Mural painting on Pulao Tuba

21^st June 2017… We arrived by taxi boat at Wild Pasir Panjang beach resort, on the small Malaysian island of Pulau Tuba.

Two guests and one volunteer were leaving as we jumped down into the sea. We followed the curve of the little beach, to the volunteer house, which Madelene and I had all to ourselves. It was a square wooden building, open at the sides, topped with a metal roof. The sleeping area was raised up on stilts, allowing the sea to wash underneath at high tide. There was a covered platform out front, and around the back was our kitchen area. We were shaded by coconut trees, and we had a view of at least six forested islands.

It was just the beach paradise we were looking for, and we intended to stay for one month - if our host would accommodate us.

Our host is a wiry little Malaysian man, called Gazry. He is seventy-two years-old. He has lived on this stretch of beach for forty years, and he runs a modest resort here, which caters for a maximum of twelve guests, spread among various little beach houses and huts.

Koi is the only other full-timer. She is from Thailand, and has been here for a few years. She is in her thirties, and she is very kind and friendly. She runs the kitchen and restaurant, and takes care of the guests' accommodation.

Soon after we arrived, and bagged two of the three available mattresses for ourselves, Gazry welcomed us to the island.

He outlined three rules that he wanted us to stick to. They were personal bugbears; seemingly inconsequential, and yet, clearly loaded with importance for him.

The first was: keep sand off the floor of the beach house. He noticed, with his sharp eyes, that we had already tracked a few granules onto the polished wood, and he snatched up a coconut-fibre broom which was hanging on the wall, and busied himself sweeping them away.

Second rule: don't overload the ashtrays. He picked up a large sea shell that had been requisitioned for this purpose, which was sitting on one of the tables at the outdoor restaurant. It was stuffed full of cigarette ends.

"This!" he said, brandishing the object. "I do not like this! The volunteers come here and they make a mess of my restaurant! This does not look good for my guests! Once you finished your cigarette, you empty it out!"

(Hardly applies to Madelene, of course, being a total non-smoker. But I, as a sometimes-smoker, made a mental note, and filed it carefully away.)

His third commandment was one of those annoying personal preferences which I knew would catch me out time and again, and which, at the time of writing, has already caught me out twice. He doesn't like people talking to him with their hands on their hips. He says he finds it confrontational.

When you're standing on a Malaysian beach in the midday heat, taking orders from a relatively benign dictator, about which bits need raking over and where you should dump the detritus, it is quite natural, I find, to stand with my hands on my hips, as I squint at the white-hot beach, in the direction of his wizened, outstretched finger. Then I notice that he has gone very quiet, and turned his back on me.

"I'm sorry for being rude," he says, half-turning towards me, affecting a hurt voice. "But when you stand there like that, I'm afraid I don't like it..."

"Oh yes!” I say. “Terribly sorry, I completely forgot, what a fool…"

… While inside I'm feeling overheated and just a teensy bit pissed-off with the old goat.

But hey-ho. I reason to myself: this is his beach, he's lived here forty years. He's bound to have developed a few idiosyncrasies in that time. Putting up with them is probably a small price to pay for staying in this idyllic beach paradise.

The hours we are expected to work are not excessive. He is asking us to put in four or five hours a day, six days a week. Most volunteers do a couple of hours in the early morning, and then a couple of hours in the early evening. They have the rest of the day free to laze around on the beach, go explore the island, or hire a water taxi back to Langkawi to load up with fresh supplies. There are no shops on Pulau Tuba, and the main island is only ten minutes away.

Our main task, we are told, is to clean the beach. Varieties of plastic wash up on a daily basis. The outdoor restaurant area, which is adjacent to our house, needs to be kept tidy, which means raking up all the bits that fall out of the trees, picking up chairs when they've blown over in a thunderstorm… and of course, emptying the ashtrays.

Koi will sometimes need help in the outdoor kitchen, preparing vegetables and so on, and when guests are due to arrive she will need help preparing the rooms, sweeping outside, etcetera. At the time of writing, Madelene and I are the only volunteers staying here, so whatever odd jobs need doing around the beach will likely fall to us.

Also - there are two dogs here, and one of them is in dire need of exercise. And a diet. I refer to a fat Labrador bitch, called Princess. 

It is one of those ridiculously convivial dogs which rolls on its back, revealing its immense stomach and its impressive array of nipples, at any given opportunity. It is an attention-seeking, tongue-lolling waste disposal on legs. There is also a skinny black dog, which is pathologically shy of human beings. He is a mongrel of some kind, and he moved himself in some years ago.

Despite being in a long-term, committed relationship, the two dogs could hardly be more different.

If she was a human being, Princess would weigh about eighteen stone. She would wear bright, colourful dresses that would show off her massive, thundering legs. When she wasn't out attending social functions or having a whale of a time on the roller coasters, she would be at home, baking enormous cakes, singing along with the latest god-awful reality TV sensation at volumes to reinter the living dead. She would wear day-glow lipstick, applied with a bucket, and a trowel. And hell, why not. Who doesn't want to look fabulous?

Her husband is in the study. He's been there for some time. He's nailed egg boxes and a length of old carpet to the door, and he's stuffed cotton wool in his ears. He's building a scale model of the Yamato out of matchsticks. She was the largest battleship in history, and the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, before she was sunk by US airpower in 1945.

