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What she’s learned

SarahAlderson

November 20, 2014

‘It’s time to leave Bali mummy,’ Alula declares as we walk out of Green School gates for the last time ever.

She doesn’t mean literally. We’re not going for another three days but in her infinite wisdom Alula’s hit the nail on the head. It is time to leave. Though the feeling is vague and nagging it is there in all of us. It’s a gut feeling, I guess, driven by a multitude of emotions and thoughts and hopes and dreams.

‘There are some things that I will miss,’ Alula muses, ‘and some things will not be as good in England. But there are some things that will be better.’

Indeed. ‘We are going on a new adventure,’ I say. ‘And it will be hard at times but it will also be really exciting because who knows what great things could come from it.’

Alula nods and I realise that this is the greatest gift of all, forget everything else she’s gained from living here. At eight years old she is learning the power of her own agency – that if a situation doesn’t serve her anymore she can bid it farewell. She’s learning that taking a step into the vast territory of the unknown can be terrifying and that it requires courage and boldness. And at eight years old she’s already discovered those qualities within herself.

I repeat: She’s eight. Not many adults have figured that one out.

And if at eight years old she can summon the bravery to overcome her fears and worries, and if she can happily embrace uncertainty because she knows that within it lies the possibility of achieving outrageous potential, and that that pursuit – the pursuit of your highest dreams and purpose – gives colour and wonder to life, then I can’t wait to see what she’s like in twenty years’ time.

Our list of the best things to do in Ubud

SarahAlderson

2 comments

November 18, 2014

Alula and I decided that to mark the end of days (ahem) we would spend an entire day in Ubud doing everything we loved most. As it turned out that mainly involved eating.

Before we left the house we wrote a bucket list of the best things to do in Ubud. And yes, that does say ‘buy a penis bottle opener from the market’ because a) we have wondered for 5 years who buys a penis bottle opener and b) figured that no one does so we should buy one to make the sellers feel better and c) we thought we could give it to John as a stocking filler memento of Bali d) we don’t have a bottle opener.

1. We started off by walking up the street to Alchemy.

Now, it’s a well known fact that I normally avoid this place like the plague. Not because the food isn’t good but because the people in there drive me batty. If you’re not wearing tasselley Lycra yoga pants or feather earrings then people stare at you like you’re an alien which is ironic because – true fact – most of them believe themselves to be descended from the Pleidians – a superior alien race.

Also people read books like ‘Finding your inner Goddess’ or ‘Tantric breathing for beginners’ and have really loud conversations with each other about how they’ve just found their bliss or just come from a drum circle or are about to go for a shamanic colonic hydrotherapy session and that’s why they have only been drinking coconut water for the last fifty days.

But… and here is the but… the breakfast bar at Alchemy is amazing. It’s one of my favourite places for breakfast in Ubud (the other being Vespa). Alula agreed with me whole-heartedly. You just have to ignore the conversations going on around you.

Alchemy Breakfast Ubud

The other best breakfast in Ubud – at Vespa Cafe. Get the flat white, and the mushroom and spinach.

2. Then we drove into town and went to our favourite massage place, stopping first for coffee at Tutmak which is one of the best places in town for coffee (their cafe au lait is served in a BOWL people. A BOWL.) Alula wants to give special mention to their cinnamon buns too. They’re good.

The Reflexi Massage shop on Dewi Sita might not look like much from the outside but let me tell you these guys totally know what they are doing. When they press on a point on your foot and you go ‘ahhhhhh that hurts. What corresponding point is that on the body?’ they can tell you straight up. Usually with me they say: ‘that your liver’.

Agus, July or Yoga are your guys. And the best thing is you don’t get oily because it’s done fully-clothed.

Alula’s in for a reality shock.

3. After an hour and a half massages we floated out and went to Clear Cafe on Hanoman which was where I wrote a lot of Losing Lila. This place does the most scrumptious drinks. Try the choco butterfly and the strawberry and white chocolate milkshake. Alula then had to try all the food tasters in the little shop next door.

4. Then we went to the market, which would NEVER be on my list of best things to do in Ubud because frankly it’s horrible and it’s hot and everywhere you go people are thrusting things in your face telling you ‘good price’. It’s mainly tat piled on tat with some more tat thrown on top of that. But it is the place to go for a penis bottle opener. Also we wanted to buy some sarongs for Alula’s teachers and a God or two to accompany us back to the UK. We settled for the Buddha, who I had to explain to Alula wasn’t a God, and a Ganesha.

Choosing Gods

5. We decided that our next port of call would be D’Warung – our favourite Indonesian restaurant in the whole of Bali. It’s owned by the lovely Kadek and we’ve been coming here since we first arrived in Bali. The food is fantastic and Kadek also does really great cooking classes where you actually get to cook and not just watch. Not that I’ve done this course because, um I gave up cooking, but Alula and John have done it.

We stuffed ourselves some more on tuna steak and ayam (chicken) and rice.

6. Full, but still aware that we needed to complete our mission, which really was turning into a food tour of Ubud, we weighed our options for dinner, deciding on sushi because it’s Alula’s favourite food in the world ever and she wishes she was Japanese.

Manmaru is our favourite Japanese restaurant in town – I’m so addicted to their spicy tuna fry that I have been known to leave social gatherings claiming I’m going to get something from the car, jump behind the wheel, speed off, run to Manmaru, order spicy tuna fry, eat them all, then run back to where the gathering / party is and saunter in twirling my keys saying ‘sorry I just couldn’t find what I was looking for in the car.’

7. We would then have gone to the best wine / dessert place in town – Room for Dessert – which is the kind of place you go to and they know your name and bring you extra desserts when it’s not even your birthday and which has a secret back garden that isn’t advertised and is only for people in the know (which includes you now) and which serves great local street food – BUT they’re closed on a Monday. Damn them. So we will go there on Wednesday instead. Their choco bubble dessert is worth flying all the way to Bali for from the UK.

8. Because they were shut we went for ice cream at the best gelato shop in what I suspect is the whole of Indonesia, maybe the world. I used to live in Italy, two steps from what was claimed to be the best ice cream place in the whole country, so I feel like I am knowledgeable enough about gelato to say that Gaya is up there in the rankings.

Our favourite flavours: chocolate, passionfruit, pistachio and cinnamon.

So there you go… that was our day.

I feel full.

A letter to Alula

SarahAlderson

3 comments

November 5, 2014

Dear Alula,

Yesterday you cried. You were inconsolable.

You want to leave now, you sobbed. You don’t want to make friends in England, you said, because you’ll just end up leaving them, so what’s the point? You’re really bad at math, you cried. And you call braids braids, not plaits. Who calls them plaits anyway? We laugh at the splat sound of plait. Braids is much prettier we agree.

You are foreign. This is the subtext. You will be a stranger in the place you’re meant to call home.

I’m sorry. I know it’s hard. As a mother it’s hideous to watch your child so torn up and to know that you are the cause. Everyone says to me ‘oh but children are resilient’ but I don’t think that’s as true as we like to believe. I think you’re deeply sensitive and that change is hard on you. You crave structure and stability and the universe has cursed you with parents who are always trying to stretch the boundaries of outrageous potential and a Sagittarius for a mother who craves instability and adventure and who constantly questions the word ‘home’.

I wonder what the hell we are doing. I worry about how this impacts you. It isn’t the perfect solution I know that. We are probably only going to be in the UK for a year before we take another leap into the unknown, heading off who knows where. It’s terrifying for me. I can’t imagine how it must be for you.

I found myself speaking today to an old friend I bumped into, who happens to also be the school guidance counsellor. We talked about the challenge of raising third culture kids and the difficulty inherent in moving them around the world.

Do the pros outweigh the cons? How can a child be made to see the advantages when all they care about is the moment and the friends they’ve lost and are dealing with the fear of starting a new school? Should we just stay put, I wonder, settle down in one place? Give her the stability she craves? Are we selfish beyond belief?

All these questions rush around my head while you cry and I hug you. I tell you I understand how hard it must be. I talk to you about the whys and the wheres and the what fors but I know that with your mind so much in the present it’s difficult for you to see beyond the hard, narrow ledge of the horizon.

It might be difficult now Alula, is what I want to say, but what we see over that horizon is a you aged eighteen, ready to take your first unaccompanied steps into the world. What we see is how comfortable you are in that world – east or west, developing or developed, among cultures different to your own. What we see is a you unrestricted by a narrow world view but able, hopefully, to see the bigger picture and your place and possibilities within it.

You will know the value and the joy of following dreams and of working hard, and of the beauty of creating, because you have been surrounded by this every single day with your daddy and I and the community around us.

You will know that an exquisite kind of satisfaction can come from those things – from following dreams and working hard and imagining things into being.

You will have friends in every corner of the world ready to open their arms and welcome you home.

You will know and inherently understand the biggest fallacy of all; that there is no certainty in the world, only uncertainty, and you will, I hope, be able to use that knowledge to your advantage, embracing it rather than reaching for the security blanket of a 9-5 job that might not fulfil you and all the accoutrements that we grasp at to help fix our identity and place in the world. You will know that none of that really matters in the end.

So, while you cry, and it hurts my heart to see it, I have to believe that in the end it will all be OK – more than OK – that you won’t look back with resentment at your crazy drifter parents, but with gratitude.

But, just in case, we’ll start saving up for therapy costs now.

xox

Things I won’t miss about Bali

SarahAlderson

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October 29, 2014

I was getting depressed thinking about all the billion and one things I’m going to miss about Bali; dragon fruit, Kadek, friends, Margaritas delivered to my door (both the pizza and the tequila variety), the mango and banana and papaya trees in the garden, the offerings to Ganesha, the hazy smell of incense, the sun, the sound of roosters, $10 massages, chocolate caramel slices, the magic, the sun (did I mention that already)… so I decided to focus on the things that I’m NOT going to miss about Bali instead. This, I thought, might motivate me to get out of bed in the mornings and pack.

The Taxi Taxi dudes

I just walked out my house and about 100 meters up the road. In this brief walk I was asked not once, not twice, but five times ‘Taxi?’ by different men sitting on the ground along the route – all of them doing the requisite mime of hands on a steering wheel just in case I didn’t understand the word Taxi. On my way back the same men asked the same question again.

I estimate in the last five years I’ve been asked ‘Taxi?’ about five million times. My molars have cracks in them.

I get it, I really do. They want work. They see a westerner walking and they can’t not ask the question. What really bothers me is when they watch me park my car, get out of my car, lock my car, and then say to me; ‘Taxi?’ It’s almost as if they know how much it riles me and they’re all involved in a conspiracy to break me.

The way anytime someone comes to fix something it ends up more broken.

Wifi, toilets, plumbing, electrics… you name it. Every time I’ve tried to get something fixed here it’s ended up even more broken than it was in the first place. Our landlady just arranged for a water tower to be built next to the house. I didn’t see the need and argued with her but she went ahead and did it anyway.

Alula just came rushing in: ‘Mummy, mummy you have to come and see this awesome thing,’ she cried. ‘This AWESOMELY UGLY thing…’

The men have come to erect the water tower. Two weeks later and we have no water tower but we do have this shallow hole filled with water in what was once our pretty back garden.

We also have NO running water because while digging the hole the men dug through the water pipe. Thanks. Thanks for that.

The internet

The internet is so slow here that if you were researching an article say about the moon it would actually take less time to build a rocket single-handed, launch it from your back garden, fly to the moon, carry out your research and fly home again, than it would to wait for the Wikipedia moon page to load.

This leads to what I call tab-rage where, in an ever-growing frenzy of frustration as you wait for your page to load, you open another tab, then another, then another, until your computer is buckling under the sheer weight of open tabs and you flick in manic delirium between them all, your adrenaline peaking at ‘a serial killer is chasing you’ levels.

