.
The domestic comedy is a blending of Benny Hill and Norman Wisdom type action and involves large women (imagine Peggy Mount on steroids) shouting at small feckless men. The hero, her husband, has two similarly feckless mates and they get into all kinds of silliness and trouble, all with best intentions and the need to outwit the monster wife. It all involves pulling funny faces and falling down a lot.
The horror consists of misty graveyards and apparitions, without pupils in their eyes, who can shoot death rays from their mouths and possess the heroine, who screams a lot. There are lots of dark scenes, no sunlight ever and endless pointless eerie music.
The romantic films involve misunderstandings, lots of scenes with women crying ( that I understand passes for high drama here) lots of death bed scenes ( cough, cough, wheeze, weak wave of hand, cough cough) in hospitals, with repentant son sat holding mamma’s hand and crying but there are always happy endings galore.
Please, please, please understand I do not watch these only in passing or when suddenly everyone starts talking English, which is just strange. Imagine! It goes something like this:
“ Tagalong ballawag( sob,sob ) of mangy ( sob) terro buntag. I only want to please you.(sob) Humgo rip rap(sob,sob,sob) nonda sago. “
It does make one sit up and wonder if one has heard right. I enquired about the crying and the mixed language. The crying is fundamental to any Filipino film be it horror, comedy or romance, it seems, and no film can succeed without it. One imagines it is also part of any audition.
“Thank you, dear, very moving rendition of Lady Macbeth’s speech from Act One. Now can we see you cry, please. Take your time, dear.’ The mixed language was convincingly explained to me in that to say the same thing in Tagalong would be impossible or take two minutes to say.
There is one horrible programme that Sione watches religiously called ‘Showtime’. The bulk of the show is dance groups all aping Michael Jackson crutch grabbin and fancy steps interspersed with back flips and some hip hop. The costumes are superb but that says everything and all there is to commend the groups. I will say that it also shows an awful lot of hard work and practice which is to be preferred to binge drinking.
In between there is a mixture of crowd hysteria, where presenters go amongst them all shouting ’Beauitful people’ all the time or ’ Party-party.” and the excruciating ’It…….t……t……s Showtime!!!!!!’ and everyone goes into paroxysms of adulation screaming and waving. The din is appalling. At either of these screams the audience salivate like Pavlovian dogs and bay and scream waving their arms and score cards,
( incidentally everyone gets 10, ) and jump up and down. All the time the prevailing din is augmented by a selection of sound effects which include a klaxon horn, a cackling old woman, a cracking bull whip, and a cowboy shouting yahoo!!!! The judges are a selection of celebs who before they are allowed to give their opinion of an act are greeted by the audience demanding ‘Sample, sample, sample sample!!!’ egged on by presenters which include, Manila’s version of Ant and Dec, Pedro and Pando, whose sole contribution is to wear the compulsory shades and shout, ‘ Party party’, a camp lady-boy who wears high heels and giggles all the time. The judges then have to stand up and do something crowd pleasing which is often a few dance steps or a back flip over the desk.
The judges always say about those being judged, ‘I really, really, really, really liked that. So much energy.’ Which means the dance group threw themselves around a great deal.
The presenters then scream, ‘Party, party’ and everyone cheers and screams and makes V signs at the camera and wave the ‘ Can you see me Mum? I’m on telly!’ wave.
They have introduced a new element, which I have to admit I turn round and watch, called’ Sample, sample, sample’ where each day three contestants compete in a talent show. Now I do not lie or exaggerate when I tell you one ‘talent’ stripped a suitcase full of coconuts with his teeth accompanied by a recording of the tango ‘Jealousy’, another did three Rubik cubes in two minutes, actually two cubes for one of them came apart in his hands ( Its true I tell you! True!) The winner was a mini-man, scrawny who wore a trilby and did back flips while singing “ I saw Daddy kissing Santa Claus’. When interviewed afterwards he kept back flipping in jubilation and the lady- boy presenter had to stand on his feet in his high heels to make him stand still.
The shows are interrupted regularly with unvetted advertising which incredibly promises ‘ 4 times straighter hair!’. How do you measure straightness? Its either exactly 180 degrees or bent. Or the toothpaste that leaves your mouth with 83% less germs or promises you 3 times less sensitivity. How do you quantitively measure sensitivity??
Any way as I say I don’t watch much television this just goes on behind me as I work tirelessly on my computer.
I have said how it rains almost everyday or night and we had a real humdinger of a storm the other night. Real knock-down-drag-out- donner- unt- blitzen with rolling thunderous crashes and rebounding echoes with vivid blue-white flashes of lightning - one time I heard the lightning crackle I swear and the hissing pelt of the accompanying torrents of rain hammering on the roof and streaming from the canopies across our windows. Next morning we woke to pale shamefaced sunlight as the dawn apologized for the rowdy night. I took Snowie for a walk in the big field, after breakfast and my flip-flops( yes, I wear them now) shipped water copiously and the grass degged my legs with wet. I sat on an old tree stump as he wandered off into his redolent world of wondrous smells to be explored. The air hummed with dragonflies that hovered and darted like splinters of a rainbow and the tiniest blue butterflies like pieces of torn tissue paper fluttering and spinning through the grass, sulphur-winged, bigger ones danced in the warm air and large white giants ghostly glided across the field.
Snowie was glad that we stayed longer than normal as he wallowed in his olfactory paradise and whenever he saw another dog my lithe whippet buddy sped across the field hurdling clumps of wet grass and getting into full gallop, brother of the wind with his ears laid back and his tail out behind him. Glorious to watch him run.

My neighbouring wilderness, the deserted garden left to fall into the wild place I have described in earlier blogs; a place of vicious adhesive burrs, razor- sharp leaves and brightly coloured leafage has, in the heat and deluge of the wet season, burgeoned. Left unattended and lacking good husbandry it has become a dense impenetrable tangle, a green barrier refusing way and barring me from entry to my own ‘ fortress of solitude ‘, from which I have become accustomed to view the passing pageant of the clouds proceeding over the distant blue-grey mountains.
However, over the past week or so someone has wielded the cleansing machete and some levelling has taken place. Small but telling ingress has been made and the resultant cut greenery lies in small rotting heaps. Of course, this close to the equator does not really favour the allocation of seasons as we know them in the chilly northern zones. Here there is no spring, no summer, no autumn and no winter. Nevertheless, the smell of these rotting heaps, as they slowly moulder and return to earth is redolent of home and the autumnal smells of October. It is not an unpleasant smell. On the contrary it is evocative and rich and reminds me of the woods around Bolton Abbey and the heavy deciduation of our English autumns, the rush and bluster of wind-driven leaves, the gathering in hollows and against walls, the drenching and the slow decay, the return to earth.
Memento mori!
I have mentioned often the rain and the storms. Mentioned them, perhaps, to the point of tedium but they are an ever-present element in our lives here just now and to not mention them would be to present half a picture. As I write the sky is blue and far to the East some mountainous snowy towering cumuli are boiling up.
It rained earlier and one can imagine that some of the water boiling up there only fell to earth a few hours ago. It is like a school book illustration of the Rain Cycle. Rain falls on the slopes of the volcanic mountain and streams seawards down flood-carved gullies and man-cut canals spilling into and swelling the two rivers that empty into the sea here at Dumaguete; rivers of only a few miles course. From the sea the tropical sun sucks up the vapours and cooler air condenses the energetic molecules into snowy cumuli and the thermals heap them into towers that boil and gather to fall again soon. Yet some will remain on earth sucked up by roots to swell the pineapple and mango, the lansones and the ramboutans and some will be collected and filtered and passed through a reticulated network of pipes to be iced to quench a parched throat.
This massive cycle of precipitation, evaporation, condensation, precipitation going on between the earth under our feet and the clouds boiling and billowing above us leaves us sweating and sweltering in the thick soup of humidity that is part of the evaporation step in the cycle.
Far to the North and South of these islands are huge tundra of eternal snows where some water has been locked in glaciers and packed fields of snow and ice for tens of thousands of years. Indeed man can extract cores of this ice and extrapolate weather conditions that prevailed centuries ago. Here this energized water, turbulently cycling so swiftly, stands in contrast to the stasis of that sleeping icey wilderness.
(As a quick but related aside I once spent two futile hours arguing in the laundry room of an RAF billet that ice, water and steam were always chemically water and only changed physically between the three forms at the promptings of the rise and fall of temperatures, and that you cannot see steam, only water vapour. He would not listen so would not learn. I learned that there is none as deaf as those that will not hear.)
Above the Horns of Negros, now, those cumuli are being pulled by high winds into lenticular clouds that offer dark grey bellies below their snowy shining crests, before drifting further inland to bestow the benison of their burden on other parts.
These blogs develop a life of their own sometimes and where I start to write of one thing I finish up writing of other things. That is perhaps the nature of blogs.
I was going to contrast Snowie’s exploration of this world principally through his nose with a critical faculty that does not recognize the smoke of warm turds as being unpleasant, a thing insufferable and to be shunned; he rather lingers there and leaves reluctantly. Nothing to him is unpleasant. Some acrid smell might hurt his sensitivity but generally he accepts, evaluates, analyses and stores without comment as to pleasantness or unpleasantness.
I compare his delights with my own. Of all the senses, for humans, smell provokes the most nostalgic memories. For me the warm smell of a morning kitchen rich with the smell of yeast working and the breath of fresh baked, teacakes and cracknies cooling in trays in the shop out front are remembered as part of my early life, as too is the walk from school on Monday mornings when homing for dinner, I swept through a cobbled street where the billowing sails of an Armada greeted me as everyone’s weekly washing dried in pale sunshine and bellied and floated or cracked and whipped in the noon air. That night I slept in sheets that smelled of snowflakes, sunshine and the wind. The smell of onions in the shepherd’s pie; the redolence of gravy over hot Cornish pasties; the wonder of a vanilla plant’s leaves in Victoria Park museum that smelled just like American Ice Cream Soda; and too, the eucalyptus plant that smelled a bit like Vick that grew there next to the angry parrot that flared its crest and spread its wings and dared me to go further;the sweet smell of Swan’s blue fountain pen ink; the smell of chalk; the gentle perfume of Miss Lambert’s overall as I read to her and learned my letters and bless her for the gift, all are safely stored in my head forever. Whenever I chance upon any of these smells, in whatever circumstances, climes or countries, I am transported, instantly, through time and space to those earlier places and years, to relive a pleasant moment once again and fondly. I say this with the reassurance that as I leaned upon my stick and watched my little brother whippet, Snowie, flash and glimmer through the tall grasses, the odour of newly baked bread, wafting over the meadow from a nearby bakery, had me stood barefoot on the stone floor of our kitchen in Bradford Street as Grandma opened the mouth of the huge oven and removed a tray of teacakes.
I envy Snowie and his sensitive nose but still delight in my own and all the memories it keeps and all the new ones it learns.


When I was salad green,
just knee-high to a bookcase,
through long winter evenings I lay,
legs crooked, chin cupped,
folded in fancy
beside the great oven of our bakery,
thence, I’d circumnavigate
on the magic carpet of my Atlas and Gazette.

My fingers dared the Hindu Kush
where day-long shadows loomed
and echoes upon echoes flew.

Out of the long flat plains of Asia
winds plucked at my padded tunic;
carried the distant thunder
of the great Khan's hordes,
marauding westwards.

I have heard the wolf gales
howl over Novaya Zemlya's shores
where cities of ice slide through silent seas
and the lone seal barks.

Astrakhan, Petra, Panama, Tiero del Fuego
slid under my fingers
where I roamed with the winds and currents
Mastless, I’ve homed on Ithaca.

Tundra, steppe, pampas, prairie, desert,
equatorial forests dim – all were my domain
as winter beat its rain-run wings
against my windows.

Later, I accepted more modest contours,
imagination fettered, I was bound
by the proscriptions of reality;
my world coloured
an even and undemanding brown.

Life turned for me.
Since then, I've winged over reefs
washed by seas of ineffable blues;
watched dolphins shepherd tuna for the kill,
beneath an umbrella of frigates,
black, broken shapes,
swept and scythe-winged,
cluttering a murderous light;
seen flying fishes flitter and skim
as our luminous wake unfurled abaft;
watched petals fall on midnight forest pools;
slept in Bedouin tent
where midnight sands sang beneath the stars;
sweated through long dark nights
on bamboo floors where no sleep came.

All my oven-coddled dreams come true
but still as I sit and swelter here
fans stilled by failed supply,
I think of home. Home?
Peaty reek of sodden moors,
wind off the tops, a whetted blade,
rain horizontal, thick with sleet,
paths paddled to mud
under the curlew’s lonely cry,
along the rugged outcrops of the scarp.

This blog will be a sort of pot-pourri, a mixture of bits and pieces, simply because it has rained considerably over the last weeks and we have not ventured too far abroad.
1) I mention the tricycles often in other blogs and often when I sit waiting while Sione does some shopping, (and that can involve some long sits) I watch the passing traffic and to keep my mental skills honed I study the numbers of the passing trikes. They are all four digit.
What can I do with them? Well I could play crib with them counting zeroes as 10. So 5064 would score fifteen two, fifteen four and a run of three , seven. But often I try to factorise as quickly as I can. I get so involved sometimes that it actually induces sweat over and above the normal copious outpourings induced by the high levels of humidity.
I have seen 0007, and 0074 ( the last four of my service number) , 0001 has passed me twice. But a beauty passed me yesterday that I particularly prized.
1881 which is palindromic plus whether I flip it on any of its horizontal or vertical axes or look at in a mirror it is immutable it remains 1881.
8008, 1001 are the only others that have the same qualities.
If I had seen it at 10.10.10 I could have claimed aplace in the Guiness Book of weird records.
BTW its prime factors are 3,3, 11 and19.
I can be very boring company sometimes when I exclaim at a passing trike ‘That’s an interesting number! Square root of two!’
2) I watched ‘Sample, Sample, Sample’ yesterday and my giggle imp was quite roused by an Elvis impersonator, with a dreadful cleft palate belting out ‘ you aint nothing but a hound dog’. He sparkled and shone in his Vegas white suit of lights, complete with sequins, he even had the wobbly leg, which refused to stay still even after he had won. The crowd loved him and I am not sure whether they were involved in a massive concerted piss take or serious but he was awful, flat and incoherent, and I do sympathise with his condition which was massive and distorted his speech drastically. The judges were bullied/ blackmailed into allocating straight 10’s, which provoked the mandatory leg wobble and back flip ( not as I recall an Elvis speciality).
3) Another episode in the Soap opera from which we saw a short extract earlier.
So Toni went to Cebu where he met a really nice girl with a nice family, her brother was a lawyer etc etc . Remember? Good , then I will continue.
It appears that while he was discovering this pearl of womanhood he taught her how to swim and used her cellphone to video the lesson. He returned to LA and she told him she had put the video on her Facebook. He went there to see it and discovered that her ‘status’ was ‘engaged’ and there was a picture of her waving her hand with the ring on. Meanwhile her fiancé , a man who runs a shop that sells rock in LA, ( No, I am not making this up. Really!) had seen the video and heard Toni shouting encouragement. Then it all came out as she was confronted by her fiancé. Toni, too, had a go at her. Now Toni had at all times acted in good faith even while he was bedding her. But she told her fiancé that he had forced her and stolen her virginity. Toni swears she was not a virgin. The fiancé has never met the girl but believes her and has threatened to kill Toni for stealing her virginity, which he prized highly. Given that they both live in LA and given the nature of LA, the threat has to be taken seriously. He has taken out an injunction against the man and that has proved expensive too. The girl’s family has disowned her, even her brother the lawyer.
That’s the story so far but watch these pages.
It’s all going to end in tears.
Just a footnote it seems that Sofia, the girl who caused Toni so much upset when he came here a few weeks ago has left school and set up as a graphic designer on the internet. ( I beg your pardon , I am not making this up!!) But unhappily she had only been doing the job a few days when she was burgled, as she was here, next door, and they stole her laptop and mobile phone, as before. The ‘ thief’ must have followed her. The theft has left her and all her companions without the tools to do their job.
I sit here with my companion and smile as I watch the rich tapestry of life being woven.