At the end of the day, for all their extreme differences, they will snuggle up on their voluminous sofa - him gasping for air, her gorging on chocolate cake - in front of the gargantuan television that dominates their modest living room.

Madelene and I have agreed we will do our bit to "sort out" the dogs. In practice, this means running on the beach with fat dog (as I have taken to calling her), and feeding black dog tasty morsels, in an effort to make him a bit less skinny, and a bit more sociable.

Our initial endeavours have met with mixed success. Fat dog will come running with us for short bursts, if she is encouraged to do so by Madelene, myself and black dog. She enjoys running, of course. All dogs do. It's just a shame she tires easily, and looks like an earthquake in a jello factory. 

Black dog will take food from us, warily, if it is offered to him, and it is something he likes the smell of. Often he will creep up to us, sniff a few times, and turn away. That is - unless fat dog gets there first.

Her senses are extraordinarily fine-tuned for the acquisition of food. If a food bag is being rummaged about with, for however briefly, her ears will twitch and her head will spring up from the beach, and she will come scrabbling over, tail wagging, and mouth agape. It will then be the job of one of us (me) to distract her, usually by wrestling her to the ground and furiously wobbling her gelatinous mounds of loose skin, while the other one (Madelene) coos to the recalcitrant black dog, trying to tempt him with some food.

Even when food is not involved, and we just want to give the black dog some attention - fat dog can't handle it. She will interpose herself between us and her introverted husband, and run through her shameless tongue-lolling, watery-eyed repertoire, in a desperate bid to steal all of the limelight for herself. Meanwhile, black dog takes his cue, and slinks off.

I asked Gazry about fat dog on the evening of our first day. The sun was setting on the other side of the island, and we were sitting at the open air beach restaurant, at the water's edge, watching the colours change. He had a Guinness, I had a Carlsberg Special Brew, and Madelene had a glass of wine.

The sea was a single sheet of silk, floating on a cushion of air, under the evening sky.

The old man scowled. "The dog was a mistake. I sent a friend of mine to pick her up from the mainland. I wanted a Rottweiler, and he came back with that. Before her I owned five Rottweilers…”

He considered the dog to be altogether too friendly, and incorrigibly daft. It didn’t fit with his conception of what a dog should be; a noble beast, with an edge of steel.

Why on Earth he didn’t go to the mainland himself to pick up his own dog, I don’t know. At the time of writing this, I have left the island, so it’s too late to find out.

*

We decided we would get up early while we were living on the island, and reverse the trend of getting up later and later, which had come into effect during our days in Thailand. The routine of sauntering out of our beach resort at 10am, with the birthday bird tucked nonchalantly under one arm, to have a leisurely breakfast, and arrive at the beach for fun and frolics around eleven, are over. These days, the alarm goes off at 7am, and by 7.15, we are running along the beach, with the dogs capering after us.

Yes! It has happened: the dream has become reality.

Running along the beach, at dawn, with the full might of the sun exploding on the horizon, with Madelene, and the dogs, has been a life-affirming experience. It's like stepping into someone else's perfect life. Someone who doesn't just turn over and snooze into mid-morning, for no good reason, other than the fact it's so damn comfortable.

I glance wildly around me, while I am in flight: at Madelene, and the dogs, and the beach, and the palm trees, and the sea, and the sunrise. It's all so beautiful, and everything feels so incredibly and weirdly right.

This is despite the fact that my brain is playing catch-up with events. It was sleeping a few minutes ago - and now look! It stares goggle-eyed out of its enclosure, hardly able to believe where its body has taken it.

OK, there are some minor niggles, intruding on this otherwise ridiculously perfect snapshot of an early morning. The beach becomes rather coarse and abrasive on the other side of the bay, making it feel like you're running on sand paper. And fat dog runs out of steam after a few yards. But still: it's an amazing start to the day.

After our run, and a life-affirming blast under the outdoor shower, it's time for breakfast.

The management provides us with eggs, bread and coffee. The bread is of the bog standard white variety, and the coffee is pre-mixed with sugar and powdered milk. Read the ingredients list, and you see it also contains hydrogenated vegetable fat, which is a substance so diabolically evil, it should - at the very least - come with its own health warning. So, we buy our own bread from the supermarket in Langkawi, and I buy my own coffee.

Breakfast should be a simple affair, and in many ways it is, and in some ways it isn't. In some ways it's a battleground.

I like to poach eggs, and Madelene likes to boil them, with their shells on. She likes to drop them into the pan from a great height by the looks of things, because there is usually some breakage.

I like to have runny eggs, and she likes ultra-hard boiled eggs. She considers seven minutes to be a good boil-time.

"But they're not large eggs!" I protest, stupidly, railing against the madness of it all. But it's no use. The way people have their eggs is wired into the brain from an early age, and nothing short of major surgery or a bad accident is going to change that.

So I fish my eggs out of the angry white froth, after a couple of minutes, and set about the business of peeling them. It's a business I am terrible at. The egg white sticks to the inside of the shell, tearing lumps out of the quivering mass, which threatens to collapse in a watery mess on the draining board.

