Book Stuff – Page 6 – Red Branch Chronicles

An Irish Childhood

I grew up during the mid fifties, sixties and seventies in an Irish family of six people on the outskirts of Dublin where the weekly menu followed a regularity which didn’t dull. Meals – breakfast, lunch and tea – were simple, quick, filling and always eaten!

Breakfast was invariable – bread, butter and Chivers orange marmalade, Kelloggs Cornflakes and lashings of tea, strong enough so that the spoon could stand up in it, as my father used to say. No tea bags for him – the sweepings off the factory floor, he used to refer to them disparagingly – but rich, dark Lyon’s breakfast tea. Sunday broke the monotony because that was when my father would cook breakfast for my mother, my brother and two sisters. That in itself was another invariable ritual. Good Galtee back rashers, Hafner’s homemade pork sausages, two eggs fried in the sizzling bacon fat, sliced black and white puddings and half a fried tomato, each plate kept hot in the oven while the final touch was prepared – a thick “doorstep” a slice of high loaf, fried in the remaining fat in the pan and liberally sprinkled with Lea and Perrin’s Worceshestshire Sauce. Not too healthy a breakfast, perhaps but it was only once a week.

Lunch was the big meal of my day. I’d come home from school by 12:50 to always find my mother in her tiny, cramped scullery (she always referred to it as the “kitchenette”) cooking our midday meal which I would wolf down before rushing out the back door to catch the 1:40 bus back to school.

Monday lunch was another fry, supplemented with baked beans but without the fried bread. Looking back now, I suppose it was just to use up whatever my father hadn’t cooked for Sunday breakfast. Tuesday was par-boiled sausages rolled up in mashed potato with butter and milk, lightly dusted with flour and then baked in a hot oven and served with fresh green peas from the garden, seasons permitting. Wednesday was steak and kidney pie, with a sopping crust of baked pastry supported in the middle of the casserole dish with a curious little Pyrex glass dome, which I have never seen since.

Thursday was lightly boiled eggs, chopped up and stirred into creamy mashed potatoes, garnished with parsley and served with a thick slab of calves liver, fried onions with baked beans on the side. Friday was always the same because that was when Granny came for lunch and tea. Friday also meant fish and chips, but certainly not take-away ones. I’d peel the spuds on a Thursday night and leave them soaking in a large pot of cold water and then sometime on Friday morning, my mother would labouriously chip them by hand and cook them in hot lard, while at the same time the fish fillets would be dunked in home-made batter and then deep fried in the same chip lard, the whole lot served with the ubiquitous green peas from the garden.

Saturday was the only day my father was home for lunch and he’d insist on a real stew because, he claimed, he couldn’t get anything like that from the canteen in the maternity hospital where he worked. A real stew was one with a thick, dark gravy that could be sopped up with thick hunks of buttered home-made soda-bread. Sunday was different in that, because we had had a late breakfast before tramping off as a family to 11:30 mass in the local town, we had no lunch. Back home at about 1:00 PM, my mother would sit at the kitchen table, a Silk Cut cigarette in the corner of her mouth, smoke wisping up into her eyes as she read the Sunday paper, a cup of instant coffee at her elbow. We’d all join her at the kitchen table and share a packet of Cadbury’s Half-covered chocolate goldgrain biscuits. I remember there were thirteen in a pack and five of us so we were all guaranteed getting at least two biscuits each. My mother might forgo her third biscuit which always presented the awkward situation of having three biscuits left over to share among four children, of whom I was the youngest.

The “cut” was usually the solution, as it was for the impartial divvying up of most tasks in our household. A book would be produced and each person would take turns, holding the book spine away from them and opening a page at random. The first letter on the top left hand corner block of print, headings and titles not included, was the key. The three “cutters” getting a letter nearest to A would then get the extra biscuit while, obviously, the unfortunate getting the letter furthest from A would not. This system, introduced by my father, was used for deciding who would wash the dishes, peel the nightly potatoes for the following day and for all the other mundane tasks that made up my Irish childhood.

Our evening meal, or tea, was just that. Identical to breakfast, only this time we had red jam, home-made loganberry, or gooseberry jam from the garden, more homemade soda bread, or as a change, crusty “Vienna Roll” from the shop up the road. Rarely did we have shop cakes, my mother turning out hot, buttered scones, jazzed up sometimes with the addition of raisins or some candied fruit and on Fridays, because granny was there, we always had homemade apple pie with a few cloves sprinkled through the chunky slices of green cooking apples, the shortcut pastry glazed with coarse brown sugar. Granny would always bring a Bewley’s Barn Brack with her, a rich, dark fruity cake on which the currants on top had always been burnt, giving a bitter, acrid undertaste to the brack’s sweetness.

Occasionally, perhaps for some adult celebratory reason, which I never though to ask about, my father would come home with a cake box, again from Bewleys’ Oriental Cafe in Westmoreland Street in Dublin, with individual Mary cakes. The mere thought of these delicious, gooey, chocolaty cakes on a hard biscuity base, capped with a shell of green marzipan with a drizzled chocolate M on the top is enough to bring back urgent memories of having to wolf down at least two slices of boring bread and butter and jam (in comparison to the anticipated sweetness) and gulp down hot, sweet tea before being allowed to have one’s reward.

Later, my father’s horizons expanded and he developed a taste for liver pate which he would bring home in a transparent tube as thick as my forearm, and which he would spread a inch thick layer of on top of his quarter inch of butter. Similarly, jellied eels were introduced, oily herring rollmops, stinky blue cheese that my mother insisted that he keep in the tool shed out in the garden. Summer time might produce smoked mackerel or punnets of strawberries, always accompanied by thick cream, but in the main, tea was just that – bread and butter, jam and hot tea with milk and sugar.

Sunday tea of course was different. We always had it around 5:30 or so in the evening and it was the most sumptuous meal of the week. Roast chicken, stuffed with chopped apples, walnuts, raisins, and bread crumbs, roast potatoes, giblet gravy, firm Brussel sprouts and sliced carrots, or perhaps Roast shoulder of pork, my mother’s favourite, homemade apple sauce, roast potatoes again, long green french beans with blanched, slivered almonds, carrots cooked in honey, butter and brown sugar. There was always a dessert to follow – stewed rhubarb with custard, sweet gooseberry fool with cream, semolina with a spoonful of loganberry jam swirled through it or sweet rice pudding with nuts and raisins stirred thought it.

Looking back, I never missed – nor even knew enough to notice their absence -such things as pasta or rice or the commonplaces that now abound worldwide. I was 18 and in Italy before I tasted my first ever pizza in the Trastevere in Rome and 22 in New York before I had a cheeseburger. I never knew of the delights of capsicum – indeed had never seen one until that eventful summer of 1971 when I first went to Europe – nor the bite of chilli or the freshness of ginger, the essentialness of garlic, the texture of beans and pulses, the succulence of seafood, the satisfaction of rice and noodles, the richness of aubergines, the meatiness of field mushrooms, the complexities of sauces and spices and fresh herbs…. Oh I could go on forever in a glorification of all the foods I have tasted and savoured and look forward to so much.

Looking back now, I wonder if my father’s eclectic and sporadic palate led me in search of new tastes or if necessity – that great mother – set me on the culinary path I have enjoyed so much all my life. Whatever it was, the career I chose brought me into contact with people and cultures, their food and tastes that was more than a quantum leap from the simple fare that I had grown up with and been accustomed to.

Cursing, Profanity & Swearing

I consider myself to be, at least, an average swearer; that is, I can curse and swear in several languages, besides English of course. Hitchhiking down to Rome in 1971 and totally bereft of Italian – I had earlier turned down a lift to “Firenze” because I wanted to go to Florence – a truck driver educated me, along with graphic hand gestures, all the more terrifying as we both slugged down miniature bottle of Campari as we barreled down the autostrada. To this day I am more fluent in Italian curses than in any other language other than English.

In Arabic I remember almost being arrested in the late 70’s when I muttered “kisimuk” under my breath at Damascus airport while, more recently, my Cantonese “pook guy” and “bart paw” had a student complain about me to the school principal.

So I was rather pleased when I discovered that a new study has found that those who have a healthy repertoire of curse words at their disposal are more likely to have a richer vocabulary than those who don’t.

“Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth“, was published in the November issue of the peer-reviewed Language Sciences publication, debunking the “poverty-of-vocabulary” (POV) hypothesis that swearing is a sign of a deficient vocabulary and that profanity shows limited intelligence, a result of a lack of education, laziness or an inability to control oneself and we swear because we can’t find more intelligent words with which to express ourselves. As Stephen Fry once said, “The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just f*cking lunatic.”

Anyway, I have just finished reading a fascinating novel which took swearing to a new level for me. I have no idea if these are “real” words belonging to a subset of a dialectal form of English or whether the author simply made them up. Whatever, hats off to him. Here are a few samples:

Pussyhole (self explanatory, I’d imagine, needing no further gloss from me!)
R’ass (rat’s ass?)
fuckery ( as in an Amy Winehouse song)
bloodcloth ( tampon?, sanitary napkin?)
bombocloth or bombo r’asscloth (??)
rahtid (??)
batty (anus)
batty boy (arse bandit or bum boy)
stoosh (?)
duppy (a ghost)

And the book from which these little gems originate? Well, I thought I would leave it up to you to see if you can figure which recent novel (in the last two years, anyway) they came from. Answers, please, in the comments

One last thing, while it’s great that an ability to curse can be equated with intelligence, it is probably best to use that intelligence to know the social domains within which you can operate and let off steam without causing undue offense to your “audience”!

A Change of Title!

As you all probably know, I started this blog thingy way back in March of this year as a way to promote my novel, Raiding Cúailnge, set in Iron Age Celtic Ireland. Anyway, the book was published in April and a few people contacted me about the vo Raiding Cooley Cover cabulary and the difficulty of pronouncing some of the words, especially the title, Cúailnge, which is the Irish for the Cooley district in North East Ireland where part of the story takes place.

Anyway, I listened – thanks Shaybo and others – and I have decided to change the title of the book to Raiding Cooley so here goes – a sneak preview!

Of course, I made a few other small changes, correcting the inevitable typos that somehow managed to sneak in, as well as updating my contact details at the end of the book.

So, if you haven’t got a copy yet, you can do so now at Amazon, Kobo, Sony, Apple iBooks and all other good E-book retailers.

Oh, almost forgot, I have dusted off and updated my interview at Smashwords where you can also purchase a copy of my book along with thousands of others.

Smashwords boasts they have published 418,228 books, of which 65,818 are Free (mine isn’t any longer, though!)

Here’s where you can find the interview. Comments or suggestions? I’d love to hear from you. Thanks.

Cheerio

Stephen

https://www.smashwords.com/manageinterview/info

Tết Nguyên Đán

Having moaned a bit about culture shock I experienced when I fist moved to Vietnam (and me, an old Asian hand!) I thought I might attempt to redress the balance by posting this, which I wrote not long after the previous posting.

Approaching the end of my first four months here in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, I have to say that the city, despite the myriad annoyances mentioned previously, is steadily growing upon me. The noise has almost faded into the distance, the money with its awesome coda of zeros rarely phases me now while the delights of the new and stylish restaurants set in uber cool settings complement the more traditional Vietnamese restaurants set so pleasantly along the riverside near where we live. Transport problems fade away with a 24-hour taxi rank at the end of our quiet street and some of the arcaneness of the language seems to be dissipating. Gainful employment still hovers on the periphery but, like the traffic laws here, remains just as a suggestion rather than something to be kow-towed to.

Tet has just ended and while I have been in Vietnam many times for Tet over the previous 15 years or so, this has been the first time I have been here for the warm-up to Tet, the actual period itself and the final run-down back to normalcy – or what passes for normalcy here in Saigon. Tet, or to give it its full name, Tết Nguyên Đán, is the start of the Lunar New Year and the herald of the Spring season and, like the Christian Easter, is a movable feast, usually falling around the end of January and before the middle of February.

Unlike many countries in the region, and indeed worldwide, Vietnam is particularly parsimonious with its gazetted, public holidays. Christmas Day for example, widely recognized in many countries, is totally ignored here with children attending school and people going to work as on any other normal day. Other public holidays amount to a stingy one-day off for special, usually historical, events in Vietnam’s fairly recent history. Labour Day (May 1), although it is called International Worker’s day here is, of course, de rigeur for every so-called communist country and then of course there is Liberation / Reunification day (April 30) when the North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the wrought iron gates of the Presidential Palace here in (then) Saigon and American Hueys lumbered from rooftops away to waiting ships in the Gulf and then there is National Day when Ho Chi Minh (the man, not the city) declared its rather premature independence from colonial forces (September 02 1945) but all these one day skimpy holidays pale into insignificance when compared to Tet.

Imagine, if you can, having your birthday, Christmas, Easter, Wedding Anniversary, Valentine’s Day, Buddha’s Birthday and St. Patrick’s day all rolled into one glorious holidays where everything, and I mean everything, closes down everywhere from a miserly minimum of one day to a glorious extravaganza of an eating and drinking and gambling fortnight. Add to that, of course, the annual roll-over of age in that at the beginning of Tet, every single person in the country becomes a year older, so in fact, it is your birthday so what is there not to celebrate?

However, with Tet being such an important holiday, it is essential to approach it with suitable reverence and intense preparation. Much like a western Christmas when shops start to gear up for the festive season as soon as Hallowe’en is over, so too do Tet preparations begin in earnest not only in shops and businesses but also in every home in the country. Shops fill up with gaudy decorations, usually some variation of the phrase Chuc Mung Nam Moi, ideally wrought in fine gold on a red velvet background – red and yellow being the principle lucky colours for an auspicious start to the New Year – but of course all variations on that theme, provided the colours are maintained, is acceptable.

Similar to the Chinese New Year when the largest world-wide migration of people take place, it is incumbent on Vietnamese to return to their home birthplace for Tet. Woe betide the Western tourist who tries to travel in Vietnam during this period as every form of transport will have been fully booked up and then overloaded. A 16 seat mini-bus will manage to accommodate up to 30 people along with luggage and bales of unidentifiable goods wrapped around and around with duct tape, baskets of live chickens and neatly trussed pigs. Part of the excitement in the build-up to Tet, of course is preparing to receive long absent family members and to scrupulously clean the home before Tet, as once the holiday begins, no cleaning may be done lest one inadvertently sweeps or throw away the good luck one is due on account of the preparations you and your family have made.

The Kitchen God – and every household has one – must be propiated with gifts and offering because it is he, and he alone, who will report back to the celestial Jade Emperor on the family’s efforts over the previous year and it is the Jade Emperor who will decide the future prosperity of each household. Of course as all shops and markets will be closed during Tet, it is of prime importance to stock up on all basic food items – rice, oil, noodles, preserved fruit and vegetables, as well as all the essential items, minced pork and mung bean tucked inside a solid wodge of sticky rice wrapped up in a thick layer of banana leaves and then boiled over an open wood fire in huge pots closely resembling oil drums, usually out in the street before the house for hours, often over night with family members taking the responsibility to sit up tending the fire and telling tales of Tets past – after all, what would Christmas or Thanksgiving be like without the turkey and the spiced ham and tales of Scrooge?

Once the home has been thoroughly cleaned, paying special attention to the kitchen, then it must be suitable decorated. Red and yellow flowers will predominate although orange marigolds may be included. Yellow forsythia branches must adorn the home while peach and cheery blossom trees are especially popular.

Kumquat trees laden with small fruit are also popular, symbolizing fecundity and abundance, something everyone aspires to in the New Year. Everyone makes that special effort to pay off all debts while new clothes and shoes are required for everyone, especially children. Everyone participates, much as they do here in driving in appallingly crowded situations by being mannerly and considerate to everyone else. Losing your temper in the bustling crowds in the teeming markets would be a very grave loss of face resulting in untold misfortune for the coming year, while at the same time, happily and willingly paying that bit extra for just about any service of goods will ensure that the Jade Emperor will look upon you with benignity, as well as helping all those others to afford the extravagance that the season demands.

The first day of Tet is probably the most important as the first visitor to the family home will set the luck for the coming year. Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve, – and usually by prior arrangement – an appropriate visitor – i.e. someone relatively prosperous, jolly and charming, bearing gifts of flowers, food and alcohol – should arrive and be boisterously welcomed, thus ensuring good luck to the host or hostess for the coming year. Be aware, not every visitor is welcome or suitable and expect the door to remain firmly shut if you are perceived to be from the wrong side of the tracks. I rather smartly slipped outside my own front door just before midnight, waited the appropriate time and then gave the beady-eyed one a near heart attack by banging and hammering on the front door. She opened it with great trepidation to find me beaming and lurching under the weight of a assorted potted plants in the appropriate colours, US dollar bills spilling out of every pocket, a bottle of wine gripped precariously under my oxter and my pockets stuffed with savoury snacks. Seeing as the apartment is in my wife’s name, I felt that I should be the first visitor to cross the threshold, ensuring an abundance of good luck for the New Year, although it was only her steadying hand that prevented me from shattering the bottle of Shiraz on the tiled floor as I attempted to unburden myself.

