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Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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


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

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Another entertainin post Arthur, Thanks

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

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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)

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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!

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

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.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

We tidy the garden every few days because there is a constant fall of hibiscus blooms and leaves accumulate although there are no deciduous trees here yet leaves die and fall occasionally. Sione uses a broom made entirely from the spines of the buko leaves to gather the rubbish and sweep the area. They are very tough, pliant and hard wearing but not fireproof. One day we were engaged in this particular activity and I was weeding a patch while Sione was tending to the burning, tumbling the gathered rubbish into the flames with the broom, tending and tidying the fire.
Suddenly I heard a yelp and a shriek of “Ayeeeeah!” and I looked up to see Sione emerging at pace around the corner with her broom ablaze. My first thought was that she was the prettiest Olympic torch carrier I had ever seen except that the torch carriers I have seen do not stamp on the torch to extinguish the flame as Sione was doing.
-It’s not funneeee! She complained at my laughter, holding the smoking ruins in her hand.
I mention this because we pulled up at a local eatery yesterday for some tocino, a local delicacy that consists of small pieces of liver skewered on a stick, coated with a sweet red coating and grilled over a smoky BBQ. The eatery was filled with the smoke and fumes from the BBQ where a portly dame wafted the charcoal with a smoke-stained leaf fan in the shape of a spade. The charcoal flared and glowed, spitting sparks as she fanned vigorously.
It was a strange eatery since it did not just abut onto the welding shop next door it actually shared the same space. It was raining heavily and the thick plastic sheeting that represented the roof, bellied deep with gathered waters and founts hosed and spouted from different points around the periphery of the sheeting. I sat and waited on a sort of wooden bench which was really a badly sawn piece of wooden plank nailed to two pieces of tree stump. The floor was hard trodden earth. Two men sat in a corner eating and drinking at a wobbly table.
The welder was hard at it, a crouched Vulcan, bent to his work as white spluttering sparks spat into the gloom and crackled through the white smoke that mirrored and mixed with the glowing orange sparks and blue smoke of the BBQ. A large dog, oblivious to the crackle of the welding and the rattle of rain on the plastics, slept in an iron cage, probably made on the premises in an idle moment.
Our tocino was coming along nicely as the dame turned the sticks and fanned the charcoal. Then it happened, the yelp and shrieked “ Ayeeeah!” as the fan burst into flame. She stood there yelping and waving the blazing fan around trying to kill the flames but having the opposite effect. The welding stopped and a man appeared through the smoke seized the fan, his protective visor up, like some gallant knight delivering the maid from a dangerous dragon, he seized the blazing fan and throwing it to the floor, stamped out the flames. The dog roused and leapt into a barking routine that declared more “Get me outta here!” rather than “ Why did you wake me? I was having a most pleasant dream.” The men eating in the corner looked up with an unenthusiastic interest and returned to their food.
The man, without a word, returned to his gloomy realm and sparks flew with renewed vigour and white smoke blossomed again. The dame disappeared for a moment and returned with a new fan, a reassuring smile for us and a plastic bag for the tocino, which was now cooked to a turn.
Their reaction led me to believe without proof, that this dance of the flaming fan occurred regularly.
We had just witnessed the matinee performance.
While on the theme of the ramshackle, of which the eatery was the epitome, I was amused and amazed the other day by a bike that was parked outside the Post Office. It had clearly been thrown together, a cannibalisaton, with bits imported from the most improbable sources. The handlebar, for instance, was a piece of short straight metal water pipe and the grips contrived from some raffia-like grass wound tightly and tucked. The saddle perched at the end of another piece of water pipe was an ovate plastic ice cream container stuffed with grass and bound to the pipe by the same raffia-like grass. The wheels were genuine but it had a fixed gear and the diameters of the crank and driven cogs were identical. There were no brakes. That was the amusing part. I was amused and intrigued at the ingenuity of the engineer who had contrived this ‘vehicle’. The amazed part of the story occurred a couple of days later when Sione and I were out buying some fish. We were on the National Highway speeding along when we were passed at speed by this bike. The cyclist was bent over the handlebars of his Heath Robinson contrivance, his legs were a blur and his long hair streamed behind him. His trousers were tattered and his ‘T’ shirt grubby but boy! could he pedal.
Insulted by the affront, Sione speeded up and passed him and as we swept past he grinned a wide white smile.
Sione is possessed of the same resourcefulness and can make things do things they were not designed to do. I come from a culture where we can buy most of the things we need to do a job. Here there is neither the money available nor indeed the things themselves even if one had the money and where we may have lost the ability to improvise or rather never had to develop the ability they can only survive and prosper by making do with what they have. They are to be admired and applauded.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Another pot pourri of a blog in which I will be looking at building techniques, puppies, food and other thngs.
First thing, foods though. Much of my current diet here is the healthier part of the diet I enjoyed in the UK. I was never a glutton and never ate much anyway. Here it is chicken and fish, fruit and although I supplement with potatoes it is mainly from rice that I draw my carbohydrates, my greens are knagkong and alugbati, both of the nature of spinach, taro, yam and carrots. I have added to my diet a delightful way of cooking eggplant (if I say aubergine they look at me funny) and a strange dish called sizzling sisig. This arrived in an eatery where I ordered it on an oval cast iron dish on a wooden platter. Sizzling in the heat that shimmered from the dish was a minced meat with a semi-raw egg cooking in its centre and cheese melting over the egg. Very tasty. I checked the dish on Google and wished I hadn’t. The meat content is the liver,brain, ears, snout and cheeks of the pig minced with onion, chilli red peppers etc (the etc being anything herby you like to pop in). I am rather put off at the thought of all that face in my food but it is really very tasty and delightful with a cold beer.
Sione cooks a tasty eggplant. She boils them whole stalk and all and then splits and spreads them like a kipper. While boiling she has prepared a mixture of egg, flour and finely chopped vegetables. These are any you like eating and she chops very finely. This spread on the split eggplant and then it is fried until all is set and brown. Two of such is sufficient for my evening meal.
Sione enjoys dried and salted fish and a grey pulp of fish which she buys in jars. It is raw and salted. She asks if I want some and I refuse politely, refuse also to watch as she eats the pulp. I explain to her that I do not trust something that is pulped in that manner since I wonder just what it is they don’t want me to see I am eating. A bit like the sisig but fishy and raw.

My field where I walked the dogs is now not accessible. Two apartment blocks are rising there. The builders first arrive and build a site manager’s shelter where the plans are laid out. Then they build themselves a dormitory of scaffolding wood and blue plastic sheets, an open wood stove and mattresses are moved in and they live on site until finished. They dig eight great square holes and from the concrete they pour in the central holding pillars emerge then everything disappears under a web of wooden scaffolding and I am woken most morning either by dogs barking or the tap tap tap of hammers as more scaffolding is raised. They strangely seem to build downwards! There is no lower floor no walls nothing but the top floor walls are there, after about three weeks or more, nearly finished. I am no longer allowed into the field as a gate with lock and bars and blue plastic sheet has been fabricated.

On the other patch of wilderness the little bow legged old lady with the machete has not been seen for over a fortnight. Enquiries reveal that her husband has stomach trouble and now she must look after him and the caraboa.

The puppies are quite big but still wobbly on their legs. The boy we are keeping is a mousy grey and already responds to his name Ratty because he’s the same colour as a rat, Sione explains. He has character. He barks and growls already. At two weeks he leaves his mother and demands to be let into the house with a continuous ripple of squeaks then I prepare some dried milk into a rich creamy warm milk and he laps it up like good ‘un and flops down and sleeps. The girl stays with her mum and feeds and sleeps and twitches as she sleeps.

The six chickens are now three and they will go to Canlaon for Sione’s mother’s birthday on Friday.

One last piece of news for those interested. I wrote a poem ‘The Mummy’ about the mummy in Cliffe Castle that used to be housed in Victoria Hall when I was a boy. It has been accepted by the curator and he is having it mounted and displayed beside the mummy, which is nice.




The Mummy
I must have been a morbid child,
drawn so easily from the playground,
away from the sunshine and laughter,
to the long silent room,
that housed our municipal museum.

I was new to death,
knew only the strangeness of
Grandma laid in pine,
face carved with pain and years.

There were nettles
where we buried her,
high on the road home,
and the sound of rain,
bleak on elder leaves,
across the moorland yard;

but the museum was a place
where death glared behind glass,
beyond the probe of rain
and the spite of nettles.

Death swung in mockery of life.
Still birds caught in flight.
An eagle, clamped on heathered rock,
rid a rabbit of its plaster bowels,
beak and claw red and bright forever.
the glass-eyed fox,
teeth white in grinning rictus,
with bloody paw, pinned a torn grouse.
I shaped the strange words “Vulpes vulpes”,
with a quiet mouth,
my reflection wraith in glass.

She slept under a thin black leatherette cloth;
a cloth I lifted often.

The smeared vague mound of her nose and pits of eyes
were all that made that yellow mud a face.
Her slender shoulders tapered
to the ragged bandage at her feet.
About twelve she was,
tiny Princess of the Upper Nile,
and those were her toe-bones, the label said,
those polished, earthy pebbles,
spilled from burst bands.

‘When the four corners of the earth shall meet
you will rise again’:
the hieroglyphs promised.

When the dead birds swoop
and mute swan sings;
when the ape gibbers
and the pinned spider scuttles,
when the stuffed fox yips
and eagle soars with dripping beak;
when rain drips from elder leaves
and beads on shining nettle,
when the sodden earth bursts
disgorging rotted yesterdays,
those broken feet may dance again
and mud laugh sweet as spring.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Nice poem Arthur.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thank you Brian.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

We got to Canlaon for the birthday of Sione’s Mama quite early and went back down the mountain later in the morning. We went to Vallehermoso to the beach where we would be swimming. We hired a leaf beach hut.
I did not fancy a swim this time because I was very weary and bum-sore after the long drive up to Canlaon. I stood on the shore and looked out across the Tanam Strait towards the rippled undulation of the far blue profile of Cebu Island.
Indeed stood with all the greenery of the forests behind me the whole world before me seemed to be blue. The turquoise of the shallows where the children sported and filled the air with their happy shouts, beyond the shallows sapphire and cyan dappled by distance the peaceful strait and then far away another thin strip of turquoise, above that the prussian blue of the island’s bulk burred of all detail, only a shaped mass. Above the island a thin veil of white cloud gathered and above that the brilliant azure of a noon day sky where the white sun flared. A boat painted ultramarine drifted slowly past and in its bow a man in a denim hat cast a net. A wonderful bright world of blue. The dazzle on the sea, the breeze through the palms, the tired flop of waves.
There was a whole roast pig stuffed with lemon grass for the birthday lunch. On the table was a long baking tray in which the roasted onelay posed in a glory of gravy covered with a shroud of banana leaf. The shroud was lifted to many oooh’s and aaah’s.
A prayer was said. Not for the pig, I opine, but because all feasts are opened with a prayer. The skin of the pig that was as brown and brittle as plot toffee and was snapped off in pieces by many willing, reaching, plucking hands to reveal the succulent white meat beneath. The skin was highly prized as a delicacy and for a while there was silence broken only by snap and crackle of chewed skin. I had two pieces of white meat plucked from the back and some steaming rice. Very nice.
We had sent the last three chickens ahead by bus in a large cardboard box with large holes for breathing cut by Sione. They were accompanied by a young relative going to the party. What a dreadful journey she must have had. The chickens, traumatized perhaps by enclosure or motion of the bus or heat, who knows, defecated with a vengeance, sticking their rears out through the large holes and filling the air with their stinking faeces. People were moaning and complaining and retching. One had chicken pooh on his trousers and nothing to wipe it off with. Eventually the chickens died. I think they had literally shit themselves to death. Their bodies were stuffed into a plastic carrier and the noisome carton hurled from the bus into a sugarcane field. The relative was booed as she left the bus in Canlaon.
I fell asleep towards the end of the afternoon. Weary and a little drunk.I slept till morning and woke in our pensionne and I am still unsure how I got back up the mountain.
Thank goodness that’s the last birthday this year.
I like the journey and Sione has many admirers for her driving there and back in two days leave on Saturday come back Sunday. They consider her very brave. We were discussing this during a rest stop. Did she like it? She loved it. Why? She smiled and replied that it was the adventure she liked most. I didn’t answer but I would have been honest if I had said, ”Yes, Sione, and so do I.”

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thanks for another interesting post. I was hoping to make a final visit to the Philippines in January(before my retirement at Easter), but it does look like it will not now be necessaary. But I think I did 8 or 9 visits, mainly just to Luzon , but one down to Mindanao, (flew down to Cagayan de Oro, then drove up the coast to a chemical company (Kao) I represent in UK.)
Changing tack , it was good to meet with your brother David at our Boys Night Out on Tuesday evening.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Hi Brian. David mentioned he had met with you and Shaun Pye. I miss a pint of good bitter although the San Mig lager is very nice and cold.
Apart from landing in Luzon at Manila Airport I have spent all my time in the Visayas. I would like to see Cebu but Sione says the people there are not nice.
I was thinking to myself only the other day how I sometimes notice people looking at me and then I realise its because I am a white man although I don't feel different from them.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Just to keep your interest alive in my comings and goings, my sweatings and bathings I will cast you a small blog. I have not sent one recently because, well, because there is not much that I have done here recently.
For those of you who are still in Keighley and even for those of you who are now, like me, further afield, I am pleased and flattered to advise you that Cliffe Castle Museum have accepted a poem of mine concerning the mummy that used to be down in Victoria Park Museum and is now housed, with some pride of place, in the Museum in Cliffe Castle.
In Victoria Hall she slept quietly in her narrow box covered by a black leatherette cloth but is now in grand display. They are also putting the poem on their website.
But back to the sweltering Tropics and the Philippines and dogs.
We decided to keep the two puppies and I am glad we did. Ok, I know that now makes it five but the adults are excellent and brave alarm and guard dogs. The puppies like all young creatures are a delight. We have gone far beyond the wobbly leg stage now and reached the ‘charge the door to get into the food‘ stage.
So there are two puppies. One a bitch is golden coloured and she is pretty as a picture and also greedy. For a while she had one ear flopped and one ear pricked and not very pretty to look at. Sione says if dogs have pricked ears they are rat-dogs and “ ..very ugleee”. She did not like Cheeky too much ‘She is half-dog, half-rat.’ She did look a bit daft actually. Sione was mending the sole of one of my trainers that had come partly drift ( this happens since, against my advice, she bungs them in the washer at the end of our three times a week wash {it’s not the dirt-it’s the sweat}).
In the process of so adhering the sole of my trainer to the welt she dabbed the bitch’s ear and glued that down. A few days later she bathed the two puppies and the ear separated fro its glue and stayed down. So now Cheeky, for that is her name, has two delightfully, sexy flopped ears. A Veronica Lake of bitches.
A brief aside at this moment if I may I will return to the dog puppy, for sure. It’s about Sione not taking advice and vice versa.
‘Ah Tam! It gars me greet
To think how many councils sweet
The husband frae the wife despises.’
Sione bought a disc for 150 pesos , just over £2, for Windows 7 professional, I tutted and shook my head. Street–wise, I advised her she had been ripped off by pirate discs. She put it away somewhere. Later my computer collapsed for no reason I could fathom. If not exactly collapsed certainly misbehaving.I told her I would go to Toshiba store and have it restored to factory condition. She threw the disc in front of me. ‘ Try that.’ After an exchange and for peace I put the disc in, set it going and because It was late I went to bed to wake to a brand new computer, well behaved , fast, clean and clever. So what do I know? I was right about trainers in the washer three times a week though. But wrong also about the gluing of dogs ears as a cosmetic exercise.
Now back to the other little fellow, Ratty. He got that name very early on from his colour which is a lovely dusty grey. It has changed slightly over the weeks and he still has that overall greyness but he now wears a pair of dusty beige goggles around his grey/hazel eyes. Sione says his eyes are my colour so they must be quite beautiful. ‘cough’
He is brave and loves to stand between Snowie and Bobby and bark even though he is not yet quite sure of the whyness of barking.
W e have drinking water delivered and this morning I came out to find him stood at the gate like Horatius holding the bridge against the Tuscan horde, as two watermen tried to deliver.
“ One bottle, please.” I called.
They would not come.
“ Your dogs.” They explained.
Bobby was flat out asleep. Sootie was asleep around the back with Cheeky. Snowie had gone walkabout. Besides which they do not bark at the watermen now they know them and they are not strangers. Only the valorous Ratty protected his family and home and really made a fist of it. I picked him up with one hand and praised his bravery and told him I was pleased that he was learning so soon to be a good soldier. The watermen brought my bottle in, took the money and beat a hasty retreat.
I can understand the water people’s reticence. Rabies is a big thing here but I have had my three adults vacinated against rabies for free from the city vet. I also bought them an anti-worm and anti- flea jab.
I see ill-fed sickly dogs around me and mine are fit, happy, obedient ( for the most part) ,clean and healthy. I believe that when you enslave a free animal, as we do when we make pets of them, then their health, well being and happiness becomes our reponsibility. So mine are well-fed, loved, and attended to with care and affection and they repay me a thousand fold.
It is a great joy to go out at 5-30 say 6-30am in a morning and see them rouse and stretch and come to greet me.
‘Have you slept well, Snowie?’
‘Good morning, Sootie, do you want to go for a walk? Let me take your chain off’.’
‘ Stop biting my toes, Ratty.’,
‘Come on you two, Lets get your breakfast.’
As I say nothing much happening here just now but life passes pleasantly enough.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Pleased to hear about the poem and, having become a fan, will certainly look it up. Its 'occasion', however, rustled up a few memories, and particularly of that mummy which, in its former location, was somewhere towards the back of the hall. As a kid it used to worry and perplex me that she seemed to have sand spilling out of her feet!

