A month in the country

I was never meant to resurrect Partly Cloudy. It could have been seen as attention-seeking, like threatening to leave then not going, or waving madly just to get people to look. But then this summer happened, and writing one last post seemed like an okay thing to do.
It was when winter took hold last year, when we started wearing double-thick socks round the clock, that we dusted off the credit card and booked five weeks of summer for a trip back to the Red Dot, one year after our big exit.
We didn’t expect a royal welcome. We knew our first week would be full of tumbleweeds, as we landed just as all the expats flew out. Luckily, one generous family was still around. For over a week they budged up to make room for us as we emptied our bags across the top floor of their house in the very cool Joo Chiat area. Exploring this fabulously laid-back zone got us acclimatised nicely. By the time we had gone on some local travels and then flown back in again, everyone else was home. Then reconnecting began in earnest.
It was all very level. There were some retro moments, like rediscovering each-a-cup Pearl Tea and making an unplanned but lovely visit to the old apartment. There were some tight hugs hello and several watery goodbyes, but otherwise the days felt comfy and happy, like getting into bed after a long day. We had EZ Link cards and an existing bank account. Mr PC worked for three weeks out of the five, bussing into the CBD with a plastic bag of kopi-o, even getting in a Wednesday game of footie with the old crowd.
Jonah found his Bounce socks and hung out with friends in town. I had some loyalty cards to use up (latte and a gel pedicure, please) and found myself more adept at knowing the Singapore bus routes than the London ones. We dined out and ate in, went to the cinema, pottered in parks. Thanks to the kindness of yet more friends, we borrowed an apartment for the last two weeks so we could play house, hosting some meet-ups and using the gym, pool, balcony and tennis court as if we did it every day. It really was a case of ‘popping in’, delightfully familiar but at the same time so special. In fact just like our summer trips back to London only in reverse.
I’d wondered if the revisit might have been a bad idea: would the second departure, one year after that awful wrench, be damaging all over again? Jonah was fine at first. He only became a bit wistful during the final days of the trip, when ex schoolmates bustled about getting ready for the new year while he stood by looking on, still a few weeks to go before the UK summer closed.
I write this in London and, now we are ‘home’ again, I’m not sure where the boys stand. I suspect that if Mr PC lived in a parallel world he might prefer to take the Downtown line to work, instead of the Jubilee. But we are where we are, I’m an ex-expat and I can talk fluently about repatriation and transition. I know there is truth in the saying that it takes two years to settle, home or away. We are halfway through and that’s just how it feels: fine to be there and fine to be here, hard to leave and hard to stay. Is it possible to have two lives?
Yesterday – last day of the hols – Jonah and I chatted about something that happened at a friend’s house a few days back, or so I thought.
‘Who were we talking to?’ I asked him, and we ran through some familiar names until we worked out that it had been several weeks ago in Singapore, not here in London. The two lives are so familiar. They have blended together like a translucent screen over a picture, with groups of friends there matching up, twin-like, to the ones here.
We can’t and won’t do a big summer trip every year, and we owe it to ourselves to sit down for a bit and let the grass grow under our gel-tipped toes. But as my Mum used to say when she found something nice in a shop but didn’t want to buy it just yet, we know it’s there.
Until next time, Singers.

That’s not MY memory

“What have been your favourite countries?” I asked Mr PC on his second Last Night In Singapore. “Mine are Japan, China and New Zealand. Japan for culture: ninjas, sushi, kimonos, geishas, waving cats and temples. China for history: the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors, Shanghai shikumen and Beijing hutongs. And New Zealand for natural history: mountains, valleys, glaciers and those stunning endless prairies.”

“Mine would have to be Vietnam,” said Mr PC, “such a different feel to the place depending where you go, such hidden gems, such surprises, and such amazing food!”

“Mine’s Bintan,” said Jonah. “The activities, the sea, and that time when Dad face-planted off the trapeze.”

