With apologies to the real Mr Men

Mr Brash had a big boat and although he was not in the least bit lonely, he liked to have company, so he invited Mr Brainy and Mr Modesty to dine and sleep. As they went along in Mr Brash’s rickety old car, Mr Brainy was still thinking about dummy GPS waypoints, used to track bearing and distance to a real waypoint that is quite different from the dummy. Having difficulty with understanding this? Well so have I, but it was meat and drink to Mr Brainy who behaved outrageously in class, drawing arcane diagrams on the board and taking over from the teacher. Poor Mr Brainy, he had such a lot of trouble holding up his enormous head!

Mr Brash drove his car very gently and skilfully, such that it was a pleasure to be chauffered by him and both Mr Brainy and Mr Modesty got an overwhelming sense of safety and the immense courtesy of Mr Brash, which of course sits at odds with his name and his exterior. Mr Brash is also a biker, and by preference he wears a brief black cutaway Harley Davidson top which shows off his extensive tattoos extending down from his right shoulder to just below the elbow.

Mr Modesty described how he loves his kids to Mr Brainy and Mr Brash. Mr Brainy didn’t listen very well and so he said the first thing that came into his mind.

“A father’s relationship with his son is always closer than to his daugher.” This was a really silly thing for him to have said, and in fact is exactly dead wrong, but Mr Brash was too polite to point this out, but Mr Modesty did say, very mildly, that he had expected it to be the other way around.

They needed to get some food to eat, so they went to the supermarket. Mr Brainy had a rather complicated scheme. He started to calculate how to add to the leftovers from the previous day, but before this plan was complete in his head, Mr Brash had already selected and chosen some chops. Eventually Mr Brainy got himself together and managed to select some rather tired vegetables and some rather green bananas. Mr Modesty was keeping very quiet because he had never been to the boat before and so very wisely decided to let the other two lead. This suited Mr Brainy down to the ground.

By the time Mr Brainy had chosen some vegetables, the other two Mr Men had already been to the liquor store and had bought mixers, beers, and wines. The three met up again after queuing to pay. Then they continued in the rickety old car to the Royal Lankawi Yacht Club where Mr Brash’s enormous ocean-going catamaran was moored. Mr Brash hurried on ahead. Mr Brainy explained about Mr Brash’s super yacht to Mr Modesty. After a little while Mr Modesty told Mr Brainy that he already knew about it. Actually it was not a super yacht but a detail like this was nothing to Mr Brainy, and he took no notice.

Mr Brash had hurried on ahead to make sure that the boat was nicely ventilated for his guests. Mr Brash is very thoughtful and he set about the practical details of cooking the chops and adding a bottle of pasta sauce to the plain macaroni that was left over from the day before last. Mr Brainy offered Mr Modesty a gin and tonic which he did not really want, but he was too polite to tell Mr Brainy. Then Mr Brainy started to teach Mr Modesty some English Literature, and he quoted most of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan so that Mr Modesty would be sure to get the message.

Mr Modesty had learned Shylock’s speech about this jewish man’s common humanity at school, so very politely he unpacked the memory and recited the text, since it seemed that it was the right thing to do. Mr Brainy drummed his fingers while Mr Modesty spoke but even he was moved by some of it – for example

“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”

Quite soon Mr Brash had finished cooking and he came out into the cockpit to serve the food to the other two. They stuffed themselves with the delicious food and Mr Brash and Mr Modesty drank quite a bit of the red wine that they had bought at the supermarket.

After dinner, Mr Brainy went off to write his blog and the other two Mr Men got down to some serious drinking. Mr Modesty started playing pop music on his iPhone, which sounded tinny to Mr Brainy, but instead of blocking off his ears, he got out his iPod and listened to Beethoven. Then he went to bed. The other two fell asleep on the benches in the cockpit and started to snore heavily, so I wasn’t able to observe any more of their behaviour.

During their sleeping periods I began to organise my views about each of the Mr Men and I have summarised them thus: Mr Brash is actually more brainy than Mr Brainy and slightly more modest than Mr Modesty. Mr Modesty is a gentle spirit with a very giving nature, but he has an assertive side and when that side is given free rein, he can be more brash than Mr Brash. Mr Brainy is almost always more brash than Mr Brash, and sometimes less brainy than Mr Modesty.

