As foretold, this weekend past, I went on a visa run. I jumped on the Friday plane with a shiny to-do list for the fantasy island, and a growing list of did-not-do that was playing catchup with my brain, and which I finally ditched while on the tarmac, figuring as all of us do when there is nothing else to do, that if the kids can’t work it out for 3 days, I’ve got more to worry about than those 3 days.

to do #1So at the SZ airport I had arranged a meeting with these guys, to talk about a possible residential arrangement. It felt very Real World – engineering a meet at an airport enroute to somewhere else. We sat at Starschmucks and wonder of wonders, when I said to the staff: “my double shot qwarfie is slightly insipid”, they drilled another shot into it free of charge. Wish I’d tried that in the early helpless HK years.

With excess caffeine in my bloodstream, and human misery on my mind, I took the bus to cross the border. It struck me quite forcefully – a) the giant wet blanket called tropical humidity [in spite of rain], and b) the difference between that and our endless spring of no rain in Kokomo. Everything seemed to be dripping or oozing moisture, which you’d think I oughtn’t blink an eyelid at given my origins, but you can be born in something, and yet not FOR it.

to do #2With time to spare, I thought I could locate a shop in the labyrinth that is the Sham and purchase T-shirts for our next run, but actually, the rain and humidity and baggage got too much and after less than 30mins I abandoned the errand and gratefully swooped into the Brown Mansion for a brief respite [hot shower, cool A/C, mmm]. Brevity is not a good game to play with the Brown Mansion as it might easily mean that the time you took to get there outstrips the time you stayed there. I did it anyway. And again the next day. That is to say, every chance I got.

We had fun at the Businesswoman’s business party, even though I ate nothing there except cupcakes and cookies and champagne. We had even more fun at a cafe for the afterparty afterwards, doing nothing much in particular except soaking up the décor, the live music and the company. Best part: 5 min ride to the Brown Mansion. Wonder of wonders, Mr/Mrs Brown were out later than me. Hah!

Sat morning and waking up to the Brown kids. Mmmmm. And a leaking kitchen roof. Hmmmm. I drank Campos while my hosts took off to Soccertots. It was gold, but not as gold as Little Marionette, funny enough.

to do #3Getting out to some facetime with Bec&Col and thus missing out on quality Cricket Club time with the Browns. I was full of some kind of lethargy which played oddly against Bec&Col’s repeated assertion of excitement at Kokomo finally happening. I don’t know what it was but that facetime felt very chalk and cheese. I took the opportunity of proximity to complete the previous todo item, in record time. The Sham don’t scare me no more.

to do #4A uniqlo shop! If we keep this up much longer, we might invite Uniqlo to come and take promotional shots of all of us in Kokomo. A birthday present for the Chief, and basics for the bruvahs.

In my brief interlude after this at the Brown Mansion, I danced a dance with Erin B to Damien Rice covering U2’s One, all the while Mr Brown commentating on the song/ band. It was a serene time.

Post-interlude found me at a concert for someone I had not much idea about [Gungor], and really truth be told I went because people I want to see were going. That and the prospect of live music. But wow – Tommy Emmanuel music and Mac Powell lyrics. I could hardly keep my eyes open, but at some point it ceased to matter since my spirit was wide awake. It was grand. And inspirational, once I got over the musical envy. We went out to the Pawn to keep the night going, where Sarky Tim and PardonMe pilfered food and the Rev G pilfered a large napkin. A nefarious night for nefarious deeds. Must have been the venue.

I woke up the next morning and thanked God for the real mattress that I slept in, instead of the sea of 2nd hand foam I DIYed in Kokomo.

And then it was time to go. I resisted the temptation to mass text everyone one last time. Why did I get gate fever for having only been there 3 days? Maybe because I didn’t eat any rice in that time? Not one grain.

So, the spud experiment is getting a little old by now. Even Feldon and Zouk can't stand to eat many more meals of potatoes. Goes to show, there can be too much of a good thing.

