As our summer trip to the UK approaches I am remembering what it was like to be pregnant or have a small baby. It’s not an obvious connection – and it started with a new-mum friend from home posting on FB about how annoyed she gets with people’s attitudes to the whole sleep thing, and it reminded me of all the questions I hated, and the bump thing as well: I was ‘huge’ to one person and ‘tiny’ to another, and really, who cared but me?

‘Is she sleeping through the night yet?’ they ask my friend, pointing at her four-month-old daughter. ‘Well,’ replies my friend, ‘I’m not sleeping through the night yet, and I’m 32’.

It’s the same with the How Long Have You Been Here question. ‘Almost two years,’ I am now telling people and always, ALWAYS I get a raised eyebrow and ‘Oh, is that all?’ in response. What? Is what all? What? I have no idea how long I am supposed to have been here before I elicit a different response, and when I do get a different one, what will it be? And again, who really cares?

This goes on ad nauseum, I’m guessing. I might do a deal – when my friend’s baby sleeps through the night I’ll start telling people how long I’ve been here.

Nothing gets my goat more than people making assumptions (I do it all the time of course, but I’m not writing about me). Like sportswear designers, for example.

It costs money, you know, to sign up to these organized sporting events but as the runs, walks and swims are all for chariddy I don’t usually mind. Besides, you get a goody bag and a T-shirt, sometimes even some fruit. No doubt a lot of our donated cash goes on the sportswear you get in these goody bags. The outfit for this weekend’s event was an unusual T and shorts combination, the bottom half being a nice little addition – sadly, ‘little’ being the key word.

It’s bad enough that I carry about an extra fifth of the weight that I used to be, that I’m not the shape I was when I was 18 and never will be, that my age and stupid hormones mean I pile on the pounds fast then just can’t get rid of them again (and yes, that I have a cake habit that suits none of the above). But then why not go and boot me when I’m down by designing fitness clothes that only a child’s teddy bear might wear? It wasn’t like I’d tried to stuff myself into a Medium or even a Large. I’d given up, this time, on pretending that the clothes sizes would apply to anyone normal and ordered a Supersize.

I tried on the shorts and T combo in front of Mr PC, who had that mute, wide-eyed expression that men get when they are about to be asked a ‘how-do-I-look?’ question and the resulting answer must be very, very carefully given. He had no chance – I couldn’t even get the shorts over my calves, let alone knees or any further up, and as I hobbled sideways in a tangle of tiny Lycra we ended up giggling about how ridiculously miniscule the outfit was. ‘Are you sure they’re XL?’ he managed. The designer, clearly, was blind, or just very stupid.

Joking aside I’m really livid about this. You come to expect overly small sizes when you live in Southeast Asia because in this part of the world there is a mythological design belief that women’s clothes should be made for a short Kate Moss, or thinner. Quite why I have no idea because it is NOT true that all Asian women are tiny; I’ve seen large ones as well as small ones – here in Singapore there is just as wide a range of people as there is in any other country in the world: there are tiny western women here just as there are tiny Singaporean women. Big ones and small ones, we are built in all shapes and sizes no matter where we live and no matter where we come from.

It’s not enough that us westerners in Singapore get the blunt end of the stout stick in shops, but then to bring it into the realms of fitness – well, just who do you suppose is running these races? We’re not all going to be stick insects, are we? Some of us are running to LOSE THE WEIGHT so please, do us women a favour and create some designs that might fit real people.

Sorry for banging on about it, as anyone who knows me knows I have been lately, but I just cannot believe that last weekend I threw myself into the sea and swam three-quarters of a kilometre and then ran all around the southernmost part of Sentosa Island for five whole more kilometres. Dressed in a tri-suit. And no one paid me, I paid them.