The next day the three friends were a few minutes late for the start of their class. At this stage they were being taught how to adjust course for leeway and tide. These were the last building blocks in the process of learning how to calculate ‘Course to Steer‘ allowing for these influences in the fluid on which their bark swims.

‘Yoked by violence together’ is an adverse comment on punning, if I remember Jeremy’s classes right, by Samuel Johnson, the Great Cham. This piece was conceived before dawn as the full moon reflected a beam of inspiration from the waters outside my cabin porthole.

As far as offspring goes I have a double aspect, both female. The elder is a normal woman, although highly successful as she contributes to society as the Head of Psychology at a well-known private school. In her spare time she pursues the drama. When spending a sabbatical year in Sri Lanka (which I was fortunate enough to have the chance of helping to initiate) she spent a lot of her time on a wonderful updated Shakespearian piece. Recently she has taken a large role in the York Mystery Plays, also playing several crowd scenes with my two-year-old grand-daughter, whose first memory may sometime prove to be on the boards. She has performed at the Edinburgh Festival as well, and her latest intersection with my younger one was on a flying visit to that city last summer (well for you in UK – the seasons are different here).

Unfortunately my younger daughter is not normal, but an alien, her bright blue skin clearly visible in a recent photo. She tried to cover this up by saying it was all for a charitable cause, but I know better. How, you may ask, could she be an alien if I still acknowledge paternity? Well, as I used to tell her when she was little more than a toddler, cocking my head on one side and seeming to listen intently:

“I can now admit that I am an alien myself. As I can hear the spaceship coming to take us away to Bubble Planet I am permitted to reveal my true identity and to take off my human mask”.

I would then grasp my double chin or the sagging aged loose skin of my neck (normally covered by a cravate in temperate climes) and seem to drag off my face revealing a hideous howling and snapping insect underneath. I really think that the first time I did this, I was for a moment believed, for I know that children love to live in the imagination which I think is held under a thinner skin of the subconscious than it is for older people. A controlled thrill of momentary fear is the spice that provides the spine of all archetypal fairy tales.

Spaceship – SPESHiPS – this could be my yoke. the partly capitalised word being a mnemonic I put together for the operations needed to make a yacht ready for sea. Whoops, unfortunately not for springs are not really a part of this. So I had better come clean at once and explain them.

In Hornblower and the Atropos the eponymous hero uses a spring attached to his anchor chain to escape from the large but old-fashioned Turkish warship that was trapping him. By securing the spring line to the anchor chain (suspended over the bow) and taking the line back amidships or further, he could swing the ship very quickly by hauling in on it. So clever! Such a marvellously thoughtful seaman! For most of my life I have not understood how to deploy such a line nor how vital it can be to a safe mooring.

Kay Sira is often moored with a bow line, a stern line, and two springs which fan out from the fat midships. The purpose of the bow spring is to prevent the vessel from going astern, whereas the spring at the stern prevents it from drifting forwards. If there is any wind, tide, or turbulence, one of these warps will be under load.

My biggest mistake so far in this adventure was to release the stern spring, which was under load to tidy it up. The boat was propelled forward by the wind blowing on the stern and the beautiful skin of the bows approached the rough edge of the dock.

“Oh dear,” I cried, “I have made a mistake”.

Barry, our instructor, and the ever patient Principal of the School immediately apprised the situation and told me to hold the bows.

“Is she marked?” he asked anxiously.

“No, she didn’t make contact” I replied.

He then explained patiently that I should either have made my operation a two-man job – on on the boat and one on the dock, or rigged another spring so that I could have safely adjusted the first.

“Let’s not make a drama out of a crisis” he finished generously, as I choked out my shocked apology.

Thus have I learned a lesson about the usage and abusage of that most important of mooring warps – the spring.

I started my second week of training today. It is shore based. Each trainee has two wonderful dummy charts marked ‘Not to be used for navigation’. Apparently the coast lines are composites of real places with imaginary names (some amusing) provided instead of the real ones.

My friend and coursemate (illustrated above) who owns a catamaran on which he is kindly putting me up estimated that the number of symbols found on Admiralty charts is about ten times the number found on OS maps. Charts, in fact, have all the land-based symbols as well as a plethora of marine symbols which stand in place of the manifold features and dangers of the sea. Perhaps the most tantalising one seen today was ‘minefield’!

