What you never knew about lightning

That it makes a crunching sound
That you really can’t catch it on an iPhone indoors if any inside lights are on
That you should lift your feet off the ground if you are stranded at a bus stop
That you should remove all plugs from sockets in the house during a lightning storm
That if the storm goes on for more than three hours it can give you an actual headache
That you would rather stay at work late than walk out in it. Here in Sing, at least.

A mark of respect

Today I attended a funeral, my first since arriving on this island some 31 months ago. As Dad was in town he came along too, and so did my husband and son. We didn’t know the deceased personally, but we all felt welcome, as did everyone else in the city – for this was the funeral procession of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, ex-PM of Singapore and founding father of the city back in 1965. No doubt you will have heard of him this week, as news of his passing made headlines around the globe.

What a week. What a time to be living here in Singapore, what a time for my dad – social anthropologist, cultural scientist – to be visiting, and what a day for a funeral (grey and rainy, just as any good Cornish funeral should be: proper job).

Since Lee Kuan Yew’s death last Monday at 3.18am, many of us ‘visitors’ have been looking for signs of stress, outpourings of grief, overt reactions within this powerhouse of a city, whose preparations for the most exciting 50th birthday party in August have ground to a temporary and reverential halt as it absorbs the fact that its founding father will now not be in attendance. As the week wore on, and the queue for Parliament House grew, and more people began adopting the monochrome black and white ‘uniform’ to show unanimous respect, feedback and opinion started to appear.

I spent the week signing off emails to local businesses or acquaintances with a brief note of condolence, and generally received muted thanks back. Grandpa and SM wrote in a book of condolence set up at school, which, to its credit, took the news seriously enough to cancel all end-of-term celebration assemblies, to involve the children in discussions about LKY (SM came home last Monday reciting LKY’s name, birth, rank and funeral date), and to keep the school flags lowered to half-mast all week. I collect front covers of world events (if I ever did one of those What You Don’t Know About Me fact lists, that would be a good one) and I picked up a copy of Time magazine and one of the viewing queue from the Straits Times. I didn’t just want the pictures, though, I was looking for clues as to how to react, ways to pay my respects. What should we be doing, or saying? I read on.

One blogger posted a poignant piece about how she was in a cab when news of LKY’s death came out over the radio (announced bravely by his own son and current PM Lee Hsien Loong) and that when the words came over the radio, the cab driver turned up the volume and wiped away tears. Personal opinions of The Man peppered social media feeds all week, both good and not-so-good. If one FB page gave a heartfelt personal eulogy, another posted a cynical note about chewing gum. If one Twitter feed posed suggestive questions about Mr Lee’s style of governing, another talked about how hard it was to stand in the viewing queue for eight hours in 37C with no hint of a breeze, and reminded us why so many people were doing it. My most overused personal saying is that no one likes a success story, and this was never more evident than in some reviews bandied about during the week – from near and far, both on and off the island. But beside every critic comes a person who is simply sad to lose a parent; if I had to weigh up the most prominent opinion over the past few days, the arrow would point towards the latter.

So how to pay our respects as foreigners in a host country? How to soak up the flavour of this very intense week? How to react when the person who built the country you are living in has died? It’s a bit like being a guest at someone’s house when the host has been unwell, and subsequently doesn’t return home. Do you brew symbolic cups of tea and pour stiff drinks, turn a tactful deaf ear to the not-so-good stories, make yourselves absent, stay out all day and slink back at night, opting for the low-profile approach? Does it matter how you behave? It wasn’t as if everyone I knew was rushing to pray – were they? Just because I couldn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. What about that viewing queue? What about all the local news stories showing definite signs of prayer island-wide, temples with black and white pictures up, white flowers at the door. What about all those rolling films on Media Corps screens at bus stops, constantly showing filmettes of his life? (Critics denounced this decision as yet another example of the nation being told what to think. I saw it as an oddity, worth reporting).