Having survived that hurdle, New Year’s Day is reserved for the nuclear family focused on the paternal side of the family. Children dressed in their new finery, bow to their parents and offer traditional greeting – Sống lâu trăm tuổi (Long life of 100 years) and formally receive a red packet – a small red envelope, decorated with traditional wishes, containing assorted bank notes (Vietnamese notes range from the very lowly 500 dong (approximately Euro 0..02 cents) to the rather lordly 500,000 (Euro 18.06 cents) while friends wish each other Tiền vô như nước (May money flow in like water).

The second day of Tet is then reserved for the maternal side of the family and for respected friends and acquaintances and it was then that we made our way to the beady-eyed one’s mother house to present our best wishes. Almost bankrupted by the excessive taxi fare for the 15 minute journey, we arrived bearing gifts of flowers, fruit, sticky rice packages and, of course, red packets. Not just for children, the custom appears to give them to everyone who is a) unmarried and b) younger than the giver. In my case, that seems to be just about everyone, including the grinning and obsequiously bobbing doormen / custodians / guards and gate-keepers at our apartment. And then, naturally, there were the Beady-eyed one’s nephews and nieces, shyly bowing to me as I sat in state on a hard wooden settle, wishing me the Buddha knows what in their whispered Vietnamese as I handed out bulging red packets. I had no idea how much money was in them as the beady-eyed one had merely presented me with a bundle of ready stuffed red packets and instructed me to hand them out. Judging from the gasps of astonishment and incredulous glances my way, not to mention the never ending line of unctuous supplicants bowing before me, it was enough to pay for a handsome university education overseas along with a Masserati for daily transport.

Shortly after Tet, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung hailed ministries, branches and localities for their efforts to ensure a happy and safe Lunar New Year festival for people of all strata, although at the same time asking them to pay more attention to traffic issue, and reprimanded several localities where firecrackers were still set off during the festival despite the ban. On a more positive note, he urged everyone to take drastic measure to remove difficulties facing businesses, control inflation, solve bad debts, keep the prices of essential goods stable, and speed up agricultural production. In implementing the instruction of the President and the Prime Minister, New Year gifts worth a total of nearly 394 billion Vietnamese dong had been handed over to nearly 1.9 million people who have rendered services to the nation, while 24,000 tonnes of rice were sent to 15 provinces to help needy people. Besides, local authorities nationwide granted presents worth more than 807 billion Vietnamese dong to families, which are beneficiaries of social welfare.

However, in a number of localities, traffic jams still happened. In many tourist sites and spring festivals, visitors still ignored regulations on hygiene and safety. During the 9-day holiday, 681 criminal cases occurred nationwide, 314 people died and 387 other injured in 373 traffic accidents.

From Local English Language newspapers at the time.

Culture Shock

I mentioned ages ago that one of the reasons for this blog thingy was cyber-space shock that I thought I was experiencing – not that I put it that elegantly, of course – which was a major driving factor for me to get involved with this blog thingy. Recently, that got me thinking about culture shock and where and how I had first encountered it. I think the first time I ever really experienced it was when I arrived in New York in 1977 and expected it to be similar to the worlds I had left behind in Europe. I remember reading somewhere (Alvin Toffler – Future Shock?) that Culture Shock can be amieleroated after about nine months and that used to hearten me, much like beating Google Maps time estimate for walking from A to B does for me now.

Anyway, jump forward to about 2013. I had, at that stage, lived and worked in different parts of S. E. Asia for more than twenty years, but, despite having visited and travelled in Vietnam several times over the few years, I had never actually lived there until I got serious and signed a lease on an apartment in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).

Saigon was a different world. Everything was strange and either ludicrous or just plain crazy. Traffic, for instance, was no doubt governed by laws, but what those were remained unfathomable to me. One-way streets, traffic lights and pedestrian crossings appeared to be mere suggestions without any serious compliance expected. Crossing any street was as fraught with as much excitement and danger as playing a computer game like Call of Duty (Black Ops) as “attackers” (motorbikes) can come at you from any direction and at any time without any warning whatsoever, but unlike computer games, you only have one life here, while lumbering buses and trucks made no allowance for either motorbikes or pedestrians. Pavements and sidewalks were fair game for motorbikes and the rule appeared to be that if you can stop your bike sideways on the pavement or in the middle of your living room, or even the road, why then, it was perfectly parked!

Recently the Saigonese police initiated one of their regular crackdowns but this certainly did not involve stopping bikes rushing through red lights or going the wrong way up a one-way street or driving on the pavement; instead, it seemed to be more of a crackdown on pedestrians in that if a pedestrian was involved in an accident, it must have been the pedestrian’s fault!. Similarly when driving at night, why run the risk of running your battery down when you can simply turn off your headlights at night and drive just as well in the dark.

Notwithstanding all that, the Beady-eyed one decided that we had better get into the spirit of things and rent our own personal motorbike and for reasons best know to others it was decided to rent a motorbike on the far side of the city to where we actually live. I made the rather tentative suggestion that we rent a scooter with automatic transmission – having spent at least a total time of less than one minute “practicing” on a Honda Airblade in Cambodia. This would, I felt, obviate the need to change cumbersome gears with the feet while attempting to maintain eyes forward, sideways and backwards and at the same time weave with the fluidity of a dust mote in a beam of sunlight, through the woof and weft of roundabout traffic. This suggestion was quickly rebuffed as it is a well-known motorbikes with automatic transmission are too powerful and have a tendency to “run away” with you if you twist the handlebar throttle too much! Instead we settled on a Honda 110cc with manual gears because then “you can start it up in 2^nd gear and it won’t run away on you”. All well and good and the one-eyed tout renting the bikes appeared to have no qualms about renting a bike to a pair such as us who blatantly had no knowledge of where to even put the ignition key or whether to use the left or the right foot for the necessary gear changes. A one-minute tutorial in (unexplained to me) Vietnamese and a 5 minute practice ride in, through and around the flower beds in a nearby public park sufficed and the keys were quickly handed over for another million dong or so.

The immediate problem that presented us was two-fold; neither the Beady-eyed one or myself felt sufficiently confident to give the other a back pillion ride and, even if we were, neither of us had the slightest of idea how to circumnavigate the city to get to our far-flung district. Bit of an impasse, until a malleable plastic 50,000 dong note was slipped to the assistant of the one-eyed man and he drove the Beady-eyed one home, using the bike as a XÊ HỐM ̣motrobike “taxi” or litterally “hug machine” as the passenger is often obliged to hug the driver to avoid being jolted off the back as the rider careens over kerbs, potholes and the occasional bricks casually tossed onto the road. I then spent the rest of the afternoon hunting for a bus which would go within reasonable distance of where we actually live. By the time I got back home, of course it was too dark to warrant venturing out onto the tangle of streets surrounding us so all we had to do was pay the gate-keeper where we live another small fortune in well used plastic bank notes to allow us to park the bike under his supercillious nose.

The next morning, after the apparent ritual of handing over another bunch of crumpled plastic bank notes to the new gatekeeper which allowed him to retrieve our bike from wherever his colleague had hidden it the previous night – we took it in turns – “remember to start the bike in 2nd gear” – to cruise cautiously up and down our local street, rented helmets with greasey, sweat-stained linings slipping down over our eyes, our arms extended stiffly on the handlbars, eyes flickering nervously down to our feet and then belatedly up to scan the street for the unwary chickens which patrol it haphazzardly, tentatively trying out the horn (an absolute must for any aspiring driver here) and the indicators and stalling the bike in our attempts to bring it to a graceful stop actually in front of the street cafe rather than on top of one of its small tables.

Suffice it to say, a week later, the bike remains safely parked in the basement bowels of our building while our helmets moulder in a cupboard, while, since our arrival at this address, the local taxi mafia have set up a permanent taxi-rank outside our front door.