If you had ever told me, in the past, that I’d be doing something like this I would have spat my tea up my nose. I am the person who, aged 15, hated sports so much that I forged my sick notes and went home, went for a walk, did that morning’s washing up, even agreed to take part in some dreaded voluntary service – something/anything rather than motivate my skinny little body into doing anything sporty. Sporty girls were that generation’s mean girls. Sporty girls shouted at us on the netball pitch when we shot the ball off over the wrong net or watched it drizzle away into the bushes. Sporty girls yelled at us as we chatted about our favourite new 45 on the far reaches of the outfield (well, EXCUSE me, but we were trying to have a converSATION, thanks). No. Sports was for sharp girls in white socks with lithe, bendy bodies and boyfriends in the year above. Give me a packet of Bourbon biscuits and a cup of Sainsburys Red Leaf any day (or, sadly, 10 B&H, but that’s a whole other story and not a proud one).

Anyway, when it came to voluntary service, we (my partner in crime was my best friend, a girl who hated the S word even more than me) were sent back to our much-hated primary school, stuck in the two bottom infant classes and told to take over while the ragged teachers staggered to the staff room for a fag. We preferred watching the school guinea pig pee itself on the reading mat, rather than join our team mates on the netball courts.

One day the children had a black paint fight. I was happier tidying it up with wet newspaper than puffing up and down Parliament Hill on cross-country, or standing on some cold sports field, or getting bussed out to the Lea Valley like convicts only to spend the entire afternoon tipping canoes over while we sat in them (whose stupid idea was that?). Me and my friend would do anything, I tell you, anything rather than do any of the above. I personally would have signed up for extra maths. I would have retaken my history O Level mock exam. A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G. We had an unspoken agreement that you lived and died by the bunk-off note, and after a while we started bunking off voluntary service, too: first person to get the kettle on and put the flame under the pancake pan was that afternoon’s winner. I think that’s when I really fell in love with The Kinks’ Face to Face album, as that was the LP I most recall bunking off to, back at mine, munching pancakes while the needle crackled.

And now I do duathlons. ‘What next?’ asks my sister (who also regularly asks me, in all-caps: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY SISTER?)

Well. Our soccer moms’ group has started a little training regime on Wednesdays while the kids do their practice. I’ve banned it up til now but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to have a kickaround. There’s a nice-sounding 5k next month that I’ve already signed up for. I got a bike last weekend for Christmas and today I wobbled all the way to a friends’ house for lunch and back again. Doubt I worked off the wine but it was a nod to health. There’s talk of proper swimming lessons, which would help if I ever signed up to a swim event again, since the worst bit of Sunday’s race was being churned around like an odd sock in a washing machine while I puffed up and down with my ‘old lady’ breast stroke as all the other white-caps sliced through the waves with their sporty front crawls. There was a clue in the category title ‘Sprint’ that I might have to go faster than my current Blue Rinse speed and I suppose I could do with learning how to go a bit faster, and how to do it properly.

I think it’s not that I hate and loathe sport or can’t manage it, I think it’s actually the opposite: I share the deep-seated competitive gene that my mother had and that my sister, I suspect, might also have. Tucked away in the recesses of our emotional motherboard is a small switch dialed for all eternity to ‘GAME ON’. (My sister hates board games for the very same reason, though she would argue that she just hates board games). Once I understood, for instance, that many of the mums at the sports day hoop race some four or five years ago had actually cheated their way to the finish line (apart from second-to-last me), I was back bigger and better next year and from then on I either won or came second year on year. And don’t say it was ‘just’ an egg and spoon, I owned it and you can’t take that away.

I feel sure that this brief hiatus to my rounded, sedentary lifestyle will retreat, once I am back in the UK, along with the rest of my tropical pool-blue memories. I hope it doesn’t, and I’m gluing all the ribbons into a scrapbook just to make sure I really earned them. One day I might even take them to my friend’s house and get her to put some pancakes on. Or maybe, as my sister suspects, I really have been stolen by aliens seeking lazy cake-lovers to populate a planet that needs people to bake the best ever buns, while sporty replicas get put on earth instead? I’d be a great choice for the baking if so, though of course I’m not competitive about it at all.

