Considering this week has been colonized by some of the dullest tasks in the academic playbook -- marking, invigilating, doing expense claims, attending fairs -- I suppose it could have been far worse...

In a Pavilion that was urgently dismantling Christmas and setting up Chinese New Year, there was ice-cream at Milk Cow. (I have tended to sneer about soft serve, but I think that's because I'm remembering Mr Whippy in the UK. Here, it's creamy and good.) This one also had a macaron and almonds:



There were Korean videos to buy (two for the price of one):



There were beautiful nights and beautiful mornings:



There were no fewer than three interesting movies, which probably couldn't have been more different from each other.

One was The Big Short. I definitely didn't grasp all the technicalities (and judging by the number of surreptitious conversations among the audience, I think this was a common problem), but as an exposition of the tragedy we call the Global Financial Crisis, it was both entertaining and powerful.

The second was Return to Nostalgia by local film-maker Woo Ming Jin. This was an elegiac documentation of the search for the post-war movie Seruan Merdeka, which featured (unusually) Chinese and Malay actors in a recollection of the oppressive period of Japanese colonization. Woo blends oral history, story-boarding, and the recreation of the final scenes of the novelized screen-play, which he projects onto the mouldering walls of a ruined cinema in Melaka.



The third was Haru's journey, a desperately sad depiction of growing old in recession-hit Japan. No-one comes out of this movie looking particularly good. Neither the family network nor the social fabric can be relied upon to provide support when it's needed. And the individual old people are not dignified and stoical, but loud and childish and full of grudges. The grey, wintry tones that we'd experienced take on a different meaning here. But there was much -- trains, houses, noodles, the hedgehog at the door... -- that made the backdrop seem very familiar.

Work is closing in around me again, like water round a drowning person. I guess I still feel a little disoriented in 2016, pulled hither and thither by conflicting interests and demands on my time. If only years came with helpful maps, like this one: