During our fruitless quest to find mortar makers in Ang Sila, we stumbled upon a large Chinese temple. The main building had the sun inconveniently sat right behind it, but there were plenty of other bits and pieces to photograph.

Off on a morning trip to Ang Sila with neighbour Nik; our target being the factories that produce mortars and pestles.

It is a fact of life in Asia that any successful business is immediately copied by everyone else in the vicinity; such that you find entire streets selling exactly the same thing. I always feel sorry for the poor sod who set up the first stall selling, say, washing machine spares; only to find that his little money spinner diluted over time as every shop around him starts selling the same pulleys, motors and whatever else goes into making a washing machine.

And so it is in Ang Sila. Many years ago, at the dawn of time, someone decided to make and sell mortars and pestles. They sold well, too well, because in no time at all the whole damn town was selling them.

Yes, it’s the annual reminder that I creep ever closer to death. And I am meant to celebrate?

She who must be obeyed was insistent that she should buy me a present and wanted to know what I wanted. I do have a list, but every item comfortably exceeds her monthly salary, most of which already disappears in support payments to her increasingly lunatic and dysfunctional family. But she was keen to mark the occasion, and we just happened to walking past a camera shop, and they just happened to have this in the window:

And the pavement.

It was 1987 and we had arrived in sunny Kuala Lumpur from rainy Holland. But it was not just the weather that was different. Living and working in an Asian city was massively different from the comfy familiarity of Europe. One of the biggest changes was that our house came equipped with a separate little housing area. Is that for when relatives come to stay? I enquired innocently. No, that’s for the maid.