The King of Fruits....

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian

It’s impossible to live here in Malaysia without encountering the objects in the photograph above. What are they? Well, despite appearances, they are not footballs, or the latest fashion in bathroom back-scratchers. If they were, believe me, H1N1 would be the least of the Malaysian health system’s worries, and the stock price for the company that makes Band Aids would go through the roof!

No, of course, they are durians! The King of Fruits!! Malaysia’s very own culinary secret weapon!!! And...it’s now the Durian Season!!! Yippeeeee!!

Before I recover from my entirely fake spasms of anticipation, I must justify why it is that durians, despite the fascination of their spiky exterior and their apparent pungent squishiness inside, do very little for me. I would have much more fun sucking my thumb, to be totally honest...

For one thing, the fruit is a dangerous weapon – large, heavy and covered in sharp spikes. I heard an awful story the other day of a man who was made quadriplegic because a durian fell out of a tree and hit him on the head. I’ll bet he doesn’t eat them either...

But the big problem for me is the taste and the texture, because I don’t go anywhere near durian trees and in any case wouldn’t know one if I saw one...

“Whoa there, Prof. Madder”, I hear you all call out indignantly, “surely you must have developed a TASTE for the King of Fruits in all your years in our beautiful country? Surely, you just haven’t tried enough of them.....”

Well, let me tell you a little story, a story about high hopes and broken dreams. It all started sometime at the end of the 1990s, when I first came over to Sarawak.

One evening, a neighbour took me to a vast, crowded and sweaty market (Satok, I think) to show me my first durians. I suppose my neighbour felt he was putting me through a rite of passage, a bit like eating deep-fried crickets in Bangkok, or sucking on the hookah pipes in Cairo. Part of the visitor’s itinerary...

I had heard a lot about durians then – they had already taken on a semi-legendary aura, based on stories passed on to me by friends who had visited South East Asia before and had been transported by the delights of this most strikingly original fruit.

So I was naturally delighted to be given the privilege of trying one for the first time. So, my new friend, a teacher from the same school as my wife, carefully selected a big, green particularly spiky and convincing durian from among a great heap on sale in the market. He tested it by shaking it gently, placing it against his ear (ouch!) and generally carrying and weighing it reverently, like a newborn baby with spikes!

Back home, we all participated in The Tasting.

To start off with, the spiky, hard surface of the thing had to be opened somehow. Durians are not like apples and oranges, which can be bitten into or easily pealed. If you try to bite into a durian it’s gonna make your dentist rich, and your mouth will have more holes than a Swiss cheese.

So to open the durian, my friend simply felt with his fingertips until he found the natural fault lines in the shell, and slowly pulled the thing apart until it split cleanly in two. It was at this point that I realised that durians, as culinary objects rather than weapons, are notable for what is inside the shell – in this case the soft, pulpy flesh that surrounds the seeds. It looks something like this:


Source: http://www.petertan.com/blog/2004/05/20/durians-durians-everywhere/

I was immediately struck by how much the insides of a durian resemble something alive, like the eldritch foetuses inside some alien creature’s womb. I could almost imagine them palpitating grotesquely as they feed on the life blood of their spiky host. I had visions of one of the grisly things suddenly quivering violently and popping out of the shell, blind eyes searching for a new host in the form of the nearest foreign visitor...

But, I am nothing if not a culinary diplomat, so I kept these thoughts to myself as I buried my fingertips in the yellowish goo and took out some of the stuff to try. It felt smooth. It felt soft. It felt gooey. But I put some of it in my mouth...

What happened next was a total surprise. Based on the somewhat pungent, gassy smell that comes off a durian before you actually eat it, I expected to taste something that was creamy, perhaps fruity, I don’t know... But what I got was a very strong flavour of tuna and onion mixed together with mayonnaise – just like one of my favourite sandwich fillings back home but definitely not what I would expect in a fruit.

I tasted a little more of the oniony, gassy mixture and was repelled by it. I threw it away, subtly so as not to upset my neighbour, and I decided then and there that durians were not for me.