Just in case anyone is concerned that my silence indicates anything to do with super-typhoon Juan, let me reassure them that it came nowhere near here where I am in the Visayas but passed hundreds of miles north of here on its way to China. In fact we are protected to the South by Mindanao , to the east by Cebu and the Horns of Negros stand guardian to the North. The typhoons do not come from the West. We get rain in plenty but few winds or storms. The occasional thunderstorm does come and they are spectacular but seem to do little harm.
No, I am unharmed, in fact I am quite fit and well. I have lost two stone. ‘Lost’ is hardly the word, too negative and the weight is not missed. Let us say I have shed two stone and I am spry and moving freely now. I can out-walk any Filipino here. I have developed a devastating and lethally accurate back hand with the fly swatter. If I sit outside I am like some great Zulu chief whisking the flies with my yellow plastic swatter.
Yesterday I saw a cat pass along the wall with a tail bent at right angles to the norm

Its tail bent at almost ninety
it stepped along my wall
and strangely the poor thing
hardly seemed to care at all.

I called it back,
I sought to stroke it,
all I wanted to know
was who it was who broke it?

It chose to ignore me
and went its merry way,
its strangely crooked tail
wishing me good day.

A rose without petals,
a pie without peas,
are some of the saddest things
that any of us sees,

like a tree without leaves
or a ship with tattered sail,
but the saddest thing I’ve ever seen
was this cat with a broken tail.

It had nothing to sweep in anger,
nothing to fold in sleep.
O, a cat with a tail that is broken
would make a strong man weep.

Just now we are having the barangay elections. I am not yet totally au fait with the political organization of the Philippines but I know the barangay is the equivalent of our ward in England. Just now they are electing their councilors and one will be the Barangay Captain. Every barangay has its barangay hall where the captain can be found. He seems to be responsible for the cleanliness of the place and the behavior of the residents of his fiefdom.
We have moved into the season of festivals and here they call the local Festival, ‘Buglasan’, in Bacolod City it is ‘Maskarada’, in San Carlos ’Pintaflores’. It would be true to say that each festival is like the other but still different in that they represent the character and individual city pride. The festival will last for a week and there will be many sub-festivals celebrating different cultural activities. Last evening they had a rap festival which was, I am sorry to say, imitative of the West, but worse, being repetitive and predictable with much finger stabbing and shouting, but all in Cebuano not English, if you can say that our own rap artists speak English. I can never tell.
There is much dancing and many parades to which each barangay contributes. Pretty much like Keighley Gala but far more colourful and noisy.
I am going to the festival site later today and may blog my visit.
Sione has decided to try to cultivate a lawn so now lets the grass grow freely without having our little man uproot it on a regular basis. She needed some shears to cut her lawn and last night during a brown out while we sat in the cool night with candles she tried her shears out. I could hear her snipping away in the gloom and after a while she came and sat down in the flickering sphere of candle light with a distraught face. Concerned I asked if she was alright.
‘I have just chopped a frog in half.’ she replied.
Her story sounded much like this:
‘….. there were many five maybe or six but I did not see them in the dark it is the frogs fault why do they hide there I am not to blame they cannot run and cannot fly they only jump and I block their way they will gone now into the night I throw it over the fence silly place to hide there among my eggplants they can only jump it is not my fault….’
And so on. I could only splutter with laughter.
‘Its not funneeee!’ she wailed.

Last night was a night of lights and no lights.
Let me explain.
We went to the festival.
It probably meant a lot to the people but for me it was a confusion of noises and kaleidoscopic images of young people twirling in costume, vendors waving kerchiefs for sale, thrust pamphlets from trade stalls, onions in plastic bags, bits of barbecued chicken on sticks with a sticky dressing, fruits, smoke, laughing oriental faces, scowling, belligerent oriental faces, inscrutable oriental faces, beggars hands blooming in the gloom, offering stumps as excuses and children plucking at my trousers, more smoke and the constant beating of drums.
God, the drums!! Will they never be silent?
My shirt stuck to the sweat on my back and the sky was alive with distant silent lightning and the lancing sweep of searchlights. Later the fireworks and the drift of balloons and the fountains of crackling stars pluming over the festival ground and the chorus of ooohs! and aahs! that greeted the green stars, the blue stars and the radiant white stars that lit the up-turned, inscrutable, belligerent and laughing oriental faces now at once, grotesque and beautiful.
The distant reverberating grumble of thunder now accompanied the shudders of lightning that licked across the sky and picked out the silhouettes of roofs, trees and the swaying fronds of tall buko palms.
Then the wind bullied into the grounds with the rain on its back and the palms bowed and susurrated.
Time to go home - so we went!
No sooner were we home than we were hit by a brown-out. The storm was sudden and swift and then gone. The sky cleared and the real stars shone. We could still the distant searchlights as we sat out in the cool evening air redolent with fresh smell of the rain.
A time of no lights except for the shudders of once again silent lightning
Then, out of the Horns of Negros, a high yellow light moved out over the city. A plane? No! The yellow lights of its, I supposed navigation lights, were bunched and all yellow. Now it slowed and stopped, hanging there in the high sky. A helicopter, then? No sound though, just a high yellow light that seemed now to be slowly dimming. Then, another moved quickly away from the Horns towards the now stationary first light. It too slowed and stopped while the first drifted, fading and then gone. The second followed the same pattern of movement, slowing, stopping, fading, and then going, gone.
We wondered at this strangeness in the sky. I thought it must be helicopters and then out from the Horns; three lights in a triangular formation appeared and went through the same patterns of movement but stopping to fall into a line where they were joined by a fourth. They too faded and later another formation of three following the same patterns. Always they stopped roughly in the same place before they faded.
All the time the lightning flashed and lit the Horns and the trees.
I do not have an explanation but I have thoughts.
UFO? Yes. They were unidentified. They were flying. And they were objects. So, yes, UFO!
Were they alien in origin? I doubt it. I have hinted that the festival was Pinoy for Pinoy and aliens were unlikely to travel who knows how many light years to witness it.
Helicopters on an army exercise seem the likeliest explanation, but I am at a loss to understand the silence, the fading and the disappearance. They did not fly away they just faded and went out.
All in all, an interesting evening!
The brown-out ended and light returned to our night.
One last question, were these strange lights related to the brown-out and the lightning or was the whole performance simply happenstance?
I think so.

Now I freely admit that I am, and have been for some time, a grumpy old man. I abhor and mourn the loss of courtesy from my world.
For instance, a human trait that I noticed back in England and which I find greatly exaggerated here has caught my attention of late. I refer to the semi-robotic state of most human beings. This is evinced by many a person’s inability to stop or deviate from their chosen path and the onus is placed on others to get out of the way and avoid collision or to give way if the offender is stationary. This seems to apply doubly here to anywhere else I have experienced it. It is also accompanied by a restricted peripheral vision; either that or else they are so totally immersed in their own universe as to be unaware of others around them.
I am a big man and although I am a couple or more stone lighter than I was, I am still big and little ladies still bounce off me and others come to shelter in my shadow on sunny days. Back in England a walk down the high street had begun to seem like some new computer game where the goal of the game was to complete a full transit of the street without hurting anyone and avoiding contact by whatever means. To hinder your progress the computer would throw dithering old ladies in front of you who could not make up their mind on what part of the pavement to walk and moved/ staggered from side to side, either that or some belligerent young mother with a pushchair, adroitly used as a weapon, with its occupant, stupefied and soporific, dreamily sucking on its dummy, a half eaten Greggs’ sausage roll in its hand. Such ladies labored under the impression that possession of a pushchair gave them absolute right of way even to the extent that I could be trying to leave an already crowded newsagent and some mother would force her way in ahead of my struggling exiting, not even considering that if I left first her entrance would be so much easier. I have often debated whether or not to actually leapfrog over such persons.
Coming here to the Islands seems to have moved that computer game up to a higher level of difficulty.
Let me give you one or two examples of what it is like here. Unitop is a major store here that follows the principal of ‘stack it high and sell it cheap’ form of marketing, so the aisles are narrow and cluttered with merchandise and people.
In consequence I have to really negotiate my passage there else I will flatten someone or something so I approach this little lady carefully and she fills the passageway. She has something in her hand and she peers at it intently, turning it over and feeling it. I cough and she ignores me. I am stood inches away from her and she cannot, will not see me or acknowledge my presence. My irritation threshold is low today for we have a brown out and the fans no longer gushed cooling air down from the walls. My shirt sticks to my back. ‘Excuse me’, I say. Nothing. Try again. ‘Excuse me.’ She leaps like a startled hare, drops whatever it was she was examining and bolts down the passage. I only wanted to pass by her and rape was a million miles away from my intentions but she bolted in terror.
It made me feel awful and intrusive.
Or the narrow cluttered passage from one hell hole of the store to another. I approach it and a slow fat woman waddles along it. I stand aside to let her pass. She passes me without a smile or a thank you. I turn for the passage and find it now full with a family walking in single file. I mutter my saving mantra quietly under my breath. ‘It’s their part of the planet. It’s their part of the planet.’ From behind me a burly strapping youth bundles me to one side and crashes through the wending family group. They make way for him. No one is hurt.
Sione asks me why I have been so long and she has been looking everywhere for me. I really should make an effort to keep up, is implied.
This happens every day on every sally forth into the tumble and turmoil of a crowded oriental city.
Peter Ustinov once observed the difference between Australians and Japanese is their sense of personal space. The Japanese have boundaries to self that extend beyond their physical self and into which strangers are not welcome. The Australians are without such boundaries in consequence of which one can walk through a crowded Japanese airport and never bump into anyone, while if you were in Sydney and there was just you and an Aussie in the waiting lounge, he would bump shoulders with you and cry ‘ Sorry , mate!’
Here it is like Japan. I have had no collisions yet.
So I am a grumpy old man!! There’s much to be grumpy about.

I have referred at other times to Sione’s gift with a rock. She has superbly developed Mesolithic skills. She was driving the customary nail into the usual cement with her rock and it stood proud and unbent. She was putting the rock back when I noticed something and asked to look at it. It was tough and igneous and drilled neatly in the rock was a hole the size of a nail. She had hammered so often with such weight and accuracy that she had drilled this hole clean as you like. I have watched her hammering and to get the right amount of momentum for concrete/ cement she needs to begin her swing from behind her right ear, slightly round arm, like a girl, but powerfully delivered. The hole was an incredible piece of accurate hammering. The nails must have been hit many times in exactly the same place to get that neat a hole.
She was guest singer at a big Halloween party and I was so very proud of her as she stood up on stage and sang to well over three hundred people and she sings so beautifully and is always well received.
She was ferreting around the house the other day and I asked her what she was looking for. Her cell phone, she explained. Then it dawned on her and she went to the fridge opened the freezer and took out her phone. I was aghast.
-Why?
-They tell me to.
-Who told you, I asked.
-The phone said ‘Phone freeze’ so I put it in the freezer.
-What?
-The phone told me.
Was she joking? No, she was serious.
-You don’t put mobile phones in the freezer, I patiently insisted.
- I put it in a plastic bag, she told me.
-O then, that’s alright.
I gave up and came away, shaking my head
Later we dissolved in a gale of giggles. I cannot stay mad with her long.

So we got Snowie a little brown half-brother, same mother, different father (his mother is bit of a slut). He is so kind to it and only nips it if it gets too uppity or snuffles in his food too much.
It struck me that Snowie, my white whippet, is alliterative and Bobby, being pure mongrel is an oxymoron and I shall be able to take two figures of speech for a walk in a couple of months.
I say he is pure mongrel because he is a result of the abandonment of free love existing here in the Philippines’ dog population and where Snowie emerged a proud little thoroughbred, at least I like to think so, Bobby, has more varieties than Heinz. I was going to call him Heinz but what with the heavy German ex-pat contingent here that would have rendered it a trifle insensitive, and the fact that he has four little white socks on his orange pekoe coloured body that reminded me of bobby-soxers so he is Bobby.
He is due for emasculation in a month.

A walk, a leaf and a blog.
The broken road glitters in the tropic sun, mirages shimmer and dance. My way forks off and then bends past new buildings to dip through the gloomy dappled dancing shades of trees, from here it trails through back ways towards Santa Monica of the white church and the dusty supermarket.
Beyond the reach of sun, a wilt of dying flowers – distant hum of passing traffic.
I step from cool shade into the hammering sun and stand upon the anvil of old roads. Away from the main road the silence is intense, the air thick with the soil’s vapours.
The white church looms through tall palms, while here ants debate bone or seed.
The sun pins me in the dust.
Dust coats all; leg, arm and bladed leaf; flicker of a passing swallow.
The shade of an old woman, black as a beetle, turns at the corner of her house and scuttles under the shade of low buko palms past star-leafed papaya and into a leaf verandah that grapples with a thriving bougainvillea.
I stoop to pick a stiff dead fallen leaf from the ground. The living-green burned ocherous, its once live compliance, stiffened and crisped. I blow the dust from it.
I find shade and pause a while.
A tethered goat, one horn broken ragged, dances on small feet, fixes me with devil eyes, bleats challenge and butts at my intrusion into the lull of his day. Cicadas stir, call ‘cave’ on my shadow from the dry grasses of the verge.
The ovate leaf is threaded with dead veins, an intricate venation encased, the delicately wrought network servicing the small factory that converts my breath to cellulose sugars and constructs towering, ancient shady trees, the vein branchings innumerable, modeling the mother tree’s apparent tangled structure of branches, boughs and twigs. I hold it against the bright sun and the patterns of ramification display in wondrous detail.
This is not the time to be out. Locals sprawl and sweat in sleep or potter under palms, closeted in shade or flutters of cool. I am a mad dog, loitering to savor the caprine stink of old goat, listening to the choir in the grass, under a noonday sun.
I stand a moment more looking at the surrounding trees and know they proliferate even to the very edge of the volcano and beyond. A nearby stream gushes and gurgles carrying the wet season’s waters seawards, less than a short mile to go, the sun sparkles and glances brilliant from the leap and lap of water. The stuff of life abounding. The goat, the beetle-black woman and I all contribute.
The trees hear us breathe, I hear them breathe, the quiet tides of life, but it is the breeze that stirs and sighs. They gather in my breath, suck water from the rich black earth and welcome each dawn to photosynthesise. The eternal exchange continues, waste for waste, life for life in silent symbiosis.
I put the leaf into my shoulder bag.
The goat’s bell chimes flat as he shakes his beard. A fly tells beads of my sweat.
Pale in a day- blue sky, the moon drifts towards the dark many miles away.
A curtain, raised in curiosity, falls back.