"Next time, I am poaching the eggs!" I assert in a rather foul-tempered way, as my ill-adapted protuberances make heavy work of the fiddly task.

Madelene has no problem doing this. It infuriates me.

"How the hell do you do this?" I cry pathetically, staring down at my ravaged breakfast. In my peripheral vision I can see that Madelene is pleased; she's got one over on me. I don't know how I can see that.

(Of course - her breakfast is even more ravaged: I take advantage of her preference for ultra-hard boiled eggs by fishing out the best eggs for myself. This is war, remember.)

Then there's the coffee. I like to put my coffee in before the hot water, and she does it the other way around.

Now this is a weird one. She says it makes no difference, and she is undeniably right. So why does it always piss me off so much when I see that mug of hot water steaming so innocently, without coffee in it?

(That's a rhetorical question. I wouldn't like to think the answer is: because you're a sad weirdo, and a pedant.)

Our first task, post-breakfast, is to clean the beach. I go litter-picking, while Madelene rakes over the sand around the restaurant area.

8am seems like a good time to get started. The beach is still blissfully cool, despite the sun being well clear of the horizon. It is not a huge beach - being perhaps 250m long - and at first glance it looks very clean.

It's only when you start picking up all these little bits of plastic that you realise how much there is. Much of it is hidden among the drifts of weeds and coconut fibres and bits of wood that get deposited by the tide.

The usual suspects are all here: straws, bottles, plastic bags, flip flops. There are broken hair combs, and children's toys. I found a little green house, which once generated rental income, on a Monopoly board, far, far away.

The undisputed king of beach junk, though: polystyrene.

It arrives in the form of huge box lids, shards of packing material, fast food containers, and cups. It is a never-ending influx of man-made flotsam, washing in from the ocean.

Some of it is shiny and new, some of it is discoloured and brittle, and some of it is so fragile, it falls apart when I pick it up.

How long has it been out there, riding the ocean currents? Years, maybe. A few more, and it would disintegrate fully, into its constituent parts. Tiny beads, like grains of sand from a plastic world. To drift and wash up, and be taken back into the sea, and ingested, and excreted, and drift, and wash up…

When our descendants in the far future dig deep enough, they will find these little beads, along with the other relics of our global civilisation, pressed into a thin layer of plastic. And they will mark it down in their books: Anthropocene. The first age of humans.

How much more non-biodegradable junk are we going to manufacture? How much longer can this age of waste go on?

It's not like there aren't alternatives. There are environmentally sound solutions to all of the problems of industry, and mass manufacture.

Take polystyrene as an example. A synthetic polymer discovered in 1839, and first manufactured in 1931, it now accounts for 30% of all landfill waste. It takes five hundred years to break down, and leaches toxins into the environment, and any animal that consumes it.

There is a New York company called Evocative Design which has come up with a great alternative. Instead of making packing materials in the usual way, out of polystyrene, they fill the moulds with a biological mulch, which is seeded with mycelium. Then they shut the cultures away, and when they open them up again, the mycelium has generated fine root structures, filling every crevice within the moulds, creating a light, sturdy biodegradable block - which can then be used to pack computers, televisions, fridges, etcetera.

This kind of creative thinking has the potential to save us from burying ourselves, and everything else on this planet, under a heaving layer of plastic. But only if it is adopted on a large scale by industry.

A spot of beach cleaning certainly provides a snapshot of what is going on with the mass manufacture that underpins our consumer-driven society, and what that is doing to the planet. It is an industry that has barely been in place for a hundred years, and already, look at the results! Just look!

The few square inches of beach in front of me are choked with little bits of plastic. I will clear it away, and then tomorrow, another band of little bits will be deposited, in a wavy line, to match the shape of the high tide. If that isn't cleared away, it will just be added to the rubbish that arrives the next day, and the day after.

And what of all the other beaches? Some will be worse-affected than others, depending on ocean currents. But is there a beach, I wonder, left on this planet, which is entirely unaffected by seaborne rubbish?

Consider the plight of the modern-day sailor, whose ship breaks apart in a storm, who drifts for days, only to wash up, close to death, on a remote, uninhabited island…

What is the first thing he would see, as he unglues his sunburnt eyelids, and gazes around the beach? Is it a palm tree? A fallen coconut? A crab, digging in the sand?

Or is it a reminder of the world he's left behind? A sun-bleached tin of Coca-Cola, festooned with mussels, winking in the sunshine…?

I consider this question as I stoop to pick up rubbish for the hundredth time. By 8.30, I am very much feeling the heat of the sun. After an hour has passed, the task is complete. I shake my head vigorously, like a dog, to clear the sweat from my eyes, and take the rubbish I have collected to one of the pits that lurks unobtrusively at either end of the bay. Then I catch up with Madelene, who is putting the finishing touches to her morning’s beach raking.

The job is made slower by Princess, aka fat dog, parking herself directly in front of Madelene, as she is trying to rake. She gazes up at Madelene in that infinitely hopeful, loving way, which only really daft dogs can properly manage.

Dealing with the canine obstacle has clearly taken its toll, and we are both ready to cool off, so we go for a dip in the sea. It is low tide, however, and we find ourselves wallowing in the mud. So we have a shower, do a bit more work on the beach, have another much more leisurely shower, and then we are finished, for the morning.

