"Ring the best that can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."

- Unknown

Months in the foreign winter breeze, and then on to the greener grass and the rather out-of-place ducks in the English spring, I learnt of Ivan Cameron (son of British Conservative Party’s Leader), Susan Boyle (accidental Scottish singing sensation), Gordon Brown’s smear campaign, Andy Murray’s rise to the clay court challenge, Liverpool possibly losing another Premier League title to unworthy winners (a baseless personal opinion) and most importantly online shopping. I live a decadent life among peers who behave as if Panini(s) in Rome is an unthinkable proposal and sandwiches in Prague by the River Vltava would be close to fashionable.

And, in my indulgence in both thought and expenditure in the most cultured parts of Europe, art and all the European romance it affords are becoming monotonous. Painters and architects, churches and courtyards, Florence and Barcelona - advertisements lie and so does my flagrant imagination of European glamour. The Italian on the red Vespa and the Catalan matadors never made it in their leather jacket and red velvet cape to the dinner table next to mine. Instead, it is the shrill laughter of a table of Malaysian girlfriends who fill the emptiness of a bleak European restaurant. Even that, it was a Chinese restaurant in Rome and an Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam.

At the end of every European getaway, it leads me inevitably back to that small, musky room in an unfashionable student hall in an even smaller town in south-east England, to unpack away the postcards of Van Gough’s sunflowers, the bookmarks of Park Güell, the memories of learning the unkind truth of my unfounded imaginations. And, then the holding on to my maroon passport and the emblem of my country – a symbol of the unification of every state and as a result, everyone in that small country and the mighty tigers which stood on each side of the emblem to represent our courage as a nation and as individuals of that nation, I always thought of how short the queue would be in my airport. There, I would not be non-European.

The roll of the Malay language on the tongue of a middle-aged entrepreneur in a small Malaysian fishery village; the sight of Ringgits in a pink, neatly folded envelope kept at the corner of a drawer with Euros, Pounds and Dollars; the sight of the red and white stripes trapped on a closed window; the exchange of Britain’s Got Talent videos over three series and then the exchange of Singaporean advertisements created and brought to life by the talent they don’t have; the awkward, almost forgotten Malay on the tongues of idealists abroad searching for a place in a broken scheme, talking about dirty British flatmates.

So, I place again, the small maroon booklet, filled with the evidence of my European rambles and adventures in the drawer with the knowledge that after another few weekends away from this room, I will be placing it on the biometric reader in KLIA. The passport does not define who you are. But, every once in a while it reminds me of where I left my heart and where it will remain for some time - where the light gets in.

[[ mood ]] working

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