PS I’d like to thank my trisuit, which I borrowed, and which not only kept it all in but looked rather good in the process. I’d also like to thank the friend who lent it to me. And finally I’d like to thank the random men who, every now and then, would bark out: COME ON ANZA! Only halfway round the run did I remember that I’d borrowed a suit that had the ANZA group logo all over it. They were such a nice bunch, I might even consider joining up.

A bendy sort of year, ups and downs and ups and downs then a gradual ascent with the odd interruption, an almost vertical bit right at the end (bad road diggers, killer courses, overly long carol concerts) before hauling up to a stunning rooftop plateau with the sky all lit up for 2014. Let’s try and keep this one bright, shall we?

HIGHS

• Nice teacher: happy boy = happy home

• Family and friends in da house: happy airport trips, best possible use for spare room

• Bangkok football: bottom for scores, tops for company

• Jaunts: Ipoh, Borneo, Jogjakarta, Tioman, Cambodia, Bali, Australia

• UK heatwave: sunshine + friends + family + M&S deli = contentment

• Getting the running bug: new sweat bands in stocking, yay!

• Kids karaoke: passing on the mike-hogging gene

• Fun times: temple running, Sydney sunning, trail walking

• Redundancy: 15 years hard graft becomes a three-month weekend for the PCs

• Cultural studies: tip top speakers and a whole new slant on rice and noodles

• Spot of actual, paid work = sense of worth, cash, brain salad

• Planning permission approval: a good home to come back to

• Dad’s book comes out: #prouddaughter

• Babies here, there and everywhere: come on, last little one, we’re waiting!

• Helpful Boy school certificate, piano lessons, catching first wave: #proudmum

• An end to the psycho writing at last: #henolongerknowswhereyoulive

• Drinks on the deck, trips to the beach: #notightsrequired

• Pottering by the pool with the neighbours (getting my cossy on, wait for me!)

• Dipping a toe in the camping arena: next time, canvas

• Australia revisited – we love you, you know

LOWS: Homesickness, Haze, lost jobs, killer courses, missed kitties, downpours, bloody knees, useless condo repairs, tenants moving out, roads being dug where they shouldn’t

GOALS: Ditch course, get job, run faster, throw party, drink less, sleep longer, Skype better, write more

Happy new year, and thanks for reading

Every project gets to a point where you have to wonder where things are going. I feel like I’ve come to a crossroads with this diary – I can’t call it a blog, it’s never acted like one and it still isn’t following the blog rules. I’m not entirely sure, these days, what its purpose is and so I just wait around until I have something to say, and sometimes that will be three things in one week, and sometimes it will be one thing in three weeks. I suppose, as a family, we have come to a crossroads of where we all are, and that is throwing shadows over everything else that we do and making us all question our time here in Sing, and making me question this blog.

I seem to be getting feelings these days, rather than ideas for postings, and I wonder if it’s a halfway house thing where you’re at a junction so your brain can only take in snapshots of instructions for what to do next. Writing this thing should be easy, I have lots to say: I have a bit of work, the course, busy family life, travels, news from home keeps me on my toes… But still I can’t think of anything more to say than to post snapshots, because it is only the image of an idea that I seem to be able to get hold of, and such images are the things that are flavouring the days and the weeks. So I take them on board and try to process what they might mean.

I’ll be honest, I do think about going home, especially on bad days. After 15 months plugging away at the expat game the one thing I can be sure about is the word ‘home’, a tricky concept that I struggled with at first. To me it hasn’t changed a bit, my real home is still London, and that’s a huge sign in itself. But it’s not that simple, as life never is. It’s not that I don’t adore it here – we are on a roll, to be honest, chugging away quite nicely. But I look at my watch now and then because I know the clock is ticking. It’s still a clock with no set alarm – we don’t know when the buzzer’s going to go, but we know one day it will.