We are enjoying a golden era with qwarfie, our latest supplies coming from the Little Marionette in Annandale, courtesy of the Hardinks, among other appealing gifts. It is an involved process in the morning, and former and present housemates know that I like a bit of brown sugar to go with my coffee. The other day, we ran out and I absentmindedly sent someone out to purchase some “red sugar” as it is called here. What I got, was ingots. So, in lieu of dropping a teaspoon of it in my coffee, we heat up our milk with a chunk of it carved out with a massive cleaver. And whadya know – caramel café latte everyday. We may never go back to granules. Andy agrees.



We got our electricity bills for our respective properties this week. Here in 601, we chalked up just over 60 bucks local currency- the lowest in our block, while over in 804, the residents blew 160 bucks worth of electric juice. I thought: a tale of 2 electri-cities. Hah.

Speaking of electricity, our erstwhile resident, Lambshanks, recently sucked up a lot of grief from that quarter. Apart from buying a massive electric stove [in hopes of baking goodies] with a wattage that fries the low-capacity wiring for her home, she also managed to, while changing a light bulb, get it to explode at close range. I hence had the surreal experience of chaperoning a foreign doctor to the local A&E – a patient more conversant with her own condition [impacted cornea] than her physician. But no panic at all, in the face of what seemed like a medical emergency to me.

On the anniversary of my illustrious birth, I woke up to a cooked breakfast, which in this country is not saying anything since every breakfast I’ve eaten here has been cooked. But this cooked breakfast involved eggs, spam and bread and no noodles, which is definitely saying something.



The boys did their best not to spleen me that day, which I appreciated, and there was also special din dins, and a cake and presents, all of which left me feeling quite serene with the years on my head.



Visa run this weekend! I hear the weather is something close to horrid on the fantasy island. Compared to here that is. I do miss the Browns.

Sometimes, i'm out with my ipod and meaning to give eartime to some of the unlistened-to gold in my machine, and end up listening to my own recordings. Sometimes more than once. Is that narcissistic?

Here is a little fact about basketball that recently came to live in my brain, or knocked on the door anyhow:

A block/charge foul occurs when a defender tries to get in front of his man to stop him from going in that direction. If he does not get into a legal defensive position and contact occurs, it is a blocking foul. If he gets to a legal position and the offensive player runs into him it is an offensive foul.

The analogy came to me one day, upon a mundane, pretty much everyday event that nevertheless causes me a short scintilla of upward blood pressure - that is, establishing right of way on Kokomo roads. It typically happens like this: I am riding my bike in a straight line and some cowboy car owner tears up the side road coming to his T-intersection attempting to, by his incandescent velocity, turn right or left or otherwise get on to my road without coming to a stop, or probably even a slow. It becomes a case of who gets in front of whom first, which sometimes exacerbates the velocity of said cowboy-inna-car and I think to myself, if this were basketball, I'd definitely draw an offensive foul and trash talk the guy till the sky fell down. The thing is though, in basketball, regardless of which way the foul goes, the defending player goes down. So in light of that, and considering Newtown's 2nd immutable law, I usually just settle for the trash talk that cowboy drivers can't hear anyway. Things get interesting when it's 2 cars playing this game because then it's not clear who's going to lose if there's contact. Well it gets interesting for bike riders, pedestrians and flat-dwelling onlookers anyway. For the drivers, it almost always derails into a horn-blowing competition supplemented by shouting in the local dialect. Intimidation as a traffic rule, and probably as a kind of general rule - who left that legacy I wonder?

rice rAce
Contrary to popular belief about this country, rice is not the main staple everywhere -just in the south and particularly in the southeast. But since the south east is also where mainly exports to other countries have come from i.e. immigrants, it is easy to work out how foreigners or even overseas born chinese came to the think that Chinese people ALL eat rice every meal everyday. Here in our Southwestern province, for example, while rice is readily available in restaurants, wait staff seem to always be surprised by our insistence on waiting till the rice arrives before digging in to all the food that is already at table. Locals sometimes bypass rice altogether, especially if they’re dining out. That way, their consumption is more conspicuous.