By now you will have gathered that I’m not clever or political enough to give a proper balanced opinion on the life and works of Mr Lee. I enjoy and appreciate life in the city LKY built and I won’t live anywhere like it again. I recognise what its faults are (and, OK, what His faults were), but after a day like today, I don’t really want to think about them. I apologise if I have overlooked an aspect of your own life or inheritance that has suffered as a result of His work. What I think I might do is just sneak in a link (below) that gives a far better summation than I ever could. I am writing this as witness, without opinion, if this can ever be done.

The last time I witnessed a public funeral was for Princess Diana’s procession in 1997. My then boyfriend and I ran down to a spot on London’s north circular, getting there only just in time to see the departing cortege, mourners lobbing lilies at the back windscreen, muted shouts muffled by the sizzling of fast tires on wet tarmac on a damp day not unlike this one. It was a very different feeling. The car was going much faster, the rain was much colder, very few people on that pavement would have been directly affected by Her, and of course Her death was a rather more complicated affair – it was all a bit of a downer, to be honest. Today’s crowds were upbeat, unanimously respectful, even in the midst of a downpour – especially so. We wore black and white under our plastic rain macs, trudged to a waiting spot just ten minutes from the condo. A guard shouted through a loud-hailer, warning the crowds that the cortege was about to pass. ‘I couldn’t hear him,’ said Dad, afterwards, ‘what did he say?’.

The man had shouted: ‘We are all here for the same reason. The procession is about to pass, so please take care, stay well back, pay your respects to Mr Lee in the way he would have wanted.’

Everyone had cheered and, in fact, done just what was asked. And although you could say that, yes, this was what some of the critics are, well, being critical of, I preferred to see it as a crowd working together especially hard on the very day in which it mattered more than ever. After the procession (which passed helpfully right under all of our noses) everyone packed into a local hawker for lunch and kopi, crowding into corners to watch TVs bolted high on the wall next to fans blasting through the steamy heat. We got our coffee to go, drizzling slowly home again through the rain, so glad to have seen it all up close, and then we spent the next two and a half hours watching the ten eulogies on our own telly at home.

One of my oldest friends once told me how privileged she felt to be at the passing of her mother. A few years later my husband found himself in the same situation and he agreed. Later still I joined that privileged club – not one you ever want to be part of, but one in which you become, always, nothing short of grateful to say you were there. What I’m trying and failing to say (in a post that is almost as long as today’s exquisitely delivered eulogies) is that every death deserves a modicum of respect, and if we get a chance to pay some – especially on a scale such as my family witnessed today – then perhaps we should always try to do so. Some opted out of the seven-day mourning period, did not wear black and white or join the queue, and they were vocal in their own defence, and irritated by the outpouring of love for a man that, actually, not everyone did love. Maybe I am justifying my own need to have gone along and witnessed the procession. I’m not really sure.

‘If you seek his monument,’ said Lee Hsien Loong in his eulogy, ‘look around you’.
When I think about my own privilege, I think about my Dad, who always says: ‘I’ve led a privileged life,’ and he was kind enough to pass that on to me: so have I. It’s a shame that, for some, Mr Lee’s monuments are not enough to dispel the negative aspects of his life. I can only give thanks for the city I’m enjoying, and which I suppose I will continue to enjoy until we leave.

Here’s that link, a Business Times piece from today, Sun 29 Mar 2015

Out and about

Recently I went to hospital. I hadn’t hurt myself (unless you count burning my tongue on a takeout coffee as I waited to meet my friends); I was there to have a poke around a museum. Now that’s a funny old sentence, I do realise, because why would you be at a hospital to visit a museum? You don’t usually find antiques (apart from very old people) inside medical facilities. Well, that’s Singapore for you, surprises around every hospital corner.

The following Saturday I was in the Botanic Gardens at 9am for a short course on birdwatching. I’d never have thought I’d ever be interested in sitting through a slideshow comparing beaks and breast colours, yet one and a half hours of ornithological slides later, there I was, standing under a promising looking palm tree, waiting patiently for a flash of feather and marking my findings down on a clipboard, not a hint of irony about the binocular marks around my nose.

What is UP with me, I asked myself (quietly, so as not to disturb the Javan Mynah pecking around the palm).

Singapore for me is all about doing things I might not do back in the UK. I draw the line at white water rafting and hot yoga, but otherwise I’ve spent the last three years trying out all sorts of things. The Tan Tock Seng Hospital visit was a research trip for our latest Peranakan Museum group, to dig up a bit of background for the latest upcoming exhibition, showcasing famous Peranakan characters. A kind and learned gentleman gave us a personal and thorough guided tour around the Heritage Museum, including close-up squints at some old and scary looking tools, and a great bit of background on the building and its history. What chance will I ever get to do that again?

The twitching was to do with a current National Parks Garden Bird Count taking place in April – anyone could sign up for it, and if you didn’t know your Oriental White Eye from your Spotted Dove you could go along to the crash course and trial bird-watch morning. A good friend had sent me the link, and when I emailed to join I asked politely if expats could come along and was positively welcomed in. Completely charming, completely FOC and completely brilliant.

I’ve no grand statement to make at the end of this posting, apart from to say how fantastic I am finding this new explorative side that a relocation seems to have brought out in me. Ten out of ten, Singapore. I can’t wait to find out what’s next.

Teapot set at Tan Tock Seng Hospital Museum

Teapot set at Tan Tock Seng Hospital Museum

Porcelain and opium pillows left behind by patients

Porcelain and opium pillows left behind by patients

Our perfect birdwatching weather

Our perfect birdwatching weather

Postcards from eve

It is lunar New Year’s Eve. Tonight, Singapore is quiet as families gather together for the reunion meal at the start of the 15-day festival to bring in the new year. Out goes the horse, and we become rams, goats or sheep, depending on what consumer branding you are following. I prefer sheep, for some reason (do I follow rather than lead, a little bit? Maaaaaybe).

This is our third Chinese New Year (CNY) in Singapore and at last I feel I am starting to really get it. I get the hanging lanterns and the songs, I even know a bit of one. I understand the rituals better and I think I understand the value of working like a beast all year and then having this one almighty celebration, unlike no other I’ve had in my closed-off life. SM’s music teacher couldn’t make tonight, as she had to see family; she left him a red packet too. The school bus tonight had a golden money pot on the front and red circular ‘ears’, one on each side. SM hopped down still dressed in his Mandarin outfit and stayed dressed in his black and red silk all night – our own red lanterns and bali fish kite are hanging up outside like stockings on 24th Dec. It’s all so festive.

I am upstairs in our main bedroom, surrounded by packing cases and the boys are downstairs watching telly. Special treat for SM to stay up a bit late, even though we have a very early flight to catch tomorrow. I have hidden a hong bao each for Aunty Rosy and Jonah – the oldest and youngest in the Asian bit of our family. They’re getting red bags full of chocolate, the bit of cash in those red packets, small pot of pineapple tarts each and two little metal goats on red ribbons each (even numbers, always), plus some oranges.

It feels like Christmas, and the build-up has been exciting: music in the shops, a relaxed feel about town, and the famed pre-new year dry breezy weather as a bonus. Last weekend, Chinatown was stuffed full of red danglers, paper pineapples, sheeps and goats and people getting their shopping in – (a bit like Truro town centre around about 23 December). The roads are now empty, schools closed, companies locked down. Our school only closed this afternoon, but plenty finished earlier. Today being CNY eve, businesses and shops closed at lunch as families returned home to meet and eat. The school bus was early this morning; roads empty for my run. It’s so peaceful.

Tomorrow we hop on a flight and head to Ipoh and Aunty Rosy, and then KL – four days of peaceful gluttony before re-entering the fray. I am delighted to be immersing myself in Asian culture this time round, and only wish we’d done this year on year, instead of choosing places that had nothing to do with the festival at all. I only hope Rosy stays awake long enough in the evenings to enjoy a bite or two with us all.

See you on the other side! Gong xi fa cai.IMG_8793

Thank you letters

To-Do lists as a blog post: dull as an old sock or as fascinating as the contents of the person in front’s shopping basket? Whatever: today I’m on about a shared task of SmallMonkey’s and mine. As well as the usual rounds of homework, room tidying and plate-clearing, he has a stack of thank you cards to write due to the recent bounty from Christmas and 10th birthday festivities. If we don’t start now we’ll be including them in the next lot of Christmas cards.