Enough said about traffic and bikes, I feel, although there was some talk that we might return the bike and exchange it for an automatic one as, apparently, they are easier to drive! Hmm, said I, non-commitedly

Noise is a constant factor with everyone, motorbikes, buses trucks and an increasing number of private cars having carte blanche to blast their klaxon-like horns constantly, mingling with the incessant noise of daily life on the streets – people crouch on tiny stools over rickety tin tables, sucking down noodle soup at all hours of the days or night while small “cafes” simply appropriate the space before a closed shop or office and set up their stools and tables there. Along with eating on the street, there are all the concomitant activities that go with it – obviously, cooking over an open charcoal fire on the pavement is perfectly normal, as are washing the dishes in a tub of greasy lather while it is perfectly

acceptable to sprawl on the pillion seat of a motorbike with your bare feet propped on the handlebars while a foot massage or pedicure is administered. Why stop there, of course? The street is a perfect place for a barber to attach a chipped mirror to the railing and set up a barber’s chair, and while you are at it, you might as well bathe the naked children on the main street as well. Need a toilet, well there is a perfectly good tree that you can hug and pee away to your heart’s delight. Feel like a nap? Just stretch out on any semi level piece of ground and snooze away.

Shopping is another new experience. Supermarkets are few and far between and the ones that do cater to western tastes – i.e. selling such delicacies as Kiwi shoe polish, Cornflakes, baked beans in tomato sauce, long-life UHT milk imported from New Zealand and Australia, pasta and P.G. tips tea bags – are few and far between as well as being outrageously expensive. Instead, Vietnamese life centers around the market – usually a maze of narrow alleyways where fruit, veg, fish, meat and live poultry are haggled over down to the last cent. Don’t feel the need to have an actual stall? Fine, just spread a torn sheet of plastic on the muddy ground and pile your veg there. Want a nice pig’s tongue or a bucket of toads, or a basin of slippery eels? No problem, just scoop them up into the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag and slaughter away in the convenience of your own home.

Nothing pressing to do today? Well then, sprawl in a plastic garden chair and drink syrupy black coffee with ice, or, for a real taste buster, load up the glass – cups are rarely used – with sweetened, condensed milk, top up with Irel like coffee and then dilute the dregs with the complimentary glass of iced jasmine tea, flicking your cigarette butts (Craven A – pronounced CARavan A) at pedestrians’ feet as they stumble past on the cracked and uneven pavements between the parked and zooming motorbikes, while fending off the legion of crippled and maimed selling lottery tickets, sunglasses, feather dusters, zippo lighters and manicure kits from a sandwich board contraption they sling over their deformed shoulders.

However, it IS and experience and I am coping quite well, I think. For a start, I have enrolled in a Vietnamese language school and while I signed up for an elementary class with other would-be aspirants, so far I am the only student and have the undivided attention of a pretty, charming, superbly fluent and patient 24 year old teacher. I signed up for 35 hours at the monstrous price of 4,000, 000 dong (yep, 4 million!) and have already completed 12 hours, most of which has been spent grappling with the tonal aspect of the language as well as learning to write using the correct tonal signals along with the assorted diacritics that the Vietnamese alphabet of 29 letters uses. A “D” not surprisingly, is not, of course, pronounced “Duh” but instead sounds a bit like a “Yuh” while letters such as Ă, Â, Ê, Ô, Đ, Ư and Ơ still retain that aura of mystique. Add the tones then on top of those letters and it becomes even more baffling as in Ầ or Ẩ or Ẫ while a simple and important word like “wine” becomes unreconisable in RƯƠỤ – notice the all important dot under the final U!

However, having said all that, I have to admit to a rather modest surprise at how fast and well I am actually learning. My class is from 10:00 – 11:30 (but then again it might just be from 10:30 – 12:00 noon) three mornings a week so after the lesson I wander around and get lost and finally, in a sweating, red-faced, sodden mess, I attempt to squeeze my bum into a plastic chair clearly made for kindergarten kids and slurp coffee – (Cà phê) while mumbling such phrases as I believe I have mastered only to later discover that I have just told the waitress that “her mother is a beautiful grave”!.

Then the wearisome search for a bus home begins. Saigon is a maze of one way streets and while this is blithely ignored by motorbikes and small utility trucks powered by oily, smoke-belching ancient motorbike-like engines, buses here do tend to follow the standard traffic direction. So, getting off the bus and carefully noting the stop – all bus stops are conveniently identified with XÊ BỨYT stencilled in faded letters on the road itself – it is all to no avail as the street apparently is a one-way street and the return bus would not just simply chug along on a parallel street but perhaps take a more tortuous route several blocks away. My several attempts at asking directions in my newly fluent Vietnamese had one gentleman hawk a gob of spit at my feet while a rather prim lady blushed and pulled her paisley-patterned surgical-type mask firmly over her face and stalked off without a word.

On the subject of surgical masks! Apparently, it is not just the Beady-eyed one’s fastidiousness and it certainly it is not just the beach that can make a lady’s skin dark. It is, rather, the mundane situation of being anywhere outdoors between dawn and dusk. Here in Saigon, of course is the added problem of “the dust” which necessitates every sinlge female between the ages of 11teen and 90 wearing a plain or haute-couture designed face mask, much like the style favoured by bank-robbing cowboys. Those particularly concerned with the “whiteness” of their features will additionally opt for the more comprehensive cover of a gorget or wimple. Along with the face mask, covering everything from below the eyes, a floppy hat is also de rigeur. Add to that, elbow length evening style gloves, similar to those worn by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and, finally, as a finishing touch, wear fish-belly grey knee length stockings with a convenient cleft between the big and first toe, all the more suitable for slipping your foot into the ineveitable thongs / flip-flops that many ladies here seem to favour.

And then it is the numbers (or lack of them sometimes) that put the heart sideways in me – I still can’t get used to dealing in millions for relatively simple purchases. The first time I ever came to Vietnam, back in 1996, you needed a plastic shopping bag to carry the cruddy paper bank notes around. Now, a semblance of sense exists and the notes are all the new shiny plastic bank notes, originating, I think, from Australia. The largest note is a 500,000 dong note, followed by a 200,000 and then a 100,000, and then down the scale at 50,000, 20,000, 10,000, and the rather lowly paper notes of 5,000 2,000, 1,000 and finally the rather pitiful 500 dong note (approx. $0.02 Australian or Euro cents !)

Despite the above, I really came to enjoy it less than four monts later.

Another recording (or two)

I thought I might add another audio recording as a few people mentioned that they had enjoyed the previous one – The Reckoning. One person – was this a complement or not? – claimed that I sounded like ” some aged, bronchial old Celtic warrior recounting stories in a smoke ridden hut”

Anyway, this is again from my novel Raiding Cúailnge, and this long chapter is called The Elopement in Part Two of the novel and introduces a different thread to the overall story with the beginning of the tale of Deirdre of the Sorrows.

The Elopement is a longer chaper and I had to take a break halfway through the recording so there are two seperate recordings but both are from the same chapter in the book.

THE KINABALU TRIP

bookcase

I mentioned in a previous post that I am determined to shake off my sedentary lifestyle and start walking as preparation for the European peace Walk which I want to do next year. Anyway, I mentioned that I haven’t done much exercise recently but that one of my highlights was when I climbed Mount Kinabalu in Sabah State in Malaysia but that was almost 25 years ago. Anyway, here’s an account of the climb which I wrote shortly afterwards.

In July 1991, I was sitting on the wharf in Brunei Darussalam waiting for a boat to Labuan in Sabah. “Wait a while, check-in 12:30”, a small, middle-aged man, with an off-white pill-box hat perched jauntily on his head, told me. He was officially dressed in a blue and white striped T-shirt, city pants with a razor sharp crease, his squat brown feet in blue rubber flip-flops. I waited and looked around.

Young Brunei bucks, their long hair artfully coiffed, rings in their ears and on their fingers, lolled on slatted white benches, picking at their feet. Pointed perahus flashed between the wharf and the water village, their cowboy drivers, the lower half of their faces covered gangster style in a kerchief, standing cockily erect in the stern of the racing water taxis. A cadaverous little man, wearing what looked like an outsize jail-house set of fatigues, stalked around the waiting area, a lit cigarette smouldering in his hands clasped behind his back. His skeletal head jerked and bobbed on his skinny neck while bulbous, wrap-around, mirror sunglasses obscured his eyes. Two withered old women sat opposite me, clutching blue and pink plastic bags, bulging with sour smelling fruit and tins of soy-bean milk. Well-worn suede handbags were worn, bandolier style, over their shoulders. Thin gold bangles rattled on their bony wrists and rings with outsized, rough stones emphasized the frailty of their gnarled hands. A girl in a two toned mustard coloured skirt and shirt sat near me, her hair pulled back in a tight, painful-looking bun. Her face puckered into an angry frown, she glared at me.

At 12:25, a circuitous queue suddenly formed. I strolled around the benches and took my place at the end. The two old women contemptuously pushed their way past me and shuffled indifferently half way up the queue. Nobody seemed to mind or even pay the least attention.