As advertised, the beach is ours to do with as we please, during the hours we are not working. It is a beautiful beach, with plenty of nice shady spots to occupy during the hot part of the day.

My favourite spot, at the time of writing, is the one I am occupying now.

It is a double sun lounger, beneath a couple of trees with long wispy fronds, which wave dreamily in the light breeze. It is next to our beach house, and in front of another little house, which is currently unoccupied.

We are at the end of the beach here. The sand finishes among rocks, which disappear into the jungle.  Lizards climb on the rocks, and monkeys call out from the jungle.

It is pleasantly neglected here. Tree fronds litter the sand, and cover the sun loungers - some of which are collapsing, thanks to long-term exposure to the sea.

Right at the end of the beach, there is a broken-down old shack. It once functioned as a bar, but its days of turning out Mojitos and Cuba Libres are long past. The sink is encrusted with dirt, where half a dozen drinks glasses lie forgotten. And when it rains, the roof leaks.

The jungle is claiming it now. Supercharged by frequent rainstorms, and gigawatts of solar energy, it is reaching out, grasping…

The broken-down old shack adds to the atmosphere of dilapidation that pervades this end of the beach. It is a marvellous place to sit, and look upon the islands across the bay, bursting with jungle.

As the only volunteers here, this feels very much like "our" end of the beach.

Our own accommodation is a large, well-built, wooden construction, raised on stilts. It provides a useful, informal barrier between "our end of the beach" and the resort - which is, itself, hardly a tourist flashpoint. At the time of writing, there are two guests.

I like to write here. And when Madelene and I sit here together, we like to watch the crabs.

This place is crab central. I've never seen so many, of such variety, on one beach. They are like weird robots, built by an eccentric genius, for his own amusement.

The size disparity that exists between the crabs leads to intermittent power struggles, which are over quickly. What happens is: one crab encounters another crab, and they wave their claws at each other, making themselves as large as possible. Whoever is the largest, wins. The smaller crab is evicted from its burrow, with immediate effect.

The other day we were sitting on the sun loungers, eating oranges. As an experiment, I threw a lump of orange in the direction of one of the crabs. To my amazement, it clocked the incoming missile, and darted in front of it - blocking it with its claws!

Madelene threw a larger piece of orange, and a crab broke off from its digging activities, and went zipping after it. Wasting no time, it picked up the piece - which was about the same size as itself - and dragged it back to its burrow. The orange jammed in the tunnel entrance, and I'm not sure how the issue was resolved.

The largest crabs of all come out at night. They congregate around the kitchen area, which is tacked on to the back of our beach house. In particular, they gather beneath the sink, where the dirty water pools in the sand. They take away all the bits of food that gets washed down the plughole. Sardines, rice, and pasta, mostly.

Sometimes they get into the empty tins, and they make a terrible racket, trying to extract the remnants of soup and tomato sauce. I go out at night and most of them scatter, but often there's one that just stands there, eyeballing me, with its claws poised at its sides, like a gunslinger of the old west.

They are very industrious, and they are great recyclers. They are also unintentional comedians, and very entertaining to watch, during long, lazy afternoons on the beach.

*

My favourite times to be on the beach: during high tide, whenever that occurs, and during the early evening.

At high tide, the sea makes a special sound, which it doesn’t make at any other time of day. It slaps energetically down on the beach, flooding beneath the sun loungers, before falling back on itself, and surging forward again. It does this perhaps half a dozen times, before quiescing, and resuming its languid rhythms.

In the early evening, the sun is disappearing behind the body of Pulau Tuba, and it is taking its fierce heat with it. The light remains, however; clear and golden, offering up hallucinatory levels of detail, and fine levels of contrast.

It is a terrific time to go swimming, after the day’s jobs have been taken care of. More accurately, it is a terrific time to mess about in the sea - with the birthday bird.

Madelene bought me a giant pink inflatable bird for my birthday just gone, which is detailed towards the end of my forthcoming travel book – Yaks, Tuk-Tuks, and Snacks. She bought it on the Thai island of Koh Lanta, and presented it to me on the Malaysian island of Langkawi.

When the time came to leave Langkawi, and embark on our Workaway project on Pulau Tuba, we squashed the air out of it, and brought it with us.

It provides us with quality downtime, after our “labours” (such as they are) have been taken care of, and after the heat has gone out of the day.

The funny thing is, Gazry doesn’t like it much. It doesn’t fit well with his no-nonsense demeanour. It’s a rather frivolous and garish addition to his small beach resort, and probably screams too loudly about the degenerate, idiotic, consumer-driven society he was seeking to escape in the first place.

“Is that yours?” he asked me during our first full day on the island, nodding towards the birthday bird - which was sitting in pride of place on our front stoop, fully inflated, and luminous in the afternoon light.

I admitted it was. He smiled thinly. I knew he hated it, and he’d dearly like to get rid of it. But fact is: this is a beach resort. Inflatables really are par for the course. There are no reasonable grounds for anyone to object to the presence of such a thing. I knew that, and he knew it too. So he said nothing more, but I could see what he was thinking.