It’s all about programming, I think. All my life, I have been programmed to expect sweetish flavours from fruits and savoury flavours from things that are not fruits, such as onions, tuna and cheese. I just cannot accept a fruit which doesn’t taste like a fruit.. And the pervy squishiness of the flesh around the seeds doesn’t help either.

Many people are put off by the smell of durians – “smells like hell, tastes like heaven” as the local saying goes. Personally, I can take the smell, which is like a slight gas leak, but the texture and the associations it sets up in my psyche mean that I have to avoid the king of fruits, deferring that pleasure for another lifetime.

Let me finish, then, with some Wikipedia quotes on durians which in many ways provide support for my own feelings about this contentious fruit. Firstly, Anthony Burgess, who would have known what he was talking about, likened eating durians to "[...] eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory”. Yessssss......Except I like sweet raspberry blancmange!

And let us hear from two chefs. Firstly, Andrew Zimmern compares the taste of durians to "completely rotten, mushy onions." Obviously, he has taste buds similar to mine! And finally, the excellent Anthony Bourdain says: "Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother.”

My thoughts exactly...

No Sensayuma

I must be losing my sense of humour as I get older. Either that or the world is becoming less funny, or at least it’s becoming more funny but in a wicked, dry and decidedly ironic way.

Let me explain. The other day, a friend recommended the new book by David Sedaris, who is an American “humorist” I had never heard of. The book is called “When You are Engulfed in Flames” and has a black cover with a picture of a human skeleton smoking a cigarette.

When you examine this book, you are engulfed, not in flames, but in an armada of critic’s comments all screaming how “hilarious” the book is or how it “made me laugh out loud” or some other verbal attempt at telling the potential reader Just How Damn Funny this book is.

So I read it, fired up by the promise of dark wicked ironic humour from the striking front cover and all that painfully obvious symbolism connoted by the image of a skeleton with a cancer stick poking out of its mouth.

And...

Well, I have to say I was decidedly underwhelmed. OK, it starts off well, with a tale of the author’s sister and her typically American neuroses about touching the handles of supermarket trolleys and what have you, and indeed it moves on to a series of somewhat long tales from the author’s rather patchy childhood, his mysteriously unsuccessful academic life and his struggles with drugs and smoking and learning foreign languages etc but for some reason, I could not find it in my heart to laugh out loud.

There were a couple of moments which did raise the ghost of a titter to shake my gut into life, especially the description of an excruciating taxi ride with a driver who wouldn’t stop telling his passenger about his sexual activities. Oh yes and the time the hero hitched a ride in a limo where he was offered sex with the driver’s wife and finally realised he was homosexual!

I will give it that. But honestly, I expected to be unable to get up for laughing, and instead found the book an interesting and brilliantly written series of reminiscences, light-hearted yes, but gutbustingly hilarious definitely no.

Oh dear oh dear. So what do I find funny these days then, I hear you scream?

I find humour in everyday, silly and ironic occurrences. Like the other day when I was driving home from work. I was approaching a bend in the road and I noticed an advance party of small traffic cones ahead of me. I thought for a split second that maybe the local authorities had finally got round to fixing the road surface on this most bumpy and badly patched up piece of road this side of Afghanistan.

Instead, they were painting white lines down the centre of the road. I mean, come on, I’ve been driving on this same bloody road almost every day for the last nine years and nearly broken my suspension on the potholes and uneven road surface more times that I’ve eaten roti canai. I’ve never needed WHITE LINES down the middle of the road before, so why do I need them now? But there they were, in all their freshly painted whiteness, eagerly ready to remind me where the centre of the road is.

Another source of hilarity for me is when people’s problems and difficulties can be completely removed in one stroke by one small change in their behaviour or environment, but they just cannot see it.

I see this every day when I drive into my place of work and attempt to park my car. It’s like this – to get to my parking area I have to make a right turn into a very narrow road. Almost every day there are at least four cars parked on the corner of this road, meaning that if someone is coming the other way, I can’t get through, and have to reverse to let them pass. And why is this necessary? Because the bloody cars parked on the corner are there because their owners are inside the nearby staff room clocking in!