So what do Kokomoans like for a filler of tummies? Believe it or not, it’s potatoes and corn. We go to our downstairs roadside bazaar and buy kilos of sweetcorn for peanuts, and in some places [Guido’s home village, for example] corn is strictly for the chooks and pigs. This weekend, in a huge cross-cultural move, we went to the spud wholesalers and bought 47 kilos of that stuff. Also for peanuts. No one thought we were going to be able to cart it away on our shiny bikes without baskets or panniers or even a back seat. So now they've met our People Motivated by Food. Our local Kokomo bruvahs are working themselves up into a lather of excitement at the prospect of spuds everyday, while the Cantonese still don't think it's real. It seems like a win-win. Plus our budget breathes a little sigh of relief.

Tonight, refried mash. My my, we are coming full circle. Zouk and Feldon assure me we can eat spuds a different way everyday for a month.

Last week, our household and I were paid a royal visit by Webbs! It was a sweet little slice of community pie for these 2 worlds to meet, and me in the middle. Very serene. Very very serene.

We play a lot of monopoly in the miniverse. It helps to have something to do that lets us relate in a way that is healthily competitive and that mildly approximates Life. Specifically we play a lot of monopoly in Kokomo. So much that we now have a subculture that’s evolved which involves a whole new way of playing and the latest monopoly fad – holding out on buying property and trying to completely bypass the AIM OF THE GAME, and hope against hope to win in spite of. It’s wonderfully Kingdom culture and I don’t even think the guys know it.




At last post, we were anticipating the arrival of our population explosion. Well, here they are- 6 more Canton Cacophonics and their temporary minders. It appears they have as much of a penchant for nicknames as me and they do it endearingly well. So now, I have multiple names for each immigrant and it’s doing my synapses some damage when I have to organise who does what each day. They are a good bunch – for the limited amount of time they had with our family, they seem to be able to take on what we would not normally expect. All in all, a good result for Team Kokomo, although the stresses of Big Change [getting messed up, as discussed last post] poked their ugly finger at my frame a few times in the process.

In the last 2 weeks, I got to fill out yet another house with 2nd hand furniture bought with the verbal battles of haggling that is the national pastime for Chinese. I came out slightly better this world cup. Next, we can go with Lambshanks, who has decided to be our neighbour in the near future.

In the midst of all that setting up house, we had us a par-tay last night – a way to mark the fact that miniverse has indeed arrived in Kokomo. Our erstwhile Shat In village head turned up for it, as did Alec, and Lambshanks, and Christabel – a kind of who’s who of miniverse Becs&Cols. We had a great time- Big Things got said in a big way which elicited tears from toughies and softies alike, we heard from God, we responded, we [over]-ate well, we made friends with people we might not have, we got a sense of purpose much larger than ourselves. What more would you expect from an evening hey?

It’s been a whirlwind. I think I may have lost time. I definitely lost track of it. A lot of things got put on hold to get this party organised. But now that party time is over, and all the people who aren’t going to normally live here have gone home, we can finally transition to what is normal for us. Take a few breaths, let everyone have a chance to misbehave a little, and then snap back to mission mode. Yeah. That was the whip, in case you missed it. Ho ho ho.

Tomorrow, I’m removing this slightly ridiculous moustache that I’ve been wearing for the past 6 weeks. Goodbye to oven-fired boogers cliffhanging off my face. woo hoo.

Happy Birthday J!

In my early miniverse days, I would always hear from Margaret about how we regularly overspend what we had, but never got in the red- the point being that money would turn up miraculously from somewhere, as long as we were willing to trust God for it. It always sounded quite incredible but living at our Fantasy Island village, and being its de facto accountant, I never came very close to this thing called living by faith. More like living by faith vicariously- other people relied on God for money, we relied on them. It was an easy gig.

This week was humbling. We had been running out of money, without enough to pay rents on our existing 2 flats, and having to find another flat to rent. But we went looking anyway. Money DID turn up from nowhere. I was down to checking forgotten bank accounts when I found a substantial amount which origins I had no idea about. I went from incredulity to ecstasy as I exhausted possible explanations. And there was also money from friends, discounts from our landowners, etc, all of which meant that this week over 3 days, we not only paid 6 months rent on 2 flats, we also got lease on 2 other ones, including our old #502, thereby doubling our real estate holdings in Kokomo. So now I know, what it feels like to know a faithful God and his faithfulness. It is marvey as.