What about this thing, then, this diary of mine? Since I’m not new any more there are fewer topics to post about. Life is more normal and there are bad days as well as the good ones, and those days remain private because who wants to read about the rubbish stuff? (and given all the upbeat, fluffy stuff I post on here, I suspect none of you would believe in the bad stories for one minute).

The good days, these days, are not so much days but more like snapshots, little vignettes of pure happiness that I want to bottle and market, and the snapshots remain in my mind and I can bring them out and savour them whenever I want. Here are three that I’ve enjoyed in just the last week:

1)    I’m on a beach in Bali. It’s that simple. The air is hairdryer-hot, there’s the kind of salty sea breeze that you remember from childhood, and the sea is warm. That’s it, end of image.

2)    I am standing on the side of the football pitch watching SmallMonkey’s team battle it out on a hot, wet Saturday morning. The other parents around me are the kind of people I want to take home with me when we eventually leave. I have found true friends. That is all.

3)    I am in a good restaurant in a leafy enclave with a friend and her ex-teacher. He is helping me with my Peranakan course. I know my own father would love to meet him. The food is amazing, the chatter comes easily – it is a good day.

There is nothing more to say about these three snapshots other than the fact that they make me feel happy, grateful and very secure.

When this course ends in January and I get my life back I want to wind things down a bit. In taking on a project that I thought would help me learn more about where I was, I have ended up having no time to enjoy that very thing. I can’t wait until I can make discoveries and assessments of my own without having to write a paper and then discuss it all in front of my fellow students. Perhaps that’s why I have nothing but brief images left. I hope I get a chance to discover things in person before the bell goes. At least when that time comes I can take my snapshots with me.

So this course, then. Wish I’d listened when they told me it was a tough one. What was I thinking? There are around 30 pages of dense text to be read each week. Plus visits to be made to keep you up to scratch with what’s what. In terms of lectures and practicals these take up roughly six hours out of the house on Tuesdays and about five on Fridays. Soon there will be tours to shadow, with trained docents and trainee docents. There will also be trips around relevant places of interest and our own talks to prepare. I’m to submit my first paper in about a week’s time – that’s a finished draft of the first five minutes of my actual tour, encompassing the first bit of the talk. I should probably transcribe my notes from the last month, plus take a look at the postings that have popped up online from my fellow trainees – it’s all on our system to be looked at. If I add that little lot to the rest of the diary (social life, chores, visiting guests, freelance work, school stuff) there’s not a lot of time left. My only remaining lunch slot until late November has just gone. I think the last time I was this busy was when I tried to go back to work after SM was born. Yeah, I was rubbish at that too.

I’m growing more and more terrified of getting out there in front of the pack and acting like I know what I’m on about. So far I’m a bit swamped by what there is to memorise because it’s not all easily understandable. I don’t get half the cultural references and have to work that much harder on understanding icons, motifs, religions, social codes. I think I thought that if I could use my baking skills to make local kueh to impress people at snack time, pop in to the galleries a few times and choose some favourites to point at, employ my big mouth to fill the tour’s hour-long time slot, chuck in some jokes for a laugh and buy some pretty ‘tour’ clothes I might be able to get away with it, but I now think it’s rather more serious.

Is it too late to get off?