Aaaand the situation is made worse because now we all have to clock in using a decidedly mendacious post-911 thumbprint reading system which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t – resulting in colleagues forming a queue in the staffroom while the machine beeps and says “please try again” and everyone is anxious and impatient because their cars are parked illegally outside on the corner and they’re feeling guilty.

So as a result of all this silliness, I can’t get through to my parking place. Despite being overweight and unfit, I don’t have a problem to park my car, walk to my office, unload my bag, walk to the staff room and put my finger on the little green rectangle and wait for the machine to say “thank you!” in its camp little voice.

And the thing is that all this hassle could be removed in one fell swoop if people could just find the time to park their cars before clocking in! You just have to laugh at the silliness of it all!

But I’m sure that some of you probably don’t find this funny. Well, if you fall into that category, I suggest you go to MPH and pick up a copy of David Sedaris’ book. Only don’t come back and blame me if you don’t laugh out loud either!

Malaysian Odyssey...

Anyone who has read this blog may get the impression that this writer is a miserable old ungrateful curmudgeon who needs to get a life and lose a bit of weight. No arguments there, so allow me to fill you in on some recent blog-worthy experiences which have largely re-charged my happiness batteries.

Now it's the Gawai season, I'm enjoying a well-earned rest after a couple of weeks of relentless travel. Yet two weeks ago, I was off to Kota Kinabalu, that jewel in the Sabahan Crown, for a one-day training workshop at my university's Kota Kinabalu campus. These things are regular gigs for me, and allow me to meet up with colleagues from different branches of my university as well as to earn some extra income...

I was giving a training workshop on how to write research articles, and my small but willing audience consisted of junior lecturers who for the most part had no idea what I was on about. That's life in the education field. Deliver your material, soak up the feedback, then make your escape....

Nothing particularly exciting happened in KK. The flyover which is supposed to reduce KK's traffic problems is still under construction (after about five years!), yet there is still a rather good fish and chip restaurant in the Warisan Square shopping mall where I managed to treat my niece and her friend to dinner. I was once again put up in my favourite hotel, the Promenade, and I felt like James Bond (your usual suite, sir!), as much as it's possible to feel like James Bond in Kota Kinabalu!

Luckily for me there were no belt buckle strain incidents, as I was travelling Business Class with Malaysian Airlines (bigger seats and marginally better food than Economy!) Lucky me! As Bond says in Casino Royale when he sees his new Aston Martin: 'I love you too, M!'

After that brief but pleasant trip, it was off to Perlis in Northern Malaysia for my next gig, accompanying my debaters for a week to a big debating contest in Arau, not far from the border with Thailand.

All went well at first on the day I departed for Arau, via KL and Alor Setar. I got seated in my Bizz Class seat on the plane at Kuching, no belt issues at all, with my boss and some of his bosses sitting in the row in front of me and a glamorous Chinese lady in the seat next to me. However, just as we were handing back the cold face towels and readying ourselves for the safety demonstration, the Captain told us to leave the aircraft while they fixed a problem with the batteries!

Now, I was under the impression that planes flew on jet fuel, not batteries, but what do I know! So we all trooped back to the departure lounge for nearly an hour, and I was sweating like a horse because for some reason the operators of Kuching International Airport don't seem to know how to turn the aircon up to a humanly acceptable level. Maybe it's a plot by the Health Ministry to make everyone look like they have H1N1 flu so that they have to spend a night in the airport's swanky emergency Swine Flu ward...

Anyway, eventually, we were allowed back onto the plane, and the whole rigmarole started again - cold face towels sir, orange juice or water sir, safety demonstration, then finally a lovely flight over to KL, with some superb Bond-like food, arriving about 5.30 in the afternoon.

I needn't have worried that I might miss my connecting flight to Alor Setar, because the plane was held up by another flight to Labuan that was supposed to have left three hours previously, and eventually filled up and crawled out of the airport at 6.30.

Finally, after a lot of waiting around, our plane arrived and we boarded. The flight to Alor Setar in Kedah state was just under an hour and I couldn't see a thing out of the windows because it was of course dark by this time! But it was nice to see what food they give you in Bizz Class on a short flight. Little pieces of French bread I think it was with some presence of salmon or strawberry or something. And some spicy peanuts which made me cough so much I was afraid they might quarantine me for having Swine Flu...

