Sunday Supplement
Today, Jakartass has Home Thoughts From Abroad. Usually they are the other way around - Alien Thoughts From Home, home being wherever I lay my wife.
I think I'm allowed to indulge this craving once in a while so I hope some of my readers, who I have recently realised are nostalgic for Indonesia, will allow my little self-indulgence.
It is good for me and others up here in the UK to read your facts and your thoughts about issues 000's of kms away. It is important that the problems are not swept under the carpet of other less important, yet more up to date news items. Thanks for this extraordinary insight. My partner was born in Semarang, albeit living in Holland since 1956 and in England since 2000.
Actually, I don't claim "extraordinary insight". Perhaps 'perspective' would be a better word, but I'm happy to oblige.
Except for today ...
Brit bits of tsunami
Tsunami: the Day The Wave Struck relied on camcorder footage and interviews with survivors, mostly British tourists. Their stories were fascinating and touching, but for those of us who were in Sri Lanka on 26 December there is an abiding sense that this wasn't 'our' tragedy to hijack; it belongs to the people of Asia.
Equinox. We are all tsunami experts after the event, but there were still some fascinating facts here: the quake triggered a displacement of energy equivalent to 23,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs; a cubic metre of water weighs a ton; the earth has been shoved off its axis by 2.5cm; and our days have been shortened by three millionths of a second. Great. Like they were long enough already ...
The Piano Player looks over the balcony and sees the devastation below.
My God.
But luckily no one is dead here.
'Is there anything I can do?' he asks.
'Play the piano,' the manager suggests.
So he sits and plays gentle ballads.
Get a life
I'm Addickted to Charlton, so I wasn't too happy to be too knackered to stay awake for last night's webcast of the rip-roaring tie (which was) in the best traditions of the cup and ended with a standing ovation from both sets of supporters.
Oh, yes. Charlton, 7th in the Premiership, just managed to beat Yeovil who are a couple of divisions lower.
Inspector Sands, whose All Quiet was recently voted best Sports Blog, and these folk are also addickted.
Others are merely addicted to sushi, Viagra, texting and online dating. According to Zoe Lewis, the latter can be damaging for the soul, mate.
Nostalgia is what it used to be
All things nice
Hope and Greenwood opened in August last year, on an upwardly mobile street in East Dulwich in southeast London. It is no ordinary sweet shop. Every detail has been planned, from the glass sweetie jars to the old Ladybird books and the pair of shoes (Miss Hope's mother's wedding shoes from the Fifties) that accessorise the shop. ... They had to beg the two 70-year-olds who are the last people making sweet tobacco to add their shop to their orders.
Expats unable to get to East Dulwich for their sweet tobacco can get it, and Sherbet Fountain Dip and Flying Saucers and ABC Letters and ...
|