#youcantaketheexpatkidoutofBintan

Special delivery

Today, one third of the PC household returns to the UK to pick up his new role, galloping into Heathrow just in time for St George’s Day and his Dad’s 79th birthday in Marlow. First he’ll have lunch and birthday cake with the cousins then he’ll drive to London and camp out at my sister’s for the next few weeks. He starts work on Monday. As for leaving Sing, for a man of modest gestures I’ve never seen so many goodbyes locked into the calendar. He had a football farewell on Wednesday for the weekly group he’s been running – that was a tough one. In a fortnight he’ll be back here briefly and no doubt there’ll be more goodbyes. And back again in June to co-host a proper leaving do with me and repeat the beer theme once more. The multi-celebration thing is unusual for a man who’s typically quite low-key, but I suspect it’s testament to how hard it is for him to leave the town he has so enjoyed exploring, and all the friends within.

Mr PC is a man who’s rarely sad. He goes through life using the same Terminal Optimism as my Dad, constantly carrying around a half-full pint glass in contrast to my half-empty water bottle. (Does that make us well matched? It certainly makes him very patient). A person who knows him better, though, might have detected clouds across the moon these last few weeks, even during our recent fantastic canter across beautiful NZ, when, at times, my permanently happy man might have sometimes been less so.

Repatriation was never going to be easy for any of us, most of all him. Like most families we try to make decisions as a solid unit, but sometimes one person is less comfortable with a decision than the others. Just as you could say it was his idea that we came here in the first place, it was mainly me who came up with the idea that we pack it all in and head back to Blighty. Worse still, while we wait under softly swaying palms for TheEnd, drifting back and forth to work and school with the sun on our backs, he has to dump his carry-on and head straight to the Tube under chilly London skies*.

Still though, every cloud and all that. I’m hoping there will be plenty of you to welcome him home, maybe put on the kettle or pop open a beer. If you see him, he’s pretty easy to take care of but he’ll probably appreciate some Singaporean touches. He likes kopi o ping or kopi si kosong. He likes congee for breakfast, laksa for lunch and a big fish curry for dinner. He likes the heat, so turn up the radiators and hang a load of wet laundry inside so the place gets a bit humid. And as always he loves a spot of running, so if you feel like trotting up and down Kite Hill with him then give him a call.

As he paces the apartment looking for things, tying up loose ends, sending emails and printing out documents I’m sitting here looking at our Mandarin textbook collection, gathering dust on the shelf since we stopped lessons in January. His favourite word was always “husband”. Mine was “goodbye” because it’s the only one that comes to mind easily. So then: zaijian Xiansheng. Safe travels and see you in two short weeks. I’ll keep beers in the fridge and kopi by the kettle and I promise not to chuck out your shoebox full of electrical cr@p or rearrange your precious pile of interesting pocket fluff. Hope the new school has a good canteen and nice teachers. I’m sure my sister wouldn’t mind if you bought a plastic palm tree and stuck it in the window.

Here’s your leaving anthem, a top choice from the Jonah playlist that we had on repeat in hire cars all around New Zealand. I think it fits.

*I’ve got the packing, the goodnights, the homework and the exam-revising to do as well, so don’t feel too bad for him

Ready, steady, MONKEY

Since landing on this little Red Dot some 54 months ago, I’ve completed several organised running events, as you will know if you’ve followed the trials here, here and here. Oh, and one [disastrous] hash run, here.

These days I manage little hobbles around the locale, lightly holding the flab at bay but really not in keeping with any great sporting occasion. When Mr PC suggested we all take part in a small 2.5k family jog around the zoo I was all over it.

Training would be easy, since I was already covering the small distance involved. For Jonah it was harder, as his current pre-teen weekend schedule involves spending as much time as he can welded to the sofa, stuck to phone, computer, X-Box [enter any other kind of electronic gadget here] doing his best to avoid all things Fitness related. We managed to lever him out the door for just two training runs before the event and to start with he was out of shape. The first attempt involved me actually overtaking him and the second was happier since it ended with a roti canai breakfast and a hot chocolate on the way home. Bribery goes a long way in our house.

By the time the zoo run came round he was good to go, though predictably moody at being dug out of bed so early. We set off after Mr PC, whose longer 10K run started at 7am. He met us at the zoo gates amidst the predictable honking and hooting, loudspeaker shouting, warm-up nonsense and bass beats herding wave after wave of blue T-shirt participants into the pig pen and off on various running stages – 10k, 5k, then ours.