While on our travels to the sticks of this province, I discovered there is an ethnic minority in Red Country called the Gin People. Hah!

We are on the cusp of change. This coming week, for the eighth time in 5 years, I will be preparing to move house. If moving house really is one of the most traumatic events in life, I’ve got to be pretty messed up by now. ☺ But I’m not. All those Almac boys coming to live with us though, will stir the pot for us AND them. Poor Zouk has started Secret Smoking to cope. One more thing to deal with in the coming maelstrom And so, hello Entropy. Pray for us. I’m ready for another furlough. And some beer. Mmmmmmm.

Below, our cast of characters, plus visitors.

Following on from last post, I am happy to announce that Uke T-shirts are printed and the first batch has gone out to the Fantasy Island for tryout models Sarky Tim and the Businesswoman. Locally, our Restaurateur scored a sample due to his instrument making its guest appearance. Next stop, Oz.

So I have just returned today from 5 days in the country, touring a spattering of drug rehabilitation centres started by someone called Henry from the Fantasy Island, on a vision and calling, and not very much else. It is quite an amazing story, Henry’s. He came out here one time and just kept coming and over the years, organised for a lot of stuff to happen, so I would say from that that he is an administrative genius. He’s bought land, moved people to work for no money, taken people off drugs, built relationship with all sorts of authorities and started a kind of franchise [minus the business connotation] that now has half a dozen centres around this country. The apparently amazing thing is that he did all this long-distance, while holding down a very senior academic position on the fantasy island. But in 5 days of seeing his work, I was struck only by the knowledge that it is not how we would have done it. I am completely impressed though, at what a bloke can achieve in his spare time.

The sticks of this province, is perpetually covered in smog so insidious that even the sun cannot shine properly. Light, instead, takes on a subdued quality, although all the diffraction makes things sharper. All in all, it’s weird lighting. I returned each day to a hotel room and beat the dust from my one pair of trousers. And we thought we were doing it hard in Kokomo. This is what their bruvahs live in, for now.



Our newest newbie [who lives in relative luxury], lets call him Feldon, is a sweet and placid guy, who seems unperturbed by the pains and aches that wrack his body intermittently while he detoxes from heroin. We love him.

We went looking for new accommodation with no means to pay even our current rent, and were tickled to find that every agent tried to flog our old flat back to us, failing to understand why we refused to view that unit until we relented and revealed we were the last tenants to stay there. But of course, our ex-landlady’s faux pas at the time was at the behest of her greedy agent, so surely the current ones who want our business then know that we are on to their tricks. Wise and wily we are with time.

This week, while I was trying to undo an ATM faux pas at the bank, I was met by unfathomable unhelpfulness, that morphed like quicksilver to keen interest with the presentation of my very foreign passport. It went like this: Are you a doctor? What do you do? Why do you help addicts? Show me your passport again, so I know how old you are. I have a bunch of single girlfriends around our age that meet up, perhaps you’d like to join us sometime? What’s your phone number?

And you thought Chinese women were coy and timorous. In the spirit of fair play, I furnished her with the digits she wanted, which probably diminished my character for the bank teller that was sitting next to her booth, patiently listening to this earnest pitch. That’s right, the erstwhile and slightly ephemeral Anna Wang. Gone for a season but now back, like Total Recall.

Have you ever applied acid to your own body? No? Last week I did, in a bid to rid my fierce right pinky of its troublesome corn. But alas, it ate at the corn, as well as my fierce digit so I had to cease treatment and now wait for the fire to die down.

So the secret is finally out – Alec is returning later this year to Amreeka and thus temporarily relinquishing custodianship of the Almac Archipelago. As part of the logistical re-shuffle that follows, some of his ardent followers are coming to join the Kokomo establishment. It is a traumatic time for all involved and so to gentle the tide of rising fear, this week, I went to Almac to meet and greet some of the imminent immigrants. Boy, was it tempting at the SZ airport to get on the bus to the border instead of to Almac.

