Among the things I shall miss about Malaysia is the ‘word’, ‘la?’.  It’s some kind of equivalent to ‘eh?’ in English (or ‘innit?’ or ‘what?’, depending on your class…).  It’s used at the end of most sentences, to invite agreement.  So someone might say, ‘Hot day, la?’, or ‘You leave today, la?’ or, ‘Good match last night, la?’ and so on.  Anyway, Helina told me a funny story.  She has a new colleague at work, whose name is something like ‘Batu’.  He’s from India, and hadn’t come across this Malaysian idiosyncracy.  She was inducting him to the company computer system and explained to him that an account had been set up for him.  ‘Your user name will be ‘Batu’, la?’.  A few hours later he came back to her, puzzled.  ‘I can’t get into my computer account’, he said, ‘It’s not recognising the username’.  ‘What are you typing, la?’ asked Helina.  ‘Batula’, he said. 

‘Malaysians only eat once a day: we start when we get up in the morning and we stop when we go to bed at night’, it was suggested to me yesterday (Sunday), when I happened to observe that I felt like I’d spent much of the day taking food. 

But for the sermon I am due to preach in St Mary’s Cathedral tomorrow morning, I guess my work out here is just about done.  This morning I had a ‘summit meeting’ with a few senior church leaders, to begin to sharpen up ideas for the contect of the CrossTalk conference in July.  It went well, and was (the sermon aside) the last major task in front of me before I fly home. 

A popular parish priest suddenly tendered his resignation to a bewildered PCC.  One after another, the PCC members sought to establish what had gone wrong and attempted to persuade him to reconsider.  ‘Has someone said something unkind?’, asked one.  ‘No, it’s not that’, said the priest, ‘you’re all very kind’.  ‘Are you struggling on the salary?’, asked another, ‘Can we arrange to pay some bills for you’.  The priest hesitated then, but decided honesty was the best policy: ‘No.  It’s not that either’, he said.  ‘Is it your wife?’, they asked, ‘Does she want to move?’.   ‘No, she’s perfectly happy here’, he said.  ‘Then is it another job?  Have you been offered a new post?’.  ‘No’, he said, ‘I don’t know where I shall go’.  ‘Then what on earth is the matter?’, they asked.  ‘It’s my sermons’, said the priest.  ‘If you must know, when I was at seminary, I copied every sermon I heard in the Chapel there, and I have simply been working my way through them since I arrived.  I don’t have confidence to preach my own creations and now I’ve got to the end.  I’m so discouraged’.  ‘Oh’, said the PCC, ‘that’s not a problem.  Just go back to the beginning and preach them over again.  No-one will notice!’.  ‘That’s the problem’, said the priest.  ‘No-one does notice.  I’ve been through them four times over already’. 

Transformation.  There’s a word.  It caused some jitters in Lichfield this time last year, as our Cathedral Sabbatical got underway.  I think there was a feeling that it implied, somehow, a lack of appreciation of the past.  But the word doesn’t – or needn’t – carry those connotations, and I’ve had to chuckle to discover how widespread the use of the word is in West Malaysia at present. 

A travel day today, back to KL in West Malaysia. The next flight is home. I was sorry to leave Sabah after such a short time: it’s a fascinating place and there’s lots to explore. I’m making a list of things I missed both there and in Sarawak, in the hope that they will amount to grounds to return… like climbing Mt Kinabalu and swimming in the South China Sea, snorkeling off Labuan Island and seeing a hornbill, visiting the rapidly growing St Patrick's Church, Tawau and meeting Albert Vun, the new Bishop of Sabah...