We filed into the starting bay; for Jonah this was a very busy first run and I could see he was apprehensive, but the pumping music soon got the adrenline going and we pushed through to the very front of the start line, checking behind to see how many people might overtake us – hundreds, from the looks of it, but fortunately they promised to start us off in waves so we wouldn’t be trampled from the rear.

“Stay with me if you can,” I said, “but don’t worry if you feel like going faster.” HONK went the starter and into the zoo we trotted, waving as we passed Mr PC who filmed us. When you play it back you can see how many people there were; at that point I’m doing a stately trot and there’s Jonah, purposefully edging forward. Fast forward around the corner and you’d see him suddenly kick it up a notch, at which point it very much became a race for Jonah, not a run.

It’s well known that in Singapore many people sign up to organised running events to enjoy a nice wander through whatever venue is on offer. Because of its position, this one was popular and there were packs of slow walkers, elderly ladies with handbags, and lots of family prams, all of which must have made Jonah feel Olympian. “Stick to the right!” I shouted as we passed a slow group clustered around the lion enclosure, and “pace yourself!” as his bandy legs did fast circles around a tight corner. It soon became clear that he wasn’t in such bad shape after all. “You go on” I panted to his back as he edged away from me and legged it past the tapir pen. “I’ll see you at the end!” I wailed, and he did a funny little backwards wave and was off, and as far as ‘Team Partly Cloudy’ went that was that – solo runners trotting separately through the semi-empty morning pathways under the palms.

Due to our fast start my ‘style’ (s.l.o.w.) was all out of kilter. I overtook several slower runners but many others overtook me. At times I was a lone jogger, relishing the chance to see zebras munching leaves, elephants taking a morning bath in the reservoir, stumpy gorillas up trees and a cheetah sitting very upright on a rock. A massive free-flying stork dive-bombed me as I pegged along the path underneath it. It was hilly and I was out of breath but even so this had to be the best venue ever for a run; also the most bonkers.

I’d been a bit worried about the noise at the start line, concerned that it might be upsetting for the animals, but once inside the zoo all was peace and calm. Runners don’t make a lot of noise when you think about it, just a patter of trainer on tarmac (and a spot of heavy wheezing from slow-coaches like me). Having been able to follow Jonah for a bit there was soon no trace of him. Was he OK, had he noticed where the path split into two different routes? I was sure he’d be fine, and I only hoped he’d spot some of the wildlife surrounding us.

A finish line is always a wonderful sight. As this one hove into view just beyond an entire family of pink-bottomed monkeys, there was Mr PC and a very sweaty Jonah, holding up a wet paw to high-five me.

“Yay,” I panted with the smallest bit of breath I had left, “you made it!”

“Actually Mum,” said the new runner in the family, “I came second.”

Jonah’s clearly got a new niche sport to follow but I think I’m all set to retire from organised events. I might just buy a ticket next time I want to visit the zoo.

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Happy scout-day

Today my not-so-small monkey turns 12 at precisely 10:46 UK time, 18:46 Singapore time. Oddly, as the hour comes around so the film starts at the cinema where Mr PC and I will be spending a couple of hours tonight, on our own, as Jonah is away at scout camp and we therefore are celebrating tomorrow. This is why, while I woke this morning with happiness as I always do on his birthday (and lots of people’s birthdays) the other bit of me felt it a bit odd to be eyeing up a bag of wrapped gifts with no one to open them.

So Mr PC got up early and went for a bike ride all around the island, whizzing past Jonah’s scout camp right at the top of Singapore. And I hobbled my way around the block on a very poor 5k loop then came home and went back to bed for another half hour. Now we’re getting ready to go to the beach – a treat to lie on the sand, just us two, and pretend we’re on a proper holiday. While the scouts build rickety carts and have races, and jump in and out of a swamp lake then make smores and dampers, we’ll go food shopping, then to the cinema. Nice, but hardly the monkey-birthday of previous years.