I think the internet is one of the reasons I am so stressed in Bali.

The whistle guys

These are the men who blow their whistles while making wild, jerking arm movements to indicate to you which way to turn the steering wheel when you are parking – yes, thank you, I know how to drive! They also stand in the road to ostensibly hold the traffic up so you can pull out safely. The problem with this is that NO ONE TAKES ANY NOTICE WHATSOEVER of the whistle guys, everyone just keeps speeding past their out-flung, whistle-holding hands.

It’s a rookie mistake to trust the whistle guy. If you do you will inevitably kill someone or be killed.

The bliss ninnies

The uber-spiritual clique in Ubud are slowly chipping away at my will to live. Yesterday I had to sit in a cafe and listen to two people talk about colonics and fasting and their inner journeys and I wanted to go and buy a Macdonalds and eat it in front of them then take an enema tube and stick it where the sun don’t shine… but there is no Macdonalds in town, only raw food restaurants, and on the second point they already do that to themselves willingly, so I’m thwarted yet again.

The crazy price of wine

This is the first thing people here say to me when they find out I’m leaving. ‘Think of all the wine you can drink back in Europe! Think of the wine!’ and their eyes go a little glazed and they get this dreamy, faraway look on their faces.

It’s true. Here it costs $40 for a bottle that I know costs less than $8 in a supermarket back home. Even the local ‘wine’ here (I’m not sure the UK’s trading standards people would allow such a moniker for what is essentially grape-flavoured window de-icer) – costs $18 in the supermarket. So yes, I’m looking forward to the wine. Cue dreamy face.

The sound of buzz saws

Buzz saws, chain saws, tile cutters. These are the ubiquitous sounds of Bali these days, drowning out the crickets, roosters and dogs. It’s up there with the neighbour’s screaming tantric sound sessions that used to daily pierce my eardrums as the noise most likely to push me over the edge and into Kathy Bates from Misery territory or Michael Douglas from Falling Down.

I’m looking forward to not living in a construction zone.

On top of Brad Pitt and Bear Grylls

SarahAlderson

1 comment

October 24, 2014

I never thought I’d have occasion to say that line but now I can I’m shouting it from the rooftops.

Yesterday in WHSmith I made it to #4 in the bestseller list and found myself beneath my teenage crush Dermot O’Leary and on top of Bear Grylls.

Then today I find myself in Hello! magazine on top of Brad Pitt no less (who looks mighty furious about it) and next to supermodel David Gandy. Can’t complain about that!

Just in case you are wondering who the heck Mila Gray is – it’s my pen name for my adult fiction. Can you even believe that when I started this blog five years ago I wasn’t even a writer but was desperately scratching my head trying to figure out what do to with my life? And look! Now I’m in the charts and in Hello! Magazine (on top of Brad Pitt – sorry, have to keep saying that out loud). Totally trippy. Can’t wait to see what the next five years brings if this is what the first five years of our CWLH adventure produced!

It’s on sale in WHsmith, Asda and from Amazon.

Thermal Onesies and avoidance strategies

SarahAlderson

4 comments

October 21, 2014

I’m busy ordering feather pillows and silk thermals online for our return to England.

Let’s put that into perspective. We don’t yet have a house to live in.

I think my feather pillows might be a little premature unless I plan to use them to make the pavement more comfy. I have a feeling psychologists might call my shopping for comfort items rather than for a place TO LIVE an ‘avoidance strategy.’ In which case bring on the avoidance strategy. I’m spending hours trying to find a sexy silk thermal onesie when I should probably be searching for two bedroom flats in Zone 2, and the only thing I’ve discovered is that Google fries its own synapses when you try to search for sexy silk thermal onesies. Nothing comes up.

In between searching for onesies I am also single parenting, working full time (I have 3 books to write in 3 different genres for 3 different publishers in 2 different names in 4 months, plus 2 other books to promote at the same time), all while packing up a house to move continents. You may well ask whether I’m taking speed to cope. No, not speed. Valium. It’s a miracle drug.