A trip to the museum was always a treat - Do you remember the monkey (just in at the door, I think) with a banana in its hand. It was wartime, and just after, so that was my only contact with the fabulous fruit my parents were always on about but which wouldn't be available until after the war was well and truly behind us. But the other thing that interested this four or five year old was the aviary in the big entrance hall, and of course, the two parrots on their perches. That room always had a very particular - and to me, very pleasing - smell, which it never lost in all the time I was acquainted with the place. Glad to hear that the mummy survived. Wasn't she a princess? If she was then she's had to wait a very long time before someone sang her praises - about 3,000 years would it be? So... Good on yer, Arthur!

Doug

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

Current location (optional) Betwixt and between

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

A princess maybe? Well, you could always try kissing her to see if she awakens. I'd gladly do it myself (handsome prince that I am), but I don't get up there very often.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1958 - 65

Current location (optional) Dudley, West Midlands

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I recently visited Cliffe Castle. The mummy is there together with your fine poem Arthur. It is very impressively displayed and has x-ray slides of it provided by Bradford Royal Infirmary which show crushed pelvis and skull. The explanatory notice, I think for the benefit of school children, who were there in force the day I visited, sensitively suggests that the breaks may have occurred after mummification.

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

Current location (optional) Denholme

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thank you, Gareth, I am glad you liked the poem and that you found time to make a visit to read it.
Thank you, too, Doug. David told me that he had given you a copy of Skeins of Thread at this years reunion and that you were enjoying the read.
I always felt the trip to the museum was an adventure. I went there often since I lived near the park and it was my playground. The biggest dare was passing the sentinel parrots. I now know them to be sulphur-crested cockatoos but I did not differentiate so closely as a boy. They used to bend towards me, shriek that blood-curdling aggressive screech and flare their crests and gape their viciously curved hooked beaks. As I edged towards the door of the museum they would follow me, shuffling their crooked claws to the limits of their perch and pin me with a angry glittering black eye.
Once past them and into the silent room with their screeches muffled by the door I edged past the ape with his banana and then the spiders and beetles. One spider had, it was rumoured, emerged from a ripening bunch of bananas in Fyffes’ warehouse in the Goods Yard. Urban myth, probably.
The smell you refer to in the entrance aviary was probably the eucalyptus plant and the vanilla orchid that was kept there in the hothouse. I always thought the leaves of one smelled like Vick while the pods of the other smelled like American Ice Cream Soda. I never could understand how a plant could have the same smell as the stuff Mum rubbed on my chest or smell like a glass of my favourite pop.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I think she's a bit too old for you, anyway, Brian...

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I am sure, at least, I hope, that some of you have wondered if I survived the visit of Typhoon Washi to my neck of the tropical forest. First, let me reassure you all that we, Sione and I and the dogs, have survived the viscious storm that battered its way through the Southern Phiippines venting much of its spite on Mindanao. It did pay Dumaguete some attention and there has been wide spread damage and loss of life in its wake.We, in our humble domicile, survived with little difficulty and little relative discomfort in comparison with so many other poor souls
So how did we manage during the Great Storm of the year 11?
Well, we were wakened by the rain at something like 4-30am when it was still dark. There seemed no reason to get up on such a miserable morning so we laid and listened to it hammer on the roof and rattle the palms and ferns of our garden’s foliage and hiss into the ground. The downpour got heavier and heavier and grew to a continuous roar so I went out to look and find out what was happening and to move Sootie to a drier spot, and already my garden was under water but not badly so. It was belting it down though and the rain blocked the view with its dense veil of water. ‘Rainng stairrods’ as my old grannie would have said.
I have mentioned in other blogs the electric storms that are frighteningly spectacular and unhappily regular here but this had no thunder, no lightning and no wind just a massive continuous precipitation.
I have wondered, since, how so much water could have been lifted up into the sky and held there for so long and why it was delivered here and not just here but deluging cities elsewhere and washing whole villages into the rivers and sea, downing power lines, ripping bridges apart, hurling vehicles into roadside ditches,destroying homes, inundating towns, drowning children.
The energy to evaporate and raise so much water into the sky must, of course, have been drawn from the sun’s heat as the depression gathered and girded itself in the waters of the South Pacific and that same heat kept the water there in massive clouds. If we can see the cloud we are seeing that the invisible water vapour has cooled and has returned to its liquid state and is now visible but the drops are still not big enough to break free from the cloud which is pushed higher by thermals and winds of updraft to higher cooler air. Precipitation occurs when there is cooling, and eventually the smaller drops of water will coagulate with others and become heavy enough to fall from the cloud. Also the mountainous nature of many of the islands contribute by pushing the incoming clouds higher into cooler stratas.
You see, it is relatively easy to understand and explain but that was an awful lot of water that Washi brought to the Islands and I am still in awe of the sheer mass of water that was taken up there and then poured down on a hapless sleeping populace and no amount of explanation can diminish my awe by a ‘one jot or tittle’.
Incidentally, there are many postings now on Youtube where folk have taken videos with their cell phones and downloaded them during the day. Some of them are pretty frightening. Post “Typhoon Sendong hits Dumaguete”
Back to Sione and me.
We watched as it continued to rain steadily and hard, the rain plucking crystal flowers from where the bloomed ephemerally on the surface of our water-filled garden which had disappeared to be replaced by an ornamental pond.
Then the electric went. Brown-out! I was sweating very quickly and went for a shower but the pressure fell for some reason I could not tell but it must almost certainly have been related to the effects of the typhoon on the city’s infra- structure. All that came out was a trickle. So we sweated out the morning until around noon when the water level was halfway up the step to the patio- and, thank goodness, the rain stopped.
We have had a flooded garden before and I knew from experience that although it filled like it had before in about five hours it would be about a day and a half or more until it drained all away.
Across the road that runs through our compound is some waste land where I understand they intend to build more houses at some time. It is slightly depressed below the level of the road so water gathers there, much to the delight and comfort of the huge toads that dwell there. Nevertheless, the water finds its way out, do not ask me how, water is invidious and has its secret ways, and runs across the road and under my fencing in a gurgling stream. Which is why it is always a long time draining after such downpours. My garden is refilled even as it empties.
It had been a damnable miserable scary day. But then, just as we had lit candles for the evening , convinced, as we were, that it would be morning before power was restored, the power came back on. We had television and light and we had made it through. We checked the news channel. We had thought ourselves ill-served and unfortunate but we realised from the news that we had suffered nothing compared with others.
From our personal point of view we had missed most of the bad weather.
We were to discover that our experience was indeed quite personal and strange for much of Dumaguete had had some moments of terror and desolation.
Several factors seem the have contributed to the level of the loss of life not just here but in other places up the East coast, at Sibulan and Amlan and a bridge washed away at Tanjay, all places I have mentioned and described on our journeys to Canlaon.
Dumaguete is a sheltered spot. Cebu to the East, Mindanao to the South, Palawan and other islands to the West and the towering volcanic mountain ridge to our Northern backs. The position of Dumaguete is well protected and anything like a tropical storm would be considerably depleted, having dissipated its violent energy on other places before reaching us here. Added to this is the fact that the general run of typhoons is up the East coast, taking landfall just short of Manila, inundating the capital and turning tail to scamper over the South China Sea, heading on up to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. We are out of the general track of such weather and, indeed, we only got the edges of this one this time, bad as it was it was nothing like the real thing. So despite regular and serious warnings being continually broadcast and warnings of great damage predicted folk here in Dumaguete and some of the cities in Mindanoa were complacent and fast asleep when the storm arrived which brings me to the second factor.
The arrival before dawn caught many people by surprise and fast asleep in their beds and explains why many of the deaths were of children.
A third factor is the condition of some of the poorer housing here. To describe it as ramshackle is an understatement. I have described some of the housing we have passed on our journeys. There are the leaf houses, but there are some that are plank and clapboard and corrugated iron and anything that might fill a hole in a wall. They are built without foundation and appear to be not fastened in anyway to the ground and are so quite easily moved by wind and water in any large quantity. I have seen videos today of whole houses floating down the river in Dumaguete. The fact that it was the ‘whole’ house and that it ‘floated’ gives you some measure of the insubstantial nature of these constructions.
When we ventured down into the city this morning we stopped on the bridge and noticed many of the clapboard houses were more lopsided than before and that some had indeed collapsed and there were holes in those rows of slum houses that clung to the banks of the river, where once there had been the shanty and the jerry-built. Children played in the swirling muddy waters and young men looked for anything they could salvage being washed down from further upstream. The banks were littered with plastic bags and tangled vegetation washed down here and left high up the banks as the waters receded
We had slept that night and woke the following morning to find that grass had reappeared on our lawn and nearly all the water had gone.
Sione began to text and call friends and relatives in and around Dumaguete to ask how they had fared. Everyone of them had been flooded. I mean ‘flooded’, in that water had entered their homes, in one case waist deep. One relative, Jake and Indang, had been awake all day and night, sweeping water out of the house.
Why not us? Why and how had we escaped? How were we spared? I cannot tell.
I will explore the terrain and the drainage of our area if I can. My curiosity is avid and unafraid. I am no expert but I will learn.
We talked about this over lunch, Sione and I, and we agreed that although it had been a miserable and, at times, scary day we had been exceedingly fortunate. We had been safe and dry. We had eaten regularly. Our home was intact and undamaged. How come everyone we knew and many others we did not know had their homes invaded and violated by this pre-Christmas visitation?
We are aware of our good fortune but do not rely on it so now we discuss and prepare contingencies against the time such a storm occurs again and we might be less fortunate than we were this time.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Just a couple of quick additions. Ricky is the name of the most organised unflappable meticulous barman I have ever had the [leasure of being served by. His home was swept away by the river he lives beside during the typhoon.
Kim Jong Il is not dead! He is selling shoes in Rest Toe Run in the Mall here in Dumaguete. I've seen him I tell you!

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thanks for another interesting post Arthur. As I may have mentioned before I am UK representative for a chemical company (Pilipinas Kao) , the factory is on Mindanao, about 40km north east of Cagayan. I have had an email exchange with them and am pleased the plant and staff have survived , though I am told the storm was quite horrendous !

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I indicated in my last blog that Typhoon Sendong left us, Sione and I , totally unscathed and yet everyone we have spoken to suffered some degree of inundation, some minor and only troublesome, some total and absolutely devastating. The news here on television with pictures shows that much of Dumaguete was so assailed that a state of calamity has been declared. I also mentioned that I was puzzled as to how we had been missed ( I can only often my flooded garden as an inconvenience and inflate it into nothing more) while all around us were touched in some way. That perhaps overstates the case but you get my point I hope.
Anyway yesterday we set forth to explore the extent of the damage and for me to try to understand how we were safe. I was looking for some pattern and it became clear that certain areas were also saved, like us, while there were signs of just how savage the onslaught had been. Whole fields of maize we found flattened and rotting in the heat and wet. Sugar cane flattened. A roof in a field, high water marks three feet up the walls, a gate blocked by a wall of mud, the road littered with drifts of fist-sized rocks, trees lurched over and their roots bared, such were the signs. But why such in one place and yet in others there were no indications that a typhoon had passed by in all its fury a couple of days ago.
Well there was a pattern that I began to recognise and which has led me to a valid theory of sorts. Please remember I am not a civil Engineer and what I shall say now is not an informed opinion. It could be load of rubbish or it could ne blooming obvious whatever it is my assessment of what I have seen .
All the most badly hit places were near to the river or a stream while where all appeared untouched there was no sign of a stream, brook or river anywhere near as far as I was concerned and certainly it is true of where we live, there is no river or stream close by.
The Horns of Negros that looms its massive volcanic cones over the city drains its catchment through many small tributary streams that confluent with the river and tumble through the city to the sea.It is a short journey and the last part through the city is through a concrete walled bed with 15 foot high concrete walls along which shack and ramshackle homes cluster. I believe that that network of streams and river are sufficient to drain the catchment area under a normal, even heavy, downfall.
Typhoon Sendong inundated Dumaguete with a massive volume of water in a short period of time. As the river brimmed it refused the input of its tributaries and there was a back-up along those streams, which were still receiving the heavy drainage from the Horns as well as their own catchment areas and since the streams could no longer drain their own catchment areas which were still being heavily rained upon, the water, as it will, sought other exits including people’s homes.
I have explained elsewhere some reasons I think that might have contributed to so much damage and loss of life that could have been avoided and I have tried to explain how we managed to avoid much of those tribulations. I must further add that any waters descending from the Horns and heading our way would have been met by a four foot high wall that runs about ¼ mile long beside the main road across from where we leave the compound. Any water that hit that would have been diverted sideways to another exit point. This explains also why we had only to suffer the immediate smaller catchment area which is fairly well drained and we have, before today, cut channels through the garden to aid drainage.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

The surrounding back areas of Dumaguete still carry the scars of the typhoon. I have described in previous blogs some of the devastation in the City itself particularly around the river where the poorer housing clusters. I wish I could properly explain the jerry built homes and how fragile they are that cling to the sides of the river there. I stood today and looked at the clapboard and corrugated iron salvaged from other sources the flimsy plywood nailed to bamboo and the leaf roofs and the ubiquitous blue plastic sheeting that constitutes building materials in these places.
We went out and about today, up to the outskirts of Valencia and there were great drifts of mud and rock left uncleared and an earthmover/digger clearing the blocked river bed of gathered rubbish and silt.
Off to one side we spotted a village in a clearing made out of that blue plastic tarpaulin-like sheeting. We went closer and found that these were the temporary homes of those who had lost their houses in the flood. Bamboo struts and rope held the canvas sheet into tents and all were filled with families and scatterings of saved or salvaged furniture , clothes and bedding spread out to dry in the sun and rice cooking on open fires. Poor wretched victims of the storm, they had spent Christmas here in their canvas village.
An American ex-pat and his wife have moved into our old house. I stopped to chat. They were refugees from the flooding in Sibulan and had lost their home. They were washing their bamboo furniture free from brown sticky clinging mud.
When did they expect to be able to go back I asked. They will not be going back they were here now and staying indefinitely. I left them to it.
***********************************************************
Surprising what you see when you don’t have your gun with you.
I was walking through the city centre when I passed a street musician with his begging bowl. I passed, stopped, shook my head, no, I don’t believe it. I back tracked and, yes I was right. The man was playing a soft-stringed banjo with no hands. No hands! The banjo hung around his neck. He could only play two chords, one with all the strings open and one with all the strings closed but he hummed a nice tune.
There is either a man-eating shark in the waters around Dumaguete or some people are accident prone.
The handless Banjo striker was one, the other was a man with the lower part of his arms missing to the elbows. What do you think he was doing? Guiding traffic into parking spaces alternately waving his stumps or holding them up to indicate ‘Halt!’, all the time peeping like a demented robin on his whistle. The one thing I particularly noticed was that he was wearing laced trainers. Which left me with the question hovering. How!
We were just returning from a run around the back ways and had just re-entered the National Highway on our way home when I saw this man carrying a large harp on his shoulder. It was Christmas Eve and I could not help wondering if he was an angel who had lost his way. Behind him trying to keep up, skipped a boy who carried a small drum and a flute. (No, I am not making this up) Believe me I would not have been surprised if the Three Kings had called at our home that evening enquiring the way and could they have a drink of water for the camels, please.