Later that day, Madelene and I returned from our beach cleaning endeavours to find the birthday bird had been moved. No longer did it stand like a totem at the front of our beach house, warding off evil spirits. It had been consigned to the shadows at the side of the house, among the beetles, and the crabs.

I wasn’t surprised.

I was starting to get a handle on the man we were working for, the “mostly-benign dictator”, Gazry.

It was the morning of our third day on the island, I think. Madelene and I had had a particularly energetic morning, raking and tidying the beach, after a heavy storm the previous night. We had worked diligently for two hours, and we were relaxing on the sun loungers next to our beach house.

I was dragging on a cigarette, gazing contentedly out to sea, when I registered movement in my peripheral vision. It was Gazry, approaching along the beach.

In that moment, I looked through his eyes, at the picture of indolence we created. I knew it annoyed the hell out of him. Never mind that we had discharged our duties for the morning, as per the agreement. He just didn’t like to see his workers looking so obviously like they were on holiday. It awakened deep passions in him. I could see it in the way he walked, and the grim set of his expression.

In his gruff style, he informed us that guests were due to arrive that day, and so, more gardening and clearing was required in the immediate vicinity of the house they would be occupying.

There was no acknowledgement of the work we had already done - which we had only just completed. There was just the veiled insinuation that we hadn’t done enough.

Oh well, I thought – having exchanged a long-suffering look with Madelene – you don’t expect thanks from these kinds of people. He belongs to a different generation – which probably was a harder-working generation than ours. We almost certainly do have it easier than he did, when he was a young man. Life generally has got easier – especially for the citizens of rich, privileged countries, like us.

But still, knowing this doesn’t stop you cursing the old goat, when you’re raking the ground again, under the full glare of the late morning sun.

*

It turns out Gazry wanted more than just diligent beach cleaners, and people to help Koi in the kitchen. He had seen on our profile, on the Workaway website, that I have a background in art, and some experience painting wall murals.

And so it was, on our second or third day, he showed me two blank walls: one belonging to a small red house, functioning as a romantic bolt hole for couples, and one belonging to a large house clad in timber, designed for small groups, and families. I would be working on the rear wall of the red house, which offered me a usable canvas of about fifteen feet by ten, and on the side wall of the timber house, which offered me a canvas around twice the size – at least thirty feet by ten.

The red house had one small window which I would be working around, and the timber house had three windows, spaced evenly along the wall. However - only one of those windows was real. Two were painted on, using simple white lines.

Both buildings overlooked the sea, and both presented irresistible opportunities for an artist who likes to work big, whenever the opportunity arises.

I am just such an artist.

Our host had no preference as to what I should paint, so I was free to do what I wanted.

The moment I saw the rear wall of the red house, framed by the ocean, and the sky, I knew what I was going to paint. A family of walruses. Mother and father, and two juveniles. They would just be standing there, massive, and immobile, the way walruses tend to be.

It’s a mural I’ve wanted to paint for some years, ever since I travelled to Alaska to video them in the wild, in 2012.

The setting was perfect, and original. Because after all, how many walrus murals can there be, this close to the equator?

The timber wall posed more of a creative challenge. It was a long rectangular field, broken up by those three windows. Any design would have to work around them, or incorporate them. Nothing sprung immediately into my mind, and even after a few minutes, there was nothing, so I sent the file down to the boffins in my subconscious, while I tackled the matter in hand.

Gazry had pointed out a large stash of paint under one of the houses, which looked promising, until I levered open the tins. They all contained either white paint or cream paint. The cream paint I had no use for, but the white paint was good for sketching out the initial design, which could then be filled in with colour. I asked Gazry to buy me the primary colours, which he duly did after a couple of days, and in the meantime I sketched out the walrus mural.

The initial sketch went up quickly, and the walruses filled out the space, just as I hoped they would.

The father walrus turned out to be utterly monstrous - larger than life-size, which takes some doing.

The mother was less imposing, but stout. She was quite matronly in appearance, and clearly fiercely protective of her children.

The smallest child turned out fine, but its elder sibling was hideously misshapen, and its head was far too large. It was a grotesque elephant-walrus, and would need heavily reworking later on.

I figured I would have plenty of time. Gazry had asked how long we would like to stay on the island, to wit, we replied: one month. He said he would give us a couple of weeks to begin with, and assess the situation from there.

The way I saw it, he had given me two large walls to paint, which would take at least two weeks, if I worked on them four to five hours a day, six days a week - as per the agreement. I was making a start on them midway through our first week, so I figured our position was safe.

Because after all - he wouldn’t kick us off the island before I had a chance to finish the wall murals…would he?

*

Within a few days we had settled into life on Pulau Tuba, and we were enjoying it very much. We had a large open-air beach house to ourselves, and we had the beach to ourselves for much of the time. Our sleep would be interrupted by the dogs barking, and by titanic thunderstorms, which brought torrents of rain down on the metal roof.

The crabs used to wake me up, scrabbling among the tins, and the rats used to wake me up, scrabbling at the open packets of pasta, until I learned to lock things down better in the kitchen, before we went to bed.

Despite these nocturnal interruptions, I still woke up at the break of dawn, or earlier, feeling weirdly energised, and ready to get out of bed. The procrastination – which is usually integral to my morning routine – was absent. Blame it on waking up in this beautiful place. But not only that; mornings were so much easier than they used to be. All I had to do was put my beach shorts on, and step out on the beach!

