Month: April 2018

This week I learned that the words for ‘late’ and ‘sodomy’ in Bahasa are practically indistinguishable to the non-native speaker.  So, it’s a good idea for all foreigners to be extremely punctual, thus  avoiding the danger of accidentally confessing to a crime and ending up with a twenty-year prison sentence. And then I had an…

I’ve learnt that when chums visit you have to stop lolling around on the sofa and go off and do a bit of sightseeing.  So when Caroline came to stay, once we’d exhausted the possibilities KL has to offer, we popped up to Penang for a couple of days. We found the most wonderful cake…

Malaysians are outraged. Why? You might ask – they’re pretty placid people on the whole. Well, there’s a general election coming up, and the ruling party has been busy changing the electoral boundaries to ensure that there’s a majority of Muslims in every catchment area, so that the National Party gets back into power. The…

I do love being unkind to children … I think that must be why I decided to go into teaching in the first place.  This was my April Fools’ Day prank – I stuck this notice on the door and then hid, along with the first three children who’d arrived to class.  They hid under…