My week has been full of journeys...

We had two special seminars at KLTC, on Wednesday and Thursday: one on the political aspects of the disasters that have overtaken air travellers in recent years; and one on the harrowing plight of refugees fleeing the mess in Syria and Iraq.

You don't need all-out war, however, to make you desperate to leave your country, as the Pakistani movie Zinda Bhaag makes very clear. Despite the hazards inherent in scraping together the money to emigrate, and despite the dangers of the road, the young men are determined to go, because they see no hope in staying.

And flight -- though in a very different era and from very different circumstances -- is similarly the theme of Joseph Roth's Hiob, which is my book du jour (as I was hungering this time for German to read). I don't understand why I've never read anything by this author before. Roth was the archetypal traveller. And the characters in Hiob are on the move too. Person by person, they leave the tiny Jewish settlement and its distinctly straitened circumstances. The older son is drafted into the Czar's army; the younger son is smuggled across the border to avoid the draft, and eventually makes it to America, where he is joined by the rest of the family.

But people journey not only across space but across time. We very much enjoyed watching the Czech movie Revival this week (another in the European Union Film Festival). It explores, amusingly but poignantly, the attempt by a group of aging rockers to regenerate their 1970s band. All the little grievances and insecurities and betrayals that brought about their dispersal the first time round start to resurface. Has anything been learnt, we wonder. Well, it has. They manage to stay together long enough to achieve success. And then, one of them dies...

Food also goes on journeys. Before the concert this afternoon, we had coffee and salted caramel cheesecake at dal.komm in KLCC. When did salted caramel start to happen? We definitely haven't always had salted caramel. Well, at least in its current vogue, it dates from approximately 2008. But it has been going strong for a while now, as a string of testimonies from 2011, 2013, and 2015 make clear.

And the soul journeys too. Some argue that Mahler's Seventh Symphony, which we heard gloriously rendered by the MPO this afternoon, depicts "a journey from night to day". The extraordinary variation in tone colour as the piece progressed certainly makes that a plausible interpretation, at least to my untrained ears.

How apposite to emerge into the Divali celebrations at KLCC. The feting of light:



And, finally, from the sublime to the ridiculous... At Azzurro, in Pavilion, you can get a pretty nice affogato. What's drowned is pistachio gelato. The treacherous surface is strewn with amaretti. (Nigel was pretty pleased with his salmon salad, too). What you concurrently have to put up with, however, is a continuous loop of the shortest and most pointless journey I have witnessed all week. Azzurro, you see, is situated right opposite Victoria's Secret, which runs -- very large, very bright, very all the time -- a video of underwear-clad models, predictably skinny, stomping endlessly down the catwalk. I bet you they've never chugged down an affogato in their lives...