I have always loved maps and charts, and particularly the symbolic representations that model specific features enabling a cognoscento to interpret the actual seascape and to convey a huge amount of information in a compressed form. Until now I have been quickly baffled by most of the symbols but from now on I have the enormous satisfaction of being able to discover their meanings via Admiralty Chart no 5011: ‘Symbols and Abbreviations used on Admiralty Paper Charts’. Without this publication and an understanding of how to use it (via the ‘Contents Key’ in the back cover) you could not raise yourself from your current level of knowledge (or in my case, ignorance).

I have used a Portland Plotter and wonderful brass-footed dividers for the first time, enabling me to take compass bearings and determine distances along a track. Along the borders of a chart the co-ordinate references (latitude & longitude) are conveniently displayed in degrees, minutes and decimal fractions of a minute. These are repeated every so many grid lines in the body of the chart, and together with that most romantic of diagrams, the compass rose, enable us to determine our position on the surface of the globe with great accuracy.

I ended the day in a mood of euphoria, for I had always thought I could understand charts if only I had the keys to hand, and now I have been shown these keys! There is a great deal to learn and I can already see that the two examinations which will take place this week will not be easy, but after the principles are well understood I believe that with methodical care I shall be able to pass them.

I am already aware of how easy it is to make mistakes with bearings and lat/long position refs by transposition of figures and many other causes. Only rigorous checking and re-checking in such a way as to avoid repeating an error can we expect to produce accurate results which really do identify the present position and enable us to devise safe and accurate courses to our destination.

Life – especially shoreside life – is not so simple or so definite, I am afraid. Many a good navigator can find himself aground in a human situation when he or she would never run that risk at sea.

I have obtained my first sea-going certificate of competence, and I notice on a detachable part of the certificate that the Royal Yacht Association (RYA) ‘know how hard… [I have]… worked to obtain it’. They may know in general terms, but they cannot know the blood, sweat, toil, and tears I have given, mostly willingly, nor can they know in detail what any other individual has seen and suffered.

In my case, there has been very little blood, just a few minor scrapes and nicks. However, there has been a superfluity of sweat, associated with the extremely hard toil of hauling and handling ropes and unfamiliar tackle. The tropical heat has been like the heavy weight of Pilgrim’s Burden, constantly gnawing and worrying on my back. Tears I just held back when I was recounting the experiences of my uncle Peter, who spent two days in a life-raft in winter beyond the arctic circle, with two companions, one dead.

I had shared this publicly to underline the importance of good seamanlike practice associated with emergency procedures in life and death situations including the abandonment of a sinking vessel and use of the self-inflating life-raft which should be lashed securely to the foredeck but capable of very quick release and deployment in the event of needing to use it.

I said above that this was my first sea-going certificate, but that was not in fact true. Quite early on in my Merchant Naval career, I obtained a certificate of competence in the French language. This entitled me to attach a small tricolour badge to the upper sleeve of my cold weather uniform reefer jacket, and to receive a small supplement of pay.

I had taken the necessary examination, run by the Berlitz School of Languages, during a spell of leave, when I attended the P & O Head Offices then in Leadenhall, in the City of London. This location in the vast urban canyon of the city from which a quarter of the land surface of the planet once was ruled, must have been very close to the site of East India House itself. This was the Honourable East Company (HEIC). It was from there that our Indian trade was directed. The inevitable interactions with native powers created the conditions under which the British Indian Empire was first acquired and then governed. This continued, with P & O eventually replacing the Company’s licensing of its own ships, until the time of the Mutiny in the middle of the 19th century, when the Company’s remaining powers were subsumed into an arm of the British government.

I passed the test, but was only called to use the French qualification in anger twice. The first time the ship was anchored off Ajaccio in Corsica and being served by local launches to take the passengers on trips ashore. The Radio Officer in the shore party was a bit of a wag and he sent back a message by radio to the ship to get me to instruct the launch captains to ‘pass around the stern of the vessel and come alongside the after companion ladder communicating with the Promenade deck’. To his great satisfaction I completely failed to make the Corsican Captain understand a word of what I was trying to convey.