*************************************************************************************


So Christmas and New year are over. (Breathes a deep sigh of gratitude).
Last night, New Years Eve, 2012 was welcomed by Dumaguete by a barrage of fireworks. Now understand that since Christmas there had been an almost continuous rattle of fireworks and fountains of bright colours lacing the night sky. New Year’s eve day the rattle rose steadily to a continuous crackle and ripples of surrounding gunfire escalating throughout the evening to be realised at midnight with a cacophony of thunderous nearby blasts and a continual ripple of what seemed like applause from distant other celebrations and always the sky laced and decorated with fountains of bright stars.
Bobby and Snowie begged to come in. Sione did not understand why they should be afraid. I tried to explain that dog’s have very sensitive hearing and some of the explosive ruptures of sound that shook my stomach and the house windows would physically hurt the dogs. At the same time dogs do not understand Christmas and New Year so this unprecedented assault of their senses was frightening and threatening.
‘Dog is dog’, she sniffed dismissing my explanation. So I sat with my two friends and comforted their trembling bodies with what reassurances my soothing tone could offer them.
Sione went outside whooping ‘Wecome 2012’ and shaking a glass jar full of coins at the night sky, which I understand was a reminder, asking the little gods of New Year’s Eve to send her plenty money in the coming twelve months. No different to our first footers and their lump of coal I suppose and do not sneer.
Today just when you might have reasonably thought every firecracker and rocket and bomb and nuclear holocaust had been lit, released and now lay in damp ashes in the rain there was another display just over the wall behind the house about ten metres away.
All afternoon it was thunderous clap after clap, ‘crump’, ‘kerpow’,‘whump’,’crash’, ‘baaaaaaang’. Without let, only spaced out with pauses, as the user chose another infernal noise maker, lit the blue paper and retired. A full two hours.
There is a point , a moment, when such ‘celebrations’ begin to border on the stupid and pointless and this afternoon we reached it and staggered past it into furious insanity.
This old curmudgeon does not look forward to the next Christmas and New Year, not because I will be a year older, which I will, but because some people do not know when enough is enough and more is just boring.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Happy Birthday, Arthur!!

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

Current location (optional) Keighley

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thank you David for your birthday wishes.
We celebrated today, the 5th, by going to a beach resort. We swam in the beautiful pool and I ate sweet and sour fish. Superb meal and doubly enjoyed since the fish, apart from a wonderful sauce, was totally free of bones, which is a luxury here. Later we went to another public beach. The wind was up and pearly combers were bursting along the shore where bathers ducked and bobbed the snarling white teeth of the waves.
Sione squealed and plunged into the boiling sea and for an hour, yes a whole hour she bobbed and ducked and squealed then staggered back up the beach to complain that she was cold and tired. I think on the whole she enjoyed my birthday as much, if not more, than I.
We have a car now. Nothing ostentatious and we use it at weekends to get down to these resorts that dot the shoreline. Some are excellent and well thought out others are just rickety rip off places but visiting and investigating is part of the pleasure.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Hi Arthur. Just checking to see how you coped with the most recent earthquake there(3 hours ago), measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale. Hope all is well.

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

Current location (optional) Keighley

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

So there I was, happy as Larry, just finishing my lunch of fish and rice with soy, when I had one of my dizzy spells. The room rocked, baby.
At least that’s what I, and most of the population of Central Visayas, must have thought.
OK , so you probably guessed already that we were having an earthquake.
I have mentioned that the Philippines is part, an arc, of the ring of fire. We were experiencing some of the consequences of being so geographically placed.
Sione spoke quietly. ‘Arthur , we go outside.’
I understood.
I stood and, without haste, or concern picked my way through the wobbling world as the house rocked and bucked around me.
We stood amongst the barking and astonished dogs as the world trembled. As the first shock subsided and all seemed settled again we went back into the house and turned off the electric and waited. Then the aftershocks began and each time we left the house. The radio was gabbling away in Tagalog and Sione was translating that the quake was over the whole Visayas and first numbers were 6.5 on the Richter scale. We moved bedding and food and water into the car and locked the house and fearing the possibility of a tsunami set off for Valencia and the high hills.
The road was filled with similar minded folk and the radio announced a level two Tsunami alert. We found a quiet spot away from buildings and sat listening to the radio which was already reporting bridges broken and impassable. You will remember that Dumaguete and the surrounding areas were still not fully recovered from Typhoon Washi. The great cracks in the National Highway which were being reported could well isolate the City the road being the main artery through which things are imported including, now, aid.
Bridges at Jimalalud and La Libertad were down. Landslides in other places and now the fuller picture was emerging. The official figure was 6.8 but this rose to 7.0 for Dumaguete and aftershocks at 5.6 and less were occurring. In all we were to experience 56 such aftershocks and this morning as I write they continue and, we are told to expect, they will continue for a week. Sione has spent the morning consolidating our emergency store in the car including batteries flashlights bottled water, cooking gear, lighters, clothes etc. OTT? Perhaps. We are agreed that it may prove unnecessary but better by far to be prepared in this way. As I listen to the radio I hear that there are some 50 deaths, most close to the epicentre and death resulting from land slides and collapsed buildings. Many of the dead are children, which is so sad.
While we were waiting in Valencia it began to rain, not heavily, but still compounding the misery of the day.
So all-in-all it has been an interesting start to 2012 and according to the Mayans there is more in store for us it seems.
I am happy to be with Sione here despite typhoons and earthquakes even though she cannot really share the pain and anguish I suffer over the whitewash in Dubai, still being with one so resourced and cheerful helps to mitigate the lesser catastrophes.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Arthur, the whitewash is a triviality compared with an earthquake . Hope yourself and Sione keep safe and that all setlles down

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thank you Brian. 740 aftershocks reported from philvolcs although I only felt two the dogs bark a lot. 88dead- and counting. Damage and disruption of National Highway is catastrophic and widespread and will take years to mend I fear.
Sione and I are OK and consider ourselves lucky lucky lucky as typhoons and earthquakes happen around us and not to us. Sione tells me it is because God loves us. Will keep in touch.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

In earlier blogs I have mentioned our journeys along the National Highway from Dumaguete to Canlaon , the city proud under the looming volcano.
Today I grieve for the destruction of all those baranguays and hamlets, all those grass huts and clap board domiciles flattened and destroyed by land slides, triggered by a major earthquake , 6.9 on the Richter scale.
I grieve for those municipalities isolated and beyond aid because the road is ruptured and impassable.
I grieve for those proud little baranguays that greeted me with their welcome signs and bade me safe journey and farewell as I left them.
I grieve for them because I hate human suffering and my socialist heart aches to reach out and offer hope and succour and I cannot.
But I watch the television and see the hopelessness and the ache and the anxiety and the pain and see also soldiers and sailors reaching out to help their own. I see the helicopters respond to sheeted messages on the grass begging for ‘FOOD’. I see the masked diggers tackling the land slides looking for life and finding rotting death.
I see the distraught mother waving her dead daughter’s dress that her dog has found but not the body.
I sit in comfort and shame as I watch this parade of misery.
O, I know I have seen it all before. Instant communication has created the global village. We watch the earthquakes and the tsunamis as a sort of extension of reality tv.
A more horrific form of ‘Big Brother’ or ‘TOWIE’ . Real but not real.
But I have extolled this strip of coastal road before misery, before the earthquake shook the life from it. I have delighted in the journey as dawn glowed and woke the day. To see it so devastated and saddened is a thing to be grieved and I am moved beyond words to explain my grief.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Here in rural Cambridgeshire we get excited when we have 2 inches of snow every couple of years and 6 inches of flooding in part of the village every ten years.
It is difficult to comprehend what it must be like where you are, but your excellent descriptive postcards help us to do so.
Thanks for keeping us informed. I trust that your luck, as Sione describes it, will continue, God willing.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1937-1944

Current location (optional) Huntingdon

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thank you, David.I might sometimes envy you your 2 inches of snow but not really. Arthur

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

The earthquakes continue with 1500 aftershocks so far but really quite small. The trouble is that structures weakened by the first quake that did not collapse were at the same time made susceptible to the smaller aftershocks so people, already dreadfully frightened, cannot be persuaded to return to their homes. Many cannot be persuaded down from the mountains where they fled in fear of a tsunami that never came although some idiots ran around Cebu City inciting widespread panic by screaming ‘Tsunami.’
James Thurber, the great American humourist, wrote a piece called ‘The day the dam broke.’ It tells about a small town, if I remember rightly after these years, going about its business on a normal day when a young man, late for work, runs down the street, a young woman afraid of missing her bus breaks into a trot, running in the same direction, a boy goes past on his skateboard, determined to get some speed out of it, A man unsure where they are all running to and why breaks into a run looking around him, two boys thinking it a game join in, someone else wonders and fearful of being left runs also , someone seeing all these people running in the same direction suddenly screams, ‘The dam’s broke.’ Soon the whole town including the mayor, the fire department, the police and all the hospital staff, together with most of the small town’s populace are running to gather eventually in terror on the hills around the town. Then someone asks ‘What dam? We haven’t got a dam.’
Cebu was like that. Everyone screaming, headed for tall buildings, abandoning stalls and cars, students left classes and police joined them. But a Tsunami never came. The whole point being there was never going to be a tsunami. Cebu City is across the other side of Cebu Island from where the quake took place, any tsunami would have needed to batter its way though a mountain ridge to get at the city.
All this is exacerbated by ignorance and fear each compounding the effects of the other, together with vivid memories of the devastating Japanese devastating tsunami still fresh in the national consciousness. Panic is difficult to resist when everyone around you is throwing a Corporal Jones hissy fit.
But there is much to be admired here; the unflagging cheeriness of folk despite typhoons and earthquakes; the natural politeness and good manners of young people; the general togetherness and joint action against adversity;the tenacity and unflagging resilience of the impoverished when their ramshackle homes are washed away or shook to pieces about their ears. They ask for and deserve aid. The rich live in houses that generally impervious to the ravages of the forces of natural disaster and so to those that have is given more than they had and from those that have little is taken away even that which they have. They ask only for food and water and a place to live. Little enough, goodness knows.
The poor victims of typhoon Sindong/Washi are still in their blue plastic sheeted village and each time we pass there is an air of permanence developing as wooden bits and sheets of tin augment the plastic and furniture is dry now and in use, washing hangs between tents and cooking fires smoke and flare as their temporary shelters mutate into their previous homes. They will be forgotten as the quake now dominates demands for aid and though much has been gathered from good hearts and willing neighbours and sent out to the effected areas we are getting stories back of thievery and looting of aid. We see the best and worse of people as desperation stifles morals and people become feral with hunger and thirst. One mayor of a municipality has commandeered all the aid, food, water, medicines and fuel and locked it in his own house to be distributed amongst those who voted for him. So it appears that Cameron and Osborne’s Tory principals percolate downwards to dominate here also.
The very forces that have been turned in all their destructive energy upon the Visayas over the last few months are precisely those forces that centuries ago created the beautiful contours that I watch each day and follow on each journey we make. The heat and wet create the burgeoning forests and dense greenery that pushes right up against the road. I leaned over a railing at a beach resort yesterday. In front of me the sea, behind me a limestone outcrop further over to my right a tongue of frozen lava splashed with wind driven seas and beside me on my left some coral laid bare and the beach littered with bits of broken coral. I thought how the limestone was laid down millennia ago to be thrust up from the beds of ancient oceans to tower over the waters below and the volcanic outpourings probing glowing fingers into the quench and dowse of the sea while tiny creatures built their coral kingdoms beneath the quiet waters until they too were thrust up from their place below.The flash floods and the old seismic upheaval that shaped and thrust and carved these beautiful islands with their majestic profiles and provided rich tilth and abundant water for agriculture, fostered the orchid and flame of the forest, nurtured the succulent pineapple, the plump sweet mango, the ubiquitous towering buko palms, support now the waving thickets of sugar cane and the flow and rustle of maize field ripening in the sun; those elements now buffet and fell homes and buckle and rupture roads and buildings, tear rifts in the earth, topple the statues of founding fathers, kill and maim, starve and deny the population.
We inhabit, albeit tenuously, this our living, often benevolent, all too often indifferent and violent planet home. It deserves our gratitude and respect and yes, our fear, too.


I have been here in the Philippines now for two years and it is probably worth a look back at this, my late-life adventure, and reflect a moment on my time here.
Was it the right thing to do? I am 79 now and it could be argued that one does not set off making a new life in a new land at that age. One should cock one’s slippered feet on the fireplace, let winter rattle the windows and watch the telly with a mug of cocoa steaming cheerily beside a plate with three digestive biscuits on. Instead I sit here in a steaming hot country as a new torrential downpour fills my garden with instant ponds and my new partner curls and folds in voluptous sleep beside me.
So right or wrong? It is not a question I pose to myself very often. I have learned to live with my choices and to make as good a fist of things as I can.
Well in health terms, I have lost considerable weight and I needed to do that. Such weight loss has been entirely down to living in the sauna-like atmosphere, hot and heavy with humidity. My diabetes is in control, my breathlessness has gone, my joints are more supple, I sleep like a baby. Yes, my health has improved.
What then of my mind? I miss my family, of course. Without details let me add that before this time my personal life had become a little bit unpleasant and rancorous, although in no way related to my family. All that has been changed. I have new friends and the delightful company of a beautiful, talented, humorous, resourceful lady who cares for me, tends me, keeps a good home, clean and tidy, bathes me, feeds me healthy food and has lots of fun with me. We are past that stage of learning about each other and now share private jokes and giggles.
I write my blog and some poetry. I have a couple of self imposed maths problems on the go that I revisit now and again. I walk my dogs. I watch the far hills in all their moods and the passing beauties of the parade of clouds. We go on adventures, riding helmetless round back roads and leafy ways.
I am content and although happiness can be elusive and ephemeral, contentment is longer lasting, I feel I get my share and more than my share of that. I am not guilty about that.
Some of the things I miss being here and not there.
A cold roast lamb salad. No sheep here so no lamb although an expensive version is imported from Australia few stores carry it since there is little or no demand. Ah! A cold roast lamb salad. Or roast ham not the tinned sort but sliced from the bone. Two or three thick slices with a beef tomato, some Cos lettuce, can’t stand iceberg, no cucumber, some mayonnaise stirred with mint jelly, or mustard for the ham, and some brown bread and butter. Heaven on a plate.
I miss an English Sausage. A good plump Yorkshire pork sausage cooked brown all round, two in fact, and served with thick onion gravy and creamy mashed potatoes. O, Lord!
Like Ben Gunn I pine for toasted cheese. There is cheese here but it is nearly all processed and wrapped in tin foil. No real Cheddar, no creamy Wensleydale, no Danish Blue, no Stilton, no Derby sage. Nothing one could honestly call ’cheese’
There are no pork pies although I have got my mushy peas sorted now but Sione turns her nose up at them, which I don’t mind for it means more for me and she is welcome to her dried fish or that pulped grey mush of tiny fish she keeps beside her plate. No steak and kidney pies or puddings, either.
There is though something they call, and treasure, called Halo-halo. This similar to our Knickerbocker Glory, it being a confection of ice, cream, various coloured ice creams, fruit and jelly. Now where I was taught to eat my Glory carefully eating different parts of the confection as I went towards the bottom they sit here with their long spoons and spin the spoon and mash everything together into a purple mush. I explain that is not the way to eat it. Sione explains, ’It is our way in the Philippines’ to which I respond, ‘Fair enough! Then why don’t you ask them to put it through the blender for five mnutes and save time?’ I am told not to be so silly.
I have met many new fishes here marlin and tangigke, tuna of course and flying fish. Some are exceedingly boney but worth the effort.
Lest it be thought that it is just food that I miss I must admit I miss some television but not enough of the rubbish British television had descended to as I left. All those unreal reality shows making the pathetic momentarily famous. Here the television is raucous where audiences are whipped into hysterical frenzy and encouraged for a few pesos to make idiots of themselves and poor copies of Western television complete with judges and marking systems and raw amateur talent.
OMG, they are introducing their very own Pinoy Big Brother. I weep.
There is always a continuous stream of written for movies Mills and Boon stories with the occasional witch and vampire or ghost thrown in. There are buckets of tears, throbbing sobbed soliloquies and hospital bedside reconciliations as well as over-strict fathers and over-fond mothers, but, hey, I don’t watch them..
The news consists of reporters shouting at the tops of their voices in an excited tirade into the camera and even though they are probably explaining the stock market has risen two points it still sounds as though some war is imminent. The move from one news item to another is accompanied by a woooooosh! And a roaoooor!
So all things being equal, which they seldom are, and allowing for whitewashes in Dubai, typhoons, thunderstorms, earthquakes and dried fish as being part of the natural order of things, I am happy with the choices I have made and accept the rest as part of the parcel.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Since the occurrence of the earthquake rescue work has continued in La Libertad, Jimalalud, the great little town, it boasted on a sign as we entered on our journey northwards, and Guihulngan City. They had found 42 dead and still 64 were missing. Mechanical diggers were brought in and two more bodies were recovered. Decomposition happens quickly in the tropics and so identification was made through clothes and bracelets worn and recognised. Thermal imaging showed that there were no further signs of life and the three landslides have been declared the grave site of the missing citizens. A suitable commemorative marker is to be added later.
I have mentioned in earlier blogs when describing our journey along the coast road to Canlaon City, the mighty limestone headland under repair as it is being carefully netted together with heavy metal nets and bolts. We always raced past without looking up, cowed by the massive loom of it. Like Kilnsey Crag but bigger, much bigger.
I was interested to see if it had survived the shock and Lo! and behold pictures emerged and it was unscathed.
Then it rained and it rained and it rained. The tail end of a cold front hindering the recue work and then....
A massive rock slide filled the road. The quake, it appears, had weakened and undermined the headland and rain had caused the final slump into the road. Happily(?) the diggers and earthmovers used in the initial repair work were still to hand and the road was cleared in a day, all the rock being pushed into the sea.
One final little point made to me by the superstitious Sione. I have managed to rid us of two of the dogs. They are the bitches Sootie and Cheeky. The point being they are puppy makers and I want no more here. Cheeky first which was followed by typhoon Sindong the next day, and Sootie next followed by the earthquake. Sione swears the incidents are related being cause and effect of my actions.
I do not agree but still I will keep the three male dogs, all expertly emasculated by Sione with her razor, iodine and needle and thread.
We have had a tumultuous start to 2012 and now we watch anxiously as a low pressure area deepens and heads our way, already predictions are that it appears to be becoming a typhoon, Typhoon Ambo if it does. We are prepared and alert.
More later. I hope it will be good news.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I should watch yourself , Arthur, Sione sounds a very practical lady, you might be next!

