Month: June 2021

So this is it. I’ve had my second shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Let’s hope it works and continues to work against new variants.

Once, we met Patrick on a busy Paris metro train in a very unexpected way. He, his wife and daughter, and his parents were travelling from Canada to visit his brother. Priscilla and I had flown in from London the evening before to celebrate my birthday. Neither Patrick, nor I knew that the other would be in the city at the same time.

We were in two different carriages, so we all got off at the next station for us to meet. Patrick said that they had missed an earlier train, and I told them that Priscilla and I had taken the wrong train and were coming back round on that one. If not for those mishaps, we would not have run into each other. I don’t know what to call this other than fate.

Patrick and I have been friends since we studied at the same school in Mauritius. Before Paris, we had not seen each other for more than ten years. Yet, it took us but five minutes to express our pleasure of reuniting, to hear what had happened in each other’s life, and to finally say our goodbyes. I think here is what makes male friendship special. Little is needed to reconnect us even after a long time, and there is this ingrained belief that we will always come together again.

My sleep pattern is wrecked. I go to bed at around 2 a.m. most days, except when my body crashes and forces me to an early sleep. I then have a very good rest, but only to recover for more 2 a.m. bedtimes. In short, it swings from one extreme to the other.

Now, my employer plans to have us back in offices in October. Undoubtedly, this will be difficult for many of us who will have to swap from-bed-to-zoom-in-10-minutes for early pre-COVID wake-up alarms and hour-long commutes to actual offices. Add the equally tedious return journeys, busy roads, and crowded public transport, and it goes from a difficult to a depressing outlook.

My colleagues and I are lucky, though. In 2019 we started the company’s new Way of Working (WOW) that allows employees to work remotely for up to three days of each week, with the condition that those days not be fixed. As software developers, my team need fewer face-to-face meetings than other client-facing teams in the company and have, therefore, been able to relax this rule. Now that almost two years of ‘COVID Way of Working’ prove that people can be productive working from home, it will be interesting to see how WOW evolves.

I was added to an alumni WhatsApp group, and I got to talk to my old high-school (or college) friends again. It is interesting to see that after 27 years, the same cliques exist, the same people monopolise the conversation, and there are the same quiet ones.

There’s also the dichotomy between the friends who live in Mauritius and those who are abroad. The first group talk about looking for a way out, and the second, a mind to return to Mauritius. The first group also appear to give a lot of importance to financial stability while the second wish for quiet and enjoyment. Of course, many more are content with their situations and express no desire for change.

I am not sure what to make of it, but it is an intriguing observation.

Many years ago Ms Jiang, our Mandarin teacher, asked us for our names, went away for a few days, and came back with the Chinese equivalents. For a long time I wondered how she managed to do that, given that the names on our official documents are approximate English transliterations of the Chinese originals at best. I even suspected that she had just made up new names for us.

After some research, I can confirm that the family (or clan) name is actually Xiong. It means ‘bear’ and is derived from a folk hero’s name. Exactly what charming Ms Jiang told us. She also said that my Chinese given name means ‘Prosperous Flower’. I want to believe that my memory fails me on this one.

My surname, like those of many Sino-Mauritians, has three parts: a botched anglicisation of the above and my father’s given name in two words. Which gives me a full name with seven parts: J E F H Y T Y, where ‘J E’ is my Christian name, ‘F H’ is my Chinese given name transliterated from Hakka, the first ‘Y’ is the family name, and ‘T Y’ is my father’s given name. Filling official paper forms with these small boxes for letters is always fun.

If you don’t know what AliExpress (https://www.aliexpress.com) is, wherever you’re buying your stuff from, you’re probably paying too much. The best way to describe it is with an example.

The gimmicks in this picture are USB LEDs that light up when they are inserted into a USB connector. They turn any USB power source into a lamp. I bought them from AliExpress in a pack of 5 for US$ 0.68, postage included. Ridiculously cheap.

My Facebook account is now reduced to a groupie boosting Like-counts on my wife’s posts, but even this strange marital responsibility and my occasional anti-anti-China taunts are becoming less effective motivators for me to log into the social network.

I can’t deactivate the account outright because I know that there will be that one need for Facebook when it is least expected — like, an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, and the only way to secure a passage to Mars is with a Facebook login. So I leave the account active but slowly undo the Timeline. The concept is simple: I ruthlessly eliminate old posts that have lost their appeal until only the bare minimum is left.

But recently when a post is deleted, Facebook moves it into a recycle bin. And for it to be gone completely, there is a hurdle of manually emptying the bin. I suspect that Facebook does this in order to retain the precious user creations that underpin its business model. Or perhaps users asked for a way to recover deleted posts. Regardless of their justification, Facebook is malign enough for me to remain sceptical.

A few months ago, picking up an old-new notebook from my stock of pillaged office stationery, I was surprised by my own handwritten quotation on the first page.

Remember to touch base. Base is where you were before you became lost.

I copied it onto a Post-It that is now stuck on my monitor, but I didn’t look for its source until today.

It actually comes from ‘The Rules of Life’ by Richard Templar. I read this book in 2004 during a phase of self-improvement although I don’t remember being impressed by it.

Maybe it was prescient that I wrote dwon this particular ‘rule’ then only for me to find it now when the advice seems much needed. Coincidentally, last week whilst rummaging through boxes in the attic, I held the book in my hands, considering whether to read it again before putting it back.

Before Facebook and Twitter destroyed our ability to focus for longer than 15 seconds and to read more than 140 characters, blogs were kings. To me 2Blowhards was one of the best. Reading the authors’ thoughtful and inspiring posts, mostly about arts, was a pleasure. Their blog also impressed on me their peculiar salutation of ‘Dear Blowhards’.

I lost the link to 2Blowhards after 2010 when it was ‘frozen in amber’. For almost a decade, my searches with the misremembered and inadequate ‘Dear Friends’ were vain. But a few days ago, I stumbled upon it in the archives of my blog on the Wayback Machine.