Gone were the days of wasting a half hour checking social media, deciding what I was going to wear, pottering about, wasting another half hour, looking for things, cursing, leaving the house, walking halfway down the street, remembering I’ve forgotten something, cursing, coming back, looking for it, cursing, leaving the house again…

I was liberated from that mindless tyranny. In its place – the dark sea, and the purple sky, and the lick of fire, which was the sunrise.

The dark, cool empty beach.

It was a perfect invitation. It made me realise: I can deal with mornings as well as anyone, so long as the conditions are right.

(Admittedly, those conditions have to be pretty special.)

It helped that I was filling my mornings with something I loved to do: painting. I was working big. I was painting a family of walruses on the side of a Malaysian beach house, for Christ’s sake.

Gazry had bought the paint I had asked for, but I soon realised there were more colours I needed, which I didn’t have. He had already left the island again by this point, to visit family in Kuala Lumpur, and wouldn’t be back for a few days. This meant I would just have to manage with my existing colours until he returned. So, once I had done all I could with the walrus mural, I switched my attentions to the timber house.

I still hadn’t decided what I would paint on this wall. It was an awkward proposition, because of the three regularly spaced windows.

I had been thinking about painting a bird of some kind, with its wings outstretched. Even as I was relocating the step ladder, I was thinking, “Yes, I’ll paint a bird,” picturing the colours in the wings, fanning out, kaleidoscopically.

Then I was reminded of those three awkwardly-placed windows, and I realised the bird wouldn’t fit.

(I could have painted over the two fake windows, I suppose. But it would have been an awful mess, and anyway, such a move would have been contra to the spirit of mural painting, which is all about working with what you’ve got, in a creative, and elegant way.)

I stood there for a while, looking at the timber wall, and thought - fuck it, I’ll do an abstract. It’s not normally my thing. I like to paint pictures of animals. But the available space had suggested the style, and subject matter, as it always does.

(The fact that it does this is the single most wonderful thing about mural painting. You might find yourself stuck for an idea, at times. But at least you know: you won’t be stuck for long.)

What the large rectangular wall, and the square windows, and the long, thin rectangular wooden slats suggested to me, was: circles. Circles of different sizes, which would form the skeleton for a huge abstract, the body of which would develop naturally, once the circles were in place.

So I busied myself with that.

We had a blissful few days on the island while Gazry was away. I did a couple of hours’ painting in the early morning, and then broke off for a good five or six hours, to swim, and write, and snack, and laze on the sun lounger, before resuming my artistic endeavours for a couple of hours in the late afternoon.

Madelene was helping Koi in the kitchen, and helping her prepare the guest rooms, for the few visitors to the island.

Koi was in a great mood, while her overbearing boss was away. His absence was a weight that had been lifted from our collective psyche.

No longer did we have to contend with the old man prowling around, keeping tabs on us. No longer did Koi have to endure his tyrannical behaviour, and put up with being shouted at if her standard of work didn’t measure up, in his eyes.

(I had seen him from a distance, gesticulating angrily at her, and I had the impression this was a frequent occurrence.)

It is universally understood that a tyrannical boss is a torment to be endured, collectively, who adds nothing to the smooth-running of the operation - despite the fact that the tyrant, himself (for it is usually a “he”), considers himself vital to not only the smooth-running, but the survival, of the operation. He has persuaded himself (and the effort wasn’t difficult) that his constant chivvying, ordering-about, and acute questioning, is the key to success, and without this, decadence would seep in, and the fall of Rome would doubtless follow.

What he is unable to comprehend is that the business would run a hell of a lot smoother without him. The tyrant is just another job to be dealt with, in addition to all the other jobs. Indeed, dealing with the tyrannical boss is the worst job of all, because there is no end to it, and the complications that arise cannot be tackled with logic, or even hard work.

The pathological tics of such a person can only be mapped to a degree of accuracy by someone who has known them too well, and for too long. The abused underling bends its thinking trying to keep the boss happy – expending precious brain power, and emotional energy, in the process.

Ultimately, the mere presence of such a person is a heavy cloud that is appreciated best when it is gone.

And so it was with Gazry: the owner, and de facto dictator, of the beach resort on Pulau Tuba.

Now, I don’t want to overemphasise the sentiment: he was not lining us up and marching us along the beach every morning to the tune of his own personal anthem, or staging mock executions. He didn’t have a team of indoctrinated monkeys doing his bidding. All I’m saying is: life felt a lot freer and happier, while he was elsewhere. As it often does, when the boss is away.

When he got back, he looked at the timber wall, and asked me, quite reasonably: “What is that?”

“It’s an abstract,” I replied.

The circles were in place, and so was a lot else. There were rainbow shapes, and squiggles, and drips, and splats, and… well, that’s about it. The design was sketched out, writhing across the side of the timber house like the vomit of an extra-dimensional being.

To be fair to him, he took it very well. I had no idea how he might react to this borderline piece of vandalism.

And again, in fairness to the old goat: he bought me the rest of the paint I needed. Black paint, yellow paint, and purple paint.