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 43-46

Current location (optional) Tasmania

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Quake February 2012

Saturday they held the festival here.

They had worked all year
on costumes, rehearsed music,
learned and practiced
the patterned steps of dance
prepared to please their baranguay.

The bunting, orange and yellow,
swung along the mile-long road
tangled with black wires
twisted through low palms.

On the day drums
beat and throbbed
discordant trumpets blared
the air quivered with sound
the way was lined with applauding folk
as, led by maidens, smiling grandly,
the children, dressed as blossoming flowers,
paused and showed the practiced steps they knew.
It was a festive happy day.

Monday mid-morning.

Deep beneath the glittering strait
a plate shifted mightily.
the road buckled and broke
the mountain shrugged
unburdening itself of
a heavy mantle of soft earth
upon a quiet baranguay.

Today

Along the quiet wounded road
the broken bunting,
bedraggled by the rain
trails in puddles
or twists in the wind
spins over the dancing flowers
buried in the mud.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I imagine some of you will be wondering about the aftermath of the 6.9 earthquake so I will give you the latest updates that I have received from around the region.
You will recall that the quake occurred in the Tanon Strait between Cebu and the Central Visayas immediately opposite the municipality of Guihulngan City and it was this municipality that took the hardest blow and suffered the most deaths, 22 to be exact. The death toll at the moment is officially 57 but there are still 60 missing. The townships of Jimalalud and La Libertad also received the full weight of the quake and it was the landslides in these places that caused so many deaths, completely covering one baranguay in a poorer area of the city. Two more bodies were discovered this morning in La Libertad but they were beyond recognition, they could only be named by the ruined hut where they were found.
Sibulan is a small township at the edge of Dumaguete and above the township is a beauty spot called Twin Lakes. Much rich wildlife inhabits the area and the lakes nestle under the Horns of Negros, themselves the result of ancient seismic activity. The locals have asked Philvocs, the government body that monitors seismic activity in the Islands to inspect the lakes as there has been serious discolouration of the waters.
On Cebu island opposite the epicentre of the quake in the shallow waters close to the shore, sulphurous-odoured bubbles are rising in rapid streams and , of course , the kids are playing in them.
The lip of the cone of Kanlaon volcano that looms over Canlaon City and Bacolod City has several deep cracks in it. It has been declared safe but climbing the volcano has been stopped.
Sione and I have experienced several small aftershocks in the last few days. They are not of themselves serious but given the extent of the damage still existing from the initial quake which weakened many structures they are worrying since they can only exacerbate.
So that is a brief summary of the geophysical damage but there are signs of serious post traumatic stress disorders in the population.
Hypertension and sleeplessness has risen dramatically in the three major townships that suffered most.
In La Libertad if there is even the mildest aftershock small children and indeed some of the older ones, fall to the ground and lie there whimpering and weeping.
Food, water and medical aid is getting through to some of the 65000 families rendered homeless, that is over 350,000 individuals, although only half of these have been contacted.
Here in Dumaguete it has to be recognised that we suffered very little damage but it has diverted attention and aid away from the victims of Typhoon Sindong and the blue plastic sheeting village that bloomed to house the homeless looks more and more permanent each time we pass.
Just one last remark I would like to make. The typhoon was dreadful and took many lives in Mindanao and southern Negros Oriental washing away homes and houses. The quake in comparison killed considerably less although there is extensive damage to the National Highway and many structures in those towns. I have listened carefully to news and read their papers. I can find no evidence that the nation has asked for aid from other countries and no evidence that any aid has been offered.
The calamities here can not compare with the Japanese tsunami or the great quake that damaged Pakistan but that cannot make these people less deserving of help. It is to their credit that they go about their business of righting the damage without complaint.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Three incidents, one strange , one funny, (well it was to me, eventually,), one quite movingly beautiful and a visit to a strange place, will constitute the meat of this blog.
The Strange.
I was in a ‘stack it high and sell it cheap’ store the other day when I noticed this very small man. Not small like a midget or a dwarf, just small, thin, yes , but slightly withered rather than thin and his features while oriental were pointed and sharp. What was particularly strange was he was holding a hammer and holding it close to his face he was examining it in minute detail. Turning the hammer with a look that was a mixture of wonder, puzzlement and awe.
-Get a life, I thought, a hammer is a hammer is a hammer.
The press of folk carried me away from him.
I was to encounter him a further two times in different parts of the store. Once it was a colander that was receiving this minute and intense exploration. The last time it was a packet of nuts, of the nuts and bolts variety of nuts,that was turned and pushed and examined close to the eye.
I have thought about this and have two theories apart from the one where the man is a nutter of the first water, out for the day.
My first theory, which I rather like, is that this little man was a ‘grey’ from a scout ship from an alien fleet hiding beyond the dark side of the moon. His mission was to explore the culture and habits of the Earth’s population and report back to his ship when his mission was complete. The visit to the store was to get some grasp of what tools and equipment we used here on Earth. The close examination was in fact an electronic scan of the hammer, colander, packet of nuts being stored on some tri-corder hidden somewhere on his ill-fitting coat.
My other theory was that it was blazingly hot outside and he had come inside to enjoy the comforts and relief of air-conditioning and he was strange anyway.
I opt for the first theory personally.
The Funny.
This incident involved Ratty, our youngest dog, he of the perpetual hunger.
I explained on other blog postings that the wilderness I enjoyed in the early days had descended into a tangle of tall grasses and bosky glooms. I noticed three young men hacking at the tall grasses with their bright machetes and wandered up to get a closer look. My three boy dogs always follow me when I go for even a short walkabout and we stood on the compound watching the hack and stack of grass as the three young men toiled in the morning heat.
I digress here, for a moment, to explain that Ratty has been in trouble a couple of times for bringing litter into the yard and had this very morning been released from his punishment which involved, being tied up for the night, which, in its turn,plunged him into a bleak and abysmal tampo, involving snorts, downcast eyes and deep shuddering sighs..
Just now he was at liberty and wandered into the wilderness and disappeared.
A few minutes later he emerged with a white plastic bag in his mouth running like the clappers. He sped past me like a shot off a shovel and zipped down the compound and into our yard.
I was angry thinking he was still bringing litter in and when will he ever learn.
I shouted after him but he ignored me so I went into our yard and he had the bag open and was wolfing the buns and bread inside.
He had stolen the young men’s lunch!!
I grabbed the bag and gave him a swipe with it and just then the young men, sweating and panting ran past our yard looking for him and the bag. Shamefaced and chuckling inside I held the bag up smiling my apologies. Sione joined me, giggling, and asked ’How much?’.
We settled for 50 pesos and I kept the buns and fed the three dogs, Bobby and Snowie got some for being honest and Ratty got some for showing initiative and an admirable and impressive turn of speed.
The Beautiful.
We were parked in the dark waiting to pick up a friend and my attention was caught by an adult, a young boy and a smaller, younger boy. They were emptying some cardboard boxes, full of unwanted rubbish, which had been put out by the large store where we waited. They were picking over the rubbish for goodness only knows what but it seemed to be mainly cardboard. The little one helped.
This sort of scavenging goes on amongst the poor here.
Just then the adult seemed to say something to the younger child who came over and they kissed each other. As one kissed the other’s forehead the other kissed the other’s nose and then that position of kissing was reversed, this was followed seamlessly by each kissing alternative cheeks terminating in a kiss upon lips. It was gently, sweetly done and was a practiced exchange of endearment.
The sequence of kissing followed a cruciform path and the phrase, ‘Osculated genuflection’ came to mind and I felt that each was blessing the other.
They returned to their scavenging in the dark.
Thus do the poor devise ways to express their love for each other, even as they seek to find some form of relief from their enduring poverty scratching through the rubbish cast aside by others.

I have kept you well informed both of the occurrence and aftermaths of recent calamities but for some time now there have been no storms or typhoons or earthquakes and it has begun to feel rather like that passage in ‘The Lion and Albert ‘ by Stanley Holloway

‘They didn't think much to the ocean
The waves, they was fiddlin' and small
There was no wrecks... nobody drownded
'Fact, nothing to laugh at, at all.

So, seeking for further amusement
They paid and went into the zoo..
That is just we did today- we went to a zoo.
Zamboanguita Zoo- Spaceship 2000- Paradise World- it told us.
It was, in fact, not really any of these.
I am considering how best to tell this part of my blog. There was the experience and there was the research afterwards that explained some of what I saw.
I shall choose to tell it as it happened- the experience first -the research later.
The entrance fee should have given some clue, 20pesos, a pittance, really.
What struck me at first were the signs, in whatever direction one looked we were admonished to ‘Love one another’. Another instructed us, ’No Smoking/ All vices prohibited. Keep to the Path’. I finished with smoking ten years ago a temporary abstension from other vices should not prove too arduous since I have neber indulged in public that which I have enjoyed in private but since there no path that par of the admonition would prove difficult to conform to. All there was flattened, grassless red earth.
The first animal we found was a bad tempered wild boar. I understand that the wild boar is, by nature, bad tempered, but this fellow was confined in so restrictive a cage that his bad temper was a justified complaint against his constriction. He squealed and stamped as well as I might have squealed and stamped had I been so confined and limited. We left him in his small piece of space.
We moved on to the crocodiles. There were three. One huge fellow was on his own while a further two smaller than him but still big were sharing a miniscule pool of green water. Another notice warned us not to enter the enclosure, as if we would, and another asked us not to throw stones at the crocodile.
At this juncture we were joined by a guide. He was short, thick-bodied with long black hair drawn into a pony tail and bare feet. He gestured and laughed and made noises but in truth none of us could understand a word.
I pointed at my mouth and asked by gesture what the crocodile ate. ‘Goat’ was the reply, ‘Live goat. One a week’ So he could speak English, a little, but he reverted to his gibberish just after as a crocodile slithered menacingly out from the green slime.
The monkeys were next. A line of cages housed the simian population. In one end cage a mother nursed her tiny baby, grooming and stroking the wee clinging splinter of life. 5 days old and still slightly bewildered about the things called life that moved around it.
There were birds, egrets, and something called polished starlings. The zoo was boring and hardly worth 20 pesos entrance fee. But what was this? A museum! The wall advised us in huge lettering that Father Tropa a former catholic Priest had founded the zoo as part of his mission to create a new religion that embraced nature.
The museum was housed in a large building whose walls were lined with photos of Father Tropa at various stages in his life. His hair, too, was long and tied back in a pony tail.
A big notice across the wall ‘Love one another and nature’ greeted us.
The place was littered with stuffed exhibits including a rearing orang-utang, a pelican, a three-eyed lion, (yes ‘three-eyed’ clearly a fake) a two headed pig,(another taxidermist’s idea of a joke). The place was dusty, fake and ill-kept, a long way away from Paradise.
I discovered later that the monstrous python sleeping in its tray and which ate chickens whole, used to accompany Father Tropa, wrapped around his neck, as he toured his zoo. The long hair and bare feet of our guide was required of the Father’s followers, who were known as ‘The Lamplighters’, even when they visited the city the bare feet were mandatory. His followers, mostly his relatives, of one kind or another, now kept the zoo and called each other brother and sister.
I enjoyed my visit because it was strange and I wonder sometimes just what goes on behind the shields of dense foliage that we sweep past.
On our trip home Sione said,’ Did you see any goats?’
‘No ‘,
‘Then how did they feed the crocodiles goats when there were none?’
‘Perhaps they breed them somewhere else.’ I opined.
‘I did not like the place. It was weird. No goats.’
‘Perhaps they buy them.’ I suggested reasonably.
‘Too expensive.’
‘What do you think then?’
‘Babies. They steal young children and feed them to the crocodiles.’
I looked at her face. She was serious.
‘Someone would notice missing children.’
‘Not here. They would not steal the children from here. People know they have crocodiles. They would know they were stealing the children to feed them.’
‘Where then?’
‘I think they go to Cebu. There are many children there. On the streets They would only need to give them one a year.’
‘Ok.’ I said, ‘You write the story and I will try and have it made into a film.’
End of conversation.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