I write posts about him on every birthday, giving a rundown of what he’s up to, but he’s getting harder to categorise and I might have touched on this last year. The older he gets the more this is the case, as it is with all just-12-year-olds. He’s by turns nicely amenable, very funny, loving and cuddly, then suddenly he’s a big moody Tasmanian devil, bending trees sideways like a Singapore storm. At home time he hurls his school bag through the door first then follows behind with a yelped hello and tucks into half a packet of biscuits, crumbs blowing over my neatly filed work papers (should have worked in my office, not at the dining table). In 10 minutes the bedroom door slams as he grudgingly does as he’s told and gets on with his homework. Half an hour later he emerges, happy again as he’s found the favourite pen he thought he’d lost. Dark again 15 minutes later when the piano lesson beckons. Keeping up with his moods is like trying to predict tropical storms. Just get a big umbrella.

He’s moral, and for all his moods he hates conflict. When asked to cut down on the number of guests invited to his birthday (I just couldn’t do another entire-class bash) he was unable to choose, so selected his best mate from outside school instead – really quite an adult decision and in fact it made for the perfect weekend. Great for my wallet too.

With the brain-stretching comes a deeper understanding and communication – we can barter better, talk at head height, present an idea in a way that makes sense to adults yet is still applicable to someone in Year 7. We can have really in-depth chats about stuff, and also share almost grown-up jokes. It’s lots of fun. We can also throw the mixing spoon across the living room but we try not to do that too often. As his brain makes room for an impossible number of new concepts, so speech depletes, and my chatty monkey is a lot less chatty than before (although I still need earplugs sometimes, which I’m half happy about).

If you follow this blog you’ll know that I posted a list of SM quotes when he turned nine, 10 and (as previously mentioned) 11. This year they’ve been few and far between but I had managed to jot down some – that was, until a stupid phone upgrade lost all my notes. As a result I’ve only got three to go on, but they’ll do:

Cheeky monkey at dinner:
Dad – “Manners maketh man, Jonah”
Jonah – ‘Oh wow, did you say hi to Shakespeare?’

Comforting monkey in parent role just before I join big new choir:
Me: ‘How do you know it will be OK?
Jonah: ‘To be honest I don’t. But it always turns out good in the end, doesn’t it?’
(and it did)

Eccentric Jonah, unable to bend one rogue toe for me to trim nails (and yes, he should be doing this himself by now):
‘I can’t be specific with my toes; they’re like a crew’

That’s it! Happy birthday my sweet scout, and see you tomorrow for that bag of goodies.

Mum x

• Aw, just had a phone call from camp from the chattiest monkey ever, completely full of the most fun weekend. We put him on speaker phone and all three talked together. Never have I felt more like my own parents, in the days when a house had two dial phones and you rang home and both folks were on the line at the same time.
4 hours later – and now a call saying he’s wet through, miserable, and wants to come home. See?

 

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Happy non birthday

Last night I found an old hard drive, plugged it in, started going through it. Turns out it was where Mr PC had dumped a load of old pics. I loved a particular set of dark and grainy snaps, taken at the very start of 2010. I recognised the small London Christmas tree as being the very last one Mum had put up; the big glossy chocolate cake I had made for 4 Jan that year, the candles blown out as Mum turned 71, with Jonah waiting patiently for the first cut. This was her last birthday on this mortal coil, as it turned out. Today she would have been 78.

She was brave about her January birthday. It’s great, she’d say, just when everyone’s so sad about Christmas being over, I get a birthday! So instead of posting sad pictures about her every year, I try to continue the fun theme by celebrating her birthday with a shopping trip to a pretty dress shop, the rationale being that if I can’t buy her something nice, I might as well spoil myself (she’d have wanted it, I tell myself)*. Besides, it’s always the sales – another point she’d have been proud of.

Today, though, the last day of the Christmas school hols, I left work and took a sickly almost-12-year-old to lunch, who whined as we trailed from dim sum cafe to post office about his achey bones and hot head. So instead of buying anything fancy we came home and here we are now, frock-less but slightly better off in the wallet department and enjoying a cup of tea and the remains of a friend’s gorgeous Christmas spice cake, one of us going through those old pics again and the other one snoozing and fondling his new KindleFire.

Happy birthday Ma. Your ‘present’ will just have to be late, but I think you’d be OK with that too.