(I needed the black paint so I could darken my colours, and apply the boundary lines, once the shapes were finished. I needed the yellow paint so I could paint stuff yellow, obviously, but also mix orange, with my existing red. And I needed purple because my attempts at mixing purple using red and blue had turned out several equally disgusting, muddy shades of grey.)

I should also add, in the spirit of fairness, that he thought I hadn’t been working hard enough. This, despite the fact I had already half-finished a massive walrus mural using the available paint, and mapped out the lines for a ginormous abstract - easily the largest single art piece I have ever taken on. All this, in the space of a week.

I thought at the time - he simply doesn’t understand what’s involved. He sees a load of squiggles on the side of a house, and thinks, “hm, a load of squiggles on the side of a house.” Of course, he doesn’t take into account the agonised mental processes that give rise to those squiggles.

On the night Gazry returned to the island, we were having a few drinks at the beach restaurant. Some Australians had turned up, and were drinking the place dry. They had sailed their catamaran over from Australia, and had already spent a few months island hopping around Indonesia and Malaysia. They were amusing, friendly people, and they were massive drinkers, as Australians tend to be.

One of the party - a woman - had her arm wrapped in a plaster cast. She had broken it falling off the boat. The injury didn’t stop her drinking heavily through the day and then jumping in the sea in the early evening.

It was a garrulous night on the usually-quiet beach. Madelene had returned to our beach house, and I was sitting with Gazry, Koi and the Australians - plus a new volunteer who had arrived the day before. Her name was Marine (pronounced “Mahine”) and she was from the French-speaking part of Canada.

Gazry was in full-on hosting mode. He instructed Koi to fish out a very good single malt Scotch whisky, which was probably wasted on the Australians, but certainly wasn’t wasted on me.

He was giving them the usual spiel about how he found this beach forty years ago, and how his careful stewardship has kept it so pristine and beautiful. The Australians fed his ego by agreeing with everything, and saying what great taste and foresight he had, etcetera. Of course, there was no mention of the long-suffering Koi, or the volunteers, who actually did all the work, while he lorded it over them.

The conversation turned to my murals, and he said again that he thought I should have made more progress while he had been away. Emboldened by the twin elixirs of Special Brew and whisky, I defended my position - telling him about the mental anguish that goes into all those squiggles, and so on. He listened politely, and then said this:

“I’ve been thinking about how we can speed up your work.” (Yes, he actually used that infinitely sinister phrase.)

“I have a new gardener starting tomorrow. I am thinking, I will ask him to help you. He can be your assistant.”

My brain reeled. The gardener? My assistant? What was he going to assist me with, exactly? Painting daffodils? Planting paint brushes? I was in shock.

“Yes, you see,” continued my tormentor-in-chief, as he toyed with his whisky, “I think it would be a benefit to you to have someone to help you with, you know… the easy bits. Like the colouring-in.”

(He was referring to the work I would be doing on the large abstract, which would begin the next day, now that the outline sketch was in place, and now that I had the colours I needed.)

“Of course, anyone could do the colouring-in,” he added, clearly enjoying himself. “It doesn’t take any special skills to do that. My daughter could do that.”

(I can’t be one hundred percent sure to which daughter he referred, as he had sired eight or nine children down the years, but I have a strong suspicion it was his eight-year-old adopted daughter, who lives in Kuala Lumpur.)

I put up a defence, of course. I told him about the agonies of applying colour theory in a real-world setting, but I didn’t erupt, as a true artiste might have been entitled to do, who has had his practice unforgivably downgraded in the company of some drunken Australians.

The truth is, I expected the ridiculous idea to be dropped in the light of a new dawn, and it was. The next day, I got on with my painting, just like I had the day before, and the day before that. The gardeners took care of their business, which was gardening. And that’s the way it stayed.

Our blissful beach life continued. This is despite the return of the dark Sith lord – Gazry – and the arrival of the new volunteer.

It’s fair to say that Madelene and I viewed the arrival of new volunteers with trepidation. We’d say things like, “I hope no one else comes to the island,” “I want it to be just us,” and, “I don’t like other people.”

When a boat buzzed into view, we would gaze at it solemnly, trying to discern its moment of travel. If it began turning towards us, we would exchange wide-eyed, panicked expressions. Sometimes we would clutch hold of each other, as we wished the alien invaders away, and back into open waters.

Like most things, it started off as a joke – and became more serious as time went on.

Anyway, Marine was no trouble – and certainly not worth the dark incantations we had been unleashing from the beach.

She was friendly, easy-going, and she was a hard-worker, too. She was active in all the major spheres of industry – litter-picking, raking, and helping Koi in the kitchen. She lived in the little rustic house next to us.

Koi appreciated the extra help – especially since more guests had started arriving on the island.

I was still putting in 4-5 hours’ work on the wall murals each day. Sometimes I would hear a shout from the direction of the kitchen, while I was balanced precariously atop the ladder: it usually meant food was available. There was an excess of spicy noodles or fish curry, and I had been recognised as a dependable waste disposal.

In this respect, I was in contention with the Labrador, who was still being chronically overfed with all the wrong things.

On one occasion, Madelene approached me from the beach, with an enormous bowl of clams! They had been freshly plucked from the rocks, and Koi had cooked them in a delicious spicy sauce. They were surplus to requirements, and so, they had found their way to me.