While out and about today I witnessed two minor events, happenings, small only, but together they set me thinking, musing on what is happening in our world today.
The first event occurred out on the back roads, towards Valencia, when we rounded a bend and were given cause to slow our journey. There, plodding slowly along the road was a huge bull cariboa, behind him was a small, thin-legged old man, skinny arsed and raggedly clothed. He wore a coolie’s conical straw hat, his back bent as he geed and hawed, guided, using the rope he held to control the lumbering beast, as together they hauled a rickety, wobble-wheeled cart ,full of grazing grass, freshly cut from someplace, towards some stall where the great animal could munch and fill himself to the limits of contentment.
They moved quietly, slowly, as though encumbered with the burden of being alive, moving about their chores: quietly and slowly under the sun.
The second event occurred, on the same excursion, when we were on the main highway. We were passing an intersection when, without warning, a motorcycle swept out of a side-road into our path, it swerved to avoid us and, ignoring the indignant admonitions of our horn, still ducking and weaving, he sped off through the traffic, disdainful of anything that hampered or slowed his way, all the time reading his cell phone!
I was driven to consider the two events and their basically microcosmic natures and search for any pertinent macrocosmic implications that might be drawn from comparison of the two.
It seemed to me, I was led to muse, that the old man and his cariboa simply epitomised a slower paced life of a time before and the macho-cyclist with his rasping revs, hen-scattering progress, cell phone clamped in his fist, held low to be read, is a product of his time.
I can value the cell phone and recognise its uses, versatility and purposes, and I will not enumerate them here, but when I watch a passing group of girls all wearing the same prim uniforms, so obviously members of the same group, watch them pass, I say, without speaking to each other as they frantically consult their cell phones I wonder what we have allowed to happen.
We allow, somehow, the cell phone to dominate, to insist in intruding upon our solitude, or sharing our company, indeed separating us from such company of friends.
Consider! We are speeding through the traffic, the cell phone plays its insistent melody, we have a call? A message? Do we stop ? NO! The journey must continue and the phone must be answered. It is not just here, it is the same in England and, I opine with confidence, that it is the same around the world.
It is not just the cell phone, it is the MP3, the Ipod and the earphones that insulate people from the reality of their lives and have them walking through life with ears deaf to their surroundings, blind to their journey, unheeding of other folk. People have become disconnected, apart, isolated.
The sedate progress, the plodding in silence, of the old man and his caraboa, has been replaced by a cacophonous, massive, insistent intrusion that we not only allow, we actually create the bubble of isolation, a shell that locks out life and denies contact, insulates us from others.
I sat having a coffee one day last week, waiting for Sione to return from some shopping, and scanned the passing crowd and without actually doing a measured census involving collection, counting, analysis, etc. still and all, I conservatively, estimated that some 20% of those I viewed were using their cell phones. I mean I have to ask, what did they do before cell phones were developed and made so readily available?
This musing is not the grumbling of an old man complaining that the world is going to Hell in a hatbox. I like a gadget. Goodness me, I am still enthralled by a solar-powered calculator!! Don’t laugh. I think it is remarkably clever of human-kind to harness the power of a star some 93million miles away to do sums for us. And get them right every time. That’s really clever.
I really do envy the old man and the sedate world he lives in and moves through. He will not eat well I imagine. He will have no cell phone and he will be like Sione’s father who could not work out how to get his foot onto an escalator, who was 74 and had never seen one before. That is the life we are losing and it is sometimes difficult to believe that we are better off today.
It is without debate admitted that we have more things to help us live our lives to the full.
My Dad, for instance, died from malignant hypertension and had a third of his stomach removed because of an ulcer. I have had both conditions and cured them with drugs. He was 56 when he died. I am 79 and still fit and active. So there is much to be welcomed in the changes and advancements that have occurred during my own personal life span.
I have visited every continent on this planet, flown twice around the world, slept in a Bedouin tent in the Sahara and on the floor of a grass hut in the depths of an Equatorial rain forest. Not bad for a lad who used to play kick can in Bradford Street and did not know what Bradford looked like. Times change, for sure, and I would not, if I could, alter or hinder that development. I could wish there were some way we might keep that which was good and worthy of our lives before now and not toss them aside, discard them without thought, for the new and insistent.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Your musings apart, Arthur, this pc threw up a few recollections. Kick-Can in Bradford Street - Tate and Lyle - "Out of the strong came forth sweetness" - always the most durable.

Your original observations brought back to me a remembered sight that, at first, had confused me. I was coasting to the traffic lights in Doddington Road when on the corser to my right I noticed a youthful female figure (who wouldn't) out of my eye-corner. Her head and upper body were going through a series of unusual motions that could have indicated an epileptic seizure. When I stopped I was able to determine what it was she did.

Her head went back and then dropped to the left - the first to take a swig from her Starbucks carton in her left hand immediately followed by the downward twist of her head to the mobile device held in her right hand at waist height which attracted her attention for a few seconds until she remembered the coffee container in her other hand. And so the sequence of jerks recommenced.

Without a bidding she would certainly have rejected, here was a young woman voluntarily under the control of two of the mightiest forces in modern society.

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

Current location (optional) Nirvana

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

We planned to make our regular trip to see Sione’s parents in Canlaon City but we were hearing rumours of flooded roads and downed bridges because of the ‘quake and the fact that not much repair work had even been started let alone nearing completion but hey! this is the Philippines.
As a result of the rumours and dire warnings from her parents that they were praying for our safe journey, which was worrying in itself, we planned, as an alternative route, to break from the National Highway, and the road we normally follow, and cross over the island that is the Negros, Oriental and Occidental, at Mabinay and follow a road into Canlaon, by the back door as it were. A huge diversion and larger than it sounds.
This meant a big right turn just after Bais and taking a road we had never travelled before. The adventure spirit roused, beckoned, stirred deep in the heart of Sione and I, and we Googled the road and explored the implications of a diversion from our normal route.
At the end we decided to travel our normal route but keep the diversion to Mabinay as Plan B, you know the plan that George Osborne does not have.
(As an aside let me advise that everyone, and I mean everyone, Chancellors included, should have a Plan B. I call them contingincies.)
So we left Dumaguete City, early and well laden. We had accumulated a sister of Sione and her child, a cousin and Sione’s daughter, the one who acquired a degree last month and pined for her loved one, he who had graduated ‘Cum Lauda’, he who lived and thrived, thanks to an adoring Mama, somewhere away beyond San Carlos. This was, then, the group we seemed to have acquired, aggregated, pretty much in the same way a larger rock accrues space debris- without even trying. On top of which, Sione had provisioned the journey and stacked clothes and food and water. A great provider is Sione.
So all things being more or less come together, as one, ready, we departed, before cock-shout, while all was still and dark and the streets were free and wide.
We made good time, over the first part of our journey, passing through the sleeping baranguays.
I am sure there were many there who slept, distanced from the labour and demands of their lives in deserved slumber, but still, whenever we passed through even the smallest hamlet, clutch of huts, village, whatever, there was always someone stood by the side of the road to watch our swift passage through the night that moved towards a distant day. Always a white T-shirt was displayed and shorts, lit for a brief moment by the sweep and light of our passage. We passed and parted in a moment, he, to wonder who we were and why and I, to wonder why he did not sleep.
We passed through a massive cloud burst or rather the remains of it for no rain splashed our wind screen but the roads were puddled and where the road was at a higher level than the surrounding bush there in the gathered bush were great ponds and bouncing brown rivers writhed and gushed. Folk were up and about battling the floods that threatened their homes. We also began to see collapsed leaf huts hung from their broken stilts and tucked into dry corners were the blue plastic sheets of temporary homes. Then, as we neared Jimalalud we could see the crumbled , broken mansions felled by a mighty fist, this quake was no respecter of person or wealth. It hit what it liked. Strangely, I could not see any difference in one leaf house or the other nor indeed between one large mansion or another and yet this one was felled, broken but the next door sound as a bell and occupied. This Green mansion slumped as though someone had lifted it and broken it over his knee then pulled it apart like a lego construction and next door apparently untouched.
We came at last to Jimalalud when the dawn had come and the day was light.
Smooth running so far but more, much more, to come.
We met a large collection of waiting cars and lorries. Why?
Men jabbered and waved at us to clear the road. We manoeuvred and found a place,
Why did we have to wait? It emerged over time that the brdge at Jimalalud was indeed down. There was a great swerving diversion off into the muddy bush and through a ford and up out of the river. A convoy would gather and then snake through the diversion and we would find a convoy travelling in the opposite direction gathered and waiting. Out turn came and we were warned to mind we did not bottom out on the rutted diversion road and to keep moving.
We bumped and lurched our way through the gathered palm leaf and dense foliage and eventually down a rocky bank into the ford. Fortunately, the cloud burst we had witnessed earlier had been very localised and the river here was not a torrent although it was in a hurry. We could feel the rounded rocks on the bottom shifting under our wheels. Everyone in the car had fallen silent or hissed quietly or yelped plaintively ‘Go faster, faster!’. Some boys pointed the way for us to follow and then we were through and up out of the river. Sione burst into delighted laughter.
-That was fun, she burbled –I go back and do it again, she squealed and everyone shouted their cries of horror at her to which she responded with squeals of delight. Mad woman. I think she was just as nervous as the rest of us but she does delight in other’s discomfort sometimes.
My hand was in cramp from where I had been gripping the hand bar on the side of the car.
We raced on our way and the sun was up and we were suddenly hungry and looking for a spot to eat and wee-wee. Everywhere we thought suitable for a picnic site was either under buko palms, ( never park under buko palms unless you want to be bombed ), or not level, or too wet or too close to houses or some other criteria was broken. Then we rounded a corner and there was a low wall, a view of the shining sea and plenty of room to park and we all yelled our approval and our breakfast picnic could begin.

We had a good breakfast of rice, bread, boiled eggs and coffee. Over the wall there was a clump of shrubs and then the sea and all the time we ate I could here a regular pounding, chopping sound.
I have an avid and insatiable curiosity and as I finished eating I wandered over to one side to get some sort of view past the clump of shrubbery. There were two rocks, large smooth rocks, and a man was sat on one with a stone club and he would reach into the water and pull out a long thick stalk of some large plant and pound the fibres loose from the fleshy meat of the stalk. I thought that at first that he was actually finding the plant there by the rock but then realised that the stalks had been brought here to be soaked in the sea and then to be pounded on these rocks. Two boys would gather up the bundles of fibres and carry them up to a waiting cycle and side-car and cycle it away to a nearby hamlet. Sione explained that they used the fibres to make soft sweeping brooms.
Beyond this cameo another man fished from his boat as he stood. The canoe had outriders and it rode steady on a sea free of ripples. Then, to my surprise, he stepped from the boat and stood only knee deep and towed his fishing platform to another site.
A young mother and smaller child stepped into the sea and walked towards a wooden platform, she was carrying a wee baby. I watched as she waded to the platform and stepped up onto it. Then she took off the baby’s napkin, a piece of stained cloth, and the smaller child bathed the baby’s bottom clean while her mother dangled the wee bundle over the water. Then she stepped back into the sea and waded ashore and lay the half-washed cloth on a fence to dry while she breast fed the baby and the smaller child paddled. Sione called me and I broke from this pastoral idyll to continue our journey.
-I don’t like this place, she moaned and stamping her feet,- too many ants. I looked around and everyone else was stamping and shaking their feet. So that was this idyllic site damned as well.
The journey from Jimalalud through La Libertad and Guihuingan City was the same views of cracked roads, tumbled walls and gates, cracked and broken mansions and collapsed huts and flattened shanties together with all the undamaged ones in between. We knew that the death dealing landslides took place a little further inland so we would not be able to see that tragic sight.
Guihuingan City had been hit badly by the quake and in addition had been assaulted by a series of cloudbursts that inhibited rescue work and indeed wrought further damage and the week before our journey it had been further visited by a series of aftershocks and to add insult to injury a tornado came to town, buffeting and bullying, blustering and breaking, before roistering off, out to sea.
The road up to Vallehermoso was quieter and clearer and we made good time. Eventually we rendezvoued with Sione’s daughter‘s boyfriend and she left to ride with him on his motorcycle. They followed behind us up the airy glen, the tortuous winding road to Canlaon as we climbed the skirts of the great Kan- laon volcanic cone.
There is a tale that two lovers from different warring tribes fell in love, he was Kan and she was Laon and they were denied expression of their love by chiefs of their tribes. Rather than live without their heart’s love they chose to climb the volcano and throw themselves in . They did this and the tribes filled with remorse and grief warred no longer and the volcano got its name Kanlaon. The city itself choosing a different spelling nevertheless took the name for itself. Nice story, asort of Romeo and Juliet without the balcony scene.
Our time in Canlaon was enjoyable and we were as usual greeted by delighted friends and relations.
I was still entranced by the possibility of a different route back to Dumaguete and suggested to Sione that we try the alternative. She readily agreed with a gleam in her eye. A new adventure always beckons for her.
Her brother Jito, the police sergeant asked a lift from us to Dumaguete. So having lost several passengers we acquired two new ones. We left around noon.
Our climb up to Canlaon the previous day now became a journey of swift descent as we first rounded a little of the volcano and then plunged down through small hamlets and villages, always down, down, down in descending curves a bit like the Cresta Run. Then out onto broad plantations of sugar, sugar, sugar.
I mentioned that there was an awful lot of sugar cane growing there. Jito told me the Negros grows most sugar in Philippines but it all belongsto one man. Really? Yes, he spat, the President Aquino, Noy-Noy. Incidentally I met a parrot in Canlaon who if asked ‘Who is the president?’ answered ‘Noy-Noy!’
The sugar cane plantations stretched for many miles but eventually we hit the National Highway and turned south. We had crossed the Negros Island and were now in Negros Occidental. The first thing to note was the condition of the roads which were superb. Smooth, without potholes, signposted and road markings, Ye Gods! Road markings! We made excellent time but I noted a great,nay monstrous black cloud dropping grey veils of rain in the distance - and we were heading straight for it.
Eventually we found it and boy! Did it rain? great bouncing stair-rods that my old Grandma described as raining in ‘ iggs and swuthers’. Sione laughed and drove straight on and in five minutes of rain-streaked windscreens that the wipers barely managed and the ferocious drumming on the roof and we were through into clear blur skies and sunlight.
On our right were great square fields of seawater with racks and rods, in and amongst, nets. Ah! squeals Sione, Oysters! She braked and pulled over and we entered a close little eatery with great steaming coppers of hot water. Sione bought two loaded baskets of oysters and they were plunged into the coppers for a couple of minutes and then they dove in with metal openers and spiced vinegar, slurping the small oysters which were fresh, of course, just from over the road.
I do not do oysters. I had one in my mouth once and was throwing up for a week at the memory of it in my mouth. So I sipped a small rhum. By the way with all this sugar it is not surprising that Tanduay Rhum is a cheap national drink, very nice drinking with lots of ice and I like it with an iced green tea mixer. So rhum and bread for me as the Walrus and the Carpenter entertained the oysters.
After this brief stop we turned back inland to recross the island via Mabinay and come out at Bais City.
There was something strange about this journey which I have not yet figured out and that is the inwards journey was really not steep and I got the impression that we were following a low pass through the mountains rather than going over them. There was no impression of being well up in the air and then we broached the island and there far below us the sea, red in the setting sun, and a hair-raising descent down a shining white and winding road. I still do not understand how we got so high , of course the road over had been long and we must have been going up steadily all the way and then the short, and so swift and steep, descent would make a sort of sense but still it did seem surprisingly strange.
Our judgement is that despite the longer journey, longer by about 40 kilometres, the riding was so much easier that we made it in better time than the outward journey, discounting the diversion and the breakfast, in just travelling time alone it was faster and easier. We shall go that way again I am sure.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

For those of you who have followed my adventurings here at the other side of the world and my escapades, wondering at my long silence. Please be assured I am fit and well and sweating mightily under the unremittingly pittiless probings of a merciless sun. So you had snow in May. Tough. Try the pinning pierce of a noonday sun in the Philippines.It searches you physically. It probes and insists.It is alive! You cannot ignore it. The dogs give in. Melt into the shade and rest and perspire. I think to join them. But I am primate supreme. I venture forth and observe. I will communicate such observations later. Meanwhile I sweat and rest.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

"If you don't like it,lad,you shouldn't've joined"