Two Bruneian Immigration officials rapidly stamped the proffered passports, a look of querulous incomprehension on their set and serious faces. They took my passport and, for some reason, looked at the back cover before returning to the blank visa page that I had handed to them. Not once did they look at me, my photograph or the passport details.

The Duta Muhibah Dua express boat to the island of Labuan in the Malaysian state of Sabah was a long, enclosed, airplane-like fuselage with four seats on either side of a narrow aisle. I sat down on the edge of the aisle, hoping that I’d be able to stretch out over the four seats for a snooze once we got moving. Two bright-eyed girls in jeans and T-shirts walked past, smiling and giggling and then returned to ask if the seats beside me were taken. Smiling at me and apologising for disturbing me as I moved my backpack, they edged in past me row of seats behind us, and spreading their own bags on the seats.

“Are you writing in French?” one of the girls asked me, nudging her friend.

“Are you writing in French?” she repeated. “Never mind,” she added hastily, as I looked at her blankly, “I can’t read French”.

“Nor can I,” I said, “So I’m trying to write in English.”

Lim turned out to be 38 years old, A Seventh Day Adventist who had met her Chinese husband in Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places, where she was doing a degree in Fine Arts. Now she is a housewife with three children. When I told her I was also 38 with three children, but separated, she offered to give me marriage guidance counselling. I politely declined but accepted an orange and an introduction to her younger, single friend, Chen, instead.

We talked about children for a while and I told Lim that I was writing to my children. “Tell them Auntie Lim say a big `hello,'” she insisted.

“Tell them to study hard,” Auntie Chen, now wearing pink tinted spectacles, the better to watch the on-board video, chimed in. I told her she looked very pretty with glasses, and she collapsed into giggles, her hand covering her mouth. Lim leaned over and told me her children were aged seven, six and one.

A small Malay boy in the row of seats behind stood up and rested his head on the back of the seat between Lim and I and gazed at me implacably. I winked at him several times but got no response until he suddenly stuck his tongue out at me. This got him a quick slap on the back of his leg from his indignant mother and he was promptly pulled back to a sitting position.

Labuan Airport Canteen.

Sitting in a grubby little room with six rickety tables in what looks and sounds like a building site. Labuan Airport was obviously undergoing a bit of a facelift. That’s fine with me, I’m just pleased to be out of Brunei. There’s only one fan in the canteen and the sweat is trickling down my face. I’ve been in Labuan for less than an hour and so far I’ve bought a duty-free bottle of whisky on the docks, where I also changed my Bruneian money “under the table’, got a taxi, stopped off at a warren of rooms above The Relax Lounge to make a date for the following Sunday with Sharifah, a girl I met in June on my last trip to Labuan, gone to the airport, checked in, provisionally booked a return flight from Kota Kinabalu to Labuan for the Sunday and finished a cold beer. I’ve still got just under an hour before my flight leaves for Kota Kinabalu.

Kota Kinabalu State Park.

Beer is $4 a can here in the Kinabalu Balsam Restaurant so I’m drinking hot lemon tea. Another reason is that it’s also quite cold at about 5,000 feet above sea level even though I’m now wearing a jacket and long trousers. I arrived at Kota Kinabalu airport at 4:45 PM and went straight to the Tourist Office to enquire about getting to the National Park. The pretty little girls were aghast, “But it is so late already. No buses now”.

I pointed out, reasonably enough, I felt, that it was only 4:45, but this, to them, was irredeemably late. The only way to the Park – about two hours away – at this late hour was by chartering a private taxi for $120. I hemmed and hawed but there seemed to be no option, so that’s what I did.

There was a slight delay while the taxi driver rang his wife to tell her about the sucker he had met and how he’d be late home, and then we were off on the first leg of the 90 kilometre drive, crawling through the early evening traffic, and then away through the outskirts of Kota Kinabalu, flashing past scattered Malay kampongs where the road steadily climbs from sea level into the foothills of The Crocker Range and then along the tops of ridges, giving beautiful views of the rugged, jagged peaks of Mount Kinabalu. “Am I really going to climb that?” I kept asking myself, already beginning to feel the awe that the local Kadazan people attribute to the “Mother of all Mountains”.

We arrive in darkness at the Park HQ. It’s cold now and I’m shivering in my T-shirt and shorts. The rangers in the HQ are expecting me and hand over the keys to the hostel. In seconds I’ve burrowed into my backpack, and fished out long trousers and a quilted ski jacket I had borrowed. I’d be in trouble with just my tropical clothes here.

The Balsam restaurant was fairly quiet except for some Germans wearing weird assortments of outlandishly coloured clothes. They talked noisily to an Australian couple and clicked their fingers and shouted at the Malay waitress for more beer. I went back to my room in the Old Hostel – no-one else was staying there – where I was very grateful for the heavy blankets ( I took two extra ones off the other empty beds) and my bottle of whisky.

Up at 6:15 and change the dressing on my ankle. It looks OK, but it’s so crusty that it’s hard to see. Pull on the shoes and limp stiffly down the trail to the Kinabalu Balsam Restaurant for breakfast.

A plate of rice cooked in coconut milk, anchovies fried with garlic and peanuts, a hard boiled egg and some sliced cucumber, a dab of fiery chilli sauce on the side, two cups of tea and I feel ready for anything. It’s 7:25 am and time to look for my guide. Everything seems to be going very smoothly. The Park HQ has all my permits and climbing passes ready and they seem to be in full control. My guide is Darius, a 23 year-old Dusun who has worked in the park for about four years. As we go outside he tells me he sometimes climbs the Mountain three times a week. He’s forgotten how many times he’s climbed it altogether. “Many,” he smiles. He’s wearing a Mount Kinabalu International Climbathon T-shirt from 1990. It’s a 21 kilometre race up and down the mountain, starting at 6,000 feet and going up to the summit at 13,455!

We get a mini bus along a surfaced, winding road that leads to the Power Station at six thousand feet. The road stops here and it’s time to use the legs. I get out of the mini-van and stretch gingerly. The air is cool and sharp. A big sign warns people who suffer from diabetes, asthma, hepatitis, heart and circulation problems and a list of other ailments not to attempt the climb. Another sign proclaims the winners of the 1990 Climbathon. A Ghurkha soldier from Hong Kong went up and down in 2 hours, 50 minutes and odd seconds. I ask Darius how he did. He smiles and says not very well. It took him over four hours.

I wonder how long it will take me to get to the hostel at 10,500 feet, let alone up and back down.

Although the mountain towers above us, we go down about 100 steps to a booming waterfall. A pretty Malay girl in yellow is posing against the fall, her long hair glistening with spray while her boy friend crouches up to his thighs in water, taking photographs of her.

From then on, we go up. Crude steps, reinforced by rough hewn branches, are cut into the mountainside at irregular intervals. I feel fine, my legs are loosening up nicely and my backpack feels light and comfortable. Darius chats away beside me telling me about his family and his kampong. After a few minutes, I’m drenched in sweat and my heart is pounding with the climb. I have no breath to answer Darius so he stops talking to me and drops back slightly behind me, letting me set the pace. I look at my watch and we’ve only been climbing for ten minutes!

At 8:30 we come to the first of many rest stops. Rough picnic benches are grouped around a table with a protective roof of thatch. There is a group of chattering climbers there. We go on past them and continue to climb. I still feel good but we haven’t gone very far. At 9:00 I need to stop and take a swig from my water bottle. A stocky Swede in a conical, Merlin-like hat absolutely covered in badges and pins, trudges up and talks to me. He tells me the guides are very expensive and very bad. His English is heavily accented.

“Zey do nuv-fing for you. Venn I vas in Mulu Park in Sarawak ve had a boat trip through ze caves, ja? Ze river vas high, ze boat fell off-er and ze guide, he vas ze virst to svim to ze bank, ja?”

I find him boring. I nod at Darius and we start up the mountain again without a word. A sign says we have reached 7,500 feet, and a map of the trail up the mountain has a red arrow on it saying `YOU ARE HERE’. We seem to have climbed a disappointingly short distance. As we climb, the vegetation changes to mossy cloud forest. Although the air feels damp and cold, I’m sweating heavily and my T-shirt is clammy. Patches of green moss and ferns appear on the trail and hang from the gnarled, stunted trees.

The trail is so steep that it is not possible to see more that fifty feet or so ahead which is a blessing in a way. Each time I look up, I feel sure that the `top’ is just ahead of me because I can’t see any further and that the trail will level out. However, each crest proves to be equally illusory and the trail stretches on up higher and higher each time I struggle up to where I hope level ground should be.