Part Two tomorrow....

Below the Belt

It’s bad enough having to pay extra for a seat that comes nowhere near big enough for a man of my size, and it’s humiliating enough trying to fit my butt and gut into the little square padded bucket they call a Hot Seat. But when you have to use the dreaded Air Asia Seat Belt Extension (Mark III), then you know that something has gone drastically wrong somewhere....

Luckily, when I went on a conference trip to KL last week in one of those sparky red Air Asia A 320s, I just managed to avoid having to ask the flight attendant That Embarrassing Little Question that goes something like ‘excuse me, can I please borrow the extension?”

But only just. You can imagine me, squeezing myself into my ‘hot seat’ at the front of the plane (RM 25 extra for the privilege of suffering marginally less thrombosis and crushed diaphragm), with a grandstand view of the shaved grey hair on the back of the Captain’s neck, thinking ‘I bet he doesn’t have this trouble...’

Once I am inside my new Hot Seat, I think of what it must have been like for the brave fighter pilots of World War Two. Did they always manage to fit into their tiny little seats in the cockpits of their dashing Spitfires, or furious Messerschmidts, or did they sometimes experience a little bit of pushmepullyou whenever they had consumed too much rice pudding in the Mess? I suppose it would have been Bratwurst for the Germans, but...

Anyway, anyway...

Back to the present - there was me tightly ensconced in my Air Asia seat and optimistically pulling the existing red seat belt to its furthest extent to see if it will accommodate my gut. Now at this point, usually one of two things are bound to happen. Either the chasmic gulf between belt and buckle is so uncrossable that one just has to say those magic words to the flight attendant, one of which rhymes with ‘pension’.

The alternative, the oh so happy alternative, is that the buckle and the belt meet together as effortlessly as train carriages at a siding. Just like they do on Malaysian Airlines planes, I’ve noticed, but that’s another story....

But last week, I navigated a middle course between these two points. I discovered that, with considerable contortions of my stomach and my face, and a lot of holding of breath, I could actually get the seat belt to fasten properly and safely. But in order to do it, I had to wrap the belt buckle round my gut to meet the fastener which seemed to be buried somewhere deep inside the left hand side of my seat.

The strain of doing this (with one hand) was akin to that experienced doing handstands in a toilet cubicle, and I had to manoeuvre the belt so that it only covered my lower stomach near to my lap.

But I tell you, the ecstasy of eating a 150 g bar of Cadburys Dairy Milk in one go is nothing, NOTHING in comparison to the sheer exhilaration and sense of triumph and joy that I experienced when I finally felt the belt buckle emit that utterly satisfying metallic ‘clunk’ that signified Victory!

Ah, such sweet sweet pleasures.....

In a Saucy Mood

It’s just amazing just how much a plate of roti canai and curry sauce can ruin your day. Normally, this delicious local repast will set me up for the whole day – the crispy, thin and utterly delicious flat bread smeared with pungent curry gravy and a chunk or two of curried chicken always provides me with the positive kick start I deserve.

But, last Monday, everything went pear-shaped. On the way to work last Monday morning, I stopped off at the nearest branch of J & J Cafeteria – another one of Kuching’s best kopitiams. As usual, I sat at a table facing my car in the manner prescribed by all good spy manuals, and I ordered my usual two pieces of roti canai, accompanied by curried chicken drowned in J & J’s signature curry sauce which can strip the paint off any wall you choose to throw it at.

Now, everything was groovy, for a sweet moment or two, as I sipped my ginseng coffee, and tucked into the roti, cutting it up into stringy, crunchy pieces and dipping said pieces into the sauce. I felt a bit like Hemingway, or Somerset Maugham, or any of the famous expats who lived life to the full in their chosen countries of exile and felt Pretty Damn Good doing it.

But, seeing as it was Monday, I was wearing my lovely white shirt with the blue stripes. And, I received a sudden and brutal lesson on the effects of curry sauce on textiles. Yes, I got industrial quantities of curry sauce all over my lovely pristine smart business-like shirt!