I think I called one blog a pot pourri which brings me smoothly to my first entry which is about mixing, in this case not scented flower petals but foods.
For me a plate of chips with a tomato sauce dip and a sundae are two distinct dishes to be eaten separately from each other. One is a sort of main meal and the other a dessert, or, simply, one is savoury and the other sweet and never the twain shall meet upon the palate, in the stomach, of course, but in the mouth, never.
I was in McDonald,s the other day ( O the shame to write that and it be true! In my defence I only drank the coffee.) when I noticed a group of young people sat at a nearby table with a haystack of French fries in front of them and two dishes of tomato sauce dip and each had a dessert, a chocolate sundae. They were eating both at the same time. My effete western stomach lurched and my gorge rose at the sight and at the thought of the conflict of tastes as each dish obliterated and confused the other.
Keats once sprinkled his tongue with cayenne pepper and drank a glass of port just to experience the effect. But hey! we did get Ode to a Nightingale out of him. We got nothing but teenage chatter from that table.
This failure to distinguish between courses is not limited to the teenagers, Sione does the same thing and when I questioned her eating pineapple chunks and cream while eating chicken adobo and rice she explained that she liked pineapple. Now I know I have eaten fried ham and pineapple, duck and orange, pork and apple and even roast lamb and banana but none of the fruits in those dishes had cream on them. As I keep reminding myself it is their part of the planet and their eating habits are really none of my concern. I just don’t look to closely now.
Religion is a dominant force here in the Philippines, he wrote, moving adroitly on to a change of subject.
There are as many churches as there are pawnshops here in Dumaguete. It used to be said that Keighley once had as many places of worship as it had pubs one only has to stand outside the Parish church and start counting there to see that this has got to be a fairly accurate assessment. However, that probably has to be altered now to read as many carpet warehouses as there are pubs.
Here the churches are clean and tidy and cared for. The large cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Hope is a magnificent snowy-white building with ever open doors letting in the breeze and sunlight and always someone knelt in prayer there when we pass. But there are many smaller churches, not all are Roman Catholic, although that is the dominant denomination here. The smaller ones can be seen deep in the shades of palms or close to the National Highway. All are clean and cared for and painted in fresh tasteful colours .
I passed one in Valencia the other day that was intriguingly named Church of the Lady of the Abandoned Parish, which smacked of both defiance and the petulant chiding of authority.
Dumaguete, as has been pointed out by others responding to my blogs, has many colleges and universities. Similarly, there are many schools and all have there different uniforms. We once had great debates about uniforms in the UK but one only has to see these young people in their white shirts and different coloured trousers or skirts to see how charming and clean and belonging the uniforms makes them.
Their outside walls are plastered with signs/banners proclaiming the latest laudable achievement of some pupil or member of staff, such as second place in Negros Oriental Chess competition, latest award for piano playing, first placed team in Kayak racing or some such. I pass like the wind on the back of a weaving motorbike and cannot read them all nor remember them either. Some do stick, however, as the instruction to students:
‘Be honest when others are not honest.
Be honest when other will not be honest.
Be honest when others cannot be honest.’
This message is hammered home at every presentation, dance, prize giving and party. It seems particularly strange here that every such public presentation that I have witnessed has been given by a woman. They are very good at it, too. They hammer home the message of honour, honesty, team spirit, save the planet and maintain high moral standards. I do not have a problem with that in any way. I find it laudable and admirable.
Sometimes it goes just that bit too far. I was passing a beach resort, clean, tidy, pleasant with shaded tables and splendid views of the sea and the distant blue silhouettes of islands and noticed a sign close to the entrance which read, and this is verbatim:
PRESERVE MORAL STADARDS.
KEEP TO THE PATHWAY.
I have since wondered whether the latter sentence was a ‘Keep off the Grass.’ instruction or “Stick to the straight and narrow way.”, which was straight out of Sunday School.

A very short blog because this happened to me this morning when we rode into the city. Always there are many tikes around at that time, 9am, with people going to work .
They are all numbered and have a four digit display across the front for instance 1090, 5692, or 0029 etc. One passed me going the opposite way with the number 0010 which was the lowest I had seen and caught my eye for that reason. Nothing unusual I thought it was just as likely to pass you as any number between say 1 and 9999, but what are the odds of a given number passing you as you call it unseen. It has to be 9998 to 1, pretty big odds. All this was going through my mind as we sped along. What if I said the next trike to pass would be 0001. I looked up and, I swear that this is true, the trike with number 0001 actually passed me at the moment of the thought.
Things like that don’t happen often so I just wanted to share it with folks who might have the same sense of gobsmackedness as I.

Your blogs are too beautiful to be called blogs, Arthur. Keep them coming. Your haikus of the eleventh and your mention of cicadas remind me of the famous one by Basho quoted somewhere by Salinger: Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1954-59

Thanks Gareth. Also well identified because the 11th blog you refer to actually used the Haibun form for that one, a form favoured by Basho. It was an intense experience and I needed to try and catch the essence of the time.

In the same way that in Spain there seems to be Ia continuous procession of saints’ days so here in the Islands they have a continuous procession of festivals and carnivals. I mentioned in an earlier blog the festival for Negros Oriental, today is the local Dumaguete festival.
First though let me recollect a time when I had a Vespa motor scooter with a sidecar. It looked very much like a Corgi toy. I left Keighley to go over the Cringles to Addingham and then on to Bolton Abbey. I got into a traffic tangle in Silsden and wended my way through and suddenly there I was actually part of the Silsden Gala procession. Feeling rather stupid and embarrassed as the crowd laughed and cheered me past, I waved back. My wife covered her face and swore at me from under her blanket and my young son buried his head in my back muttering ‘ I hate galas.’
I mention this because a similar experience occurred as I struggled through a crowd on the festival ground. The air was vibrant with drums beating and music playing, lights dazzled and blinded and the crowd stubbornly refused me a clear way through. I had no idea where I was heading and Sione and I just weaved and pushed a way past the sweating mass of people. I stepped suddenly clear of it all and stood on my own in the middle of a beautifully costumed dance. I turned to get out of it and found an impassable wall of bodies locked against re-entry. Sione had disappeared and I was left to enjoy the laughter and applause of the sea of faces around me. The dancers ignored me and continued their well-rehearsed gyrations. I have to admit to the pleasure of being surrounded by bevies of pretty Filipinas.
I did manage to extract myself and found Sione and we continued through to the carnival ground.
This was pretty much like the Keighley Gala field in Victoria Park. There were a few rides and many stalls and eating places, of course. No brandy snap though, which I always loved. The rides were the caterpillar, a ferris wheel, and a sort of roller coaster but that was very very tame, which is irrelevant since I did not go on it.
What fascinated me was the number of stalls that involved gambling of one sort or another. There were several stalls that had a piece of netting stretched taut and the centre pulled down by a hollow ring. A football was dropped or thrown onto the netting and much as a science programme describes the space-time continuum being curved by gravity the football wandered round the netting until it passed through the ring and bounced onto a table that held 25 large numbered cups embedded in the table. The ball bounced and wandered around the table being thrown from one cup after another to the accompaniment of gasps and groans from the punters until it settled in one and then the appropriate odds were paid to anyone betting on that particular number. Rather like roulette, I suppose, but slightly less sophisticated.
We did not stay long and had great fun trying to find our motorbike.

I think I may have discovered a new art form. Something to rank beside Damien Hurst and his cadavers or that unmade bed or the pup tent, at least. It is kinetic, serendipitous (so requires little art training for me, which is good,) and it is beautiful.
Let me try to explain.
It rained all afternoon, long steely rods that lashed mud back up from the earth.
The rain continued through the night and into the early hours, the roof rang and hosed cascades of water into the yard; lightning shuddered through the dark with deep rumbling eructations of thunder that shook the windows; silhouettes of trees were printed over the curtains; shadow forests flared and flickered across the floor. Eventually sleep.
There was a stillness that came at dawn.
I turned and found a new day sparkling through the garden.

At one corner of our house an opalescent plastic tub, that once held bread flour, brimmed with caught rain and the new day’s full light was pent under its still pane, the domed skin of its meniscus, curved like a great lens, trembled in a breath of passing air that drew ripples over the taut skin and shook feathers and fronds out of its well of clarity to quiver on my ceiling fantastically.
The meniscus held unbroken and perfect.
I watched the patterns of light, light bent, refracted and reflected into the feathers and fronds, the light and vapourous dark of a breeze-birthed tangle of shapes and ephemeral phantasms that shone from the tub as first a transparent dragon drifted over the ceiling, became a glass fish waving its fins through a glass pool, a crystal bird rose, startled, into a crystal sky, a face, a frown, a diaphanous butterfly kissing a flower, a snarling tiger, all came and went punctuated by dancing, feathery patterns that offered no shape to toy with, only the joy of watching and imagining and creating.
Is it art?
Well I have always argued that there are two acts of creation in a piece of art of whatever genre; music, dance, poetry. The principal creative act is the artist’s vision and realization of the presented work of art, the second, and in some ways just as important as the first , is the creative act of observing, listening, watching. This second creative act of the observer is multiplied by the number of observers and so there are many creative acts in a presented work of art. Often the first and second acts will be essentially different e.g. my response to unmade bed, which is very much a negative WTF!!.
So. too, the tub of water presented as art. To many it will be just a tub of water, to others, like myself, it will be a source of wonder and joy.

Arthur,
That water in 't bucket wor art!

'The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of enquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art. He needs no one to give him an 'Art Education'; he is already qualified. He needs but to see pictures with his active mind, look into them for the things that belong to him and he will find soon enough in himself an art connoisseur and an art lover of the first order.' Robert Henri

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1945 - 50

Current location (optional) Norfolk UK

Denis, thanks for that. An interesting and pertinent quote.

Reading your postings on this site,Arthur, you wouldn't be a devotee of Thomas Hardy by any chance?

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 55-60

Current location (optional) Harrogate

He's a great novelist Alec and to be admired and I like Tess and Under the Greenwood Tree, both very much but I have never considered myself a devotee. Interesting question though.

It's 50 odd years since I had "Far From The Madding Crowd" thrust upon me but I thought I detected a similar style. Must have made some sort of an impression I suppose.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 55-60

Current location (optional) Harrogate

With your penchant for verbosity you must be very keen on Hardy, Alec...

Doug

"If tha knaws nowt,say nowt, an appen nobdy'll nowtice"

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 55-60

Current location (optional) Harrogate

I love language, Doug. I like words,wherein lies the fault.

So Christmas is upon us ! Fireworks here and laughter and parties and children with bright eytes. Let it please be the same the world over. Merry Christmas my good friends and Old Boys. Keighlians Aye!!

Happy Birthday, Arthur!!!

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1945-50

Current location (optional) Keighley

I echo that too, Arthur.

Wish I could still call in on you in Addingham - a notable domicile for a mathematician.

Glad you are happy in the tropics , Terry

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1952-60

Current location (optional) Lincoln

I'll drink to that too! But you've been silent for over a month now; have you run out of postcards? I, like many more, I'm sure, look forward to your next posting.

Doug

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1951-58

Addingham. Does anyone remember, in the late sixties,when the vicar denounced its citizens and the village became known as "Sin City"?

Thanks very much for your kind wishes. I shall continue my blogs soon. Nothing much but rain at the moment.

First of all can I say I am grateful for all your kind wishes on my birthday. 78 good years with a few not so nice ones but on the whole its been fun and interesting most of the way. Thank you all very much.
I have not blogged ( Is that really a verb? Ye gods! at least I have resisted ‘tweeting’) since Christmas Day. Really there has not been much to say except that it has rained everyday since then and although it is hard to understand the 12% increase in the water rate it remains quite cheap, relatively speaking.
Many is the day I have sat and watched the puddles gather and fill, seen the muddy water pock and bubble, listened to the frogs’ metallic creak and croon from their hidden places and watched the drops gather and fall from the eaves.
Interesting water drops, not rain really, raindrops come in all sorts of sizes, ranging from thin drizzle, through driven horizontal slashing winter rain to fat summer drops. I can remember sitting in our café room with the curtain lifted watching the wind driven rain swoop down Bradford Street and my old grandma would explain it was ‘ raining in iggs and swuthers’ and it was. You could actually see the iggs and hear the swuthers
But back to water drops, you know, the kind that hang pendant from a tap gathering and swelling until ‘plop’ it loses grip and drops. We have all of us listened to the regular drip-drip-drip of the tap with a failing washer which we will change tomorrow, for sure. The regularity of that drip indicates that all the drops are the same size. The water clock or clepsydra relied on the regularity of the drip to tell time so if regular then the drop must be pretty regular in size. I should think. Of course if we really wanted to know the mass when it loses grip we could catch a few drops and weigh them, but is there another way. I wondered.

I figured that the governing elements defining the size of the drop are the density and purity of the water, temperature might figure also, and importantly surface tension and gravity all elements. The mass/weight of the drop will be determined by the purity ( is there anything in solution or suspension? ) and since gravity varies according to position on the earth that would be a variable too. But at any given place all those variables could be considered constant to that place and time.
Sounds complex to me so off to Wikipaedia and there it was

mg=pi.diameter of pipe x 71.97( surface tension)

Divide both sides by g to get mass on its own.

So mass(kg)=3.1417... x diameter of pipe x 71.97)/~9.8ms^2

Take a 2 cm diameter tap nozzle say.

mass(kg)= 3.1417 x .02 x 0.007197/~96.04 = ?

converting to correct units I make it about .04614 grams or .00004614kg is the largest droplet that could form. About .05 grams which converts neatly to .05ml.
That would work for a tap but I still think the drops from the eaves that initiated this chain of thought looked, I repeat looked, similar in size. Your thoughts are invited and welcom

There has to be a normal size else how would they prescribe drops for certain medicines??
So watching the endless rain falling has proved of some interest.
Just a few points that deserve mentioning as strange to me.
If I order a drink in a bottle it is brought to me with the mouth sealed with a piece of wrapped tissue paper. Hygenic I suppose but weird to me
I explained about a trike that passed me with 1881 as its number and how it was palindromic and symmetrical et al. Well yesterday I met its brother 1001. Are there others? 0110 , 8118 I suppose. But I have not seen them yet.

I am pleased you like numbers as much as you love words, Arthur. I was as gobsmacked as you by your story of thinking about 0001 and then seeing it immediately.(Probability of the order of one over a myriad squared ?)Here's an experiment for you :think really hard about the Hardy/Ramanujan number and see how long it takes before you see it on a trike.Let us know the result.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1954-59

Current location (optional) Denholme garethwhittaker99@hotmail.com

But how many times have you thought about a number and it didn't appear?

As Richard Feynman (I think) said "I saw the number 43716 on a car plate today...what are the chances of *that* happening!?" [The point being that the chances are just the same as seeing the number 11111 on a car]

1729!! I have already seen it. About the 3rd week I was here. Strange also it was the number on the package of the rough green paper towels we used to use in school.LOL

I looked at my clock today around 5.30 and guess what! Yep that 1729 came up again. The weird thing is it keeps happening every day.

Hi Chris . I do understand the nature of probability butit is always good when a 'friend' turns up. I understand very well that it is just as likely to turn up as any of the other ten thousand numbers but still. Its like winning at bingo.

Sorry boys. I am easily confused. Not one over ten thousand squared, of course; ONLY one over ten thousand!! Still, significant enough to suspect Arthur of being psychic.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1954-59

Current location (optional) Denholme garethwhittaker99@hotmail.com

Hi Gareth. There are just 9999 numbers availale using a four digit display. Of course as already pointed out any one of those numbers can pass me at any moment. The odds on nominating the next one to pass and being correct are in fact 9998 to 1.I have been told but cannot verify that Dumaguete has more motorcycles than any other city in the world. I imagine the trikes are considered motorcycles and sometimes there does seem to be ten thousand of them. Everyone rides a motorcycle and it is heavily congested often. No road markings and no traffic lights but lots of intersections and crossroads. The lack of road signs and markings and no traffic lights is not to be cared about since they would ignore them anyway. Do not try to use zebra crossings without care for they are ignored.
ack to the numbers it is not nominating that interests me but the spotting of 'interesting' numbers. This is an entirely subjective defintion of 'interesting' of course.
eg 1875 id decimal of 3/16, 1414 is square root of 2 and of course 1729!!

Surely 10,000? Starting with 0000

I very much doubt that there is one going around with 0000 on it. As I say I doubt it but I will look. It helps pass the time.

Ho Chi Minh City would be a contender for most motorcycles too.

Is 0000 a number ???

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 55-60

Current location (optional) Harrogate

Definitely a number but whether it is used on vehicle plates is another matter.

Did you know...

In Formula One, if the reigning World Champion no longer competes in Formula One in the year following their victory in the title race, 0 is given to one of the drivers of the team that the reigning champion won the title with. This happened in 1993 and 1994, with Damon Hill driving car 0, due to the reigning World Champion (Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost respectively) not competing in the championship.

So is 0000 the same number as 000 and 00 and 0 ?

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 55-60

Current location (optional) Harrogate

Yes!

Ah, that explains it !!

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 55-60

Current location (optional) Harrogate

I have been reliably informed that there are only three thousand trikes in Dumaguete. I am now unsure that even though the number of trikes are less than the ID numbers available ie 3000 rather than 10000.
How does this effect the probability of nominating and seeing a particular number? It seems to me that if I nominate a number and it is not allocated to a vehicle then the odds are ) that I will nominate and see that number, however I do not know that that number has not been allocated and still think the odds are 9998 to 1. What do you think?