The air is noticeably cooler now but the sun, unimpeded by the dwarf trees, is hot on the back of my neck and arms. My T-shirt is drenched and the waist band of my shorts is dark with sweat. Darius swings easily along, enjoying himself, obviously not bothered by the exertion of the climb.

At about 11:00 I meet three Canadians lounging on some rocks near a water tank. I stop for a break and they chat to me for a while. They have completed the climb and are on their way back down to the Park HQ.

One of them looks at my T-shirt. “Hope you got a good jacket in that bag of yours, fella,” he drawls. He’s tall and rangy, dressed in a long sleeved check, flannel shirt, blue jeans and heavy, professional hiking boots. I nod, too breathless to answer just yet.

“How about a poncho then?” I nod again, grinning inanely.

“You’ll need gloves for the ropes.” My breathing is almost back to normal now and I say I have gloves as well.

“Well, looks like we can’t sell you anything, then,” he laughs.

I ask about the climb.

“I tell you, the water in these here tanks tastes the best in the world,” the tall man answered, gesturing with his boot at the water tank opposite him, “But that climb from the Hostel is just one mean, sunnuva bitch!”

His girlfriend is lying stretched out full length on the ground, her bush hat over her eyes. She props herself up on her elbows and pushes her hat back and looks at me for the first time. “I made it to within about ten minutes of the summit and then I had to turn back. I could see Harry here, and Bill up there, but no power on earth could get me up the last rock climb”.

I asked her how she felt about that and she shrugged. “I guess I know my limits a bit better now.”

I topped up my water bottle at the tank and shared a Mars bar with Darius and then we shouldered our packs and began to climb again, leaving the Canadians still lying there.

We pass a sign that says in area between 7000 to 10,500 feet nine different types of pitcher plants can be found. I find one and Darius points out two other different types. The leaf tips of these plants form a cup which is both a trap for bugs and a stomach for the plant. Once an insect is lured into the cup by the liquid inside, the `lid’ closes and the insect is digested through the walls of the leaf. Darius tells me that is why the plant can live in the poor, thin soil at this altitude.

My legs are beginning to react now. If I stop for a break, they tremble uncontrollably, so I try to keep going, but very slowly. My calves are aching and I find it difficult to maintain an easy, swinging rhythm because the steps are so unevenly paced. Some are only 10 inches or so high while others are more than two feet and I can feel the pull and strain in my thighs as I haul myself up and on.

There is very little vegetation now, certainly nothing that can be described as trees. Dry looking grass and low bushes stick out of cracks in the flat slabs of granite that begin to appear now. We reach the first of the Mountain Huts at about 12:00 noon and Darius tells me it’s only another ten minutes to where we’ll be staying the night. We get there at 12 :15 and it’s just in time because I’m ready to collapse.

The hostel at Laban Rata is a wooden, two storey, crescent shaped building built by the pioneers of the Sarawak Army Rangers in 1985. I’ve never been so glad to arrive before in my life. I shrugged off my backpack and slid slowly down the wall to the floor, with my legs straight out in front of me. My thigh muscles are twitching and there is nothing I can do to stop them. I sit there for a long time, staring blankly at my legs. Darius goes off whistling gaily and brings me a cup of hot, sweet tea. I really need it and I begin to feel much better. I stand up and stretch gently and then go over to the bay windows. The view back down the valley from this vantage point of 10,500 feet is superb, while the summit, a sharply cresting rockface 3000 feet above and behind us is awesome. I stand there, frankly terrified, thinking I can’t climb that, I must be crazy. The lunar landscape of grey granite, fissured and cracked, ends in an massive silvery dome.

Darius comes over and gives me a nudge and takes me upstairs to my room. There are two tiers of double bunk beds, a radiator and a window in the room. I change into a dry T-shirt, long pants and put on a heavy woolen pullover and talk to Paul, a lawyer from Sydney who is in the opposite bunk. He and his brother started out at 7:30 that morning, but before they reached 7000 feet, his brother turned back. Paul is determined to make the climb and feels that it will be a`snap’. I remain doubtful.

I go downstairs to get something to eat and the place is jammed with chattering Koreans, packing up to leave. They all pose for numerous photographs before the bay window, laughing, giggling and jostling each other. There is a stupendous mound of gear stacked on the floor and I begin to wonder nervously what I am missing. It seems very quiet when they all troop out in an orderly fashion and begin their descent to the valley down below.

I put too much chilli sauce on my fried noodles and can’t eat them. I settle for more tea and go over and lie full length on the couch in front of the window. Even though the afternoon sun is shining in the window full on me I’m so cold that I stuff my hands into my armpits in an effort to keep warm. After a while I give up and go upstairs and crawl under the blankets on my bunk.

I wake up around 4:30 PM and the hostel is hopping. Paul comes in and tells me that a school party from Perth has just arrived. I go outside and there are teenage girls screaming in the showers down the hall as they wash their hair in cold water. Doors open and slam in flurries of meetings and assignments and kids charge wildly up and down the stairs. Downstairs in the restaurant area, there is a group in electric coloured tights doing aerobics. I go back upstairs and get my bottle of whisky and Paul and myself sit in a far corner and drink tea with whiskey on the side. We talk about legal rights and refugees in Hong Kong, the role of the Irish as the first scapegoats in Australia, and, inevitably, the climb the following morning.

By 7:30, we are the only ones left in the restaurant area, and then Paul gets up to go. I sit alone over a last whisky and then, standing up, go outside. The cold feels bright and clear, and although orange arc lamps marking the start of the summit trail obscure the stars, the bulk of rock towers up above me blacker than the dark sky. I look up at it and shiver with cold and apprehension. I must be mad, I think to myself again. Just as I turn to go in, Darius appears and tells me that he will bang on my door at 2:30 or so. “All things being well,” he says “we’ll leave at about 3:30.”

He’s gone before I can ask him what could go wrong.

I’m awake by 2:00 am, listening to the excited bustling of the Australian kids charging up and down the corridor outside my room. The place is booming like a drum. There’s no point staying on in bed. I swing my legs over the side of the bunk and sit up. Paul rears up in the darkness opposite me “Is it time?” he asks.

I put on a singlet, a T-shirt, a woolen pullover, a nylon ski jacket, long pants, socks, gloves and a hat, and I’m ready. My stomach is knotted with anxiety. I really don’t know if I’m up to this, but there’s only one way to find out. And yet, I really don’t know if I do want to find out.

Darius and I leave with Paul and his guide sharp at 3:30 am. Darius says it should take us about two hours. Paul is eager to get moving and strides off into the darkness, taking the lead. It’s icy cold, with a thin wind and I remember reading that 40% of body heat is lost through an uncovered head. I feel absurdly pleased that I remembered to bring a light cotton base-ball style cap with me.

Within five minutes, my heart is pounding, the blood is rushing in my ears and the back of my hair is slick with sweat. We pass a sign that says 11,000 feet and keep going.

By 4:15 am I’m in trouble. The trail just keeps going on up and up. I keep expecting it, naively, to level out and when it doesn’t I begin to get annoyed. At this height, the air is thin and I’m gasping for breath, my lungs hot and raspy. Doggedly, my head down, I begin to count my steps, saying to myself that I’ll stop at 38, part of my mind wondering if this bloody lump of rock will permanently stop me at 38! I force myself to trudge on up for fifty paces and then I have to stop. I daren’t sit down, I just slump against a rock. Darius pauses beside me, but doesn’t say anything. I like that. I wouldn’t have had the breath to answer him. I appreciate his non-judgemental attitude. There is no sound except the thin whistle of the wind and the monstrous pounding of blood in my ears. I peer up into the blackness and can see nothing except the wavering torch lights of other climbers and guides scattered over the trail. I have no idea where Paul is except that he must be somewhere ahead of me. I don’t care.

After a minute, I push myself off the rock and stagger on up. Just think of every step, count each pace, I tell myself. There’s no point in looking up or back – there’s still nothing to see. Every foot gained now is a struggle and I have to stop after every hundred paces or so. I suddenly realize that we’re walking on bare rock and that there are no trees or bushes or grass anywhere. At 4:30 or so, we reach the rockface proper, and thick, white, knotted ropes hang down. Even through the woolen gloves I can feel the harsh, coldness of the ropes. Thank God I have gloves. Labouriously, panting for breath, I begin to heave myself up. I actually begin to enjoy this part. I’m using my arms now as well as my legs and lungs and I get a vicarious pleasure out of making my arms take over some of the hard work. That’ll teach the lazy little sods, I think, and begin to giggle insanely. I must be getting light-headed.