Anyway, this is to explain why I’ve told John the House Issue is on him. I’m just far too busy to deal with that. After all I’m also packing up HIS stuff that he left behind for me to deal with. Inside the suitcase he tossed his things into for ‘shipping’ I find the following: a stapler, paperclips, pencils, a net bag, a Bintang shopping bag, an eraser, a dry cleaning cover… I could go on but you get the idea.

I stare at the contents of the bag and think ‘hmmmm, we could pay thousands of dollars to ship a box of paperclips and some stationery from Bintang OR I could throw all this away. It’s not like John is going to miss any of this stuff, I’ll just tell him I misunderstood and thought he said that was the bag of stuff for the charity shop.’

I know I’m safe to do this because a) I don’t think he reads my blog and b) when we left England we filled an entire garage with boxes and within three weeks of leaving the UK we couldn’t remember what was in a single one of them, so what are the chances John will even remember about this bag, let alone the contents of it?

I am on a mission to leave Bali with just the 23kg suitcase I am allowed and will ship only one box of books that I cannot bear to be parted from (OK, and a little ganesha statue).

I want lightness. I don’t want baggage. It’s easier than you’d think to do this, because unlike John, I don’t get sentimental about paperclips.

I am giving away all my books and all my clothes. I won’t be needing them after all as I intend to just spend the winter wearing my sexy silk thermal onesie.

A little self-improvement

SarahAlderson

1 comment

October 19, 2014

“I’m planning on being a nicer person when I’m back in England.”

‘You are a nice person already,’ I tell Alula.

‘I think I could be nicer. I’m already practicing,” Alula informs me.

I feel humbled into silence by my eight-year old daughter’s level of emotional intelligence and self-awareness.

Feeling I need to up my own game, I nod and say; ‘I think I could be a nicer person too. I need to be less grouchy and more patient. My patience is a little thin these days because I have a lot on, three books to write, an entire house to pack up, you to look after, and no daddy around to help out.’

Alula cocks an eyebrow at me. ‘Mummy, your patience is always a little thin.’

Hmmmmm.

‘I think you could swear less too.’

OK, now I feel wretched, as ashamed as if I’m standing at the pearly gates in front of Archangel Michael himself (is it him at the gates or at I getting my archangels confused?) listening as he reads off a list of all my wrongdoings. We could be here until the second coming, I think to myself. It appears as if Alula is just getting into her stride. She’s ticking things off on her fingers now.

‘You could also perhaps be a little kinder,’ she says. ‘You know, for example when children ask for something and don’t say please instead of saying ‘you’re not getting anything until you remember your manners,’ you could say ‘what’s the magic word?’ instead.’ She pauses. ‘And smile when you say it.’

I wrinkle my nose at her. This is how I imagine a North Korean criticism session or a Scientology auditing session might feel (though admittedly with a lot less terror and no Tom Cruise). My amazement at her maturity is being eroded by the ten year old inside my head who feels like stamping her foot and storming off to her bedroom, slamming every door in the house on the way. How dare she criticise me? What does she mean, smile? Oh god, she’s right! The penny drops. She’s right! The shame!

‘I’m working on sharing my lego,’ she tells me, ‘letting other people come up with ideas for games to play, and also on being less bossy. I’m finding that last one a little difficult,’ she admits.

‘Yeah. I hear you,’ I say.

We make a pact that I’m going to work on patience and my swearing and generally ‘being nicer’ (secretly I’m thinking that this all might be as impossible as unravelling a DNA strand using just a pair of knitting needles.) If only I had started working on improving myself when I was eight.

Who is this child? I think in awe. When we left she was three and in an earlier post from back then I likened her to Pol Pot. She’s now much more Dalai Lama. Well, they do say your children are your best teachers.

Snake!

SarahAlderson

2 comments

October 14, 2014

It’s ten pm. The lights are off. I’m sitting on the bed watching Mad Men. Beside me Alula splays in sleep, indifferent to the charms of Donald Draper.