*I do the same thing for my birthday in June. She’d definitely have wanted that too

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Interdependant’s Day

Just four years ago, the idea of taking a cab in Sing held less thought for us than it does now. Now I have to think twice before ordering – do I really need one? How near is the MRT? I won’t melt in the rain. I could probably walk it. It’s not accurate these days to say that cabs in Singapore are cheap, because with the advent of online taxi apps the market is volatile. But this morning’s Grabcab was a good price and it was also quick to arrive, which was a good thing because this was a cab ordered by me but not FOR me, a cab for Jonah to get him home fast after a sleepover at a friend’s. I had to call the friend to get her to warn Jonah and load up his iPhone so he could text me along the way, as we’d not tried this before.

This business of putting kids in cabs is normal here, a very expat thing, veeery Sing-ish. If you don’t have a car, can’t wait for a bus, need to be two places at once, then a cab is often the answer. You can track the route and delivery is straight to your door. To pick up this morning from the friend’s house would have involved me taking two buses there and two back, one hour each way, and all before 09:30am Much easier, said bossy Mr PC (completely springing the idea on me) for him to come back on his own. ‘Everyone does it,’ he said, ‘and he already goes to scouts alone by local bus on Mondays.’ But scouts is near by, and the local buses are so reliable and… and…

Silly to be worried. At the same age I was going to school on the bus on my own (walking a 10-minute hike at the other end), popping into Covent Garden by tube to see the buskers, down to Camden to buy neon nail polish in the market, crossing the Heath on foot to visit friends on the other side – and not an adult in sight. And no cellphone either. Of course it was all rainbow jumpers and unicorns back then and it’s a different world now. All the same he needs to start learning, and what better place than in super-safe Singapore?

Jonah got into the cab looking worried, said the friend’s mum. After all, we hadn’t planned this or talked it through. ‘You should probably give him a call,’ she said. Thanks to iPhones I kept up a chat exchange the whole way home, in fact I stalked the route from there to here (panicking slightly when the app froze for a while). Ridiculous – the most non-independent mission, in fact positively pampered, but a step in the right direction for sure. Next stop, MRT to VivoCity and meet him at the cinema lobby.

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celtic popquiz

Sitting in the queue at immigration far too early one Saturday morning – actually yesterday, waiting for Jonah’s new green card to come through, feeling slightly jaded after a fun night out. As we sit heavy-lidded on the yellow bucket seats in that very odd immigration centre, Mr PartlyCloudy and I while away the time by reviewing the previous night’s very fun social shenanigans at a post-summer drinks night full of Scottish food and nice wine. We’d got chatting to a lovely couple, one of whom had asked me:

“Now then, what do you call someone who’s from Cornwall?”

To be fair it was rather an odd question, so instead of stating the obvious (“Cornish”) the best answer I could give was “Morwenna”. Much hilarity ensued, and if the lighting had been better I think this would’ve been one of those rare moments when the usuallly rather smooth Mr PC could be found blushing.

Fast-forward back to our hungover Saturday morning queue and Jonah asks what all the sniggering’s about, so we try out the question on him.

First answer: “Grandpa”
Second attempt: “Farmer”

Mr PC rubs away the tears and with a sigh checks the slow-moving ticket numbers on the screen: “I might see if I can put in for a new family”