The second and last occasion was, strangely enough, also in Corsican waters, this time in the Bonifacio Straits which separate that island from Italian Sardinia. There had been an earthquake in Southern Turkey and very strange meteorological conditions resulted in a force 10 hurricane strength wind associated with very high seas, but with unexpectedly good visibility. The distance between the wave crests was not so great as it would have been in open waters, but even so, the 38,000 ton liner was pitching and yawing like a rowing boat steaming up the crests and falling down into the troughs. It was 0600 and all the non-watch keepers and passengers were still asleep when I was awoken by a general tannoy announcement requiring me to report to the bridge. I flung on some uniform and ran, taking care to avoid being seen by any passenger since any action that suggested emergency was absolutely forbidden.

When I arrived on the bridge the Captain and Officers of the Watch were standing around a radio telephone which continuously squawked:

‘Le Northern Star, ou etes vous? Repondez s’il vous plait’ …. then a slight pause before the same message was repeated ”Le Northern Star, ou etes vous? Repondez s’il vous plait’ – on and on.

They must have been waiting for some time in a tight circle like that while this communication was being repeatedly transmitted. Then the Captain had decided to hoik me out of bed and my summons was broadcast to every cabin and public space on the ship. This time I was able to translate all the messages that the Captain said to me in English into a good enough French to be understood by the Francophone shore-based radio operator. I had to ask what was the height of the waves at the entrance to Ajaccio Harbour and to convey the response.

As a result of the information which I translated the Captain decided to cancel the ship’s visit to Ajaccio and to continue directly to Gibraltar, our next port of call.

No such emergencies dogged our circum-navigation of the Island of Lankawi, some 124 nautical miles, which took 6 days, and involved 7 hours of night sailing. We made 3 landfalls, and conducted many evolutions on the way, including about half a dozen ‘Man Overboard’ drills involving ‘Bob’ a big fat fender, whose body was represented by a coiled warp and whose face was drawn in indelible marker on the side of the buoy. It was pretty easy to bring Bob back on board after he had been caught with a boat hook, but of course a real human casualty, perhaps unconscious, would be much harder to recover, since Kay Sira’s rails are about six feet above the normal level of the water.

Each evolution involved back-breaking work hauling in the huge genoa sail furling it onto the forestay, only to haul it out again ready for the next merciless cycle of that training. At one point our Instructor announced that we would not turn home to dinner until we could recover the ‘casualty’ in under 5 minutes. In the end we achieved a time of 2 minutes 53 seconds and I am sure that we all felt 10 feet tall.

I found the work particularly hard on the feet, which still are tingling whilst I sit typing. My ankles swelled up and I reported this. The instructor, Barry, and his wife Lynette looked at my ankles and recognised the condition as one they had seen before. They recommended a visit to a pharmacy, as in this country they are licensed to do simple diagnoses. I obtained some anti-diuretic tablets and after my third daily dose the condition is improving.

Next week we spend in the classroom exercising only the opposite part of the body – that is the head, as we learn about passage planning, chart work, basic navigation, compass work, tidal flow and extents, weather patterns, forecasting, and more.

To summarise what was learned this week I would say that there was a strong familiarisation process with the boat. It had to become like an extension of each crew member’s body. Only when this analogue has at least a foundation in each crew member can the vessel be operated smartly. In apposition to that intimate physical and psychological learning process was development of a human angle, in which each crew member learned to rely on the concerted actions of each other, sometimes well executed, sometimes clumsily, but always as an essential complement to one’s own actions.

To start with I was a little over-anxious and took on too much. but I soon found that I had to learn some moderation as in the enormous heat the continuous toil quickly took me towards my current limit of endurance. I hope to become stronger as time passes and I practice more, but it is a salutary lesson that I must rely on the hard work and contribution of others to preserve my own strength so that I can reach the end of an exhausting day without needing to lie down.

It was sad to part with two of my first shipmates, Jenny and Joerge, after developing such a close working relationship, but we humans must learn to be more like the ever-changing tides and currents that can carry us to distant shores.

Here is the sun setting on our 5th day at sea.

Compressing and expanding our experience of time by effort of will cannot be guaranteed because ‘the mind is in its own place’. Your inbuilt Lord High Admiral can order his fleet to sea, but cannot entirely command his meanest deck hand, who like the subtle nerves at the finger ends, blindly transmits sensations that can unseat admirals and knock them into a cocked hat.

Certainly my own time experience over the last two days has overloaded my critical functions close to whiteout. Viewed by the almighty, our small meanderings around the south eastern side of many-cliffed Lankawi would seem like small beer indeed. but from the lowly vantage point of the sailor under command our evolutions were strenuous, overwhelming, and had the unexpected effect of a team-building spirit in which each shipmate looks out for the next and relies on her or him.

