The working week's high spots were a nice sunrise, and kimchi instant noodles...

But the weekend was a non-working weekend, to pay back some of that extra work I'd done all week.

At Avenue K on Saturday, I accidentally ran in to an event feting Azizulhasni Awang and his world cycling title (and to my shame, cocooned as I've been this week, this was the first I'd heard of it...).

And I went to an MPO performance of The Bear, an animated film by Raymond Briggs, with music by Howard Blake. Our soloists were fabulous Malaysian singers.

It was a "family" event, so they did a nice little introduction to the orchestral instruments before showing the movie.

The need to do a good deed (ie, return the teddy bear little Tilly has dropped in his pit) gives The Bear the courage to break out of the zoo where he has been unhappily imprisoned after being bear-napped at an early age. He introduces Tilly to the Star Bear, who takes them both on a big adventure over frosty London streets, and then The Bear swims home to his parents at the North Pole. (It's set in that vague, semi-recent but quaint past that English animations all inhabit, so there's still plenty of ice.)

"Somewhere a star shines for everyone..."



After that, tea at Acme (the Pavilion Elite one). People rave about their jackfruit cake, and it does look very pretty. But I was disappointed that it didn't have more of that punchy jackfruit fragrance. Frankly, I wouldn't have known it was jackfruit if it hadn't been for the label.

Sunday brought Tsao Yu's Thunderstorm, up at KLPAC. This is a Chinese classic from the 1930s, transposed for the occasion to Ipoh. It's a real melodrama, with an autocratic patriarch, a mentally disintegrating second wife (or, more accurately, first official wife), a long-lost mother, plenty of family skeletons and hidden identities, and an almighty thunderstorm... I guess it was the tragic equivalent of farce, with characters emerging through handy doors and windows at opportune moments, but it was very nicely staged, and full of that heaviness that only families can produce.

As I walked home, a thunderstorm was booming in the distance. I walked fast...