Many many years ago when I was a tender young officer cadet, I was studying at Royal MIlitary College, Duntroon, in Canberra. The Australian Capital Territory was fairly unique in Australia in that it used numbers only for car registrations. These were in the form XX XXX. we didn't quite get around to playing bingo with them, but we did drive around playing number plate poker.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1958-1961

Current location (optional) Blue Mountains, Australia via Haworth

I used to play crib with the old bus tickets on Keighley buses back in the 50's.
By the way I saw 1875 the day after Imentioned it in an earlier posting.

Writing of bus tickets

Can anyone recall the no 7 "scam" ??

The information was passed by word of mouth round school that the local Keighley and District Bus Company would donate cash to a charity (I stand to be reminded of the designated of the charity) for each and every bus ticket handed in whose number ended in 7 !!
Diligent KBGS pupils could be seen delving through the waste ticket boxes on the buses and checking everywhere a discarded ticket could be seen.
The Bradford and Cowling based pupils had a great input !!
The total to be collected escapes me but I remember that a sackful of the said numbered tickets was proudly taken to the Bus Station in order to prove a successful conclusion to the challenge !!
Only to be sent away embarassed because no such promise had ever been made.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1950-55

Current location (optional) KEIGHLEY

The bookies may quote odds of 9998 to 1 but only if they believed there were 10,000 trikes. As there are only 3,000 they wouldn't be the CORRECT odds.

Since it continues to rain on a daily basis and generally restricts any adventuring we might contemplate let me introduce you to our dogs- a sort of dog blog, if you like.
You have met Snowie already and I did mention Bobby and while out for a quiet walk we found Sootie, a fluffy black bitch puppy.
Snowie is now a full grown dog and he has kept and emphasised his whippet outline with long elegant legs, deep chest and high abdomen, rose ears and speed, speed speed. His movements are balletic and he walks as if on tiptoe but is most impressive when he runs as he does when we go to the field. He springs and dances, pirouettes and bows his long back when he plays with the other two. He loves to find a piece of wood or paper or cloth and pretend to the others he has found a treasure that he will not share with them and they chase after him. He loops and skitters and outpaces them. He loves to play and despite his emasculation he is brave and picks a good fight on the compound. He eats well and he is very fit and the other dogs are no real match for him. They are dull eyed all ribs and hung heads and he can scarcely raise more than a grumbled rumbling growl of protest from them with his good natured playful ragging.
On our way to the field for his walk and games he passes this huge iron gate where the Rottweiler lurks. He rouses the beast and bangs the gate back to annoy it. The Rott is snarling malice personified and his howls of frustrated rage can be heard yards away. Snowie sometimes goes off on his own and I can tell where he is by the sudden explosion of the metal gate, which is good fifty to eighty meters away, being hit by a charging Rott and the anguished baying at this impudent mocker at his gate. I am of the opinion, however, that the Rott welcomes the challenge. All else passes without stopping to torment and enliven his day so Snowie is an episode, a happening, a diversion they both enjoy, that relieves his boredom. Bobby and Sootie now join in the ‘game’and I pass as quietly as I can and just hope the gate survives.
Bobby is Snowie’s half brother, his mother, having had three litters inside two years and being unfed and uncared for, is a bag of bones that slumps in the cool shade and walks slowly back and forth, she is dying as I watch.
Bobbie’s turn for neutering duly arrived and rather than wait for her brother, who did the business on Snowie, Sione averred that she knew how to do it now, having watched the last time. Her father and mother were visiting so they were enlisted. A new razor, some iodine, needle and thread were arranged. Mother and father held Bobbie’s legs as he struggled. His head was wrapped in a towel, “ So he does not know it is me that does it and so he will go on loving me afterwards’ she explained.
I retired and closed the door. I refuse to be involved in the carnage.
Still his yelps of pain could be heard and Papa going ‘O O O ’ and Ma giggling and saying ‘ Finish now, finish now’. Sione says they both had their eyes closed.
He yelped more at the needle that repaired his shattered doghood than he did at the blade.
He spent the next four or five days examining the loss and tending to the slight wound and it healed well. He does not hold a grudge. And still loves and favours Sione so the head towel seems to have worked.
I need only pick up a stick and put on my cap and he and Snowie are ready for their walk up to the field. I had to carry him past the gate at first since the savage assault by the Rott would frighten him. I had to carry him back too, but now he joins in and backs Snowie up in any arguments with other dogs and the Rott.
They do love their walk and there is much chasing and hiding and mock battles and running games chasing the one who has found something to shake and rag.
I have had to reprimand Bobbie for eating cow muck and he does pass it by now without a sniff or a glance.
Bobbie has an enormous appetite and he is omnivorous eating meat and noodles and rice and vegetables without leaving a thing. He even tidies others dishes after they have finished and then comes inside to see if there is a little tidbit or morsel we have left. Time for a little something, as Pooh might say.
This appetite and a remarkable docility has allowed me to teach him. We taught Snowie early on before Bobbie came, how to wait until told ‘OK’ before he took food. He learned this so well that one time we put his dish down and got distracted by visitors and we forgot to say ‘OK’ and half an later we found him waiting by his dish to be told he could eat.
I started to teach Bobbie the same trick and was holding a piece of cheese between my thumb and first finger and my little finger was cocked as we were taught to drink tea in the posh manner and I noticed that he was looking at my little finger so I stopped saying ‘No’ and left my finger cocked and then as I dropped it he took the cheese. Now he does it that way and indeed all I have to do is to extend my hand and cock my finger and he sits.
Sootie, the little bitch, wanted some cheese, too, and came and sat beside him and I held a piece out with my finger cocked and she sat like Bobbie and waited. She had learned by watching. Incredible! Now I can extend both hands with the cheese and cocked fingers and they wait until their finger is dropped before taking it. Even if one has its cheese the other will wait until their finger is dropped. They are a delight.
When we go out they want to come out also but I tell them ‘ On Guard’ and they go and sit on the patio.
Sootie is small and black with two white front feet and the most amazing chocolate coloured ears. They look to be dusted with cocoa. She is brave and fearless and feisty. She will fight and rough and tumble with the boys and never give ground. Sometimes if there are bones around I have to go out and pull her off Bobbie. She has a great range of articulate growls and voicings.
As a result of her getting into fights so easily she has had her ear bitten and broken so that it hangs rakishly over one eye and gives her a suitably hostile look. A bit like the bitch in Lady and the Tramp who sings “ He’s a tramp but I love him’, with Peggy Lee’s voice.
Sione always goes out to see them in the morning and talks to them. She opens Sootie’s mouth and spits in it. I ask her why and she says, ‘ So she will know me and like me.’ A bit like Argentinian gauchos breathing in a horse’s nostrils.
Anyway that’s my dogs.
Sione is amazed at how obedient they are and did not know that dog’s could be so friendly. She thought only of them as guards and alarms never as pets now she adores them. She bathes them all once a week and that is a real fun time that seems to be all water and yelps and barks. They don’t like it but then they enjoy it and Sione sings to them and tells them they are good dogs.

The rains are still with us so it was with some trepidation that we chose to do the coast road run to Canlaon City for the festival held there at this time of the year.
Raincoats were stowed and food prepared and we left at 3am.
Of course, after all the fears and careful preparations it never rained the whole of the journey. Which only goes to support my old Mum’s advice: “ If you don’t want it to rain take a brolly with you.”
I have described in some detail, in other earlier blogs, the journey along the coast road, the National Highway, and the thrilling climb up the deeply gouged valleys and along the sides of cliffs as we mount the volcano. It culminates in a flat plateau-like plain and still the volcano Kanlaon looms above us.
We were staying two nights in a small hotel surrounded by paddy fields.
I have done a little research into rice since I have come here.
The Philipinos adore their rice. They eat it unsalted and Sione has never heard of rice pudding, the baked kind my Mum used to make with evaporated milk in. We go to a big rice store in Dumaguete which is always crowded with rice sifters and smellers and buyers and always there is a delivery of new sacks being carried through the packed mill of buyers. I counted 32 differently named and priced varieties of rice and I am sure there are many more. Unfortunately no Basmati!
Rice does not need to be grown in water. The real point of the water is to keep down weeds which cannot live long in those conditions where rice can. Also the water keeps away rats and the like that might nibble and abuse a crop. The paddy fields around the hotel were visited daily by white wading birds, egrets I think, who, as far as I could make out did not touch the rice growing there but were looking for other things in the water, frogs perhaps.
The use of rice paddies can be traced to prehistoric times, as evidenced in the names of towns such as Pila Laguna whose name can be traced to the straight mounds of dirt that form the boundaries of the rice paddy, or "Pilapil.
The amount of labour used to conceive and realize the huge amount of paddy fields there must be in the Philippines must place the achievement
on a par with the Pyramids.
As a quick aside I have always felt that the dry stone walls of home or the sheer mass of masonry used in building our rail network, both surely come close to matching the Pyramids in sheer tonnage alone.
Before breakfast I would go out of the hotel and look at the paddy fields.
They follow the contours of the low hills, they almost define the contours and there is a small inlet for fresh water, guided there from the streams that empty the volcao’s slopes, and a small outlet as far away from the inlet as possible to let the water down into the next level of fields. It is carefully done and well conceived .
One morning I watched a man steering a huge water buffalo through a field dragging a great metal rake behind him that gouged the mud up and turned the lot of it over. He was bare legged and clearly in a hurry to get it done before the sun got high. There was a faint smell of methane in the air and I understand that every so often in the year the fields are drained to let the methane generated there disperse and let the soil breathe.
This plateau below the volcano will be rich with minerals from earlier eruptions and there is much agriculture here, rice, of course, sugar and maize, and all manner of fruit and vegetables on sale in the market places.
It is to celebrate this abundance that the festival is held, like some great colourful harvest festival. Each barunguay must provide a part of the procession that moves slowly through the city on festival day.
Every hundred yards or so the procession will halt and each baraguay will perform its fertility celebration.
There is great effort and pride invested in each baranguay’s presentation. Performance is felt to reflect on their place.
The costumes are splendid and the dances well choreographed and practiced.
Dressed as bees or butterflies or heads of corn or carrots and broccoli they will dance and weave to their own drum and blaring bugle band.
This is a very religious country, most of them are devout catholics, but these sort of festivals have a slightly pagan air. I am never sure whether they are intended to celebrate the fecundity of their part of the planet and the abundance of its harvest or whether indeed it is intended to induce that abundance.
The whole affair is sprinkled with prayer certainly but the drums are boomingly vibrant and the bugles brassily strident while the dancing is ordered and demure it is still sinuous and fascinating to watch.
I watched the whole parade pass me as I became a face in the crowd. We all sweat but the drummers wielding their heavily padded sticks high in the air, their arms extended, sweat the most, more even than the heavily costumed dancers.
It is interesting to watch the drummers and try to determine who is’ calling the shots’. Someone is watching , counting and signaling the others and once one spots him one can note the change in the pattern of beats and it makes we wonder how ancient these drum patterns are and how are they learned, handed down, as they must, be from one generation to the other. I have enquired but all I get is stares of not understanding the question.
Later in the evening we found a tent owned by Sione’s brother, the police sergeant, which had a karaoke. I had a couple of beers and sang ‘Memory’ from ‘Cats’ (I know it is a girl’s song but I like the words and melody) and Danny Boy, there in the glimmer and heat of a tent under a tropical sky that seemed crowded with stars and the stark black of the volcano brooding over us all.
On our way home we passed the highly coloured statue of the man who turned Canlaon into a city, that stood, one arm raised, on a cornucopia of plastic melons and maize and mangoe and carrots and whatever, keeping prideful watch over the fecund fields and paddies..
Since I began this latest blog the rains have virtually left us and the heat has been turned up. It is hot and dry most days now.
Before I sign off I must tell how Henry, the little man who looks after my garden came and told me using signs that something had bitten his neck and beckoned me to follow him. I had asked him to clear the fence of alugbati and in the process he had disturbed the tiniest nest of some kind of stinging insect. We lit a broom , stamped it out and smoked the nest. He then flicked it onto the floor. It was just smaller than a mobile cell phone and made of the smallest hexagonal cells I had ever seen. It was made of thin paper like material and the insects themselves were so tiny. They are now dead and I am no longer tormented in the evenings by their spite and malice.

Easter week has been a strange one.
The weather is now well into the hot season and we swelter and perspire copiously. Electric fans whirr and flutter the curtains. The rain has not quite stopped but the showers are brief and mild and warm. The shower inside our bathroom is tepid although still welcome relief. Sometimes around mid morning if I run the tap for any reason the water is too hot to bear and I need to run the tap for a while to be able to use it. The sun’s intensity is such that it warms any uncovered piping.
Nothing strange there. No, you are right.
The strangeness is in the celebration of Easter. On Good Friday 25 men let themselves be crucified with nails. The mails were stainless steel and sterilized so they did take care of their healths. This self mutilation is frowned upon by the church, Roman Catholic, but enjoyed by the tourists, who take lots a pictures and videos to show the folks back home. The crowds cheering them on watch and if a back is not bleeding enough they will break a bottle and open up fresh wounds with the glass.
One man was asked why he did it. He explained that he did it every year for the last eight years to thank Jesus for saving his life when he fell three stories on a building site. So there you go.
There are, of course, the normal processions preceded by some image, cross or idol of Mary. Roman Catholicism is dominant but there are many, many tiny churches not related to the Catholics.
They used to say about Keighley that one gave directions to a stranger by referring to the pubs and churches/ chapels he would pass on his journey to wherever he was going. The pubs, well some of them, are still there but the chapels now sell carpets or kitchenware/furniture. Here in Dumaguete they would use the different churches to give directions. They can be found on most corners or tucked back from the road.
We visited one of Sione’s relatives here in the city. We left the main road , wandered through some shady trees to a house set back from the dirt track we had followed. We sat in the shade and chatted. We were disturbed by the harmonious rendition of ‘ How great thou art’ from a grass hut about 50 metres away.
It’s a church the relative explained they meet every night. It’s not very big, I observed. There are only eight of them, he smiled.
There is, of course, the cathedral which has a long flight of steps up to the large doors. Standing beside it is the old watchtower that warned of Muslim pirates that raided around here centuries ago.
Outside is a gathering of beggars including the one with the one note pipe and the stick with bells. Children tug at sleeves, old men offer handless arms as reason for their request for aid, withered grandmas hold up beseeching hands. My heart hurts for them but I can do nothing for them, dare not , should not, will not.
Near to one of the Universities of which there are many, is a beautiful large clean church. Pretty as a wedding cake and one large one on the way up to Valencia that is so grandly painted outside it quite takes the breath away. Cream and browns and magnolia and lofty elegant spires and railed doors. Wonderful!
The grass, leaf huts and a tangle of lino and canvas and corrugated iron stand/ lean in stark comparison to such opulent grandeur.
I once had it explained to me that the architecture, the height and scale and colour which would be that of new stone, the odours of incense, beautiful singing, music and cleanliness were a deliberate contrast to the squalor that English Medieval man lived in. It was a multi media show , a shock to the sensibilities, an echo on earth of the heaven promised.
Consider the Shambles in York running with blood and faeces and leaving that to enter the Minster.
It would be even more impressive to them than it is to us now and we are still impressed.
So it is here, I think. The grandeur enforces the promise of a better life to come in the hereafter.
I do not go there

Sorry Arthur, let's get down to the nitty gritty. Can you recommend any bars in Dumaguete? Or is it a waste of time travelling down from Manila.

Depends what you are looking for Ronald. There are many bars on the Boul;evard all serving cold lager. I like the Cocos Amigos and the Whynot serves some cracking food. Mashed potatoes even!!

Arthur, I particularly like the look of the Mexican establishment. Though after a few ice cold San Miguels the Why Not will no doubt have its special attractions. Only two months to go before I land in Manila for an important reunion. It's a long way from the Square Mile. Any more ex KBGS still working near Bank underground station?

Arthur, very much like your blogs. Makes the place well worth a visit. I may have missed the original narrative but how did you end up there in the first place. Did you meet the young lady in UK or where you an enthusiastic pen pal who took the plunge. I look forward to more blogging from the Pearl of the Orient.

Current location (optional) Eldwick

Kevin, Hi, Sione, my lady partner is a sort of electronic pen pal. She is beautiful (check 'beautiful buloron' on youtube) young( 38, but looks 28) she is clever,wise,strong, funny, humerous funny, talented, when she sings everyone listens and has enormous presence in a crowded room, she is resourceful, kind and caring. I am lucky at my age to find this pearl with which to wile away my last years.

>>humerous

does that mean a large funny bone?

Current location (optional) Singapore

humorous times 10 in deference to Prut.
I am always grateful for correction of my ancient eyes and fingers.

Arthur, I am sure that your evening strolls in breezy Dumaguete are a delight most evenings. And of course with your special partner. Are you the only British expat enjoying the lotus-eating lifestyle in Dumaguete. I would imagine there are also a few Australians, Americans and Canadians frequenting the local bars and restaurants. Hopefully not many Koreans. Is there a local airport too?

Current location (optional) Eldwick

Kevin , There are many ex-pats from America and Australia. I am a friend of a US Navy Commodore and an English Business man from London visits often and my partner is a great friend of their wives. There are many Germans and I went to a party thrown by an Englishman ex-pat and there were other Englishmen there. Two of them with their legs in plaster. They were all motorcyclists.

It is a while since I last blogged. This is mainly because life here is pleasantly hum-drum and that hum-drummery is sufficient given the sweltering heat we are enjoying (?) just now. It is purgatory to go out and hang the washing and sometimes the light from the sun is so intense and brilliantly white that it is frightening.I always hang the washing out because Sione unlike English girls does not want to get 'black' and wants instead to be white. Girls!!!
Here it is the holidays, schools and colleges and universities are closed. The stores are full of picnic sets , buckets and spades, inflatable floats for the sea, sun dresses and flowered shorts, it is summer, summer, summer and the resorts are busy with swimmers and divers. In England we would value the better weather, the warmer air, the sunshine, the cricket, but here , for me summer is a time to hide from that flaring beast in the sky.
Where my computer rests, faces a window and through my window I can watch the sun set into the volcanic ridges of the Horns of Negros. Often it sets in splendor the sky falling through the spectrum into darkness, the sun ducking through a veil of diaphanous clouds and the ragged profile of the range set velvety in dusky blues and purples, but often, too, it sets without clouds and then it burns through my window and laced curtains and I have to abandon my station and rest a while.
I say I hide from the sun but I go for a swim now and again. The sea is warm and where we bathe is shallow. I feel the occasional brush of a fish against my body and it startles me.
Sione is funny. She has bought a two piece bikini costume to go swimming. She goes and changes into it in the changing room of the chosen resort and emerges wrapped in a small bedsheet. OK I think, she protects from the sun but then she goes into the sea still wrapped. I ask what she is doing. She explains that she is shy and people are looking at her. People are not looking at her even though in her bikini she is very lookatable. She continues her swim wrapped in the sheet. Later I ask why she bought the bikini if she will not wear it properly. Because it is pretty she answers with a frown, Silly question.
The people of the Philippines are a happy bunch of folk. If anyone stands up to sing at a party, and there are many such, some of them are very good, on key and confident, everyone in the audience shouts their approval during the singing, girls will wave their arms above their heads in time to the beat wearing big smiles or clapping their hands. It gives a great life to the party and as the drink is consumed over the evening the waving gets wilder and the cheering louder and the dancing more frenetic. I say this with all kindness and fondness, that the people are truly part of the 21st century with their laptops and cell phones and cameras, they are deeply religious with their ten thousand churches, all full, but they have the hearts of pagans and it is invigorating to share and watch. They bubble and laugh and flash white teeth and I know I am in the City of Gentle People for there is never any trouble to be witnessed only a time and place to be entertained and to enjoy and be happy.
We are well into festival times now and Dumaguete is afroth with bunting and locked with traffic diversions as processions weave and throb through the city streets. I have described these parades before but I am always very impressed by the time they devote to devising their contribution, designing their costumes of flowers and vegetables and the hours spent practicing their music and their dancing. I have taken part in two Keighley Gala processions and just marched with cubs in my specially whitened pumps and grey jumper but this that I witness at every parade I watch is a universe away from my experience.
Their choice of music is always excellent some of it live and vigorous by sweat soaked musicians some electronic, ringing from huger lorry borne speakers that rattles your teeth,but the last one I watched had me in fits as I watched some huge carrots and mangoes cavorting to the Can-Can and later some lettuces moving in weaving patterns to Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy. I was shaking with chuckles all the way home much annoying Sione who wanted to know why I laugh at her driving. When I explained she just said- Its not funeeee!
It has rained for the last two days , the weak arm of a distant tropical storm and tonight the air is tired and listless, smoke from evening cooking fires or burning garden rubbish hangs limply in the warm humid might. Crickets share an evening chorous and the wakened frogs join in with their louder metallic tanka tanka tanka. The darkness is intense and tiny blooms of faint light are no light at all and faint figures move against the light. No star shine.
Sione, the eternal planner and sustainer of excitement, plans and dreams of a new journey to her home town, Canlaon City of the towering volcanic cone, the sweeping rice fields and sway of maize.
Like any English mother she will pack and repack several times before we leave in a few days time. Her only regret will be leaving the kitchen sink and television.

Arthur, a great descriptive essay, I can feel the heat and humidity even from England. Sione sounds a terrific host and guide to Negros. Her home town will be a joy no doubt. Can you file a report from Canlaon?

Current location (optional) Eldwick

My old Dad used to say that Coleman’s mustard made their profits from the mustard left on the plates of those who used the condiment. Given the popularity of mustard and the number of plates on a Sunday dinner time that sported the smeared remains one can understand his reasoning. I mention this because I have similar thoughts when I come to the end of a jar of peanut butter. Every jar that I buy has a shoulder at the head of the generally cylindrical body of the container and it is under that shoulder that the remnants of the jar’s contents hide. Inaccessible to spoon or knife it can only be got at with a finger. Now although there is, for me, a vicarious pleasure in collecting those last remnants and licking my finger clean, a pleasure that I learned to enjoy as a boy when my Mum would let me scrape the burnt bits from the rice pudding dish or clean the mixing bowl where she had prepared a cake and I got to clean the bowl of the remains of raw cake mix. I say despite this private pleasure I still consider the jar badly designed either deliberately or thoughtlessly.
I am coming by a rather a circuitous route to the point of these early remarks but first let me explain that we have moved house. Our new home is on the same compound but this house has grilled and netted windows a strong inner door and webbed spring loaded outer door so we can have the fresh air without the mosquitoes. It is better decorated and a large well filled garden with some exotic plants in full flower, palms and ferns, a guava tree and a papaya tree. The fence is decked with two kinds of shrub a vivid yellow hibiscus and a similar yellow shrub that has a large bell shaped flower and no name. There is some grassy lawn that needs cutting and a concrete car port. All-in-all a nicer place although the house we had before was fine, this is better.
We moved in a day which was easy since we had only to move things over twenty yards and we had wheeled support and some willing hands and all that we needed to do to be safe and comfortable was to get and fit two new locks to replace broken ones and thereby hangs my tale.
My opening remarks are an introduction to my hatred of modern packaging. I am not by nature a conspiracy theory buff but surely there is a conspiracy in the packaging industry to make things simply inaccessible. The peanut butter jar that denies you access to the last bits, the creamer locked in foil that will not tear, the sugar packets that give suddenly and distribute sugar all over the table., the nightmare of meals in flight where we are assailed with packets and parcels and no room to maneuver; the ungettatable razors wrapped in plastic that will not open. Now I know that part of the problem is old eyes and clumsy fingers but that wretched packaging does not help.
Return to the razor blade a moment, if you will bear with me, the disposable ones, somehow I never have the foresight to free the razor before I lather up. So when I realize I need the thing I am left struggling with wet slippy fingers and a stubborn, made to resist entry, package. There is a critical point with all packaging where under gradually increasing pressure the package explodes as catastrophe theory kicks in and the razors are scattered around the bathroom. I eventually I find one and blinded with soap and fury I forget the tiny piece of plastic that covers the blade is still on and I am halfway through a smooth but ineffective shave before I realize this and I hurl the offending implement away. It lies by the sink smirking maliciously and I pour a torrent of invective upon the beast.
So back to the fitting of locks.
Technology is involved here so it’s a man’s job obviously. Ha! The packaging first, scissor resistant, a sharp knife? No! a machete is considered and abandoned ‘ as is the Stanley knife, too much blood last time. Return to the scissors and gradually work a small hole in the impervious plastic. The packaging seems safer than the lock. Eventually and slowly an aperture is worked and ignoring the sharp edges of the plastic I push my hand in and look to tear it open. Catastrophe theory strikes again and the lock, screws, strike plates and small helpful (?) tool disperse. I save the lock and gather the screws. Instructions have disappeared but I am a man and don’t need instructions.
Once where I worked the company secretary was talking to a draughtsman and picked up a switch held together by elastic bands and fiddled with it as he talked, suddenly it disintegrated in many directions. The draughtsman swore in protest. The shame faced secretary stared in horror and said.”It came from together in my hands.”
A similar disaster lurked just over the sweaty horizons of the door as I tried to fit the lock. Phut! Crash! Tinkle! It came from together in my hands. Poke at it. Fumble with it. Push and pull at it. It simply got worse. Sweat was dripping steadily from my nose. My glasses steamed up. I stared at the debris. Sad and shamed I called for Sione. Quietly she opened the package of the other lock, sent someone for another from the store. 20 minutes later both locks were fit and working and she was back sorting her new home.
She is beautiful, talented, wields a wicked rock, speaks four languages, sings like an angel, drives like the devil and is possessed of a natural technical genius and resource. When we ride to Canlaon and stop for petrol, attendant’s jaws drop when they see that she has driven all the way from Dumaguete. I mean she’s only a girl.

What an amusing and entertaining post Arthur. I share your views both on jars and on packaging. Some of the moulded plastic used is ridiculously tough, I couldnt even open a new toothbrush the other day! And a new computer mouse presented a difficulty recently as well as a new front door bell system.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 58-64

Some of you have made the journey with me to Canlaon City, under the volcano Kanlaon, before, so you must know the way, the sights and sounds as well as I now do. There will be some for whom the journey is a new experience so I will tryn to be swift but succinct in my descriptions of our latest journey to Sione’s home town.
For the most of our journey we stay on the National Highway, which is under massive reconstruction just now, so that sometimes the way is smooth and easy driving in the early hours, then sometimes we hit the pocked and pitted tarmac, and I mean seriously pocked and badly pitted, mainly because monstrous, lumbering sugar-cane lorries and the inter-town Ceres liners belt up and down the road, their weight and huge wheels nibbling at the edges of existing potholes and breaking out new ones, which explains the reasons for the refurbishment. There are places where the road is just not there as they have gouged up the old road and not yet replaced it with the concrete new one.
There is one precarious, scary piece, right up against the sea’s edge where the road rounds a limestone headland and it is collapsing, crumbling on one side while the sea is waiting below on the other. There is a major engineering job going on netting and supporting the collapse but the road is littered with broken rock and signs warning of danger. I advise Sione to keep her eye on the road and to keep moving.
It does my self esteem little good when I see two workers having their breakfast under this lowering cliff. It is as though Kilnsey Crag had come to the Philippines but this is larger and more ‘in your face’ than the Crag.
It can be a very bum-numbing ride but I have a wonderful driver and I mean that. She really checks well ahead for any troubles and makes good decisions when overtaking. When we arrived in Canlaon I applauded the fact that she had avoided all the death-wish dogs, witless cats, kamikaze hens and sleepy old ladies, to which she replied sadly; “ But I ran over a frog”.

Sibulan, San Jose, Tanjay, Amlan, Bais City, Bindoy, Majulod, Ayungon, Jimalalud, La Libertas, Guilhuingan, Vallehermosa, the townships are strung like beads along the Highway that hugs the flat coastal plains.
I watch the passing parade of sea vistas and cameos, the island of Cebu, darkly purple in the paling pre-dawn light, looming across the straits, the quiet wind-ruffled lagoons, the catamarans inverted and rested high on poles, the sea walls, the empty basketball courts, the white lonely necropolis with the piled white catafalques, sad and silent in the early light.

In between the townships are the hamlets and villages of shack and shanty, of clapboard, corrugated iron, leaf roofed with odd motorcycle tire thrown on the top to hold things down. They hide under palms between the sea and road, lit by dim lights as the waking baranguays stir and figures move in the gloomy depths. Smokes from morning fires bloom or thread palely through the growing light.
The houses here receive no apparent care or attention, jerry built, lopsided, propped, spilling, wobbly, lurched drunkenly, some set on teetering stilts although some others have made a despairing effort with hollow blocks but left it all half finished, thwarted by lack of funds or effort. Thick lips of cement protrude, pressed pouting from between blocks and left to set, the walls unfinished and concrete grey, two pillars about the door, modestly ambitious, left unpainted, no windows. Yet again there are the quasi-mansions, huge wedding cakes, clean and bright, beige or pink or pale green, set in exotic tropical gardens complete with gazebo, swaggering palatial halls, with serving girls but there are high walls topped with broken glass and beyond that barbed wire; the imperious gates, black and gold and massively locked;