Ahead, it seems to be getting brighter. I can see the top of the wall of rock outlined against the sky. I can’t believe I’m there, but at the same time, my body tells me it’s about time. Agonizing steps later, I reach it and see that I’ve arrived at the lip of a gently rising lunar-like plateau which sweeps up into a rounded dome at one end. Darius turns and points at the dome – “That’s the summit”. But I can’t go on. “I have to stop,” I gasp. My legs are rubber and my chest is heaving. We’ve just passed 12,000 feet. I won’t be able to make it, I can’t go on, my body screams at me. YOU CAN DO IT my brain bellows, macho-like.

The wind is a real problem now as it sweeps across the open plateau. It’s just one more thing to contend with. It whistles across the bare, grey rock and I can no longer feel my ears. My shirts are soaked with cold sweat and then Darius touches my shoulder and I look up. The summit rock looms up in front of us. The foot of the peak is about 300 metres away but it could be a lifetime away. Christ, I’m GOING to do it, I CAN make it. Slowly, slowly.

Darius strolls ahead casually, picking the way of least obstruction and greatest ease, I hope. I look down at my feet, and they are moving, step by step, all by themselves. It’s 5:20 am and I’m nearly there. I lean against a rock and cough and hawk up phlegm like a tubercular case. My chest feels tight and I’m panting for breath. I sit down on the cold rock and concentrate on my breathing. Fill the lungs, slowly let it out. Very slowly, fill them again. I sit there, trance like, and deliberately regulate my breathing. There’s a horrible rattling sound in my throat as if something is loose and I realize that my throat is parched. I’ve been lugging this bloody great big water bottle along with me the whole time but had forgotten it. I swirl water around my mouth and then spit it out. I gargle and spit and then gulp long draughts down. I no longer need my torch and I try to stick it in the pocket of my jacket. It seems to take a long time before my fingers can work the zipper. I pull myself up and Darius is waiting patiently for me. “Don’t worry, I’m OK. I can make it,” I say.

It’s another ten minutes before we reach the foot of the dome. It’s absolutely vertical and if it weren’t festooned with ropes I’d never make it up. Now that I’m not holding the torch, it’s easier with two hands on the rope but I still have to stop literally every thirty seconds or so. It’s much brighter now and I can see about fifteen people already at the summit waiting for the sun to rise. They are only thirty feet above me. I CAN do it, I tell myself and then I’m there. Darius grabs my arm, “Here, stand on this rock and you can go no higher”. A smiling Japanese moves aside and I stand on the rock. Darius slaps me on the back, practically knocking me off into the mile deep chasm on the other side of the dome, “You made it,” he says. The Japanese congratulates me.

The wind is bitterly cold up here. It’s 5:45 am and the sun isn’t up yet, although there is a bright orange line below us on the horizon, like the early dawn you can see from an airplane.

I sit on a rock with my feet dangling over the chasm on the north-east side of the dome. I’m so happy, I’m close to tears. After about five minutes, I stand up, lower my head and then straighten up, filling my lungs to the maximum. I throw my head back and give a bellow of triumph. The sound is lost in the immensity of mountain and height. Everyone laughs and cheers. A Malay from Sarawak, his face completely covered in a balaclava and scarf except for an eye-slit, shakes my hand and asks me my name. We are all grinning and congratulating each other. A Korean is posing with a Wooden Sign that says :

LOW’S PEAK
4101 m (13,455 ft)
CONGRATULATIONS
You are now standing on the highest point in S.E.Asia.

I grin maniacally at him and pull a bar of chocolate out of my pocket. It had melted and then frozen into a weird, disjointed shape. I break it in half and offer it to the Korean. Puasa, the Malay in the balaclava, gives me some of his Mars bar. The Japanese takes out a little digital thermometer and tells us it’s 5°C. The sun suddenly appears down at our feet and we all clap and cheer madly.

I feel absolutely fantastic, I feel superhuman. We all take photographs of each other and the sunrise. Paul tells me that there is a rat right behind me and I don’t even bother to look around. I’m too busy drinking in the scene around and below me. Darius asks if I want to leave. I shake my head. There’s no way I’m leaving yet. I only just got here. At 6:15 am, the Japanese announces that it is 10°C. I sit on, staring at the view over Borneo. Someone points to a smudge and claims it is the Philippines. I don’t know, it might be. To the west, I can see the South China Sea. The visibility is superb, but even as we watch, clouds start to edge in below us, filling the valley below.

It’s only when Darius and I begin the descent that I can appreciate, visually, how steep the ascent really was. My feet are jammed into the toes of my shoes and I have to lean back at an absurd angle to prevent myself from pitching face forward down the slope. Thank God we made the climb in darkness, I think. Seeing it in daylight would have completely broken my spirit. Now I feel on top of the world. We make the descent easily and I stop only once. My euphoria lasts and lasts – God, this is the best high I’ve ever experienced. The valley is spread out below us and through a hole in the clouds I see how beautiful it looks – a Shangri-La from a bird’s eye point of view.

We reach the hostel where I had stayed the night by 7:45 am. I strip off the ski jacket and my soaking pullover and T-shirt and sit there in my singlet. I feel so good. Two girls stumble in and I smile at them and say “Congratulations” to them.

“Thanks, …but we didn’t make it.”

“Well, you tried,” I say and they smile and limp away.

I hang my sweaty clothes out to dry in the bright sunshine and then go and change into dry shorts and a T-shirt and go for a cup of tea with Paul.

Paul had made it to the summit in one and three-quarter hours and then had sat there, freezing, waiting for the sun to come up. Like me, he was on a definite euphoric high, and we lounged there in the bright, early morning sunshine, pleased as punch with ourselves.

After he left at 9:00 am to begin the descent to the Park HQ, I sat on over another cup of tea and took stock. I began to feel that I deserved a bit of luxury and self-indulgence. After all, I had just climbed a mountain and it was my birthday. No point staying on top of a mountain then, I reasoned. Another cup of tea, and scribble a few lines in my notebook and then it was time to pack up.

Darius was squatting out on the verandah chatting to the other guides but as soon as I appeared he stood up, gestured inquiringly with his head towards the trail and, when I nodded, he picked up his bag and started to walk. I loved it. Other people would have had to say goodbyes, rushed off for a last trip to the loo, made last minute adjustments to their packs, or found some excuse to delay departure in some way for a minute or two. Not Darius. A nod was all he need and he was up on his hind legs, striding away.

Some people claim that going down a mountain is as bad as going up, that the strain on the legs is actually worse, especially on the ankle and knee joints. I don’t know what kind of legs I have, but with every downward step that I took I felt the strength flowing into me. I guess I am a sea person, and impressed as I am by mountains and heights, my true metier is sea-level. Another beauty of the descent – and there were many if I were to list them all – is that I had both the energy and the altitude to look around me and to appreciate the varying countryside we were moving down through. Below us, I could actually see the weather changing, clouds sweeping in and blocking off the view while we continued to make the descent. I asked Darius if he thought that it would rain and he shrugged indifferently. “It often looks that way in the cloud forest zone”, he said.

And then we were there, plunging into swirling wraiths of damp wetness. Visibility was suddenly gone and Darius moved ahead of me to take the lead. In this saturating mist, the landscape took on an eerie “Twilight Zone” appearance. Mosses of various types, sometimes as delicate as spider webs, draped the twisted, gnarled tress, hanging from their branches, looping down to the exposed roots. On the way up, I had barely noticed this weird, freakish forest, perhaps because there had been no enveloping mist; now I was fascinated, but glad to leave the damp clamminess and emerge in the sunshine below. We were now in true forest where trees were recognizable as being trees, and the lower we went, the higher the trees grew up around us until the sky was blocked out and isolated rays of sunshine dappling the forest floor became less and less frequent.

We were making excellent time and it was only when we stopped for our first break at noon that I realized that perhaps my knees were beginning to suffer from the constant pounding they were receiving as we hopped down the steps. Cautiously, I explored my legs, poking my thumb into my calves, along the shin-bone and into the meat of my thigh. Not too bad, I thought, but we weren’t down yet. And then suddenly we were down, and Oh God, there are those bloody steps to climb up. Never mind, I thought to myself, what’s a 100 steps or so after you’ve climbed a mountain? A lot, I was to find out. My legs, nicely conditioned to going down, bitterly resented this sudden turnabout, this violent reversing of gears, as it were. Back to counting the steps, take it easy, nice and slowly and then we arrive at the Power Station where we started out. We’re still 2½ miles (and 1,000 above) the Park HQ and Darius suggests we wait for a lift rather than walk. Sitting on the top step, idly chewing on a stalk of grass, I ask Darius when his next trip up the mountain will be. “Tomorrow morning at 7:30 am” he grins at me.