Like a planet our bark slept each night in a different port and this is the second place where we have laid our weary heads. The first is already lost to the fanatic accuracy of my internal clerk, though a wrack of photos have been left behind as incontrovertible evidence of things that took place too long ago to be directly re-created for you in your armchairs.

There is also some scrawling in my ‘Where’s Wally?’ notebook a gift from a dear friend who knows my love of stationery. On these I will rely to research the temps perdue of the last two days.

In the meantime I can offer you a portrait of the author as an old sea dog, taken during my spell at the wheel by a thoughtful shipmate.

Note: Thanks to those readers who reported the absence of the above. Your vigilance is appreciated. The omission was due to rotten phone reception in the bowels of the berth. Belatedly I have been advised that the reception is a lot better a few 100 metres away in the Royal Lankawi Yacht Club in which I am for the nones a squatting member. I am sitting now in their grand lounge at 0836 in the morning and feeling a lot more satisfied with the prospects for publishing more pictures as one old friend has demanded.

Starting rather slowly with lessons on safety, conducted in port, the day became extremely strenuous by 2pm when we set sail and began to learn how to operate as a team to handle the boat.

In particular I was exposed to the full tropical sun almost during the hottest part of the day, at a time when, in Penang, I had retreated to delicious air-conditioning for a short sleep.

We did endless tacking, gybing, and the four trainees took turns with each task, streering, or hauling on the right ropes in the right order. We inched in to a new marina as evening fell and had another meal ashore.

Here is a typical view during the afternoon.

I am tremendously tired and unfortunately my eyes are stinging, probably because of  getting a mixture of sun cream and sweat into them

I must sleep now….

Coming aboard a new ship as a crew member for the first time effects an emotional transition as well as the mere physical stepping from the dockside. I well remember this internal struggle as I joined my first ship P & O ss Canberra 46 years ago. Despite my long experience this transition from drab landsman to smart seaman took me by surprise.

I arrived at the meeting point for this voyage outside the marina office some four hours early because of timetabling of available flights and sitting with my bags in a strange zone of silence in the untended cafe section of the adjacent supermarket I tried the phone number in the joining instructions, as prescribed for early arrival. Using my UK phone the internationally prefixed number rang briefly with a strange tone, but then a voice – mercifully in English – told me that the number was not available. The phone displayed the message: call failed.

I was not uneasy as I told myself that phone service is often chancy. There is little likelihood of this whole setup – for which I have paid in advance – is some internet scam in which unsuspecting trainee seamen are fleeced of their small resources. Putting aside this type of thinking and also the lesser problems such as business failure, I determined to ‘man up’ and make inquiries at the Marine Office.

Clambering up to the second floor of a smart square blue building, following signs to the Marina Office I entered a large space tenanted by a single woman who delayed looking up at me until the last possible moment.

“Hello, I am looking for Mr Wickett of Kay Sira. I cannot contact him through the telephone number I have been given. Can you help me?” I inquired courteously.

“If you student must wait downstairs” was her gnomic utterance in reply.

“Ah, no, I don’t think you understand. I have arrived four hours early and I need to follow the instructions in this paper to make contact with Mr Wickett. I only have a UK phone – can you ring this local number and ask Mr Wicket to come?” I showed the lady my joining instructions, and borrowing a highlighter from her desk, I helpfully indicated the local number. Very reluctantly, she reached for a phone and dialled, but alas, she got the same message as I.

“Must wait downstairs. Cannot stay in office,” she said and at that moment a radio telephone started to squawk and she lovingly picked it up, offering her lips to it like a lover, and spoke in rapid Malay. When the radio conversation died down, I rejoined:

“Can you please show me where Mr Wickett’s boat, Kay Sira is berthed?”

“No cannot”, she immediately replied, with some satisfaction, as if she had seen a pretty obvious trick designed to catch her out.

Fast forward to the next morning. The crew is awaking and I must make tea.

More later.

“Is it a nice place to be?” asked my wife Jack, with whom I can now chat using FaceTime every day.

I did not know whether the question refered to my sister’s house or the wider environment of this island set shield-shaped about 4 miles from the Malaysian mainland, located at the north end of the Straits of Malacca and containing Malaysia’s second city, Georgetown.