……..Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,…

We chased the rain all the way up the coast never quite catching up with it but driving over freshly wet roads, so the local rain gods were kind to us, withdrawing their drench to allow us safe and comfortable passage. Dawn arrived in splendor, quite the most beautiful I have seen here, the sun shyly pushing aside the clouds and emerging to gild the waves and trees and palms, redden the wet and shining road and rooftops and further back in the sky the most perfect aquamarine. These are true colours, prime and perfect, the white sunlight passed through the prisms of air and moisture to give the whole spectrum in such wondrous purity of colour.
I gloried in this gift as we sped into the day and the sun climbed up the sky.
Often during the journey I am so busy looking and wondering about the things I see that I go quiet and Sione will ask if I am awake, when I say I am fine she tells me to sing so she knows I am awake. She likes “Goodbye from the White Horse Inn” and I give it the full Joseph Locke as we belt through sleepy towns, turning heads of walkers, waking sleeping dogs frightening hens, rousing the grazing caraboa to haul on its rope or startling the goat to prance and tug. Together with the rasp of the two stroke and my strained semi-tenor we are a passing whirlwind of sound.
She likes also “You are my Heart’s delight” and “Come back to Sorrento.” which I sing in Guardhouse Italian but she doesn’t know that and thinks I know Italian. I am not a great singer but I do carry a tune and enjoy singing. She learns lyrics very quickly and joins in often. So we go on our way singing like Dorothy and the Scarecrow on our way to Oz.
After Vallehermosa we turn to climb “…up the aerie mountain and through the rushy glens…” towards Canlaon, waiting for the welcome sight of the cone of Kanlaon to bulk and fill the sky and signal the last part of our journey.
In the Solomon Islands there is a volcanic island whose enormous cone is named Kolumbangara and I always thought it was a perfect onomatopoeically chosen name for a volcano only to be very slightly disappointed to learn that the name meant King of the Rains. I am happy that, for me anyway, it now means both things at the same time.
I have not yet learned what Kanlaon means if, indeed, it does mean anything anymore. It is the tallest peak in the ridge of volcanic cones that begins above Dumaguete with the Horns of Negros and runs the whole backbone of the Central Visayas and finishes above Bacolod which we intend to visit again sometime, having been there before during our first meeting.
Anything I might have written to describe the vertiginous ride up the volcanic foothills can never do it full justice, nor can pictures or poems. The rearing cliffs and deeply gouged valleys are awesome, all locked in a tangle of grappling greenery of palm and fern and grasses, truly gob-smacking, with sudden swift glimpses of the now far sea glittering below us. It is an experience to be lived and to enjoy the sheer terror of it to be believed.
We stop now and again for me to pummel life back into my old buttocks and flex my stiffened joints. It is during those halts that I explore the houses that cling to the margins of this piece of road. They are stilted and propped and below the floors of the homes is only air and distant rocks. I would not enter one leave alone get a good night’s rest in such a place. Why, why, why? Why do they even think of building there? And how? How did anyone even conceive of hanging down there putting in the props never mind realising such an insane concept? And look! Children playing football on the road stop and wave as we hurtle past, hard over for the next bend.
There is one place we always stop to eat before the last dash into Canlaon and I think Sione chooses it to test me. We stop and eat in a flimsy leaf and bamboo hut poised over a dizzying drop and eat breakfast. She is challenging me, testing my masculinity, prodding and teasing my vertigo, my private terror. I laugh as she says, “There are bodies down there. Why don’t you look?’
I explain that I am still eating and nothing, repeat, nothing is going to make me look through the unevenly spaced slats of the floor we are seated above and which supports us from a fall into hell and oblivion.
After this test of my manhood we continue our journey and arrive in Canlaon having covered the distance in a new best time of four and half hours driving and after checking into the Pension House we go over to Poppa’s ( her father’s )stall in the market where he sells rope for harnessing goats and bulls and chickens, also the most evil potent black coffee and bread rolls.
His stall is full of smoke as he roasts his coffee beans in a thin metal pan stirring them with a broken stick and shaking the tin over a wood fire, freshly lit and slowly fed with long sticks. He roasts the beans full black and then into the grinder that whirrs in the back of the stall and he emerges with a sieve made of bent wire and netted curtaining. A handful of the splendidly perfumed newly ground coffee is put into the sieve and boiling water from a bubbling cauldron is poured over the grounds and swished back and forward through two sieves as the hot water gets darker and darker. It smells wonderful. It is, however, potently purgative, stimulating sleeping bowels into lively wakefulness.
Sione orders some thin watery fish soup from a neighbouring stall while I settle for a freshly baked bread roll dipped in my coffee.
There are many shouted greetings and peals of laughter at the exchanges and sly searching glances of me are made. She is popular and well-loved. She introduces everyone as ‘my friend’ and they high five, giggle and embrace.
Her brother, Jito, a police sergeant, arrives complete with pistol on his hip and dangling a very small octopus from one hand. He shouts his welcome, ‘Artur’, and shakes my hand. He is a nice guy, very interested and likeable. He removes one of the cauldrons and throws the octopus onto the embers and goes to find a plate. When he considers it cooked he removes the charred body and with scissors cuts it into small pieces, gets a plateful of last night’s, now cold, rice and eats. Sione furtively spears odd pieces and chews them, declaring it to be ‘Sarap’ which is ‘delicious’.
In between mouthfuls he asks about our journey and times. He looks at his sister proudly,
“No one believes she can do it, but I know her. If she wants, she can do anything.”
In my short time with her I have come to that same opinion.
The journey leaves me tired and stiff as does the return journey two days later and there were times when the jar of a pothole hit at some speed really hurt but one has to be alive to feel pain and I love those long rides, free to look at what I wish and feeling so very much alive and happy with my arms around a wonderful, multi-faceted, lady companion.
As a footnote cum postscript to this particular blog I will briefly describe how I spend my days. I write my blogs when I have anything remotely interesting to impart, I take my dogs up to their field and watch them sport and chase and play their games together, occasionally they break off to indulge in some olfactory delight they have discovered or come over to me for a pat and a stroke and a quiet word, I go on short excursions to swim or dine out or shop, I do some maths, currently looking at sphere packing inside a cone. I sleep, bathe three or four times a day, change my clothes, hang the washing, eat, watch some tv, read and write my poetry sometimes.
I have received notification today that a poem of mine has been accepted for publication in the July edition of ‘Sea Stories’ only to discover that it has been stolen for advertising by a Los Angeles firm that deals in Sea Burials. My poem is called ‘Burial at Sea’.

Hi Arthur. Just been catching up on your last few blogs. I sympathise with your rage at packaging. Your soapy hands reminded me of my own pet hate – bad design of bathroom equipment. Round taps that look good but can barely be turned when your hands are dry let alone soapy. And a waterproof radio designed to hang from a shower fitting but with tuning knob that only just protrudes from the shiny case! What do they teach at design school these days? The never try it out method.
I’m glad to hear you set aside time to do some maths as well as writing poetry, walking your dogs and being pillioned between volcanoes over there. Sphere packing in cones is worthy and all but have you time to spare on a recreational puzzle devised by a master. It baffled the brightest minds in the maths department at Bradford College a few years ago. If I can remember it correctly it goes like this: You have 24p and must distribute all of it among four people standing in a circle so that as you go round and round the circle clockwise each person you pass always has nearer to ten pence than the previous one. Answers on a postcard.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1954-59

Current location (optional) Denholme garethwhittaker99@hotmail.com

Gareth I was a part time Lecturer in Maths at Margaret McMillan. You wrote :“If I can remember it correctly it goes like this: You have 24p and must distribute all of it among four people standing in a circle so that as you go round and round the circle clockwise each person you pass always has nearer to ten pence than the previous one.”
The wording is strange and therein perhaps lies some clues.
If by ”distribute” is meant ‘share’ and this in turn means ‘share equally’ then it seems impossible to meet the other restriction that “each person you pass always has nearer to ten pence than the previous one.” since as soon as one person receives his six the next person must have six and get his equal share or seven and get more than his fair share, in either case the restrictions are broken.
If ‘distribute’ does not mean ‘share equally’ then there are a few possible answers:
I offer for instance, 4,5, 6,9 or 4,5,7,8
Or since 12 is nearer 10 than 9 is what about 3,4,5,12.
I am not sure how to read the rule that each must be nearer 10 than the last person, why not just say each person passed should have more than the last person, unless that is also part of the answer as suggested by last solution.

An alternative solution based on the “nearer to 10 pence” proviso.
The money I will distribute will consist of 14 one-pence coins and one 10-pence piece. As I distribute the money the person receiving his allocation will be stood nearest the 10 pence coin in my hand.
I give the first man 3 pence, the next man 4-pence, the third man 7 pence and the last man 10 pence.
The money is distributed and each has been nearest to the 10 pence in his turn. Conditions met. Problem solved.

Hi Arthur. To clarify: distribution need not be equal; you must be able to go “round and round the circle”. So 4,5,6,9/4,5,7,8 don’t work because 4 is not nearer to 10 than 9 or 8.
You say “12 is nearer 10 than 9 is”; but it isn’t. However, in 3,4,5,12 you are right that 12 is nearer 10 than 5 is. But 3 is not nearer 10 than 12 is, so we can’t go round and round.
The puzzle was created by someone who, like Omar Khayyam, was both a poet and a mathematician. I thought it especially appropriate for you. You did not disappoint me and saw that it required your word-skills as much as your numeracy. Your alternative solution is ingenious and kind of works but is not quite so neat (nor so infuriating) as the creator’s.
To give a flavour of his solution, there is a sense in which your 3,4,5,12 DOES work. 4 is nearer to 10 than 3; 5 is nearer to ten than 4; 12 is nearer to 10 than 5; and 3 is nearer to 10 than 12. But only in this sense: 4 is nearer to 10 than 3 (is); 5 is nearer to ten than 4 (is); 12 is nearer to 10 than 5 (is); and 3 is nearer to 10 than (it is to) 12. But this also is not so neat.
If you knew the identity of the puzzler you could probably use your searching skills and find the solution on the internet. He was a contemporary of Omar’s most famous English translator.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1954-59

Current location (optional) Denholme garethwhittaker99@hotmail.com

A young girl celebrated her 15th birthday on the compound the other day. I was invited along with Sione to join the party. We went along early and I wasn’t sure why until Sione explained that the girl’s grandfather had brought her a birthday chicken. This did not exactly explain why we went so early but it was the only explanation I could win.
Grandad had us stood in a circle around the girl with the chicken in his hands. He said something in Cebuano and then placed the chicken under his foot and swung a machete I had not seen before.
The headless chicken was let to bleed into a bowl for a blood soup later. He dipped his finger in the bowl and drew a cross on the girl’s forehead. I watched all this, if not with a dropped jaw at least with a dry mouth and a fixed grin. This is a traditional rite here, much as the Doffer’s Bump or hair pulling was in my early days. The ritual is intended to ward off evil spirits that might bring bad luck to the child. This is done every year by the way. I do not condemn the rite just record my witness of it. It is similar, I suppose to blooding at a fox hunt in the UK.
I mention this for two reasons, the first being it shows how deeply religious people, and they are very religious here, still follow the old ways of superstition, ritual and charms. It is interesting to note that they could co-join pagan and Christianity by blooding with the sign of the cross.
The second is the ease with which they all joined in the slaughter of the chicken, which frankly sickened me somewhat, but I keep chanting my mantra that “It’s their part of the planet.”
This apparent cold acceptance of the act of slaughtering impressed me and the girl never heeded or was shaken by the blooding, indeed she welcomed it as her particular right and her place in the ritual. It is after all very much like the tradition we have of blooding after a chase and a kill in fox hunting.
My qualms led me to wonder how we and others around the world allow others to kill our meat for us.
We slaughter by proxy. We distance ourselves from the cuddly lamb, the beast, the chicken, the pig, by asking others to kill and dress the meat for us so that we do not identify with the killed animal, we do not recognize the lamb gamboling in the Spring meadows as being the source of this chop on our plate covered in mint jelly.
We go further than this we bomb and shoot and kill others in other lands but most of us do not hold the rifle or the grenade or press the button we let others do it for us and call them heroes.
Hitler probably never killed a Jew himself but he managed to find others to do it for him. Himmler could organize the slaughter of millions and be a little sick when he actually witnessed the act on a visit but he did not kill anyone himself he found others ready and willing to do it for him.
Gaddafi finds others, as does Assad, indeed as does NATO.
The dictator and his use of hired killers is not different essentially from us and our applause of our soldiery. I was a serviceman I identify with and support today’s young men and their fighting on our behalf. I also know that I distance myself from the act by letting others do it for me be it butcher, poulterer, airman or soldier.
Is this asking other’s to slaughter for us and the use of the cross in an essentially pagan ritual, acts of hypocrisy or just not very pleasant facets of our humanity.
There are murmurs about the suicide of a young girl,15, recently near our home. Reasons are unclear but hints are made that, as Laurie Lee comments:
“Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad.”
I make notes as I sit on our patio. Our garden is so much better than our old one which was more of a building site than our new one. We sat on the patio for our breakfast of chicken, rice, succulent watermelon, sweet and juicy mango and iced water. Sione got a long stick and earned herself a guava for her plate.
We have planted two banana plants and at the back of the garden she has contrived a mini paddy field where she has planted Chinese Spinach. She inundates the site each morning. They call the leafy vegetable Kangkong here and when I Googled the word I must have misspelled it because all I got was big angry monkey swinging from the Empire State building swatting aeroplanes.
Henry, my little gardner,(I do not use ‘little’ in a derogatory or condescending way, he is below my shoulder in height, scarcely 5 foot if that) has leveled the swaying grasses of the prairie that was the lawn and which the dogs loved to roll and hide in. Snowie hides all his bones there. It is clean and tidy now and the dogs tumble and play fight. As I write they are playing “ Everybody get Bobby” and he loves it.
The grass is such that we are toying with the idea of getting a goat, perhaps two. There is enough and even more in the wilderness over the road.
Bobby followed some girls to school and they threw stones at him to make him go home. He got scared and ran in the wrong direction and got lost for a whole day and one sleepless night but returned to our worried faces early the next morning. I swear he grinned when I asked him, “Where have you been?”. While he was away Snowie had a big tampo and would not walk or play or eat. When Bobby came home Snowie was the first to greet him with a kiss and a fight.
The fences and gate of our new home were in a sorry state of disrepair and I have done lots of work rehanging the gate and mending the fences. I have not been helped in this by the sex mad dogs that have been courting Sootie who has just finished her first heat. They find and exploit any weakness in the fence and each morning involved further work. All our efforts were undermined by Sootie who found weaknesses and invited her slavering suitors to help her escape.
I had no desire to deny Sootie her conjugals but they were greedy and showed no respite in their decadence. All I asked was a little decorum, some measure of decent restraint but they were unrelenting.
So we strengthened and strengthened and her heat abated and left and now all is quiet but I am sure the repairs are good and sufficient and will hold against any fresh assault.
One last short story. We were leaving an eatery the other evening. It was dark and it was raining light but steady. Over the road at the top of a pole that gathered all the neighbourhood wires to its tip were two men swung perilously from a wobbly crane. Just as we were leaving there was a spluttering crackle of electric sparks showering down. The men were unhurt, the short was unheeded and they continued their hazardous work in a fluster of sparks and crackles.
Health and safety? Never heard of it!

kang kong - popular in Singapore too and tasty when cooked with garlic. Picture here.

Before I get into the main theme of this particular blog I want to record a couple of brief asides.

I was walking down to the store the other day when I saw a dog walking on three legs and scratching itself with one of its hind legs. It was still walking as it scratched.

“Now that’s clever!” I thought, “Never seen that before!”

Just then the dog fell over, still scratching.

“Stupid dog.” I said, out loud.

It was remarkable, but one wonders why it even tried since it was always going to fall over.

While on this trick of doing two things at the same time, (“multi-tasking” I believe it’s called, something a woman can do that a man cannot, they tell me), I have, three times, been passed on a motorbike where the driver, always a man incidentally, is texting, not reading, texting on his cell phone. For me that is criminally stupid. There are degrees of stupidity, I opine, and reading a cell phone while driving a motorbike with one hand is quite stupid but texting is utterly, mind-blowingly crass but further, to overtake while engaged in this ridiculous manner is wickedly dangerous, inconsiderate of the safety of others, stupid and deserving of punishment. Cell phones are a good thing and they have earned and deserve a place in our lives but to let one so dominate your life that you cannot stop your bike to answer your messages, or wait until you finish your journey before attending to the demands of the beast, is to be as bound as a slave to the tyrannous thing.

Stupidity is not reserved for flea-ridden dogs only.

My other brief aside is to report that they, someone, a team surely, with a motor saw and machetes, have felled my bosky wilderness. My arbor is dismantled, hewn, split and tied into bundles of firewood to be hawked around the streets, the leaf has been piled and burned, the debris of branches and twigs left tangled and impenetrable. My Fortress of Solitude, where I could retire with my dogs to sit and listen to the trees, meditate on the far blue hills and watch the silent parade of clouds, has been leveled.

Who fells a tree kills patience and murders hope.

“Long live the wet and the wilderness yet.”

I am bereft.

It happened after we moved but in no way are the two events related. I only noticed the devastation when I returned to our earlier home to get something forgotten during our flit.

These things happen, of course, and it is not really my business, why should I be conferred with, but I do regret the loss. Perhaps they will finish the clearance and garden there again.

I add to this entry the news that I have been told that they will grow corn there. It is their part of the planet and they are free to use their land as they see fit but I shall miss my arbor.

Now I come to the main theme of this blog.

We, Sione and I, had read and been told of this high place, Tierra Alta, where there was a Zipliner. Tierra Alta! What an invocative name for a high place. Perfecto!

I will explain what a Zipliner, aka Flying Fox, is in a moment although some of you may already know. First, we had to find the place that was the home of this Zipliner, which we were given to understand was further up the volcano’s sides.

We took the Valencia road because Sione thought it the most likely and she was right, again, for we soon found that on that road the place was clearly signposted.

“Tierra Alta 4.4km Straight Ahead”, the sign read and strangely these signs were interspersed by other signs, the first reading,

“I think that I shall never see”

and after a few hundred meters,

“A poem lovely as a tree”.

That was how we made our journey with the 4.4 km becoming 3.8km and then 3.2km and in between them, “A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed”, then

“Against the Earth’s sweet flowing breast”, all the way up the volcano, as I followed the song’s lyrics.

Intriguing - and expensive, I would have thought.

I sang the song as we drove along, finishing with:

“But only God can make a tree.”

Then revelation!

The explanation became clear as we passed a large open area where trees were being sold. Young trees, they were, for planting in your garden. This arboretum was busy, with a full car park. Here in the middle of a virtual jungle they not only sold trees but made enough profit to have the lyrics of a well known song signed all the way along the highway.

This brings me to another brief aside, interesting and sort of relevant, I think, so bear with me. They have strange names given to them in the Solomon Islands. I knew one school governor called Happy Christmas. I had one young pupil named Silence and worked with one head teacher who was called, grandly, Defense Force Raja. There were, of course, your standard Henrys and Williams, Alfreds and Saras, but these odd ones kept cropping up. This brings me to the point of this aside. I met two young sisters called Fig and Sycamore, whose brother was called Hickory and their elder sister, a policewoman, was called Arboretum. The father of this family tree (groan!) was a carpenter.