Superhuman and elated as I feel, I know that there is no power on earth that could drag me up that mountain again for a long time, if ever at all.

A mini-bus arrives and disgorges a bunch of picnickers and Darius scrounges a lift for the two of us back to the Park HQ.

“Where are you from, sir?” the mini-bus driver asks.

“Ireland”.

“Oh, have you seen Christy Brown’s film, `Down All The Days’. I thought it would be very sentimental, but in fact, I enjoyed it very much indeed. By the way, my name is Jody”.

Jody turned out to be a Filipino working here in Sabah whose sister had recently become engaged to a person I knew in Brunei. Back at the Park, Darius presented me with a fancy Kinabalu Certificate for climbing the mountain. We shook hands and that was that. Jody beeped the horn and asked if I wanted a lift back into town. I did, and by 1:00 PM we were flying around hair-pin bends and the air was getting noticeably warmer. I watched, appalled, as we slithered around bends and overtook a lumbering ox-cart on the inside, and it was as much a desire to block out the nightmare ride as creeping exhaustion that my head began to sag forward on my chest.

When Jody dropped me off in the centre of Kota Kinabalu, I was amazed to see that it was only 2:20 PM (the trip up in the taxi had taken over two hours).

Time for a birthday beer, I decide, and it tastes so good that I have a few more before I even considered going on to my hotel. I had booked a beachside hotel about 12 miles outside Kota Kinabalu on the recommendation of some friends whom I was planning to meet there.

All the taxis wanted an exorbitant sum to make the 12 mile run so, having been stung by taxis already on this trip, I decided to take one of Kota Kinabalu’s ubiquitous little private mini-buses that crisscross the state in competition with public transport. I check that the driver knows my hotel, agree on a price and climb past the other dozen or so people already crammed in, and we’re off. My eyes felt increasingly heavy and it was an effort to fight off the effects of tiredness and beer and the very welcome tropical warmth.

It was only when we stopped in a small village to disgorge sacks of rice that I began to suspect something was wrong. This didn’t look like quite the area for a beach-side resort hotel. I mentioned this to the driver and the look of shock and embarrassment on his face was comic. “Aiieeee, sorrylah. Forgot”.

It turned out that we were in a small town called Beaufort, which in a way, suited me fine as I would have had to come here to-morrow on my overland leg back home. The driver refused to accept any money from me and within five minutes I had checked into the only hotel in town above a bustling Chinese restaurant. Within ten minutes I was in bed.

Hunger woke me at 9:00 PM. Beaufort is a small town and a ten minute stroll was enough to show me that my choice was basically the restaurant under the hotel or nothing. The sweet and sour fish and fried vegetables were superb and the beer was cold and what more could I want for a birthday dinner?

Well, there was a nightclub around the corner and I lumbered (a bit stiff-legged now) over there. Small and dark, it had a three man band bashing away in the corner. I took a table diagonally opposite them (as far away as I could get) but one more beer and despite the noise, I began to slump and for once, prudence asserted itself, and I knew, with a surprising clarity, that the best possible birthday present I could give myself was a good night’s sleep, so that’s what I had.

Mount Kinabalu towers 4,101 metres (13,455 feet) above the tropical rainforest. It is the highest mountain between the Himalayas and the snow-capped peaks of New Guinea. Ever changing, it is a mountain of colourful blossoms and golden sunsets, but also of dark and violent storms. At times a ghostly mist shrouds the mountain and it is easy to believe the local Kadazan’s claim that it is the homeland of their spirit world.

The mountain stretches upward from lowland rainforest to montane forest, cloud forest and subalpine meadows, before finally reaching a crown of bare granite.

Kinabalu’s name is a mystery. The most popular view derives it from the Kadazan words Aki Nabalu meaning “the revered place of the dead”. The local Kadazans believe their spirits dwell on the mountain top. Among the bare rocks of the summit, grows a moss which early Kadazan guides said provided food for the spirits of their ancestors.

Another theory about the mountain’s name comes from the derivation of Kina meaning “China” and Balu meaning “widow”. A Kadazan legend tells the story of a Chinese prince ascending the mountain. He is seeking a huge pearl on the top which is guarded by a ferocious dragon. The prince succeeds in slaying the dragon and stealing the pearl. He then marries a Kadazan woman, but soon abandons her and returns to China. His wife, heartbroken, wanders to the mountain to mourn. There she is turned to stone.

As there is no record of local people climbing the mountain, the first honour goes to Sir Hugh Low, a government officer from Labuan who reached the summit plateau in 1851. He did not scale the highest peak believing, as he wrote, “the highest point is inaccessible to any but winged animals.” But in honour of his journey, this peak, along with a 1 mile deep gully, a pitcher plant, a rhododendron and a few other organisms, all bear his name.

The custom of leaving a signed and dated letter in a bottle at the top of the mountain gives us a history of the early climbers. In 1858, Sir Hugh Low made a second expedition to Kinabalu with his friend Spencer St. John. It was not until 1888 that the highest peak was scaled by John Whitehead and his intrepid Kadazan porters. In 1910, Lillian Gibbs became the first woman to scale Kinabalu’s lofty peaks. In the same year, Kinabalu’s first tourist made the ascent, describing his trip as “purely a vacational ramble.” Shortly after this, a bull terrier named Wigson gained fame as the first dog to climb the mountain, accompanied by the district officer from Kota Belud.

Kinabalu Park
Sabah Park Publication No. 7

Something New

I haven’t been doing much with this blog recently. I have been tinkering around and messing with parameters but don’t actually feel I have achieved anything new. So, no new curves except … well, here is something new, for me, anyway.

I’ve made an audio recording of a chapter from my book. No doubt I will aspire to vblogs (shudder!) at some point but here, for the very first time I put my voice on cyber space.

The promiscuous and vindictive Medb, queen of Connachta, incensed by her husband Ailil’s claim that he alone had made her rich and powerful, insists on a full inventory of their possessions to prove, finally, who is the richest.

Ailil possesses a semi-divine white bull, a descendent of the ancient gods of the Sídhe, and of the Tuatha de Dammam. Its only match, the Donn Cúailnge or the Brown Bull of Cúailnge, can be found in the kingdom of the Ulaidh.

Chapter 19, beins with mac Roth, Medb and Ailil’s steward, ordered to tally all their possessions and to report any discrepancies.

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Raiding Cúailnge is an 113,000 word historical novel based on Old Irish manuscripts. Cú Chulainn, an Iron Age hero, sacrifices family and friends to achieve the everlasting fame foretold at his birth. Defending his lands from an avaricious queen, he breaks the bonds of kinship and loyalty that hold Celtic society together.

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So, …if you haven’t managed to get around to getting a copy of my novel, now is the time to do so and i would be most grateful if, having read it, you would post a (hopefully) enthusiastic review on whichever site you used to download a copy, but remember, the discount only applies to the Smashwords site and not to Amazon or the other retailers where the novel is available.

A New Curve?

When I started this blog back in March 2016, I was doing so for three main reasons – firstly to promote and advertise my first ever novel – Raiding Cúailnge – and to have fairly regular posts on Book Stuff in a general fashion. Next was going to be a section on Celtic Trivia where I would share some of the research I had done for my Raiding Cúailnge and finally a third string to the bow would be to track my Learning Curves in this – for me -new world of social media communication.

I seem to have managed, more or less in maintaining the Celtic Trivia section and I have added a few short stories to the Book Stuff section but it seems like my Learning Curves has petered out a bit so here I am again, trying to bolster not only it but also the main reason why I started this blog – my book, Raiding Cúailnge.

So, I am going to embed / upload an audio recording of me reading a chapter from the novel, which is set in an Iron Age Celtic society in Ireland and is based on the epic The Cattle Raid of Cooley,

OOOPS – major hiccup here. Just tried to upload an audio recording of a chapter from Raiding Cúailnge only to find I need to upgrade my blog before i can do so. Hmmm.

So, if you are new to my blog, feel free to start here or go back to the beginning and flit through the various posts I have made on all three main categories.

For some reason, as yet unclear, the individual posts I write don’t seem to go automatically into their respective categories, so I suppose I should reserve a future post for Curves in an attempt to find out what I am doing wrong and to correct it in future posts.