Just a moment, I must pause as La Traviata reaches its supreme sacrificial ending on my iPod… OMG if I were Alfredo I would have looked after her more. But then again, perhaps she casts herself as a victim and cannot play any other role. Oh how it pierces the heart to hear her say she is getting better as she slowly dies in imperial dignity!

But back to Jack’s question, first I will say that to me the house is not far from ideal. It is located in a slightly cooler area than the narrow and previously marshy coastal plain, some way up Pearl Hill. It is on a terrace, dug in at the back into the side of the rising hill, but the road on which it fronts is almost level, passing at right angles to the slope. The house is detached and there is a fairly narrow concreted path all the way round, with a ‘parit’ (Malay: storm drain) under the deeply overhanging eaves. There is a broad verandah on one side and a jungly patch on the other. It is set back 6 metres from the road, with a well designed garden infrastructure of paths and beds, supporting a riot of flowering shrubs and including some moderate sized trees. At the front is a car port and another broad verandah inhabited when it rains by the three dogs.

Inside there are 2 bedrooms with A/C each with a bathroom, a broad hall giving access to the bedrooms on one side and the sitting and dining rooms on the other. There is a kitchen behind the dining room and a vast scullery leaning-to across the back of the house, incorporating the parit, which is neatly bridged with aluminium grill panels. There is a third bedroom without bathing facilities, or perhaps sharing mine. Every window is protected by diamond-shaped metal grills. These are hinged to allow access to the verandahs. This high level of security is needed against the penchuri (Malay: robbers) which might otherwise come in a gang by night and pass your possessions out in a chain.

This happened to our parents in the 50s, when a servant inadvertently left a grill unbarred one night and the lithe oiled bodies of the penchuri flitted soundlessly from room to room. Our mother, who was a small person, but very fierce especially when at bay, nonetheless woke and at first she thought in that pre-air-conditioned age that a firefly had come in from the night. When she realised it was a dimmed torch she leaped up with a huge shout and the men in the penchuri chain dropped whatever they were passing at that moment and as one man took to their heels, leaving cameras, radios, record-players, tins of food, in fact all our possessions, strung out across the very extensive grounds we had in those days, including two full-sized games courts.

At that time it would have been awkward for us to keep dogs. For one thing there was no fencing between the individual plots of government housing, and indeed it had to be easy for the Public Works Dept (PWD) gardeners to move smoothly from house to house. For another it would not have sat well with our servants, who were Malays to whom, being Muslims, dogs are unclean animals.

Another difference is that my sister’s bungalow is guarded on the road front by a huge electrically operated security gate. The back is too steep to allow access and abuts more private property. At each side there is a strong fence demarcating the gardens of the adjacent houses, and as I have said, we allow the jungle to take back a bit of its lost luxuriance. These picturesque predispositions have earned my sister the soubriquet of ‘the  jungle woman’ locally, for all our neighbours hack slash and extirpate, allowing only a few sparse and uniform lines of specimen plants.

So to me this house is supremely comfortable and deceptively spacious, affording perfect settings for cool breakfasts in bed, tiffins under slowly rotating fans, evening ginslings as the brief tropical dusk fallsgolden, and secure comfort for dining and reclining. Nights can be noisy with dogs barking, but the backgound scream of cicadas is absent here, although nowadays it would be completely muffled by aircon.

If however Jack’s question was directed at the wider environment of this island which some have called the jewel of the east, then I will start off by saying that Georgetown has become a world heritage site, its grid plan still reflecting the urban plan laid out by the founder, Francis Light, in 1786 before which almost the whole island was impenetrable jungle.

It’s said that to start the clearance Light landed his ship’s cannon and loaded them with silver dollars, firing them off each day at dawn to encourage the workmen. After eight years of hard work, Light died off form fever, but by then he had overseen the first development of the town which subsists to this day, and although he names of the streets have been malayanised, the original proper names have been consistently preserved, so that Light Street has only been changed to Lebuh Light, and Scott Road only to Jalan Scott. Maintaining these links with the past is of course a wise move from the tourist point of view as the sense of continuity reassures foreigners, but it also perhaps suggests that the islanders still retain a sense of their old independence from the mainland government.