Sione was watching the road and not these songposts along the way. Her attention was devoted, instead, to looking for the Tierra Alta signs and calling out the diminishing distances to the place.

The road had a steady incline, not steep, but still, over the distance travelled, it had elevated us well above Dumaguete City, which now lay far behind and below us.

The air was cooler and the high ridges of the Horns of Negros loomed closer

We followed the Tierra Alta signs and, eventually and obediently, we turned from the highway and climbed up a very steep side road bending and twisting and climbing quickly, with really steep inclines of 30% or 40% and the road lined with signs advising us “Select a low gear now” and warning “Test your brakes now” with one big sign with a huge black arrow pointing at a gap in the neighboring wall saying “Site of an out of control car crash.”

Sione took none of the advice that was being copiously offered and swept gloriously to the summit of our ride.

We came to a halt outside a palatial, snow-white building with the title “Tierra Alta 2011 AD” writ large and golden above the portals. There was a smaller sign, with an attendant security guard, fully armed, which read “Admission for registered club members only.”

A look behind us showed we were really quite high up now.

The Zipliner was to be found a little further on.

There it was, two 700 metre stainless steel ropes swung in a curving catenary over a deep chasm where 200 meters below the waiting forest watched and waited hungrily as those who dared winged.

The gorge was deep and gouged and the dense canopy had no gaps but further out towards the fringe there was a white road that exited for a few hundred meters then curved and plunged back into the bush and off to somewhere further up the mountains.

Beyond the road a river bounced brightly over rocks.

Sione wanted to go on the Zipliner, her eyes bright with excitement. In my age-counseled wisdom, I demurred. Bubbling with laughter, she dashed off to the preparation area.

Harnesses were tightened, crash helmets were fitted, a rope with a fitment with wheels was issued to each braveheart and away she went to wait in a white buggy-like vehicle that held about nine people. The vehicle filled with other courageous hearts and off it went to make its way across to the other side of the chasm where the flight back would begin.

I made my sedate way over to the landing site; a flat platform surrounded by safety nets and ropes and from there I climbed up into a viewing tower.

As I waited I noticed how much nearer we were to the volcano, the Horns of Negros.

The air at this height was clean and sweet, clear and cool as a glass of Chardonnay and I could, for the first time pick out features on the bulky body of the cone. Behind and beyond, I could glimpse the other smaller volcanoes that made the backbone of the Visayas, blueing away into the haze.

Below the viewing tower stretched the journey we had made and far in the distance the white buildings of the City and the glittering sea. Between the city and our viewing point it seemed all solid greenery and yet we had passed through many villages, hamlets and clustered gatherings of huts on our journey, but these were lost in the dense bush below us.

The only evidence of those dwelling places were blue plumes of smoke rising straight up, through the canopy, into the windless air, gradually spreading, dispersing and blending into each other in a thin, faint pall that added to the haze of distance.

I saw the white vehicle, containing the daring flyers, climb towards the launching site and knew it would not be long before their hazardous journeys would begin.

A crowd had gathered and we all waited, looking out across the long gap of the deep-cut chasm where the ropes curved away and up to the launching platform on the opposite side.

Suddenly, the rope began to sing and we knew a launch had been made. We squinted into the distance looking for first sight of the daredevil, lost for a while against the backdrop of bush and mountain, and then we spotted him.

It was a man with his arms out from his body gliding, swiftly and smoothly, through space, a big grin on his face. Superman! He was brought to a halt by a braking device of ropes and he stood, his legs quivering from the rush of adrenalin, while they freed him and he wobbled down some steps, still grinning at this victory of the heart.

Soon the other rope began to sing and we peered into the distance at the approaching shape. At about 100 meters I recognized her smile, blazing with excitement and delight. Sione!

She swooped in with one last “wheee!”, elegant as a swan in flight, to be halted by the ropes and she stood there, helmeted and harnessed, lighting the world with that radiant smile.

Of course I could have done it.

Easy-peasy!

If I had been pursued by ravening wolves, in danger of being trampled by a rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex with an open maw full of white steak knives, or a ragged platoon of Japanese soldiers who still thought the war was on screaming

“Banzai!” had come charging out of the bush waving shining samurai swords, I would not have hesitated. I would have been aboard, hooked up and long gone.

However, none of these conditions, or, indeed, anything approaching these conditions, prevailed, so it was enough excitement for me to watch her flying with her arms spread-eagled and laughing all the way home.

She was still fizzing with excitement and the pumped rush of adrenalin, half an hour later.

I was going to end this blog by commenting how proud I was of her courage but…

Well, this morning about 5-15am, a really loud “boom”, actually more like “Ker-boo-ooom!!”, heralded the arrival of a real, drunken rowdy, bully of a storm that came tumbling in from the sea, kicking over dustbins, singing rude songs, shaking the windows, waking the dogs, scaring the chickens.

Suddenly I was well awake and sat up, Sione was curled in a foetal pose with her fingers in her ears and her eyes screwed tightly closed.

“Let the dogs in. They are scared.” she squeaked.

The dogs were scared, ha! What about Captain Courageous? She was terrified!

I opened the outside door and they came in, scrabbling and hurdling each other to get in. The garden hissed with the torrential downpour and the trees shook and swayed. The sky trembled with lightning. The hills echoed and rebounded with deep coughs of thunder. I hurried back inside.

Two minutes later I was sat on my bed surrounded by three terrified dogs and a supine incurled woman with fingers in her ears. I do not like electric storms at all and I have been scared myself many times by the awesome power unleashed. I still am. This was a real shocker. I was unhappy if not quite terrified. Why should they all look to me for protection and succor at this time?

The rain hissed, slashed and rattled on leaf and roof and the storm came home to roost as there was now little pause between flash and crash. We were huddled in the heart of the storm. I noticed it was not the vivid flashes that scared her but the crash of thunder.

I tried to explain to Sione that the noise would not hurt her it was the flashy bits that were the harmful elements. As I was toiling through my explanation, given to ears that were firmly plugged with fingers, there was a terrifying crash immediately outside our window and I found myself under the sheet with her.

The dogs whined and Sootie scratched at the tiles trying to find somewhere to hide. Bobby fought with me to get beside Sione who would not open her eyes or remove her fingers from her ears and fought us both off with her elbows. Snowie howled in protest and ran in tight circles, jetting piss. I came from under the sheets and started laughing at the scene I was witnessing there.

A plaintive wail came from under the sheet,

“It’s not funeee.”

Sometimes it is enough to be nose to nose with the joy of being alive, simply alive.

30 minutes of madness and mayhem were wrought and then, with a grumbling and truculent reluctance, the storm rumbled off into the hills while a pale and frightened dawn peeped from behind the clouds where she had been hiding.

I now understand that Zipliners are not a problem and to be enjoyed but electric storms, in all their fury, are to be feared, especially the noisy bits although the flashy bits are OK.
A late addition to this blog. Last evening an arm of the Tropical Storm “Falcon” swept over Dumaguete City. There was an enormous cloudburst followed by a torrential downpour, it was raining stair rods. Our garden became a river but though we were flooded it was minor. We never got wet, ourselves, but there was plenty around. It lasted just over two hours. When we ventured forth for rice the streets were awash and traffic slowed into a jam as flooded areas were skirted. Motorbikes ploughed through the shallows throwing up arching bow waves. Great fun.
The storm iself did not come here but killed 30 in Davao City. I have mentioned in other blogs that Dumaguete is protected to the south by Midanao, to the west by Palawan and to the east by Cebu and the Horns guard us to the north. We get weather but most of the fury is spent by the time it arrives here.

My poem Burial at Sea is here if anyone is interested:


http://seastories.org/category/littoralcurrents/

There was a swan, a goose and a turkey seated in the sidecar of a motorcycle. No, no, it’s not the start of a joke but the living truth, unless someone can think of a good punch-line!
When I served in the RAF it was a running joke in our billet that we would wake early sleepers by shaking them gently and asking,
“Do you want to buy a battleship?”
then dissolve in laughter at the puzzlement invoked and dodge the hurled boot.
I was standing by the gate to our compound looking for my dogs when this motorbike drew up beside me and the toothless old driver asked me, in good English,
“Do you want to buy a swan?”
I laughed, thinking it a joke, then followed his pointing finger to his metal-framed, make-do side-car where there was indeed a swan, together with a goose and a turkey cowered under a piece of netting.
I waved my hands in dismissal at the same time enjoying a visit from my giggle imp.
“No.no! Salamat, but no!”
The wobbly sidecar lumbered off down the broken road and the three avian captives wobbled with it, looking back at me plaintively.
I mean what would I want with a swan when I have six chicks?
When we moved to our new home we found a bamboo and leaf chicken coop behind the house. Although the goat is still in the pipeline, not literally, of course, I mean that the intention to get a young goat is still on the agenda, Sione still thought that chickens would be good to raise so we got six in the market and they settled in well. Since it is intended that we shall eventually eat them I have resisted allocating them names. This would have been difficult anyway since they all look alike. I let Sione care for them and being a rural, by nature and upbringing, lady she gets pleasure from it. When she said we would be eating them I asked who would do the killing and she replied that it would be her, of course.
There have been times in my life when I have had difficulty cutting the head off a kipper without bursting into sobs of horror, that has now passed but I would still shy away from killing a chicken. It is not in me. I am an urbanite and the slaughtering of animals for food is, as I discussed earlier, done by proxy. When the time comes I will retire to my room and wait.
I shall eat sparingly of the supper so provided.
We have three curious dogs who I fear might be less squeamish than I. They do not go near the coop when we are not there but become very curious and interested when she replenishes their water and feed. Snowie yelps at them and since this invokes a roused cheeping from the occupants he gets even more excited and starts to bounce and press his nose against the bars and netting. Bobbie then comes to see why Snowie is making such a fuss and joins in himself. Sione admonishes them.
“Behave! Behave!”
She snaps at them and it is one of the command words they know and obey.
Sootie comes then and with her broken ear lolling over one eye, she looks even more desperately wicked, which she is anyway, but lovable with it. She is pregnant now and might just fancy a little bit of raw chicken to supplement her diet. We hope for only two puppies and think of how to dispose of them when they do come.
Sione l0ves the dogs and wonders at their obedience only ever having considered dogs as a guard and alarm. I asked her had she had dogs before and she told me about Dindy, a bitch she owned in Canlaon.
One day someone called her that her dog had been run over. She ran out quickly, worried and saddened. She looked everywhere but no body. There was blood on the road but no dog.
Eventually it emerged that the police had witnessed the accident. Her house was close to the Police Station Headquarters. They had disposed of the body.
When I say ‘disposed’ I do not mean that they buried the body or even throw it into some gulley somewhere, I mean they ate it.
She discovered this when her brother Jito, a police sergeant, called at her home. Had he come to see if she was alright? To share her sadness, perhaps? No, he had brought her a portion of cooked dog averring that it was,
“ Sarap! Delicious!”
They knew it was clean because it was his sister’s so they could eat it without fear.
Since Sione would not eat it, he took it to her mother and father, who would not eat it either, so he ate it. Remember I told you how he ate the charred octopus. He has a versatile and undiscriminating palette and a stomach of steel.
Sione has a cute accent when she speaks English and as she told me her sad story her face grew sad and she said,
“You know, Artur, a dog cries a lot before it dies. Dindoo cried a lot when he died after his accident. Dindy did not cry. I was out quickly but the pulis were quicker. I think they see she is hurt and kill her. They have big sticks.”
Her face was serious and sad. I asked how they had cooked it.
“They boil it first so all the skin will come off easy. Then they chop it into smaller pieces and boil it till it is tender. Dindy was a big dog there would be plenty meat.”
As a matter of interest Sione tells me,
“I have eaten the dog of my sister, but that is only time. It was sarap.”
She only ate that because she knows the dog is clean and did not eat rubbish. As I have said before, they have their own logic.

I went back to my wilderness today. It is being slowly flattened, nibbled at, flattened. As I slowly examined the desolation that was occurring I heard the soft chop-chop-chop of machete on soft woods. I moved towards the sound and found this pleasant lady sat on a comfortable chair in the shade cutting leaves from thicker branches.
She greeted me with snaggle-tooth grin and said in good English,
“Good afternoo-ooon”, drawing out the last ‘oo’ sound like the finish of a song.
“ You speak English?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“ Where did you learn to speak so well?”
“I sit near some Americans and listen”
Again the beaming smile , this time with delightful pride.
“Are you clearing this lot?”
“Yes.”
“On your own?”
“Yes.”
“Where is your husband?”
“He is with the caraboa.”
“ Did you chop the big trees down?”
“ My cousin. But I will clear the rest.”
She waved her machete towards what remained. I looked at what remained. Not as much as before but still a tough task. She stood and waddled across to collect some more branches. I say ‘waddled’ because when she stood I saw for the first time how dreadfully bowed her legs were.
I once watched from a safe hiding place, a Solomon Island wife destroy her house and home with a machete in a fit of high dudgeon, her chagrin roused by her husband who would not take her across the lagoon to the market.
I have read of how the mighty Amazon forest succumbs to the nibbles of human ‘slash and burn’ farming techniques. This bandy-legged lady with her bright, sharp machete would, I knew, clear this once fecund small-holding of its weeds and wanton foliage and grow her corn there in neat rows. I will watch it happen.
I left her seated in the shade stoning a sharper edge to her blade.
I turned at my gate and looked back at her. She waved and the smile shone over the space between us.

Another entertainin post Arthur, Thanks

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 58-64

Thank you, Brian. I get lots to laugh at here and like to share it with others as well as the beauties and interest of the place. I am collecting all my blogs into one coherent piece with pictures but it is organic and continues to grow so not a full grown thing yet. Still too much fun living it all.

Yes it helps that I have been several times to the Philippines, mainly Manila , but I did get down to Cagayan de Oro ,a bit nearer to you.
I may get one more visit in January before I retire at Easter

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 58-64

I had not intended to write another blog so soon but it has been a very interesting week so far and it is only Tuesday.
Yesterday, Monday, we went for a spin around the back roads that thread their way through the lower foothills from Tierra Alta. I like those runs when we get a chance to look at life in the rural settings, where pigs, goats and dogs and people share the same back yard, where fields of maize press right up to the windows of a bedroom, where washing hangs in a tangle from a drooping wire or slung from parts of a battered fence.
They do not know how to hang out washing here. It dries so quickly in the exceedingly hot sun that no one dreams of shaking the piece of washing out into its proper shape and hanging it so that as much surface area as possible is open to the drying process. They just dangle it tangled and knotted and dripping.
I was interested to pass a mango orchard where all the fruits, still hanging from the tree were wrapped on pieces of newspaper. First, how had they managed to do that was the conundrum that perplexed me and I could only conceive of the sort of machine that we use in England to change light bulbs in street lighting. There was no sight of one but still how else?
The rows of trees, altogether perhaps twenty trees, with their fruits wrapped in paper that fluttered in the soft breeze, looked like prayer trees where people tie their particular prayer to the gods. I think they do it in Tibet or Nepal somewhere. The wind carries the prayer to the gods. A sort of divine e-mail server.
The second point was not just the how of it but the why of it.I can only guess that they are protecting their fruit in some way, perhaps from insects.
The back roads we took carried us into a different and closer look at the Horns and they were magnificent on this day. Not covered by cloud but holding all their hugeness and shape entire through a haze and behind the Horns the receding ridges, blue and high. It is difficult to adequately express how breathtaking they are. As we sped along these by ways there would be moments when there was a clear view of the volcanic ridges and then trees, orchards, buko plantations intervened and the view was lost, hidden.
Cameo and vista, our trip unwound with only the sound of our bike behind us and then the tinkling of a million tiny bells as we roused the chicadas to sing on all sides.
The Negros Trench is an area in the Sulu Sea just around the coast from Dumaguete and about 30-40 kilometres out from the coast. It is an area where sub-duction is taking place as one tectonic plate pushes under another.
I may have seemed to have flown off at a wild tangent but it is not an irrelevance at all. It seems that as we were scooting around admiring the scenery there were 5 earthquakes in a short period of time, all emanating from this trench, and we were not aware of this at all.
At 4.47 this morning our bed shook us awake. I looked at Sione.
“ Quake?”
“ Yes”, she whispered, wide-eyed.
In the twenty minutes following this 6.2 magnitude quake we had several smaller after shocks. There have been several fissures found in and around Dumaguete but no further shocks today so far.
It is an interesting feeling and a remarkable way to be woken.
I share all this because my trip around the back roads was such a pleasure as I admired the old dead cones that stand over the city but the quakes this morning were an apt reminder that we still live on the surface of a young and living planet.
I have a feeling it may get a little lively over the next few days. There has been no damage or deaths so far.