How often is it that you look into your inner self and take measure, for whether there is enough there for the task at hand? If you are Rev G, the answer is a lot. And sometimes other people tell you, although if you live with bruvahs, they tend to tell you what you lack. I breezed into Almac pretty much blind and my constant refrain [much to Alec’s dismay, who was already addled by the strain] was “um, no plan”. Probably, I had ventured that, as in all matters to do with our bruvahs [and incidentally, parenthood] it matters most that you are present. So there I was, present and flying more or less on auto-pilot at worship, when Jesus came and met me with words that made me weep. Not your strength, he said, but you and I, heart to heart, is what I desire. It surely wasn’t what I expected in Almac.

I returned to Kokomo today, after the customary 25 hour train ride, with the first of our transplants.

Back in Kokomo, we have invited our next newbie to come and live with us. He will arrive, if he does, tomorrow afternoon. And so will begin yet another round of sleepless nights, confinement, endless prayers – the pouring out of love and therefore life, to wit “death is at work in us, but life is at work in you”. And then in the middle of that, we shall have sets of visitors come from the Fantasy Island for a variety of purposes, not the least of which is to beat the path of the miniverse’s Grand Vision of redemption all over this region. When all that is over, if we are still intact, it will be time to find yet more accommodation in anticipation of the Almac arrivals. And from there, entropy is sure to have her way for a season. At least it will be summer time.

In other news, our next t-shirt project is now ready for the printers although I am belatedly finding out that pink probably only really works for people with very fair skin. Or dark.

In the course of this past week, I found out that this Red Country has a staggering list of 55 crimes for which the death penalty may be applied. It made for an interesting evening of debate among our community of former law-breakers, out of which not the least apropos fact was that it is possible, for a person who is guilty of selling cold-pressed virgin olive oil that is ACTUALLY re-refined oily scum from restaurant waste, to find themselves facing execution by firing squad. I wondered if our scavenging party last week were savvy to these rather dire consequences, given their visible nonchalance. We had decided to ring the coppers on the next lot to try their luck on our turf; a decision now tinged with moral conundrum, although I suspect not for any of our bruvahs.

Schting, who is from Hainan Island, brings to our family his own brand of linguistic bloopers that typically stop a conversation or discussion stone cold while all parties concerned mentally loop through possible permutations of his most recent locution to guess what he MEANT to say, all the while Schting repeating in earnest futility the words of confusion. 9 times out of 10, we end up on the floor. The sweetest thing is, he laughs with us EVERYTIME.

I finished reading a book this week that details an experimental stint in working class America by its middle aged female author. In that country, going by the documented evidence, you can work 2 full-time jobs and still find yourself sinking into poverty and debt, thereby debunking the smug middle class and probably protestant and/or evangelical myth that hard work gets you everywhere and conversely, if you’re poor it’s because you’re lazy. I want to give this book to some people I call friends. In it, one night, because entertainment costs money, the protagonist decides to try killing time at a gospel meeting:

It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and this need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth - Barbara Ehrenreich “Nickel and Dimed: on not getting by in America”

Depending on how the preaching schedule shapes up, I reckon some years in Santa Luka, or even, dare I say it, at the Mission, and definitely at our Motherland Original, the life and times and redletter words of our professed Messiah don’t get much of a guernsey. Why not? Our live link to the immortal, invisible God only wise, right?

Below, the scene each morning round about coffee time at the windows from our living room, which never fails to elicit an impotent sense of deprecation. Why does it happen? Because I matter more. Maybe they could work a death penalty into the traffic bye-laws somehow.

It is Friday night. I have been in Kokomo for just over a week now, and vestiges of Furlough 12 fade inexorably as the insistency of life in this community asserts its own gravity on my time and thought. So to give myself a little hanging-on booster, here are, arbitrarily, ten top moments [not top ten] from Furlough 12.