I’ve got some thanks to give as well, after a blog event I attended last week. If you check in regularly you’ll know I’m not a commercial writer, no banner ads and no hashtagging unless I’m Tweeting a link, and being a ‘vanilla’ blogger is not necessarily a good thing. I wanted to change the world with my blog, or at least make a bit of cash – turns out I’m mostly banging on about What I Did On My Holidays (not fishing, just saying). I’ve yet to work out what’s next.

No matter, I do what I do and it trolleys along nicely, and every now and then I’m invited to meet other people who blog, most of them more successfully than me, and it’s always good to hear how the other half do it.

Companies know that bloggers connect well, and Singapore lends itself charmingly to hosting such events, being a relatively small city, geographically, with a social set-up that tends to form miraculous chain-links in a Two Degrees Of Separation kind of way. Although my page is clear of business links I have done more networking in my two and a half years on the Red Dot than in the whole of the 43 years preceding our move. Isolated from familiar ground and with the jolt of the move still firing me with some enthusiasm, I am free to reinvent myself at every media event I attend, pressing my cards forward with two hands and connecting up the next morning. It is easy and fun and interesting, and it’s opened more doors for me than ever before.

So down to the blogmeet.sg event I popped, hosted at Edit Lifestyle (funky homeware store) and set up by the very clever Lucy from Lulabelle Lifestyle, who wanted to create a space in which people who rattle the keyboards could connect and hashtag themselves into a flurry of useful bonding. Aside from being a happy and fun evening, the event did just what it said on the tin, and I left two hours later with a wodge of new business cards, a stuffed goody bag and a Panama hat, plus several new blogger friends. I also reconnected with a work colleague from (clicks on CV to work it out) golly, about 17 years ago – that’s as long as I’ve known Mr PC. She still remembered my spot of bother over the wedding dress, and we’re meeting again for drinks in a few weeks. Awesome.

THANK YOU, then (because I’ve got to get mine in before SM, haven’t I?), to the following outlets who filled our chubby goody bags with items that are much nicer looking in reality than in the photo here. ClockwiseIMG_8765 from top left:

Pictured centre: Sweet croc dangler and discount voucher from Tamarind Living; funky ring and discount from Shiva Designs.

See? #swagtastic. That’s the next few birthdays sorted, plus a lot more padding in the old contacts book. Not a bad evening’s work. Consider yourself properly thanked, Lucy @ Lulabelle.

PS: Did I mention the Panama? (oh, the Panama)

Interlacing v2

There it goes again, Singapore doing that deja vu thing, only it’s always real deja vu, never imagined. Last time it was a Dad memory that repeated itself from a different vantage point: oh, it’s too hard to explain, take a look here (it’s not a long entry, don’t worry).

That one was a Dad-based memory and this one’s Dad-based again, only rather than being set in the woody enclave of last time (see link, above), when it happened this time I was on a bus going to SM’s school, when the bus I was on pulled out a little in order to get around a rugged corner of construction work. As we sidled past I noticed that part of the hoardings had been taken down, or pulled to one side, and I peered through the gap.

And there it was, at last. In the time it took us to squeeze past and be on our way, I saw the food court that I’ve spent the last three years trying to recall, explaining and describing it to countless people in the hopes that I might find it and go there again. It was John’s aunt who took us there – me, Mr PC, SM and Grandpa – on our first trip to Singapore in winter 2011. I liked the place a lot, for some reason. When I have tried to describe it, people always try to help. ‘Oh, that’s Newton,’ says someone. ‘Maxwells,’ says another. ‘Bukit Timah,’ said my map-voice when I shut my eyes and tried to recall the car trip and the route in relation to that journey’s starting point, but my map voice was wrong, I was too far east. To make it more complicated we had visited the food court at night, so describing it to anyone was always going to be tricky.

Anyway, thanks to this city’s wonderful way of taking you right back to places you’ve been to before, without you realising it, we can now all relax, because this is just what had happened. All we have to do is wait until they finish building the MRT line by those food courts and then we can hop on the No 75 and go and get our bowls of noodles. I love your interlacing, Singapore, you do it so well – you’re like a mystical puzzle in a very safe setting, with kway teow in the pot at the end of the rainbow instead of gold. Brilliant.