All it took was one simple accidentally spastic backwards flick of the spoon on my part. It was a spoon which was loaded with sauce which was meant for my mouth. The result of this was that the entire left side of my shirt, as well as some of the fingers on my left hand, became be-speckled and peppered with little humiliating islands of brown, rich, and definitely not stain-free curry sauce.

After I had finished effing and blinding very quietly to myself, I struggled to my feet, and went over to the wash-basin. Water. Water. Water. Dab dab dab. Rub rub rub. Rinse. Dab. I managed to get the curry sauce itself off, but my shirt was still decorated with sickly-yellow patches which hardly got any less yellow with further applications of H2O and soap.

I was at this stage faced with a choice. Do I drive all the way back home and change shirts, which would make me late for work? Or do I brazen it out and walk with my left arm folded just so in the perfect position to cover the stains?

And you know what? Being a lazy sonofabitch, I opted for the stains. And the stains stayed until home time, staining my self-respect, and making me thoroughly depressed for the rest of the day.

I now know why Mafia bosses never wear bright-coloured shirts. Ever noticed? They always seem to wear dark shirts? The reason is now obvious. It’s to hide the stains from where they spill spaghetti sauce all over their shirts. So from now on, when I eat roti canai, or spaghetti for that matter, I’m gonna wear a nice black shirt. Just like the Sopranos.

KK Again...

Just returned from another debate trip to Kota Kinabalu, that gorgeous ocean-side city in Sabah. Once again, I took some of my students to participate in the Borneo Cup debate (or was it Borneo Open debate? Can't remember!)

This is an annual debate competition which was originally set up as a showcase for student debaters from Borneo universities (i.e. Sarawak, Sabah and Indonesian Kalimantan). So far, it has been a very successful event (well, my university has won it twice!) but I can't stop myself from commenting on a disturbing new trend that has started this year - opening the competition to teams from the Malaysian Peninsula.

As anyone who has taught English in Malaysia knows, it is generally the case that students from the Peninsula universities, such as University of Malaya and Multimedia University, tend to have a better command of English, as well as better access to debate training and competition opportunities, of which there are many over there.

Also, it is often the case that many of the students in teams from Borneo universities, such as UNIMAS (Sarawak) and UMS (Sabah), are also from the Peninsula! So, what happens? You get a Borneo debate competition which is in reality a Pan-Malaysian debate competition!

It's rather like the English Premier League, where a great deal of the players and Managers are not English!!

So, to address this anomaly, the organisers are re-branding the Borneo Cup as the Borneo Open. Yes, it's Open, but the only thing Borneo about it seems to be the location!

I've got nothing against Peninsula students, and I'm not trying to get political with this, I just want to see more debate competitions and training opportunities in Sarawak and Sabah for young debaters to cut their teeth.

I would so much love to see the standard of English rise this side of the South China Sea, and debating is one of the best, and most enjoyable, ways in which this can be achieved.

What Goes Around...

Let’s face it, folks, there is nothing romantic about being overweight. None at all. You don’t get any street cred points for being a gut bucket, at least unless you are one of those comedy actors who appear in American family movies.
And I don’t fit into that category. In fact I don't fit into much these days...

So I have come to realise that it’s about bloody time that I stop making excuses and do something about my health. Or rather my rapidly increasing lack of it.
So, on the advice of one of my colleagues who is in a similar situation to me, I took myself off to a local doctor who specialises in heart illness, and asked for a check up.

The doctor was very nice and kind, and took some of my blood, asked me to give a urine sample (“what from here?”) and put me on light medication for my somewhat high blood pressure.

The results come back next week. God knows what they’ll say, or what action I might have to take, apart from a massive diet and more exercise. But at least I have decided to take my first feeble, heavy steps on the road to recovering my health, before it is taken away from me forever.

I have decided that there are still many things I want to do before I go gently into that good night from which there is no awakening. I want to carry on with my blog, write more articles, become a bestselling author and retire to somewhere nice with my wife.

I want to keep on experiencing things and writing about them so that you, my gentle readers, can carry on enjoying them!!