10) biting into that first fillet of deep fried battered fish, Marrickville Metro style
09) “blocks, more blocks”, Crosby style
08) the Blondie Mazda-Subaru high speed fiasco along the thunderbolts way
07) arriving to sun-soaked Sydney and sun-shy drummergirl in high fashion
06) mornings at Cronulla
05) speed art, with Mama and Moo, and dissing the Picasso exhibition
04) “the kids” at drop-in: all knew the name and none the face.
03) “is he your uncle too?” a confused Melody Pass
02) “an-dy, an-dy… Ga-ry!” Hurricane Harding I love you
01) Rev Gibson, cooking up a gloriously spontaneous Sunday moment
00) Dave K and I, feeling like pros in the Harding studio
-1) facetime with the Slim Sisters, all the history intact

It was awesome. Thanks for the good times, and the bad ones- I soaked it all up.

One of the first topics we encountered when I began Economics was the idea of comparative advantage, explained at the time by examples with tropical islands in the Pacific producing coconuts, rafts and the varying parameters of production. It was confusing. Today, after almost 20 years, the fog lifted. It’s not hard, living in this country, to understand the concept of learning to make things more cheaply than other people. If you were one of the 900 million rural residents in this country, would you rather a) assemble iphones for peanuts, b) assemble copy iphones for even more peanuts, or c) grow peanuts? The answer is B, naturally. You might say the search for new comparative advantages is more or less the obsession of the nation. It doesn’t even have to be scrupulous.

A curious incident today of people with empty drums snooping around our neighbourhood sewage drains illustrates this nicely. I worked out eventually that they were there to siphon off the oily scum from the couple of restaurants that share our block. What’s this to do with economics? Well, the scum that they pick up is eventually re-refined and then sold on the retail market as if it was cold press virgin olive. Believe it!. We had a collective conniption right there. They got it down pat so you can’t tell by looking either. Massive comparative advantage there. They probably sell it back to the restaurants downstairs. So now, we are the proud contributors to local entrepreneurship. If only it were legal, but then neither is video piracy and no one in this country cares about that because it is still production. That is why, all of today’s enterprise was carried out in broad daylight and our trying to stare them into shame elicited zero response. GDP at all costs.

Make your own oil, is the solution to this – the only downside is that the only way we know how to is to fry up some lard. So, watch out for Tubby G.

I have arrived, after seemingly interminable bus rides, back at the place of my calling. I arrived at the conclusion that this is the place of my calling by the repeated questioning of one and all throughout Furlough 12. Not that they asked if it was, just that talking about life in Kokomo in general and specific terms was my process to get there. Answering repeat questions is not something I resent, just by the way, even if it’s for the 20th time, provided different people ask it.

Accompanying my arrival here, as it had for both Oz and the Fantasy Island, was that infernal rain. I am Rainmaker G.

When I departed, it was amid shenanigans enacted by our very new newbie, Schting. Consequently, I had some misgivings about his suitability, then and eventual, for residency in our special community. All interim furlough reports [two] pointed to these being unfounded. On my first morning here, the first thing Schting said to me was: “ thank you”. No context, no explanation, no qualification and yet, every unspoken meaning shot straight for my heart and it pretty much melted. By a measure of love and its attendant sacrifice, we made a way for redemption in one person’s life. This month. That’s no small fry. It bowls me over.

Our meeting with Bec&Col went quite nicely. No surprises [read bombs to drop] – which was a pleasing relief all around and then Alec and I, with Sarky Tim, proceeded to get mildly drunk over lunch straight after. Tells you a few things doesn’t it?

In this inebriated state, I received from KTP an opinion to do with the state of miniverse oestrogen, which sounded quite innocuous at the time, but has now done a hostile takeover of my inner life. I feel, at times disagreeably keenly, that I lost a part of myself in that conversation. That, too, bowls me over, but differently.

What can be harder than trying to shut a woman up? Shutting a French woman up. So offered the French woman in question. I could not believe it. In my slightly morose state, I sat at table with both the Businesswoman and PardonMe, and the woman who puts even their significant combined loquacity to shame. Plus she can do it in French. I gave her points for honesty.

We stayed out far later than anyone intended. Even Mrs Brown, my eternally indulgent hostess, raised the proverbial eyebrow in the morning. I revelled in that. Just quietly. And then it was time to find a bus.



It’s a time of transition. Think JC might have said that on the cross? Maybe?

Mixed platter, all in all, at the moment.