IAN STEWART'S shoulder has been giving him hell lately - perhaps it's all that time hunched over a keyboard - and the veins are starting to poke through his weathered skin in a way they didn't a few years back.
A lot of journalism colleagues have been quietly wanting him to call it quits. He's 73 next month, after all, and the daily expectations and pressures of a newspaper such as the South China Morning Post aren't as straightforward as they may seem when they are unfolded at the breakfast table.
But the retirement talk has nothing to do with Stewart having lost his grip. It's more to do with the fact that those 55 years as a journalist - most of them as a foreign correspondent in Southeast Asia - really need to go into a memoir.
Stewart must have been reading his colleagues' minds. This morning, he leaves his rented home in Kuala Lumpur for a few days' rest in Singapore and then to retirement in Sydney, where he will work on books - and hopefully that first volume of his autobiography.
He's already got four internationally published works of fiction under his belt - one of them, Peking Payoff, a best-seller in Hong Kong in the mid-1970s - so he knows the form. But one suspects his life story in words might be a huge undertaking. Stewart is typically modest about it all, preferring to think of himself as being in the right place at the right time rather than being able to predict the future.
He was born in Whangarei, New Zealand, but his family moved to Auckland, where he went to Auckland Grammar School. He took a diploma in journalism at Auckland University and joined The New Zealand Herald in 1946. He later reported for The Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney and Canberra and then worked for The Herald in Melbourne.
From there, he was recruited through the Australian Associated Press-Reuters system and, in 1953, was sent to cover the Korean War.