I am horrified that the coast road, which in my youth was a simple two-track affair, with occasional cars, and many pedal cycles, have become six-lane highways, choked with 4x4s and all the bicycles have become cheap Japanese motorbikes. I am aghast at the development of high-rise housing, invading the foothills of the mountainous centre of the island. So far the dense jungle of the higher slopes has in the main remained untouched, although since 1903 there has been a railway up to the cool top.

From the Convalescent Bungalow, located almost at the summit, you can on a clear day look out to the answering majesty of Kedah Peak (Malay: Gunong Jerai), the greater range adjacent on the mainland, a characteristic shape supported by a huge sprawling base, penetrated by many rivers. As you move about on the more populous east side of Penang island you continuously catch glimpses of the Peak across on the mainland, each from a slightly different angle, but always familiar.

Well, as you see, I am trying to paint a favourable picture of both the immediate and the wider environment, my waiting room as I prepare myself to join the yacht in three days time. You will see that this shore is anything but strange to me, and even now, when my parents who lived here are long dead, there is a part of me that recognises this island as my childhood home.

Capturing and controlling volatile stuff that is difficult to handle without damaging it can be achieved by a ‘decoy’ method in which the stuff is initially enticed into the large end of a cone-shaped enclosure. It is encouraged to move by degrees into the smaller end until its freedom of movement is so constrained that it can cannot escape and it can then be manipulated easily and safely.

I am deliberately using this method to effect my transition into retirement, and I have invented the ‘Prequel Procrastination System’ (PPS) to regulate and control it. Are you worried about making the change from a working life? PPS is designed to soothe and swale away all the anxiety and sting!

PPS depends on forward planning – all the virtue is contained in the long run up. Last March I happened to meet my boss at the security turnstiles  on our way into the factory and in answer to his courteous inquiry I told him that I was excited because about to book up my two-month RYA Yachtmaster course. This would necessitate my retirement in early October, said I.

This set a terminus so distant in time from the event predicted that for many months my job seemed to run along just as before, as the critical analyst in me – the person who looks out at my reflection in the mirror – gradually prepared me for the pain of parting from so many work colleagues that I count as friends.

PPS has a layered model, like an onion where each skin’s time envelope protects. I started this blog in the UK run-up – the few days between leaving the factory and my flight to Penang, Malaysia. I was already full of enthusiasm before boarding the plane, but now I am within the next, and indeed the last little envelope of time before my adventure begins. I am staying with my sister who lives here in Penang. I am practically bursting as I live through the short remaining time. It races past with extraordinary intensity, bright as tropical flowers.

As is often the case before the voyage, there are quite a few shoreside complications.

Winged words were spoken by the camera salesman into whose hands I had delivered myself. I was putty in his hands and I was enjoying it. The possibility of love between me and my single-lens reflex seemed remote to start with, but his proposal to mend our relationship by offering a renewal of that doubtful commodity struck a chord.

Explaining that I had not got on very well with it, I had told him that just maybe a telephoto lens was needed, and he cleverly engaged me by simplifying the issue to a straight choice – either this one which is basic and cheap, or this one, modestly more expensive but including some automatic stabilisation against camera shake. I’m pretty sure he had already classified me as a prospect that would be tempted by the best that money can buy. If so he was right – I always incline towards the more expensive choice in the hope of getting value. I care less about preserving my hoard of money than the self esteem it buys.

I am struggling with the display of images resulting from my purchase. I wanted to show details of a tiny island about a mile offshore from the island of Penang where I am staying for the few days before my seatrack begins. I would have like to show two images side by side, one shot with the new telephoto lens, the other with an inexpensive compact camera on full zoom.

Alas my technical skill with this new computer and the new WordPress software I am using to generate this blog, is not yet sufficient for my purposes.

This is a cropped picture of Pulau Tikus (‘Rat Island’) at high tide, taken with the lens I bought from the salesman.

Tamron 70-300 Telephoto

Here is one taken with my small Fujfilm FinePix on full zoom, taken the day before at low tide.

Fujifilm FinePix on full zoom

What I want from the new telephoto lens is to be able to capture distant objects within a narrower angle of view than is possible with a standard lens. However it is obvious to me that my photographic skills need a great deal of attention.

Well my current levels must serve me during the sailing course which starts in six days time. But maybe when I get back to London, I shall put photographic training on my list of activities!

Anyway, as for the salesman’s promise, I think the most that can be said at present is that we are still getting to know each other!