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

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

As I open my latest blog, which will include tales of a wedding, a tropical storm called Butchoy, some green hens and a smelly witch, I watch from my window as the fading evening sky, cloudless and palely-fading blue, acts as the backdrop to a waltz and twitch of bats as they swoop and gyre, feasting on a cloud of dancing flying insects, a hatching.
When I realise, now and again, how massive is the weight of insects as part, a percentage, which, incidentally, far exceeds humanity’s contribution, of the bio-mass of our planet, I am grateful to all the spiders, birds, bats, my tin of Baygon and my cheap, but accurately effective, yellow, plastic swatter. which allows us to keep the creeping, humming, biting, winged, swarming hordes in check.
But to my blog.
We were first heading up to Canlaon to sleep there overnight then, the following day, together with the rest of Sione’s extended family; we were off to Calatrava, which is further north of Canlaon, for the wedding of Sione’s daughter Realyn to Andre.
It was for this journey and this reason, that Sione, like any good mother, had been packing, unpacking, re-arranging and repacking for the ten days previous to our departure.
What was going to make this particular journey more interesting than most was the arrival of tropical storm Butchoy. This early season low pressure area would not arrive here in the Visayas but even though passing well north of us it would trail its skirts of wind and rain across our path.
So we began our journey and rode with squeaky windscreen wipers through a rain-filled day, along the journey I have described in detail many times before and when we arrived in Canlaon, after a surprisingly quick journey, the car, previously polished and shining for the wedding, was camouflaged with mud.
It was on this first part of our journey that I saw the green hens, which have nothing to do with the malodorous witch. There they were about ten, maybe more, green hens I spotted as we sped past a small farmstead clutching the edge of the highway. Now green is not the natural colour of hens. I have been many places and seen many hens and none of them have been green. But, as I say, there they were. Green as bobs of lettuce. And then we were past them.
If Sione had seen them she never mentioned them so I broached the subject.
-I just saw some green hens.
-Yes.
-No, really. I did see some green hens.
-I know. I saw them.
-O.
I was quiet for a moment then,
-Why were they green?
- I don’t know. You want we go back and ask.
She is an expert in sarcasm. I chuckled.
-No. I just thought you might know. It is your part of the planet. I have seen no green hens in the UK.
-He dyed them.
-The owner?
-Yes. I think it is stop people stealing them.
-Aah. That makes sense.
Given that she was driving through some rather dreadful conditions her short remarks have to be understood as quite sufficient and polite.
And it did make a sort of sense. More sense than my first thoughts which were that the owner was a big fan of Dr Seuss and had been reading ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ and hoped to get the green eggs from his newly-coloured hens. Green ham is easy. Just leave a piece on the table for a couple of days. But Sione’s explanation was better. If the owner had been losing hens then dying them green would be a sort of deterrent for if they stole them now, in that colourful condition, and killed them to eat there would be green feathers around the thief’s house I imagine.
We sped on our wet way leaving Sam-I-Am behind us.
So that’s the green hens out of the way. The smelly witch comes later.
We slept at her parent’s house which has places in the walls for windows but no windows in the spaces. The wind was up and Butchoy was intrusively gusting with vigour, shaking loose tin roofs, chasing rain along the roofs and sweeping the sugarcane with a hissing sigh.
Nevertheless, we slept, although I awoke a couple of times to watch the curtains billow and lift and fall slowly back, bellying in the wind that shook the house. The house was newly built in a meadow, a pasture, inhabited by copiously shiteing cariboa, who littered the ragged pasture with wet plaps of cowflap.
Early in the wet morning, just before a grey dawn arrived, there was an explosion of heavy rain upon the roof, no slow increase in the rate but an eruption of slashing rain lashing the world, including our home, and that was it for the day. Rain, rain, rain- and more rain and a sweeping wind.
We got dressed for the wedding and made for an early start.
Sione’s Poppa had worn flip-flops all his life and possessed no real shoes. Jito found a pair for him and although they seemed at least four sizes too big for him, he wore them proudly. To give you some idea of the disparity between the size of his feet and the size of his shoes, I confidentally conject you could have put a live hamster into the toe of each shoe and if he had worn them all day the hamsters would have survived. They may have hibernated but they would have survived. You could here the clap-clap-clap of the shoes hitting the tiles as he moved about the house.
The journey to Calatrava was one of rain and mud and broken roads through fields of lashed sugarcane that bent and swayed as Butchoy toyed with them. We arrived more bedecked with mud than we had been when we arrived at Canlaon. Shamed we parked the car under a tree away from prying eyes.
For myself, I saw the splatters of mud more as a badge of honour betokening the effort we had made to be at the wedding.
We had come a long muddy way through rain, winds and green hens. Be proud.
There was a short stop at a sort of boarding house where everyone prepared themselves for the wedding which was to take place a further journey away.
I changed my shirt and waited and watched.
Sione was called by the photographer for a picture with her daughter ,who looked quite radiant, and a small man, who I guessed to be Sione’s ex, and I was proven right later. Sione stood for her picture but ignored him as studiously as he ignored her.
10am came nearer and the wedding was programmed to begin at EXACTLY 10. Sione’s sisters, unused to sophisticated cosmetics, smeared their eyes with eye shadow from Sione’s kit. They emerged looking quite ghastly and off we went.
Another swift journey over broken roads and we arrived at the church.
Sione was asked to sit next to her ex at the front and I was left alone and further back happily under a cooling fan as the service began.
The service was conducted entirely in the local language which was not Tagalog nor Cebuana but some other. I never understood a word of it. It went on and on and every now and then someone would come forward and give a bible to the pair, or a chalice, or cover them with a veil. There was a clap-clap-clap of over-sized shoes as Poppa and Momma came forward and bound the couple with the Cord of Undying Love ( a piece of white rope).
And so it went on with strange language and different comings and goings which were accompanied by keyboard and drum belting out music and a rich baritone singing parts of what I imagined were the mass, ringing and booming around the echoing church.
Happily for me it reached an end and we all departed for the reception which was rocky kilometres away. It was still raining. We stopped at the motel and changed back into travelling clothes and arrived at the civic hall just as the wedding breakfast was about to begin but first the speeches. Boy, do they enjoy speechifying here. The men were brief and succinct, thank goodness but the women would go on and on and all in the local language.
Sione had to sit at a special table where the bride and groom and their parents were to be seated raised above the hoi-polloi by the conventions of the day. Sione left a gap between herself and her ex. Later I noticed they exchanged a few words and Sione explained later she had told him that she had a new life now and that he should get a job and find a new wife. She left the table and joined me when she felt it reasonable and polite to do so.
Her ex left the top table also and came and sat with family but still well away from Sione. Someone came and told Sione that he was crying. Someone always cries at a wedding, I told her, its part of the day after all. Sione did not move she said quietly to me.”He has much to cry about.”
But enough about that part of the day.
We had a long hard journey back to Canlaon and fortunately the rain had stopped as we returned over the broken muddy ways and found a smooth road once again and two hours driving brought us safe home to Poppa’s house.
Later that night I opened my eyes and the curtains still billowed and rose and floated in the light from a small battery lamp. Like a scene from ‘Rebecca’.
We planned an early breakfast at Poppa’s stall and then our journey home could begin. I was drinking my coffee when I was enveloped by a stench of quite noisome intensity. I looked about me trying to locate the source and there,stood close behind me, was a hideous lank dirty creature. Straight out of ‘Snow White’( and I can still recall the terror of that moment in the film where the wicked queen turned into that hideous witch) Yuk! The Niffery! It was appalling. Sione mouthed ‘Witch.’ at me and I cowered. She was begging, of course. Now I have to say that to reach that level of stink one has to assiduously dedicate decades of unwashedness both to one’s body and the clothes one wears. She was scaled and her clothes were besmirched with unnameable stains. How she endured her condition is beyond understanding and if it had not been for the stench I could have pitied her. Jito bid here leave and she shuffled away on her stick thin legs but her smell lingered, a concoction of ill-kept hamster’s cage, old urine, stale sweat and other malodorous ingredients.
I took my coffee deeper into the stall and waited to leave.
The weather eased and we had a safe journey home but Sione insisted on taking the car to a car wash before finishing our journey.
So there you have it; a wedding, a tropical storm, green hens and a smelly witch - all as promised.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

So I have a tale to tell that does not involve the rain that lashes and floods Manilla, which lies well north of us here in Dumguete. I have explained in other blogs that tropical storms and typhoons follow a well established path that sweeps over the northern edge of the islands and gives Luzon a bashing although occasionally and not often they break from their normality and hit us here in Dumaguete. In the main we get a brief brushing from the skirts of the storms which invoves grey, turbulent skies, a lot of rain and some winds.
Sione greets such skies with a wise. ‘ Low pressure come.’
So we had some rain and winds that blew a tree down but nothing really, the tree being inherently weak . It was soon macheted into bundles of firewood by the little old lady with the bad legs, the broad gleaming smile and the flashing machete. “Good afternooooooon’ she sings at me when ever I go to watch her. By the way that elongated noooooon is common here not just the old lady but she does it with such a big smile that it provokes my smiles in return.
No. no. its not about storms that I write this blog. My tale is a rat’s tale. No, not a rat’s tail. A rat’s tale. Do pay attention.
It all began as Sione tidied her well-beloved car and discovered rat turds, she calls them rat pooh but sucks boo to the niceties these were turds. Diminutive, I accept, but turds nevertheless. Sod the niceties.
Sione insisted she could smell the rats and indeed they seem to have eaten some of my mail that I had kept in my glove box. She has a remarkably sensitive nose and if she smelt a rat you could be sure that there was one. I have no idea what a rat is supposed to smell like so I would not have thought ’rat’ even had I detected the odour.
We purchased some rat poison and laid out some poisoned sardines for them and a few days later we found the corpse of one stiff on the patio being ignored by the dogs who sort of slept around it.
Later there was another and the turds stopped so we thought the problem solved.
I got up early one morning a little later that week and discovered one of our armchairs out on the patio, tipped on end and the cloth on the bottom pulled away.
‘There is a rat in there.’ Sione explained when I queried the armchair. Her sensitive nose again proved accurate when a further rat corpse appeared on the patio.
Anyway we seemed at last to be well deratted and were driving home one evening when as she turned on the headlights one of the hazard lights appeared on permanently and only disappeared when she turned the headlights off. ‘ The rats cause that.’ she opined with authority. I qasked why she thought so. ‘They eat the wires.’ I thought that would cause all the lights to go out but did not argue.
We have found a friendly and efficient little mechanic and drove over to see him next morning.
He ducked inside the car and started tugging at cables and dismantling the lights.
Sione said, ’ It will be the rats, I think.’
The man started pulling bits of plastic out from behind the dashboard and chewed paper.This was followed by some eye shadow and bluetack.
‘I have been looking for that ‘ squeaked Sione grabbing itall and adding ,’ The rats are thieves.’
The man pulled some wires clear and poimted at them.The rats had chewed through the rubber /plastic on the wir and the bare wires had touched and welded together so that when we turned on the lights for night driving the hazard lightrecived a permanent flow of electricity .
‘I tell you it was rats.’ She looked at me proudly. I had to agree she was right.The technician also told us the rats cause many problems with airconditioning, blocking the vents and tubes feeding air around the dashboard.
So as I close this brief blog and watch the bats twitch and flicker across the pale cloudless evening sky and the radio mutters that heavy rain still assails a flooded Manilla I realise that when Sione tells me that she smells a rat she is being totally literal and intends no figurative implication.
I am enjoying the Olympics and although I applaud all our gold medals I am particularly proud of Yorkshire’s contribution and I hope all the old boys feel that swell of pride also.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I miss your postcards Arthur. Hope you and Sione are well. And hope Dumaguete is safe from Bopha.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 54-59

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Hello Gareth. Thank you for your kind interest in Arthur and, like myself and other close relatives in the UK, you might have been more than a little concerned about the typhoon which threatened the Philippines some 10 days ago. We received an Email from him dated 2nd Dec, informing us of typhoon 'Pablo' which was due to make landfall 'within 24 hours', and they were preparing survival kits in anticipation. Apart from details gleaned from brief reports here on TV and the internet we heard nothing from Arthur until Monday 10th, when we received an Email, sent from one of the few internet cafes 'up and running', advising us that they are fit and well. The Super Typhoon caused widespread damage in the area felling ancient trees and power lines leaving them without power for 6 days, and counting. So, no fridge, no fans, no PC, etc. They had been given a Storm Warning of Level 3. The house next door to them was blown down(ie 'flattened') They themselves, had minor roof damage which was repaired the following day. The Ferry Building at Siquior was uprooted, brought to Demuguete and deposited, gently, alongside the Ferry Terminal there. That's about all the information I can pass on to you at this stage apart from the news that, at the last count, some 900 plus people are known to have died during this storm. No doubt Arthur will post something more detailed on this site when conditions there return to somewhere near normal.

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

Current location (optional) Keighley

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thanks for that David. Everything is up and running now which speaks highly for the preparations for the Typhoon and warnings which were made well in advance. It arrived here at our place at 4pm Tuesdau 4t and stayed until 1 am the following morning. We experienced very little damage apart from lack of power and some damage to the roof. We ventured forth the next morning but could get nowhere as all roads were blocked by felled trees and downed power lines.maniny the ples holding up the wires damaged. They would have turned off the power as the typhoon hit I imagine for safety.
The 900 dead David mentions consists mainly of Fisehermen from Mindanao who working for a Fishing fleet were ordered out to sea despite warnings. Questions now asked why authorities, who have the power, did not ban any sailings. I will blog more later. Arthur Thanks for any concerns .

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thanks for the update Arthur. As you know util my retirement last Easter I was UK agent and distributor for a chemical plant in Mindanao ( an hours drive north of Cagayan, and somewhere opposite you I think. I hope the plant is still standing !

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Not much news from Cagayan Brian. I did hear they evacuated 2 baranguays Carmen and one other Much damage again.1/5th of banana plants destroyed on Mindanao The rebel army even felt compelled to declare a ceasefire. My blog will follow later.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines


It has been a while since my last blog and much has happened not only at the personal level but on a national level also.
First then let me explain that we have moved home from the compound where we had settled nearly three years ago into a house in Sibulan, or rather closer to Sibulan than to Dumaguete. However, although they are distinct townships I still see places like Sibulan and Valencia as suburbs of Dumaguete in that if I need to buy anything for the house, visit a hospital or find an ATM I have to go into Dumaguete.
Our move occurred because Sione’s brother. Jito, he of the appetite for dog and charred squid, had a property in Sibulan from his days at the Police College, which is just over the paddy fields from here. He had rented it to someone who had now vacated the property and he offered it to us rent free if we would look after the property and pay the electric and water bills.
The house had been left in a poor condition but a little work and all was righted and tidied. We needed to make the place secure in the first place because as Jito took us to see the house for the first time he discovered he had left the keys somewhere else but he went round the back and climbed into the house to open the doors. Security became priority number one!
It was around this time that I woke in the early hours shivering and trembling as I was invaded by some illness that laid me on my mattress for 8 days and robbed me of strength, appetite and interest. I cannot be sure what it was that made me so ill but it was not the dreaded dengue and, to be sure, it felt more like a very bad cold or a weaker form of flu. It was not malaria. Whatever, I was unable to be involved in any of the activities normally associated with house moving and the burden fell upon Sione entirely. To her lasting credit she never wavered but did it all, decorating, collecting and ordering then moving bits and pieces, supervising security measures at our new home as a fence was built, walls raised by a couple of hollow blocks higher, sealing gaps in the house walls and any niche which she thought might allow invasion and all the time nursing me. She is a titan. On the due date she bundled me into the car along with the dogs that seemed aware that something different was afoot and did not struggle overmuch. Indeed Bobby was happy to watch the passing scene through the side window.
As a matter of interest Bobby was ill, off-colour really, no appetite, for about two weeks back in October but then recovered to appear as leaner more muscular dog now taller than Snowie and before we raised the walls at the new house capable of clearing them in a bound.
When we arrived at our new home and all ties with our other home had been severed and nothing left behind, Sione dumped me onto my new bed and left me to recover.
I did so, but as I say I was greatly weakened and I had lost some weight. I did some research and found my new weight and BMI were now ideal for my height. At the time I write now I am well recovered and fit and well. We are nearer the sea now and Sione insisted on taking me there every day because bathing there would give me strength. I did not refuse. The sea was warm and laved me gently but I doubt its strength-giving properties.
Christmas begins early here and we have regular visits by kids singing “We wish you a merry Xmas” and “Jingle bells”. The shops are teeming and brightly lit with plastic Christmas Trees glistening with plastic snow and decorations and strings of lights decking and festooning everything. This is a deeply religious country as I have observed before from thanking God for the relief of a fart to regular, every 30 minutes, fervent pleas being made, by radio, to God, Master and Creator of the Universe, that Typhoon Pablo takes as little life as possible. More of Pablo later.
What I find incongruous is how this devout, intense religiosity has allowed the West to define their Christmas from the singing of Jingle Bells when not one child could describe a ‘one horse sleigh’ or even explain snow, that they allow fir trees to stand in their homes when the first real fir is a thousand miles north of them, that the decorating even of trees is of pagan origin coming from the tree worshippers of ancient Germanic races.
At the very end of November we began to receive warnings of a tropical storm developing to the south of the Philippines. The authorities had learned much from the chaotic response to Sindong last December and identified ‘unpreparedness’ as being a major factor in the number of deaths. Evacuation of threatened areas began and here in Dumaguete over the few days available before typhoon Pablo arrived, there was a problem of where to house evacuees since there were ten thousand athletes in the city from all over the Negros so all the schools were filled with the athletes. Baranguay halls churches and Universities were called into help. The mayor authorized the purchase of rain wear, radios, tools, emergency lighting and all the paraphernalia one would expect. Government officers were instructed to deposit their spouses and children in safe places and report for duty. There was a continuous stream of exhortations, information and advice both of the progress of the typhoon and the level of preparations and readiness for its arrival.
The tracking and timing of Pablo was impressive and when we were told that the typhoon would hit Dumaguete at 4pm, Tuesday, 4th December we were already well prepared having battened down everything that we felt might be moved.
Sindong, last December, caused most damage by torrential rainfall and flash flooding but Pablo was more wind than rain. Rain there was but not of the measure of Sindong.
As we paid one last visit to town to corner some candles and tins of food, although we already had plenty, a few drops of fine rain spotted the windscreen of our car and that is how typhoons signal their arrival with tiny messengers and then breezes pick up speed and there are buffeting gusts and trees sway and shake. Loose metal sheets clatter and tug to be free. One piece tore itself loose and flew through the air to decapitate a man struggling home in Siquiore.
Then the lights went out.
I am not sure but I do think that the off switch was thrown before any landlines were down as a safety measure and to avoid storm damage using the power to start fires.
Incidentally as I watched repairs of the downed power lines in the days after Pablo parted with Dumaguete I realized that the slender power lines were not to blame for being downed it was the swags of thick cable that carry broadband and telephones from the various providers that decked the cable routes and swung thickly tangled and the gusts would use these thicker cables to rip down the posts carrying the power.
At one point Sione began to fear for the house as the full might of Pablo hit us and she got into the car and drove into the dark. We got about 200 metres from the house when she spotted downed cables and posts blocking our normal way. A motor bike came out of the dark and she enquired which way she could go. The rider said there were trees down all over the area and no way out that he knew. We turned back home as Sione decided it was safer to be in the house than out there with the world being torn apart.
As we returned I noticed many men out under awnings seemingly watching the storm which for a moment seemed a bit silly. Then we watched as the house next to ours shook as Pablo huffed and puffed. The house acquired a slight tilt from the upright. Pablo huffed and puffed with gusto and the house leaned at an angle. Pablo huffed fiercely and puffed mightily and blew the house down. It was literally a heap of tangled leaf, wood and plastic sheet. In no way did it resemble a blown down house. Then I realized the watching men were outside because they feared the typhoon might blow their house down. It was significant that there was no one in the destroyed house since the occupants had been evacuated to the safety of the baranguay hall.
Our house has a leaf roof and this is put together by tying dried leaf to a bamboo strip and this strip is then tied in place to stronger timber slats and hinged there and overlapped as we overlap out tiles and slates. When the wind blows directly at such roofing the individual pieces fly up on the hinge and the weather comes in. As Pablo got rougher and rougher with us these hinged pieces would rear up with a clatter and as the gust weakened slam back with a wet slap. It was quite frightening and although all our possessions were under plastic sheeting we got some of the rain that did fall and we had momentary glimpses of the noisy turbulent dark. We did not lose our roof although we had some slight damage that was easily mended. I think the roofing is designed in the way it is to let the wind through in this way much as the coconut palms survive typhoons by having the slatted leaves that close and swing down-wind with strong fibrous trunks that allow sway and avoid breakage. Sometimes the heavy rains soften the ground around the palm and the wind can uproot and blow them over, rarely do they break.
Sione was worried for the canopy that covered the car and was paddling round the yard adding wire and tightening rope. She wore a hooded rain-jacket and the hood was tied so tightly around her face that it was pinched together. She worked furiously in the dark with a small torch and then called me out as she prepared to move the car into a better and, to her safer, place. I think she wanted to believe she was doing something to mitigate the effects of Pablo but I could see no advantage in moving. A typhoon in full throat is no place for a debate so I went to help just then there was the crack of breaking wood and the crackling hiss of tearing sheet as Pablo took the canopy and draped it over our fence. I moved the broken pole to a safe place and Sione gave Pablo best and left the sheet hanging over the fence.
We went to bed and I slept fitfully as steadily the winds, the howling the clattering of the roof declined and then I noticed that the opposite slope of our roof was now responding to the gusts in the manner I described earlier which meant that the wind had shifted and that Pablo was moving off elsewhere.
What I report now is the absolute truth and the coincidence I see purely as that - a coincidence.
Pablo was indeed moving away but still gusted peevishly. I slept and was startled awake by a gust that clattered our hinged leafage. In the pale light of a guttering candle I spoke into the gloom, “For f---‘s sake, pack it in now.”
And that was the last we heard of Pablo.
It was 1 am on Wednesday, 5th December. Pablo had been with us for 9 hours.
During the waiting for the arrival of Pablo we were told via the radio that Dumaguete had been given a storm warning 3.
IMPACT OF THE WINDS:
• Many coconut trees may be broken or destroyed.
• Almost all banana plants may be downed and a large number of trees may be uprooted.
• Rice and corn crops may suffer heavy losses.
• Majority of all nipa and cogon houses may be unroofed or destroyed and there may be considerable damage to structures of light to medium construction.
• There may be widespread disruption of electrical power and communication services.
• In general, moderate to heavy damage may be experienced, particularly in the agricultural and industrial sectors.

All of these happened although the buko palm in our yard remained intact
We spent the next morning tidying the house and yard. Since we came to San Miguel we have found a handy man that can climb buko palms, scramble on roofs, heighten walls, build fences etc.
His name is Bobby. Sometimes my beautiful dog Bobby comes into the house or barks at passing strangers. I will shout “Bobby, get out.” or “Behave yourself, Bobby. “ in a harsh commanding voice. This startles the man Bobby who once stood up to go and I had to tell him I meant the dog.
We ventured out on the Friday and found the road by the airport which had a magnificent avenue of mighty boled and stalwart, thickly sinewed branched giants. I had opined that these trees were very old and watched with interest as people would come and remove the layers of thin dry bark; I reckon they used it as kindling.
Five of these giants had been felled. So sad. In the two days since the typhoon the trunks had been sawed through and dragged to one side to allow traffic to pass through. Already the inevitable scavengers were hacking at branches and carting it off for use or sale, who knows. The thick trunks remained though -too heavy to move. What interested me was they all had a blood red circular core and this was surrounded by a snow white outer part of the trunk.. I am not sure but I think a tree increases itself from the centre pushing out with each year’s new growth so the blood red core would be new growth or rather, more recent growth.
As we have passed them each day since these huge Yule logs are slowly being removed and those that remain have been skinned of their bark and their smooth white insides are revealed.
We followed the national highway into the city and noted Cang’s new store which days before celebrated its first anniversary had had its entrance canopy bent and the spark of electro cutters were removing it where a scaffold protected those that entered the store.
It was the same all the way into town. Long ways free of damage then a fallen tree wedged against a wall or being chopped into kindling be flashing machetes, a fence toppled a house toppled. Pablo left his mark everywhere.
I have mentioned the avenue of trees by the airport and there is a similar avenue along the front of the Boulevard.
Seven of these great shady giants had been toppled and were being sawn up even as we were passing displaying their ruddy cores. I have reported elsewhere the terminal building purported to have been blown there from Sicquior. Urban Myth! A lie, for which I apologise. It was blown across about 100 metres of water from the wharf at Dumaguete harbor. Still a considerable piece of damage but I had found it hard to believe it being deposited so appropriately, as it had been after a long sea voyage.
We were 8 days without power during which time the city ran out of candles and we learned from Bobby how to make a lamp using a container, oil, salt and twisted cotton wool as a wick. They said the salt was to prevent the oil catching alight in the container and restricting the flame to the wick. I a not sure if that is so but I did find the salt thickened the oil and allowed the wick to stand up and not fall sideways. They worked splendidly and Sione made eight of them so we even had light in the toilet or what they politely call the Comfort Room or CR.
So no light, no TV, no broadband, no computer, no fans, no fridge, no ice.
We made occasional trips out to find Ice to keep the freezer cold and protect the contents. There was little available but we always managed to find some.
During the day if we had not been into town I would lay on my bed sweating and staring at the wall. I would walk out now and again with the dogs to note any progress in restoring power and first the road blocking posts were sawn and removed then slowly new posts were fit and on one return journey as dusk descended on the 8th day we noticed a man working on a terminal box and conjected that power would soon return to our darkling plain. We were right. We rode into a village aglow with the restored light and the return of the carol singers.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Just a rider to the main blog I have posted.
I have over the few years I have been posting here referred to earthquakes, floods, high winds, gales and typhoons and to hazardous journeys over difficult roads. The Philippines are in a hazardous part of our earth. Part of the ring of fire and in the natural path of typhoons so these things are par for the country, remarkable only when they do not occur.
I am not heroic. There are times when I have been really frightened of the possibilities in a set of circumstances. I am grateful for having had the companionship of a resourceful, intelligent and brave partner in my adventures. I am also grateful that despite all the hazards I have remained remarkably unharmed.
In truth, despite all, I would not exchange one second of my time here.
Have a good Christmas, everyone and look forward with hope into the New Year, Arthur Seeley

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

And best Christmas and New Year wishes to you and Sione also Arthur.
As you know I have visited the Philippines many times on business,alas now at an end. I greatly miss the friendly spirit of the Philippine people. Their resolve in difficult times is tremendous.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Happy 80th Birthday, Arthur!! Lang may yer lung reek!!

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

Current location (optional) Keighley

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Hi Arthur, I am advised that the quotation should read " Lang may yer lum reek". I wrote it down as I heard(misheard)it. One never stops learning, does one? Thanks Terry; and Arthur, 'look after that reeking lum'. David

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

Current location (optional) Keighley

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Happy birthday from me too, as a Philippinophile ( I wish I could have done one more trip) and one who always enjoys your 'postcards'

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

David Seeley
Hi Arthur, I am advised that the quotation should read " Lang may yer lum reek". I wrote it down as I heard(misheard)it. One never stops learning, does one? Thanks Terry; and Arthur, 'look after that reeking lum'. David


Note from Auld Reekie: yes, it's lum (as in chimley)!

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

thank you everyone for your kind wishes on my birthday. Life continues and I keep fit and well and can still out walk younger Filipinos. I am at the moment collecting my blogs, editing and tidying and moving in illustrations to make it a readable whole without losing the informality of the of the blog form. Then also collecting my poetry and looking to Kindle to publish the same. I will blog later but all rather mundane just now, no storms, no flash floods, no typhoons, no earthquakes, in fact, nothing to laugh at all.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

In which case Arthur, you might as well visit the zoo

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

We havent heard from you for a while Arthur ! I enjoy your postcards (partly because I have visited the Philippines several times). Hope you are OK and can drop us line soon !

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thank you Brian. I am well and will post a blog quite soon now. Thaks for your concern and interest.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I have not written for some time but I am fit and well and content with my lot.
So summer is ending here and the elections are over, the posters are all taken down and the children are returning to school.
During the election the fence by the airfield was festooned with a billowing, fluttering pageant of posters all asking for your vote. Processions of vehicles supporting different candidates jammed the flow of traffic while t-shirts, balloons, combs and other gifts were showered upon the crowds. Sione’s parents had their bus fare from Canlaon paid by one candidate. They have no difficulties with buying votes here.
Summer here has meant a seemingly endless sucession of clear blue skies where the sun climbs to its zenith and people have no shadows. Cars cast only rectangular shadows under their frames.
It has been searingly hot and folk look always for such shade as can be found beneath trees or duck into air-conditioned stores.
It is too hot to go swimming except at about half past five as the sun dips down towards the high volcanic ridge.
We found a good place to swim or lay in the shallow warm waters. The sea is a mill pond and along the long stretch of beach there are a few working the waters for shell fish, some gathering sea-grass for salads, some, like us, bathing lazily, some just messing about in boats.
The smoke of evening fires rises lazily in blue-grey columns until, clearing the trees, a gentle movement of air, not quite a breeze, drifts it slowly, threading it through the buko palms and dispersing inland to add to the faint blue haze.
In front of us the island of Siquior looms like a great blue-backed whale, and , where the beach turns out of sight, a glimpse of Apo.
The sea is a glory of dazzling, dancing light and the blue sky slowly dims as the night approaches and a moon, a shaving away from being full , sails slowly up the sky, chasing the sun away.
We return to the car and as we drive back to our home we look away from the sea up into the Cuernos de Negros mountain ridge behind which the sun sets. The view of the Cuernos from our new home is different from my old viewing arbor in the wilderness of the lost garden. We have a wider view and can see way back up the ridge towards Bais City, although many kilometers away. I may have mentioned n earlier blogs that the coast road we follow to Canlaon allows a magnificent view of Kan-laon Volcano as we leave Bais City even though the volcano is still perhaps 100 kilometres away.
The sunsets are beautiful. The gradual fading of the sky through the spectrum is entrancing. I find them so although Sione seems singularly unimpressed. I keep saying ‘Look at that sky’ and she grunts at me.
We always seem to leave at the same time for the short journey home. The sun sets until it is just a brilliant white sliver above the ridge, brilliant white in a burning orange sky which slowly fades into a rich wine red and then fades again into night. Behind the moon sails over the dark blue sky and stars come one by one. Strange night skies here where Orion is upside down and the rest of the stars are strangers to me, brilliant and unpolluted by city lights, but strangers. If there are any old friends up there I cannot recognize them.
So summer is ending, has ended, it is still stiflingly hot but now we have rain, mostly at night or early morning. The rattle on the roof and the cool breeze that shakes the buko palms heralds the arrival. We will have the occasional storm now before the arrival of the typhoon season later in the year.
We have been looking after Sione’s Poppa for a few weeks. He has had a trapped nerve in his hip and been unable to walk properly. There are no decent doctors in Canlaon and Sione insists that the locals only go to the hospital there to die. On our journeys to Canlaon we always pass the Canlaon ambulance dashing to Dumaguete Provicial hospital. We took Poppa to the Provincial Hospital but it was terribly depressing. They are renovating the interior ans there was an appalling mess of rubble around and all the wards were closedand people were lying in the corridors, head to foot. Now it is the cutom in the Philipines for the family to come into the hospital with the patient and stay with them so the place was like a war zone. It was insufferably hot and close and the smell of sweat and stale urine was disgusting.
So we brought him to home after one night when his tests and x-rays were finished. He is quite well now but still a little unsteady even though he is without pain. He weeps occasionally in gratitude because Sione looks after him with loving attention and since he has spent much time laid on his back I told her to beware of bed sores so she massages his back and buttocks with alcohol a few times a day. Lucky sod! He has not been eating in Canlaon just chewing tobacco leaf all day. Now he has no leaf and eats bread in between meals. Bread and bananas. He does not seem to get any fatter but he is certainly happier. He was grumpy and ill tempered before now he smiles and sings and talks to the dogs. We are taking him home to Canlaon this weekend to see his family and friends but Sione will not let him stay there until she is sure he is safe to be left alone. Of course, Momma is there but she will be running the stall.
So basically that is my news for now. Life goes on and I am happy here. If my blogs are sparse and infrequent now it is because I would be repeating myself if kept up the flow.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thanks for that Arthur, no we don't expect too regular 'postcards' but its good to hear all is well with you.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I had not intended to blog again so soon but I have a strange tale to share with you.
I explained in my last blog that we were taking Sione’s father back to Canlaon for him to see his family and friends. He also asked if we could stop at a cemetery for him to visit his parent’s grave in his home town which is about 60 kilometres from Canlaon but not out of our way.
We wended our way through some back streets and found the local Necropolis. A long winding stairway led up from where we parked the car. I chose to stay with the car not wishing to intrude nor tackle the stairway.
I had been sat quietly in the car for about 10 minutes when a man and woman came down the steps. The woman had a small bundle of dead weeds and grass in her hand. She hurried down the last few steps and placed the grass against the catafalque immediately in front of the car. He gave her his lighter and she tried, without effect, to light the grass. She left it where she had placed it and they left. I was puzzling about this when two young girls accompanying a lady who walked with a stick very doddering came down a smaller set of steps off to my right. They passed in front of my car and one of the , looking about her, suddenly darted off and grabbed the bundle of grass. She said something to the old lady who shook her head and the girl passed behind the car and placed the bundle against a gate.
I was then left alone with the mystery of the grass when I noticed the crucifix which Sione had hung from her rear view window was spinning and swinging. I was sat quite still, there was no breeze and no outside vibrations except for a young man bouncing a basket ball about 25 metres away. I held my hands up to stop any breeze that might have been there but it still swung and span.
I sat there puzzling over this for about five minutes until Sione and father returned.
I asked Sione to listen to me carefully for I needed to understand things. I told her about the man and woman and the grass and she laughed then the girls and the old lady eventually picking up the grass to show her. She laughed and grabbed it with glee. She took it off to one side gathered a few dead leaves and soon had a small smoky fire going. She wafted the smoke about and returned to the car.
She then explained that if you visited the grave of a dead relative and did not light a small smoky fire the spirits would follow you home.
Ah, I said, that might explain the crucifix. Half joking.
She looked at me with wide eyes.
What about the crucifix?
I told her it had been swinging and spinning until she had lit the fire. She looked at the crucifix now quite still.
She told her father about what I had said. He too had wide eyes.
Now I have told the tale exactly as it happened. I did not think then and do not think now that the crucifix and the grass are in any way connected. Pure coincidence as far as I a concerned but still…