It rained last night but then again it rains most evenings. It rained hard, a cloudburst, but then again we have experienced worse. For goodness sakes, I’ve batted in a blizzard when the snow coming out of Oakworth Crematorium was swept horizontal across the pitch and into my face and the umpire wouldn’t take us off till the over was finished. I still have the bruises. No, it’s not the extremes of weather about which this blog concerns itself but rather the human responses to them.
Let me go back a little. Sione needed something from the mall, it was after six, I was dressed in baggy shorts and an old ‘T’ shirt and I didn’t want to get dressed properly for a reason that did not affect me so I told her to go on her own. About the time she should have been returning, beginning with a soft ratle on the tarpaulin raised for the dogs, the sky opened and the clouds emptied in a tumultuous downpour, hissing through the leafage and shrubs, rattling the roof, puddling the lawn, lashing the compound, ponding in depressions and gurgling and swirling down the drains.
I had just figured that Sione would have shown good sense and waited for the rain to bate, when her headlights pierced the gathered dark and I saw the huge rods of rain shining for a second befpre they speared into the drenched earth. She was sodden, sopping, her clothes cold and clinging to her. Did she park and race inside? Not a bit of it. She whooped and ducked round the side of the house where great spouts shot from the incline of the roof and began spinning under it with her arms stretched out, laughing.
Like Eric Morecambe in that never-to-be-forgotten sketch ‘Singing in the rain’. I watched in bemusement and amusement. She kicked off her sodden jeans and pirouetted in the mud and did a little dance.
I watched with a smile and then I thought, ‘What the hell! That looks like a lot of fun!’, and joined her, doffing my shirt and opening myself to the lash and pelt of the rain. We giggled like school children throwing scoops of water at each other.
The water streamed down my body, chilling, thrilling, wild. My face was torn and riven by the lash of it.
It was primal. It was elemental. It was simple, clean, exhilarating fun.
I tilted my head back and shouted into the sky,“Yah! Bring it on!” I honestly wanted the thunder and lightning to join in but it was just the rain.
We toweled off and changed into dry clothes and enjoyed our dinner. Tuna, cooked in buko milk, kangkong, rice and a mango each. During the meal I looked at her. She ate quietly and quickly, with gusto and relish, and her eyes shone. I wondered at her response to being caught in the downpour and how other ladies I have known would have screamed and run for shelter. Sione just seized the moment and enjoyed it. Sometimes life needs to be gripped firmly by the throat and given a good shaking. She caught me watching her, she threw her head back and we broke into new laughter.
Yes, it was cold and it was wet but it was a wonderful experience - and yes, it was a lot of fun.

I wonder if you can imagine how frustrating it is to be an Englishman sitting alone at the fall of evening, in the tropical bush watching the live scoreboard on Cricinfo and following the back chat on Guardian’s OBO, all on my laptop. Outside in the darkness the chicada ring like tiny bells and rouse at every passing step. The television mutters in Tagalong behind me as I bend to mark each ball. When anything exciting happens and I hiss ‘Yes’ or groan ‘O no’ how difficult it is to explain what it is that can be so serious or important as to provoke so passionate a response.
How do you explain someone has just hit a four or dropped a catch or was nearly run out and ye gods and little fishes how do you explain LBW to a Filipina when half the English speaking world, including many umpires I have been umpired by, don’t understand the law. If she can’t understand something simple like you can be out LBW even if you are hit on the shoulder( her eyes filled with tears and her lip wobbled so I stopped) I mean there’s no point in trying to explain the other nine ways you can be out.
I tried to explain to Sione what an innings is how fielders go out and the team whose innings it is come out that is when you are in and the batsmen begin their innings until each is out when they have to come in while the other batsmen come out and have their innings and that’s an innings and there are eleven innings for each team’s innings until ten innings have been used and the man with the incomplete innings is not out but he has to come in anyway when the batting team are all out they come in and then go out to field while the other side come out and have their innings and they do this twice and take five days doing it. I mean it’s quite simple really.
I tried to explain field placing to her but after trying to make her understand that third man was just one person I gave up. I told her one bowler used two short legs and she threw a slipper at me.
I am of the conclusion that you need to be born to the game to really appreciate how pleasingly simple all the complications are.
She put her fingers in her ears and sang “lalalalalalalala…..” when I tried to explain Ian Bell had been given out and ended his innings but was allowed to come back out after tea and go on with his innings.
It is the greatest game ever devised by man, played at whatever level you choose. You are part of a team and yet you are the batsman facing the ball not the team, you are the bowler bowling the ball not the team, you are the fielder taking the catch not the team. It is a series of individual performances contributing to the team effort. It is a game involving eye and skill and physical bravery of the highest order.
Consider would you allow someone to hit you in your hand with a 5 and ½ ounce hammer. I think not and yet every Saturday I paid 5 shillings to be part of a cricket team and put my hand down to stop some fierce hits. The largest part of batting is courage, to take a hit in the ribs and then face the next ball. It is a game to be fit to play fielding is draining, bowling is sheer hard graft and batting is tiring when you are running others run as well as your own. It is open to debate but I figure a test cricketer playing a full programme, as England are doing at this moment, considering all the test series they have played recently, are fitter than a Premier leagus footballer.
As I say the greatest game ever devised by man for the pleasure of man and if there is a heaven I hope there is a green field smelling of freshly cut grass, peerless blue skies and a flat wicket and as I go out to open batting I whisper in my partner’s ear, “I’ll take the first knock, Geoff.”
But all I have at the moment in this far flung outpost of civilisation is a laptop but it is enough and sufficient if we keep winning so magnificently as we did on Monday.

Arthur, the answer is simple, teach the locals the game, just as some Yorkshireman must have taught the Indians and through partition, the Pakistanis, it was a Yorkshireman, James Cook, who ultimately brought cricket to Australia and New Zealand. Get on with it man, make a couple of bats and get teaching

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 58-61

Current location (optional) Blue Mountains, Australia via Haworth

Fortunately it is on cable TV "live" here in Singapore. The England-India tests generally start around 6pm and I can still be watching at 2am. The annoying part is that at the end of every over or wicket there is an advert in Indian for some Indian service.

I was told there are some internet-based TV services for cricket but don't know if you could access them from .ph

John, I like your suggestion that I teach the game of cricket to the Pinoy youth and it is an attractive idea but after long and careful thought I have decided that I would hate to be remembered as the man who was responsible for introducing the game here, when in the future, say a hundred years, more or less, a team from these islands humiliates our English first team.
O, don’t say it is impossible for we are busy at this very moment putting in their rightful place a team from the sub-continent of India that are Number One in the world and, in the past, we have been thrashed by the descendants of Caribbean slaves, and the great-great-grandchildren of convicts.
Another of our exported games, association football, is now so dominated by other countries from which we have imported star players into our Premier League sides that it now so hard for us to pick a national team from players who appear regularly for their Premier club.
No, I think on reflection I will leave well alone, I mean if they can give the world of sport a boxer of the calibre of Manny ‘Pacman’ Pacquiao, (who is adored by Sione, by the way), just what could they do with a bat in their hands.

They have begun to build a block of apartments in the field where I used to walk my dogs but not anymore. The way is blocked and it is now just mud and mire and big holes. Of course, there is now a constant stream of heavy lorries down the broken road that leads from the National Highway to our compound. Snowie, backed up by Sootie, now rounding out in her pregnancy, and to some extent Bobby, protest and contest the invasion of our quiet backwater. Snowie has an alarming bark delivered full throat as a sort of baying falsetto howl broken by barking. It explodes from him and is designed by him to freeze intruders in mid stride while Sootie yelps and vocalizes a frightening sequence of growls all the time darting menacingly. She is feisty at the best of times but I do think the hormonal imbalance as a consequence of her pregnancy has tipped her over mentally. She even attacks Bobby if she considers him to be receiving more attention than he deserves and robbing her of her just entitlement, considering her delicate condition. The truth is that not one of them will bite. ( I think), but rabies is so feared here that any dog can induce terror just by offering aggression.
One of the heavy vehicles killed a cat the other day and I only noticed it when the rains dried up and I was able to discern its shape, now rather elongated, in the muck. It is so dreadfully squashed that is rather more a ‘flat’ than a ‘cat’ or even so violently squashed as to become a ‘squat’ the truth is I think it was more of a kitten so it would be a ‘flatten’ maybe, or a ’flat ‘un’ or even a ‘smitten’. It is now well on its way to disappearing all together pounded by the many wheels, including ours, which pass over its remnants.
I have this day returned from a visit to Canlaon and I won’t pester you with another description of the journey, which I always enjoy. I would like to share a couple of epiphanies with you and a couple of cameos, if I may.
The road for the most part follows the flat coastal plain and the journey is one of few inclines but the geography of the islands is such that choosing such a course will occasionally bring you hard up against a rocky headland through which the road must be driven rather than built.
We stopped for a break where the road curved round a high buttress of tough ruddy igneous rock that had obviously been cut that way to accommodate the road, the cliff face of the huge buttress was quite smooth but even so there were some relatively small crevices in the face and growing there were some tenacious small plants. How they had become lodged there only nature and the manner in which seeds are distributed by the wind can explain. I drew back from this microcosmic viewing and looked at the string of volcanic hills across the intervening fields that lay between them and the road and as far as I could tell almost every available space was occupied by some growing, thriving plant.
I turned to look at the quiet sea and just along and down from the sea wall where we were resting was a leaf house, along the wall firewood had been spread to dry in the sun, the leaf roof was covered in old motor bike tires. On one side the sea lapped at his bedroom window and on the other the constant buzz and rasp of passing traffic. His door let out onto the road and the back of his house was stilted only just above the soft lap and lick of the sea.
Like those tiny plants up the face of the buttress this family had found a niche into which they could lodge and live. Here between the road and sea they would eat sleep, work, bathe, make love , give birth, live out their times and die.
To live thus is to live with tenacity, with the simple purpose of surviving against all the odds. The tenacity of such folk outmatches the simple wind-borne seeds lodged on the rocky face and rendering the distant hills verdant and splendidly alive. The man knows there is something better and strive as he might he is unlikely to prevail against the adversities of his life or improve except marginally his lot but he does not despair he accepts. He rises with the sun and grapples with the tasks of staying, gripping with the tenacious labour of both hands the small hold he has on a place to live.

We pass many tethered goats on our journey. Every patch of wayside grass has its goat. They are tethered to prevent roaming and chew their way through the heats of the day, accepting the tug that reminds them to go no further. They are happy to accept the restrictions of having access to only the circle proscribed by the radius of the length of the tether. It is enough and sufficient.
Perhaps many human lives are like that. O, the tether is invisible but what holds us and proscribes us is as strong as any piece of nylon rope and ultimately as limiting on our lives.
The tether limiting human life is for so many the security of not challenging the proscriptions but accepting that those proscriptions exist but being satisfied with the grazing left available to us.
Some chew through the rope rather than eat the grass.

In the early light of dawn we passed an eatery lit by a pale light and inside captured in their stillness a group at breakfast. The lighting and posing of the group seemed a perfect re-enactment of the moment captured in Van Gogh’s ‘ The Potato Eaters’.
On our way up the mountain we passed at speed a group of two or three woman making their way down the side of a small fall of water that passed under the road. One woman, young and slim, her skirt raised and tucked into the leg of her panties stepped daintily down the fall with a young infant straddling one hip and a bowl of washed clothes on the other. She moved with such a fine grace and delicacy, under the most difficult of situations, that I almost shouted ‘ Brava!’ as we swept past.
I do love the journey for these exquisite moments of insight.

We hs made the journey to celebrate the birthday of Sione’s father. I won’t go into the noise and pleasure of the extended family, including cousins, uncles, aunts and a clamour of young children enjoying their oneness and togetherness.
I had bought a goat for the feast but did not partake. I like goat’s milk, yoghurt and cheese. I like the smell of goats even but I do not eat the meat. Just part of the fastidiousness of my palate I’m afraid. Sione brought over a bowl for me to try. I looked in. There were finely diced vegetables, a dash of soy and vinegar and something else. I asked what it was and she told me it was goat skin salad. Long boiled in water and then thinly sliced and diced, they actually ate the skin. Yuk! Yuk! And thrice Yuk!
I think she delights in appalling me in this way because, laid resting after our journey home, she casually informed me that for breakfast she had eaten the tongue and nose. I mean alright they do get eaten I suppose -but for breakfast? No!
My turn to ram my fingers on my ears and sing ‘ Lalalalalalalalala.’
I will get my own back later when I make her listen while I explain leg breaks, off breaks, googlies, the wrong ’un, a flipper and reverse swing.

You missed out the 'doosra', Arthur. You must tell her about the 'doosra'. Incidentally, if you find out what it is, let me know. Please!

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1945-50

Current location (optional) Keighley(Still)

Hi David. Google explains:
The bowler delivers the ball with the same finger action as a normal off break but cocks the wrist so that the back of the hand faces the batsman. This gives the ball spin in the opposite direction to that for an off break, causing it to spin from the leg side to the off side to a right-handed batsman.

The doosra is the off-spinner's equivalent of the leg-spinner's googly, which spins in the opposite direction to the leg spinner's stock ball.

Sione will kill me if I try to explain that!

I had thought that Sootie would be at least another ten days or so before she gave birth but last night after a day of snarling at Bobbie and Snowie, yelping raucously at any passing shadow, refusing her supper and being unable to be still and comfortable for more than ten seconds. she gave birth to two tiny splinters of fumbling blind life.
Sione happily and willingly played the part of midwife after watching a video on her laptop of a Great Dane having five puppies and indeed it was she who guessed from Sootie’s rather aberrant behavior that her time was near and went out into the night and swung quietly and watchfully in her hammock until her attendance was required.
About 9pm Sootie retired to some denser part of the garden and hid in some bushes and began panting and moving around looking to be comfortable. Sione got a light (we have an emergency light/fan for brown-outs) and a chair and sat stroking her head and filming it all on her cell phone. Sootie looked pathetically into her eyes, a little bit lost, bemused and not really aware of what was happening to her
Bobbie and Snowie were quite puzzled and marginalised by it all and they, like all good men, left the girls to it and went off into the shadows to sleep and sulk.
I, too, retired. It was going to be a long night, I figured, and I could do no good standing around. I advised Sione to trust to nature and assured her Sootie would handle it instinctively.
-She need my help. I will stay.
I left the lady with the lamp to tend to her patient.
There seemed an understanding, each of the other, a connection, in these shared moments of femininity, a bonding, a mutual awareness of what was actually occurring, of life becoming, a visceral unity, primal and beyond words but perfectly understood.
So next morning I went out to the birth-stained tiles of the patio and there curled asleep on an old T-shirt were a dog puppy and a bitch puppy. Sootie the amazed but proud mother curled around them, warning her brothers to keep their distance even though they found it hard to tether their curiosity when the puppies puled quietly.
-Good morning, you clever old thing.
I greeted her and stroked her small head.
The dog puppy is grey with a fine sheen, his sister has the brown of milky coffee. They sleep and breast feed, puling and mewing when they are lost, with legs that swim rather than crawl or walk, rowing over the smooth tiles of the patio with blind eyes, seeking the sweet,warm fount of their mother’s teats.
We shall keep the dog and get rid of the birch to a good home. Sione will pick the home and insist she wants one that will feed the dog because if she sees it full grown and starved skinny,
-I would be so sad. Like my own baby.