Wǒ bù zhīdào

I’m not kidding when I say that – I mean, I really don’t know, half the time, as the Mandarin classes are getting more and more tricky, although it does help that in Chapter 8 we’ve started talking about cats and dogs, because to be honest that interests me a lot more than who is a student and whether or not I am going swimming tomorrow. Give me a xiăomāo any time.

I’m showing off, of course. Wish I was so cocksure in class.

A brief guide to the F1

The world’s racing stars come to town every year, bringing the centre of Singapore to a standstill with streams of onlookers and big bands to back up the action. This three-day festival with a motor race running through it comes at a price, with tickets going for several of your best Singapore dollars, and it’s a notoriously tough event for drivers, who have to ride it out in such high temperatures and humidity that the race is at the very top of the two-hour medical time limit for such an event.

On Friday the cars practice, on Saturday they practice again, and on Sunday they go really, really fast after which the winning driver sprays everyone else with bubbles. Standard. Meanwhile, lucky ticket holders mill about the Padang and the Esplanade, clutching plastic tubs of beer and reading the handout map upside-down.

Thanks to this popular event I reckon I might be able to make the folks back home a little bit proud. Being the only one out of four not entirely comfortable with festivals and [mouths silently] camping, I think it might surprise two of them to know (and would have surprised the remaining third had she been around to appreciate it) that I’m actively enjoying this annual slice of festival life. OK so we don’t actually camp but I’m fine with the stinky Portaloos, with the lying around in between discarded paper plates for now-and-then-breathers and with swapping my beloved V&Ts for buckets of beer (which of course gives rise to all the lie-downs). All of this is just a shadow of the love my family have for Woodstockathons but it’s a start: perhaps we might be directly related after all?

The carrot on the stick is those whizzy cars and the big bands that provide the wow-factor backdrop. Singapore is shown off via the world’s news channels in starry palm-fringed flashes, and when you venture into town to see it for real, let me tell you the most anti-festival person would happily set up camp for an hour or two because it is all pretty fabulous. With three pops at the F1 cherry under my belt I am now qualified to show off the mud beneath my nails and divulge my top ten F1 tips. After two nights of losing Mr PC somewhere near the Fanzone Portaloos I’m tempted to give it the slightly tetchy SMS subtitle: ‘Where the F1 are you?

F1: I reckon you should splash out and buy Zones 1, 2 and 3 to get maximum coverage. I have no idea what that gets you as we’ve only ever bought the ‘cheap’ Zone 4 seats, but the posh zones quiet literally sound like fun.

F2: If you are stingy like us and persist in only buying Zone 4 tickets, exit from Raffles Place and you’ll find a whole set of stands just for us lot from where we can wobble up some metal steps to see the cars whizz past. It’s alright, they’re pretty solid. Nothing collapsed under me (this time).

F3: Leave the suede footwear at home because those nice boots will not survive. Wear Tevas or Keens, wash, air-dry, repeat.

F4: If you wait at the back for second entry into the Fanzone, do not push me, I repeat DO NOT PUSH ME. The only ‘crush’ I want is ice in my beer cooler.

F5: If there’s someone good at the Esplanade stage then arrive early. It’s such a ridiculously tiny venue, you can all but set up a fun little tea party and that’s it. I saw the end of one of Ziggy’s dreadlocks. Once.

F6: Rain is rare, but if you got caught in the Robbie monsoon you’ll know just how soaked that 90 minutes of Padang time can get you and there will be nothing, NOTHING you can do if the sky unzips, apart from swim home so leave the umbrellas behind.

F7: If it does rain, strip to the waist and aquaplane all around the Padang until it’s time to go home. Or not. Looked like fun.

F8: Despite warnings of road blocks and jams, this weekend we got lucky with those nice blue cars no less than three times. When you’re going in get dropped just before the Fullerton and walk up. Going out, walk a little way from the Padang and BING: tons of the little green lights all down the road. Praise be.