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I went to Canlaon this weekend. It was for the most part an uneventful journey but as always there were singular incidents that bear the mention.
Most of my readers will know of the road up the volcano, a long and furiously winding way and even when breasted, the body of the volcano still looms and soars , hiding this time in a veil of grey cloud. In between the massive cone, the highest point in the Central Visayas, there are hundreds of lesser cones which I cannot explain, but they barely seem to be small volcanoes, or the remnants thereof. Nevertheless the road winds and bends and curves its way up to the fertile plateau. Along the edges of the road where the land pushes back at alevel before rising again in steep banks beside the road there is sugar cane growing . One wonders how it is harvested –but it is.
Beside the road this journey there were many lorries. Huge cane carrying monster with some 16 wheels. These are generally stacked very high with the cane in Canlaon before the steep dive down to Vallehermosa where it is processed. They storm down the hill and many times we have passed those that failed to take a corner or were tipped by their over-burdened load.
But back to my tale. On the return journey down the hill we approached a corner where there was a warning traffic triangle in the road.
“ Accident.” Sione breathed quietly.
We rounded the bend and there lurched over on its side leaning against the metal shield that there are at each precipice edge and bend was a huge cane lorry. There was , of course, the normal crowd of children and rubber-neckers , as well as the men moving the toppled cane back to a parked lorry which was collecting the salvaged load.
There is something pathetic, sad and vulnerable about seeing one of these giants thus humbled. Like, I imagine seeing a dead elephant or a beached blue whale. They do drive dangerously and I can imagine that if one has made the journey safely many times one can become blasé and careless.
We passed o our way and I wodered about the driver was he OK?Alive but scred? Or what?
Further on down the road I saw a man dragging a dead dog behind him at the end of a thin rope. I assumed it was dead because it did not repond to the treatment.
“ Another accident? “ I suggested.
“ No he kill it and will eat it.” Sione said.
“ How do you know. Perhaps he take it for a walk and it died and he has not noticed yet.”
My attempts at humour are never understood. Apart from the fact that he was dragging the corpse by its tail.
“ I don’t understand.”
“Never mind. How do you know he killed it?”
“ I see wound in its neck. They lasso dog and then push knife into its neck.”
“ Not nice.”
“ It was nice fat dog. His family will eat well. And his neighbours.”
“Ok, Ok. Concentrate on the road.”
Silence prevailed for a while as we negotiated the bends and rode out into the flat coastal plains.
“ They will eat the skin as well.” She offered.
I did not reply but wound the window down and let the cool sea breeze in.
That was it really except for the other dead dog that no one wanted laid motionless in the road.
“ That is accident.” She ruled.
Oh, and then the hen.
We were entering the home straight when from someone’s yard this
Kama- kazi hen dashed out with a wild fluster of wings and stretching legs under our racing car. It emerged with a vehement torrent of indignant clucks, unscathed, shaken but not stirred.
As a passing note of interest , some of you will know that there is trouble in Mindanao, to the south of us, where some muslim rebels have taken hostages and tried to march to Zamboanga Town Hall and fly their flag of independence. !00 were killed and captured yesterday and the army, navy and police force is there in some numbers.
Jito, Sione’s police sergeant brother, texted Sione that they have intelligence it might spill over into Dumaguete so we must be careful and not go out too much.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

As always Arthur I enjoyed your post I continue to take an inteerst in your adoptive country even though I am now retired and unlikely to visit again.
There has always seemed to be some sort of trouble in Mindanao/Zamboanga.
I hope it doesn't spread to Dumaguete, and wish you the best of luck. People like that can be so unpredictable.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Arthur, is there a taboo in the Philippines against the number 3 similar to our superstition about 13? If so do you know why?

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 54-59

Current location (optional) Denholme

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Gareth , I have asked around and there does not seem to be any taboo on the number three but I will keep my eyes and ears open. You will understand that before modern forms of transport came here the various islands developed separate cultures and languages and customs so there may well be such a taboo elsewhere in the islands but not here in the Visayas

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

During the super typhoon Pablo, the house next door blew down. I was stood outside watching Sione struggle with a furious tarpaulin that struggled violently to be free of its ropes when in three slow lurches the house crumpled and piled in a disorderly mess of planks and sheets and bits of tin.
The next morning the family who had left to shelter in the baranguay hall returned. The lady launched into a screaming fit not at the crumpled house but someone had stolen her pots and pans.
Over the days I watched as the pile was untangled and bits and bobs were salvaged and slowly a smaller house grew where the old one had been. The man left for Manila, to earn some money. The lady cooked in the open and began a garden, growing vegetables.
Then the lady disappeared. Enquiries revealed she was in hospital with epilepsy.
She returned later but no longer seemed to be cooking but had shouting ‘do’s” with no one. Last week she began throwing stones at our dogs and ranting. Sione took steps to protect the car. Then I saw her attack a man with a stick in her garden. Later as we were going out towards the main road in the car we saw her dressed in what appeared to be her best clothes walking through puddles.
Sione said she thought she had lost her mind.
When we returned there was a crowd near her home.
She was dead.
A short, sad tale.
We had only witnessed snap shots of what must have been a chaotic last journey.
Now as I write if I go to our front door I can see her white coffin, lit by candles and small fairy lights.
For the last three days there has been a continuous vigil , night and day, as people from the village come and sit in her garden, chat or sit quietly. Sione took some coffee and bread around earlier. She came back, “ I did not look at the body. It would scare me and I would dream.”
The vigil will last till Wednesday morning when they will walk the coffin to church and to cemetary.
They have some strange customs here, apart from this marathon ‘wake’. They will not sweep the floor otherwise her spirit will tangle with the broom. When viewing they will take care no tears fall on the coffin as it would disturb her spirit. They put a white curtain with white flowers in the window to indicate they are in mourning. Much like we drew the curtains in our street. The lights and candles remain on during the day. Durnig the night if I ‘surface’ from my slumbers I can hear the continuous hum of conversation.
I will not go to the funeral although Sione says she might.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Lovely, but sad story Arthur.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Arthur. I am sorry to hear a new and rather violent typhoon is reaching Central Philippines. I am sure all of us here hope you , Sione and your friends are able to keep safe, and we wish you the best of luck.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Hi Brian (and any other interested ex-students) Just to let you know that Arthur contacted family and friends on (their) Thursday evening to inform us that he and Sione, had battened down everything worth battening down and moved into a hotel 'for the duration'. Everything of value had been loaded up in the car and off they went. Ample warning of Typhoon 'Yolande' had been given and as Arthur said," you can replace furniture etc., but you cannot replace life" The hotel has Wi-Fi so we expect and hope, to have some positive news over the weekend, when the typhoon is projected to have moved on to Vietnam. David

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

Current location (optional) Keighley

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

David, thanks for letting us know that. As you are aware I have had a long standing interest in the Philippines having visited many times and done business acting as agent for a chemical company in Mindanao.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Just to let you know that, on checking my Emails this morning(7.30am), Arthur has left a short message, posted 8 hours ago, that they have survived the storm and will send more details later. Should be an interesting blog to look forward to!!

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

Current location (optional) Keighley

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I cannot think that David, who is quite a bright lad, could have missed that, Brian. Good to know that Arthur and Sion are safe, so thanks, David.

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

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

The worst hit town seems to be Tacloban, about 170 miles North east of where Arthur and Sione are. They are estimating in excess of 1000 dead there.
But there is also a lot of flooding on Cebu Island which is nearer to them.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

We had ample warning of the Super typhoon and made plans to survive. This involved gathering furniture into piles and plastic sheeting it against the possibility of a lost roof We put our movable valuables in the car, fed the dogs and found a stocky little hotel. The room had a comfortable bed, air-conditioning, hot shower that worked, television and a view. We sealed off in our cocoon and waited for Friday when Yolanda was due to make landfall on Leyte Sione liked the room so much she wished we could have a super-typhoon every week.
I kept track of Yolanda through my internet and noted it would landfall at Samar or Leyte and then track West-northwest across central Visayas. This track would carry the eye away from us but Yolanda had a 600 mile diameter so we could expect high winds and rain. Yolanda came and went and left us safely intact
Yolanda swirled her petticoats and felled two trees, blew up a transformer but little real damage here. The devastation in her path is coming together now and 10000( ten thousand) are feared dead in Leyte Province alone, Tacloban has been 80% destroyed, bodies in the streets, widespread looting as people scavenge for food, which is understandable, but which escalates into televisions and radios. Complete lack of power, cars piled on top of each other by 10 metre storm surges.
So our little adventure proved a bit of a pussy cat really although the devastation further afield is catastrophic and as yet only vaguely understood.
As it appeared to quieten Friday afternoon Sione went out on the motorbike to check the house, five minutes away. She returned very quickly her journey unfinished. The trees were being bullied by the wind, she was the only one on the road, She was frightened. She went again later and reported that there was no damage to anything in our home so our plan had been happily a success/ Of course not everyone has a Sione to care for them,She did all the hard work preparing and continues to enjoy my admiration and gratitude. I am stranfely proud to have been in the presence of the world's most powerful typhoon ever recorded, albeit peripherally, and survived. More later. Thanks for your concerns.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thanks Arthur, Pleased that you werent affected too much. I always realised it was going to pass some miles north of you but expected you would get a substantial fall out from it . But I am saddened that so many Filipinos have perished and my thoughts are with their families, and particularly those who are homeless.
A massive clearing job for the Government now.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thanks for your concerns. The clean up has begun but the logistics are severely clogged by enormous swathes of debris and fallen trees. Dead bodies everywhere in Tacloban but that is a city there are many remote communities which have not yet been heard from. Estancia on Iloilo was 100% destroyed, completly and utterly swept from the earth.There are probably many more like that particularly coastal villages.
Food cannot get through to many places and where it would be local government that responded to this they themselves are hampered by lack of transport and communications. They are a resilient breed the Filipinos and come earthquake and typhoon they will survive.
Yolanda chilled the seas sucking cooler water up from the depths so a Tropical Depression formed off Mindanao is likely to remain such and not develop before making landfall. We will see.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Some images and stories coming out of the storm- wrecked islands

This little boy
a graze under his right eye,
a soiled red t-shirt,
dazed and puzzled beyond reasoning,
eyes glazed with dismay
wanders through his crippled broken world,
looks for his lost parents.

This weeping father carries
with loving gentleness
the body of his small drowned daughter,
his tiny broken doll
the swung arms
he loved, dangle.

This old lady
her mouth and nose hidden
under a scalf
to mask the stench
of the bloated bodies she passes,
looks for water.

A soldier contemplates
the monstrous sculpture
of a bus upon a car
and a ship upon
the bus.
How?
What dreadful power
has placed them so?

A citizen seeks
to understand
how his burgeoning green paradise
Is stripped of every leaf
and become a desert of debris
where buko palms
stand like broken umbrellas.

A food warehouse collapses
eight looters killed-
all for a bowl of rice.

A miracle at the airport.
A young pregnant woman
watches Yolanda wash
her grandmother , mother,
and her children
out to sea
she swims
holds on to a pole for two hours
drags herself ashore
walks several kilometers in bare feet
hitchhikes to the airport
and in a ramshackle make-do clinic
after five hours labour
gives birth to a baby girl, Bea Joy
named after her grandmother Beatrice
lost in the storm.

It is a terrible thing we watch
- the people here are resilient
and indomitable
but they do need help.
With courage and patience and skill
they will begin again
they will rebuild their lives
their homes
their cities and villages
and ravaged municipalities
but they need the wherewithal
for Yolanda left them nothing.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Lovely writing Arthur, even though it paints a harrowing picture, we here cannot really imagine what its like for the Filippino people

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Arthur, you've gone silent on us...

Hope all is well,

Doug

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Silent? An unusal state for me. Thanks fpr your concern but truly I am fit and well and content. Sione's father died late last year and so somethings have become becalmed. A Low Pressue Area has been skulkimg off the coast of Leyte giving us unseasonal cold weather and grey skies. It turned into a Tropical depression and we all watched it with some trepidation but it degraded back to LPA and yet lingers in the same place, give or take 50 kilometers. We remain wary with Typhoon Yolanda still clear in our memories as Tacloban seeks to create normality from the wreckage.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Hi Arthur, By the time you read this it will probably be your 81st birthday, in which case 'Many Happy Returns of the Day'. Enjoy! David

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

Current location (optional) Keighley(Still)

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

thank you David. In fact it is the 3rd here tomorrow is my birthday but to be honest I have stopped counting. Regards Arthur

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

So like us you look forward to Christmas except we have to survive something first. The Super Typhoon Hagupit ( What an ugly name) has entered our area of responsibility and become Super Typhoon " Ruby".
She follows pretty much the same track as " Yolanda" that flattened Tacloban last year and caused 3000 deaths.
We will have rain here and some strong winds but it will generally pass north of us. It is expected to make landfall Saturday night/Sunday morning.
Sione has bought batteries. for torch and radio, lighters, water , extra food, topped up with petrol, packed two emergency packs in case we have to move.President Aquino has said in any one is not prepared for Ruby they have only their selves to blame.As a matter of interest stores in Tacloban have closed because they have sold everything.
If you do not hear from me for a few days do not fear the worse. There will be inevitable power losses and broadband down.
See you all later.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Good to hear from you Arthur. Hope all works our well and you and Sione keep safe.
If its not too early , have a Great Christmas and Happy New Year.

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Thank you Brian and the same to you. I think we have taken all the sensible precautions available to us.Sione is worried about storm surges but I try to explain the storm is coming from the wrong direction to threaten us with that feature.

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

I guess the worst has passed now, and the storm weakened. Please do let us know how it was for you

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

Current location (optional) Wirral

Re: Postcards from the Philippines

Well she came and rioted and razed and lashed her way across the Central Visayas before gathering herself to bid farewell to Manila. How do I know? I watched it on television because she never came near us here. Not one drop of rain. Not enough wind to turn a leaf. No brown out. Ruby was a pussy cat. Of course I am not disappointed. Ruby was a right bitch but not here. Only 27 deaths nationwide but that's because one million were evacuated to centers of safety and food and shelter. It took over two days but they emptied Tacloban of families. 11000 families and that's a lot of people. They gave plenty of warning in terms of preparation time. They had rolling stocks of food and material distributed over the track of the typhoon. . They had learned from 'Yolanda " Regular radio reports and television updates.The Philippines could teach the world after her example during this typhoon. As Aquino said , if anyone was unprepared this time they had only themselves to blame.

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