Back in the room

Someone who shall remain nameless suggested, as I complained my way through the packing at the end of this year’s summer trip to England, that I should’ve sorted out our sons’ school shoes at some time during the “holidays”. How I laughed. At what point might I have found the time?
I write this on my first afternoon back in Singapore. I’ve had dinner out, done a morning at work, had lunch out (#lazylah) and, yes, bought those s*dding school shoes.
Thing is, there was a time when long-term expats would explain to me why they never did home visits any more. They’re tough. You zig-zag from picnic to pub, taking up people’s floor space with your exploding suitcases, refusing and then accepting endless puddings, having hurried farewells as you kiss the growing children on the top of their summer holiday heads and then waking up the next day and doing it all over again. Five weeks, five different beds, a million kisses goodbye and then a flight back through the night, holding back the inappropriate homesick tears at the end of the supposedly funny film on the flight, before hitting the heat of the taxi stand and having the first of a string of sleepless nights as your body struggles to right itself once more.
That’s the negative version. I concur, to a point, but I still think there is massive mileage in going back and seeing all those friendly faces, drinking all those cups of proper tea, getting all those bearhugs. The visit gives us all a large dose of happiness that stays in the system for a long time. Our 2016 version went a bit like this:
Cool air, late twilights, high blue skies, cups of proper tea, trees to climb, lawns, bacon, M&S deli, favourite old toys, trains, DELAYS, traffic, sirens, ROADWORKS, pub grub, festival fun, beach huts, car trips, park life, baths, chewing gum, fudge, familiar faces, bear hugs, gossip, scandal, the odd bit of appallingly bad news, more picnics, more bear hugs, much inexpensive but delicious wine, bus stop chats with strangers, thrift shop bargains, clouds that don’t burst, plates that are hot, more trains, washing up in old family sinks, neighbours who love you, kids playing nicely, curiously pleasing smelling laundry tabs, butter that doesn’t melt, more bloody ROADWORKS, intravenous familiarity and lots of love.

This year’s tune-to-wash-up-to, a bit tacky, goes to a hot road trip back from the lavender fields with Isabel, Chris, Cam and Georgie. Press play and clear the kitchen.

See you next time, Blighty

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Sand in my eye


Six years ago I had a picnic party on Parliament Hill. Since childhood, this was something we would often do when a family member had a birthday, well, for everyone apart from Mum, whose wintry January 4 birthday of course had to be inside. But for me (June), my sister (April) and Dad (September), it was a case of packing up the blankets and heading outdoors with as many friends as we could gather. Standard.

At the exact moment that Mum died, in the early hours of June 4 2010, no one really gave two hoots about how to celebrate my birthday, which was disastrously scheduled to happen no matter what the following day. As it turned out, by the time the sun came up again some 22 hours later, we were very ready for temporary distraction. One swift Facebook wallpost from my sister and around 20 of us were knocking back the much-needed vino under a tree by the Bandstand, partly to remember Jo Darke, and partly to give us all a chance to eat cake. It was quite the most bittersweet birthday I’ve ever had. The kids bundled about in the long grass, people kept appearing from over the hill, waving that long-armed “seen you!” wave, we had natural shelter when it rained, and Jonah had Fanta for the first time ever. You’d never have known we were in mourning. I’m not sure we were really, not quite yet.

The next year there was another picnic, which was lovely but rainy and a lot more low-key. The next year there was a house party combined with a farewell knees-up for John, as he prepared to move out to Singapore ahead of us, so that was fun but odd, and then we were here, and the next three June 5ths in Singapore have been tropical hotties played out whichever way I could organise it in this funny new life of ours.

And always the date was preceded by that sombre little 24-hour patch known as June 4, extended out here in Singapore to 31 hours thanks to a seven-hour time lag. In that time I always receive sweet messages and little blinking kisses and then, rather like The Resurrection, the big hand hits the 12 and it’s party time. I love that she allowed me to relax and enjoy my day – generous to the end.

This year, unable or simply too lazy to host, I dropped a mumbled note to friends about a picnic on a beach and that’s how we wound up, last Sunday, flopping about on Tanjong with a cricket bat and a blow-up birthday crown. As dawn broke on the last line of sorry kisses and they segued into happy party-popping tweets, the sun came out and I floated out into the sea with a friend while the kids ran native all over the sand. I thought of Mum, who would have so loved this loose sort of party arrangement – planned but not planned – and I thought of her again when I emptied the sand out of my lovely new blue birthday shoulder bag at home (because oddly enough a lovely new blue birthday shouder bag was also the last thing she got me), and as I tripped over a piece of uneaten sandwich and tipped the last dregs of wine out of a picnic glass, I thought of her again.

I never need to write about the Fourth of June because it is remembered by so many people in such lovely ways. I can organise my own June Fifths, have always done, and I do it very well (spotlight, moi?) but since the 5th is now permanently glued to the 4th we might as well raise a double glass every year. To you and me, Ma. Bottoms up x

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