F9: Bringing the saucepan lids? Up to you. Some smalls love it, some hate it. We’re bringing SM next year so I’d love a repeat of the wonderful Mr Williams, who wet-tap-danced his way through a great version of one of SM’s favourite hits Candy. If it’s JLo wagging her papi again we’re in trouble, because I can get foam earplugs from the merchandise stands but they don’t sell blindfolds.

F10: Want to know where to find the cheap beer? Come with us next year, we’ll show you.

See you in September 2015.

IMG_7481

Postcards from the hedge

Three sleeps. I couldn’t have planned the countdown to UK better: this has turned out to be one of the most frantic and busiest weeks I’ve ever had, and that keeps the butterflies out of my tummy. When I sit down to think about our trip I’m a popcorn pan of excitement. By turns, as if to trumpet its own treats before I leave, Singapore has unfurled a couple of funky local sightings over the past few days:

• large parrot riding on handlebars of old man’s bike (Victoria St, nr central library)

• massive and beautiful vine wrapped around street lamp (Loewen Rd, Dempsey)

• crazy red bird with dark blue rooster-type head ruffles (Sentosa Cove Village)

• jagged red clouds on morning run (corner of Commonwealth & Queensway)

Touché, Red Dot.

Sundowner for starters

10 steps to 10k (when you’re not a real runner)

1K       10.30pm, Singapore Flyer, 32C, clear skies – off we go! No warm-ups for me, I’m relaxed, in shape, feel good. Take my first jellybaby from the little bag Mr PC gave me – one per K for energy levels. That’s one tip I’m happy to follow. Little sip from water bottle, lid a bit stiff but prise it open with teeth, no probs. Staying hydrated, yep.

2K       This is so easy, the training paid off. There’s a breeze, the stars are out, we have perfect running conditions. Look at the view! Look how the cars are stopping for us! Wow, I love this town. My ankles are fine, my knees are fine, all good. Jellybabies working nicely. Glide past first hydration station, don’t need it yet. All good so far.

3K       Trotting past the walkers, getting a bit warm but nothing I can’t handle. Jellybabies are just so clever, I can really feel the power-surge as they melt in my mouth. Water bottle still a bit tough but can still yank it open with teeth, no probs.

4K       Out of my way slow-coaches, I’m a lean, mean running machine! Actually I’m a tiny but warm now, stop for an ice-cold 100+ at the next bench. But honestly, I’m a natural, why don’t I do this more often?

5K       Slightly bored now, and passing the time by looking at people’s shoes. Breeze has dropped and it’s all very sweaty now. Sweaty hair, sweaty calves, sweaty fingers. Can’t get water bottle open any more. Splash my jellybabies. Everything is wet. Uh-oh, hill…

6K       …bloody huge hill. Very hot. Surely done more than 6k, tap phone to check it’s working. Still no breeze and a million sweaty porkers all herded round the paper cups at the next water stop. The warmth in this running crowd is ridiculous. Need a wee. Jellybabies sticking together.

7K       Eyebrows sweaty. Christ it’s hot. And dark. Trip over twig, paper cup, walker. Jellybabies now just one big clump. Sporadic onlookers clapping politely in the dark, nothing like the drums and cannons at the start. It’s a nice gesture but I could make more noise opening a crisp packet. Probably snakes in hedge so can’t stop for wee.

8K       Another hill. Can’t breathe. Very hot. Stupid jelly babies, stupid water bottle. Find bin, throw it all out. Sweat coming out of eyes, dripping off nose. I smell of a farm. The whole air smells of a farm. Last water stop, chuck cup over head. Sound of band at finish line. Oh God, the finish line…

9K       …not the finish line, just a long bit of track that runs alongside the real finish line. Note to organisers: PUT THE END AT THE BLOODY END otherwise it’s just teasing. Can a person run out of sweat?

10K     Last few yards, proper clappers now, but ears full of sweat. Is it the finish line? Yes. Underwhelming limp under banner. Accept medal and banana. Find cab. Sweat. Divert to Daily Scoop and buy a lemon sorbet, wipe forehead with it. Limp to condo licking hair. Limp up stairs, limp into shower, put medal in bin, have wee, bed.

Woken at 5am by Mr PC coming in from marathon and also binning bag of jellybabies.