Like the walrus out of the Lewis Carroll poem – The Walrus and the Carpenter – I sat looking out to sea, gorging myself on the succulent bivalves. It was a wonderful meal.

Other times, I would break off from my painting to take delivery of supplies, which Gazry ferried in by taxi boat. Or I would be called upon to lug gas canisters about, or some other heavy items. But mostly, I was painting, chatting to the guests, relaxing, and splashing about in the sea – and life was good.

Until…

One morning, I was returning from the far end of the island, where I had spent a couple of happy hours working on the walrus mural. Gazry approached me, and asked me the usual question: “Finished?”

“Not yet,” I replied. “Getting there…”

And then he dropped his bombshell: he wanted Madelene and me off the island, with just three days’ notice. He had new volunteers arriving on Monday, and today was Friday. The murals were at least a week away from being finished at that point, and now I had just two full days left to finish them!

I told him there was no way I could get both wall murals finished in that time, and he dismissed my concerns with a wave of his hand.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just do what you can.”

Thanks very much, I thought – among other, less printable things – as I trudged back to the beach house.

“Just do what you can…” – What does that mean, exactly? It means, rush madly ahead, and do a shit job, or admit defeat, and leave the paintings unfinished. Either way, it’s a profound anti-climax, and results in a complete waste of time. Does he not see – there’s no point in starting an artwork, if you can’t finish it?

I explained the situation to Madelene – who was as incredulous as I was. She offered to work with me on the wall murals, in a bid to speed things up, and to help me convince our host to let us stay a bit longer.

And we tried! We asked him – please, just give us one more day. But he was resolute – he wanted us gone by Monday.

So, the pressure was on. Not because I wanted to get the murals finished for him. The old rat bag could swivel, so far as I was concerned. I wanted to get them finished for my own peace of mind, because I have never started a painting and left it unfinished!

And plus, of course, I wanted something half-decent-looking to put on my website.

Fortunately, our host was leaving the island the next day, as he had a long-standing medical appointment on the mainland. It was nice to see him go, knowing we would never see him again. The shame of it was, we didn’t really have the time to celebrate, as we now had a Herculean job on our hands.

I started painting that day in the twilight of early morning, and by midday – after about five hours – the walrus mural, at least, was nearly finished.

In the afternoon – after I had had some lunch, and a much-needed snooze – both Madelene and I put in around four hours on the abstract.

This one was still a long way off being finished, owing to its immense size, and complexity. Having Madelene work alongside me, though, was a great comfort, and helped to dispel the feelings of dread, and horror, that had been with me ever since Gazry dropped his bombshell on us.

It was fortunate that I was using flat colours on the abstract; no shading was required. This meant it was a simple job to mix the colours, and then show Madelene where the colours needed to be applied. We only had one ladder between us, which was a bit limiting, and Madelene was taking time to build up her confidence – as mural painting was new to her. But, by the end of that exhausting day we had made great progress.

We had received some good news, too – in the absence of Ming the Merciless, Koi had agreed to let us stay an extra day. It transpired that the new people were arriving on Tuesday – not Monday, as Gazry had told us. That meant there was no pressure for us to leave on the Monday.

It meant there was a good chance we could get the big abstract finished – if we worked like demons, and we weren’t too bothered about achieving artistic perfection.

The next morning, I finished the walrus mural. Madelene made a mini-time-lapse video of me putting in the eyes, which was the last job – save for a few whiskers on the nose of the mother walrus.

I was happy with it, because the standard of painting was good, and there were no major mistakes. More importantly, the walruses were characters in themselves, and seen collectively, they were a comically dysfunctional family unit.

The daddy walrus was overbearing, and severe. The mummy walrus was confused-looking, and overly-protective of her eldest child.

The eldest child was the reworked “elephant-walrus” I described earlier. In his final form, he was sitting down, with his mother’s flipper draped over his left shoulder. He certainly had a forlorn and pathetic aspect to him.

The youngest child sits next to her brother. She is the only one to peer directly out of the scene, meeting the gaze of the observer. Embedded in her expression is a cry for help, and recognition that she really has nothing in common with anyone in her family.

*

Walruses taken care of, it was time to turn all of our guns on the big abstract. We spent that afternoon painting, until there was hardly any light left in the sky, and we painted the whole of the next day.

Our chilled-out beach life was a distant memory, as we laboured under the cruel rays of the tropical sun. Whereas once we would have taken a break between the hours of 11am and 4pm, now we were just grabbing a quick break for lunch, before sweating once more at the coal face. Thanks to our incomparable host!

We had a few well-earned beers with Koi and Marine on our last night, and then I was up again at dawn, to finish off the abstract.

And – well, we got it finished! It had been both a marathon and a sprint, and it had left us both thoroughly exhausted.

We had a couple of hours before our taxi boat arrived, to take pictures and play with the dogs, and say our goodbyes.

I owe Madelene a huge debt of gratitude for helping me out with the big abstract. Considering she doesn’t have an arty background like me, she did a stupendous job with her side of the painting – and I found I relied on her more and more as her confidence improved.

Having never been much of a collaborator myself, the experience proved to me that I can work with someone else – though not just anyone else. I’m very glad it was her, anyway, and not the gardener.