All of a sudden the soft sound of Jenga blocks tumbling over startles me. I hit the pause button on my laptop. It was probably a mouse, I think to myself. Maybe a big cockroach. Four years ago this would have roused me to action or screams but now I’m seasoned to the tropics. And besides, Donald Draper is on the telly. I hit play.

But then it comes again – more Jenga blocks tumble. Alula has been building Jenga block houses in our bedroom. Something is knocking them over. Would a cockroach even be able to do that? Tentatively I creep from the bed and reach for the light switch.

I’m expecting to see a mouse. What I am not expecting to see is a two-meter long snake.

I always imagined I’d be like Katniss or Buffy in the face of danger. When I imagine the zombie apocolypse or myself in the lead role of any TV show from Falling Skies to The Walking Dead to The 100 I am always the kickass girl who can hit a moving alien vampire target at 500 paces, who can stitch an arterial bleed one handed, all while making ironic yet brilliantly self-deprecating quips and flirting with the hot but haunted hero with the cheekbones you could grate cheese on. And while also looking suitably hot in skinny jeans and a leather jacket, my hair glossy yet artfully mussed. (Oh my god, I have spent way too much time in my head and writing YA fiction).

Anyway… the reality is I freeze. I cannot move. I am paralysed. It is a snake. An actual snake. And it is slithering over Alula’s Jenga house, has crushed her Jenga house into oblivion, and is now sliding behind my book case.

Hyperventilating, still unable to move a muscle, I manage to yell John’s name.

He ambles into the bedroom rolling his eyes. He knows this scream. It is my ‘John there is a cockroach, can you come and kill it’ scream.

He looks at me, irritated. I have brain freeze. I still can’t move. My hand is still resting on the light switch. All I can do is lift my other arm and point, shakily.

Hah! John’s look of mild irritation gives way to total ‘holy shitballs’ shock. Take that! I think. I am not crying wolf (for once!)

John springs immediately into action in a manner that I think would make Bear Grylls jealous. ‘Move Alula!’ he barks at me.

Huh?

‘Move Alula!’ he tells me again.

I blink at him. Oh shit. Not only are my wilderness skills utterly appalling but my mothering skills are clearly under par also. I’m happily standing on the far side of the room. Between me and the snake lies the bed. The bed with my daughter on it. A fact I’ve only just realised.

John has to repeat himself another six times before I leap into action. I rush to the bed and pick the still sleeping Alula up and carry her through to the other room.

‘Find the number for the snake guy,’ John orders me next.

Snake guy. Snake guy. Right. The Snake guy. With shaking hands I turn off Donald Draper and Google the snake guy who lives in Bali. It takes him an hour to arrive. A whole hour in which John and I don’t take our eyes off the snake that is half hidden behind the book case in case it decides to slither somewhere, like inside our mattress. Or, you know, into the other room to eat Alula.

The snake guy has barely walked in the house before he starts admonishing us over the state of our garden – a veritable snake utopia.

He tells us he is surprised that deadly pit vipers and venomous craits aren’t leaping out at us on a nightly basis. Are we insane? Why have we let our foliage grow so thick? There is no anti-venom he warns. We would be dead in minutes.

‘Can you just please catch the snake?’ I ask him, feebly.

He whips out a stick and a sack and within seconds he is wrestling, literally tussling, with a very angry snake that is taller than he is. I scream. I admit it. I scream and leap onto the bed, heart thumping. He manages to get a grip on the snake’s head and calmly shows us the rows and rows of fangs. The deadly poisonous fangs. It’s like the Basilisk from Harry Potter. Maybe a bit thinner. But every bit as scary, I promise.

Heart attack. I’m having a heart attack.

The snake craps all over the floor. ‘It’s stressed,’ the snake man tells us, staring in awe at the fangs.

‘IT is stressed?’ I think to myself. ‘It’s a miracle I’ve not crapped all over the floor.’

He drops it into a sack. ‘What will you do with it now?’ I ask him.

‘I’ll release it into the wild.’

My eyes widen. Aren’t you supposed to drive the sword of Gryffindor through its skull or something? I realise though, that this isn’t a movie and I should not suggest this out loud. I should be showing some compassion. I mean, the poor snake didn’t mean to wander in here in its search for food. It just got hungry.

‘Into the wild, far, far from here?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ the man says. Then he glances at Alula, sleeping next door. ‘I have a dozen baby cobras at home, do you think she might like one as a pet?’

An invincible summer

SarahAlderson

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October 11, 2014

I’m sitting in my swingy chair on the balcony wearing a light cotton slip, listening to the soothing afternoon chirrup of the crickets, looking out over the sweltering blue sky and sipping an iced coffee.

This is my world right now….

And then someone I know sends me this (along with a smiling faced emoticon, for which I will never forgive them)…

I’m already teetering close to tears most days about the thought of leaving Bali. Now I just want to curl into a ball and sob for hours on end.

I know you think I’m being a wimp. And hell yes, you would be right. But the cold and I are not friends. In fact, if the cold was a person I would be throwing jicama at its head (Jicama is a vegetable like a potato just in case you don’t know – I certainly didn’t before I moved here so there’s no shame in not knowing that).

Last night in Bali it was probably 80 degrees and I was wearing jeans and a jumper. I slept under two blankets. I don’t do cold. I can’t. That’s not to do with being spoiled – OK, maybe it is a bit – but it’s also to do with the weird fact that my basal temperature rests a good degree lower than what’s considered ‘normal’ (just like the rest of me).

Various reasons for this temperature anomaly have been put forward:

The thermometer is broken
I’m a vampire
I’m a cold-hearted bitch with ice for blood (this one not to my face, but I know there are people out there who would suggest this as a reason (ex boyfriends for example), so I’m getting in there first).
I have a thyroid problem.

Let’s go with the second or the fourth option.

My point though is I really, really feel the cold. And this isn’t even cold. This is ARCTIC. This is polar bear weather. OK. Now I actually am crying.

At least, I tell myself, forcing some optimism, I work from my bed. And though it won’t be a mosquito net draped bed and there will be no view of palm trees swaying in the distance it will have a luxury electric blanket on it with FIVE heat settings (can I set all 5 at once?). I picture my M&S delivery of thermal tights.

No. I’m still crying.

I look up quotes on winter for some inspiration and find this one:

“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?” – John Steinbeck.

Sorry Steinbeck, I don’t need an arctic front to remind me how awesome the sun and warmth is, in the same way that I don’t need to swallow a mouthful of vinegar in order to appreciate how good ice cream tastes.

Which leaves me with Camus: “In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”

Let’s see about that one Camus. I just hope you’re right.

Hair Today, Cursed Tomorrow

SarahAlderson

4 comments

October 10, 2014

The balcony is covered in hair. Alula’s blond curls lying there like tumbleweed. We both just had several inches lopped off by Karin the lovely Swiss hairdresser (Alula has not stopped crying for about 3 hours since claiming she now looks like a boy, but that’s a whole other story.)

I stare at the sweepings and this being Bali, instead of thinking, ‘Oooh I should get a broom and throw that in the bin’ I think to myself ‘Hmmmm I should get a broom, put that in the bin and burn it just in case someone gets hold of it and puts a black magic curse on me.’

I have been here too long.

But seriously. That shit happens here. And I don’t fully trust my neighbour Nyoman. She smiles at me when I walk past and she nods and says thank you every time I hand her the money for offerings but it’s an alligator smile. I get the sense that what she’d really like to do is snap her jaws around my head and yank it from my neck in one savage go.

This happened to a friend of mine. Not the having her head ripped off by a half woman half alligator. She was sick for months and months. Finally she went to see a Balian (a Balinese priest) and was told that someone had stolen some hair from her hairbrush and used it to put a voodoo spell on her.

Crazy town.

But I still don’t want Nyoman to get her hands on my hair so I’m going to hunt for some matches.

Better safe than sorry.