How quaint

I'm bitten by the flu bug as with everyone in my band... no work today. As I was surfing the net, reading all sorts of trivia and historical essays, I stumbled across Frank Swettenham's essay entitled 'The Real Malay'. An interesting read but the last paragraph caught my attention in particular. It reads as follows...

"...'if, after all this experience, she like me best, I have no fear that she will wish to go further afield. All Malay girls marry before they are twenty, and the woman who has only known one husband, however attractive he may be, will come sooner or later to the conviction that life with another promises new and delightful experiences not found in the society of the first man to whom destiny and her relatives have chosen to unite her. Thus some fool persuades her that in his worship and passion she will find the World's Desire, and it is only after perhaps a long and varied experience that she realises that, having started for a voyage on the ocean, she finds herself seated at the bottom of a dry well'. It is possible that thus she becomes acquainted with truth."

I wish her all the best.