Dear Singapore,
Thank you for having me for the last ten months, it’s been so exciting. I’m just popping back to the UK for a few weeks. Please do all that smoky and rainy stuff while I’m gone and if you’re going to do the dry and bright thing then keep the lights on when I come back because I won’t be happy returning under a cloud.
I’m very grateful for a few key things that have cheered me this year, notably: the big blue skies on bright days and warm, balmy nights, plus absolute lack of need for tights; your big, bushy hedges, incredible banana plants, odd snake-like seeds; your bonkers morning bird calls, chit-chats in the kitchen, bats over the pool and cheeky monkeys at MacRitchie for my Wednesday walks with L.
Thank you for your exotic global positioning, and although your crushing humidity is a bit mad (three showers on a bad day is just wasteful), thanks all the same for allowing me to wear the minimum – I love it. Thanks for building the Central Line just before we arrived and for making my MRT the stop with the shops. Thanks for putting a beach at the end of the line and also for running loads of buses up and down Holland Road. (No thanks for making it rain just as I step out). Thanks for giving me alternative choices – MRT, cabs – when it does. (No thanks for making cabs impossible to get in the rain). Hey, though, thanks for creating such city-wide empathy for rainstorms that being late in a downpour is totally expected.
Thank you for Crystal Jade, Kinokunya, Cotton On, Charles & Keith, Simply Bread, Lim’s, Tangs, wet markets, dry buses, cool trains, hot swimming pools, little green lights over vacant car park spaces, natural vitamin D, condos with open-door policies, mostly clean public lavs (world take note), air con, taxi stands, food courts in malls, considerable lack of dog poo, weird and wonderful Sentosa, beautiful East and West Coasts, the awesome ACM, sweet TPM, posh buffets, tasty hawkers, ramen bowls, dim sum baskets, Esarn, Indochine Supertree, rickety river boats, the beautiful, mad surfboard, Sago Street, Amoy Street, the skate park at Scape, all my friend’s houses, my beautifully warm wooden deck and my (blush, ahem) Jacuzzi. Huge thanks to the StreetDirectory app, without which I would literally have been lost.
Some bits and pieces you might consider sorting out while I’m gone:
• websites that act like websites – a Facebook page IS NOT A WEBSITE
• shop assistants who can direct you to other places in the mall – you WORK HERE ALL DAY, surely you know more then me?
• dishes served at the same time – I want to eat WITH my family, not half an hour later
• booze we can afford – can’t stand flinching when I open the menu
• taxi drivers who don’t jam the pedals – I don’t get car-sick, it’s just that I’m often carrying trays of cupcakes
• shop assistants that leave me alone – do I have something stuck to my shoe? Am I on fire? No? Then go and stand over THERE because I have no idea what I want, WHICH IS WHY I’M BROWSING
• endless construction on every street corner – I think you might have enough new buildings, now

Ultimately, though, it’s been a right old journey. I know I’ll kick myself for saying this when I go all homesick again in a few months time, but out of all the places we could have relocated to, I’m glad it was you. I’ll never belong here, but at half time I can say it’s been an incredible journey and you have been so very welcoming. See you in a few weeks and good luck with the Haze; if it comes back I’ll blow fresh winds your way.

Love, Mrs PC

Everyone seems to be getting ready to leave the island. Some schools are already out. I can’t keep up with the daily diary of dates of departures, re-entries, patchwork trips across Europe, America, Australia, mental maps of who goes where and when. By the time we leave in two weeks the bulk of my friends will already be gone. By the time we get back at the start of August, those who left early will already be back here in Sing and the children reinstalled in their schools, and all the Brits who break up later like me but didn’t leave as soon as us, but a little bit later, will be left behind in Blighty just starting their UK sojourn. Exhausting. It’s travel maths, that’s what it is, and I can’t compute.

Now I think of it, when we landed last August things were eerily quiet. It was like Hampstead in summertime but on a huge, huge scale – a mass exodus and the locals all breathing tetchy sighs of relief and enjoying the empty pavements and roads. I am already looking beyond the trip to the flight back here and for the most part I think I’ll be OK about coming back again, if only to sit down after a busy four weeks of catching up. I do wonder if I’ll go through that g-force re-entry all over again, with the same sensations I had last time: homesickness, culture shock, loneliness and that claustrophobic far-away feeling of being stuck way down at the bottom of a long sock like a forgotten Christmas tangerine. I guess we’ll soon see.

….done a season in choir. Joined an Aquafit class. Learned how to switch off the air con. Become expert at switching it back on again secretly. Discovered weight loss is futile. Been to Malaysia, Indonesia, Sentosa (Sentosa is not a foreign country but since you cross water to get to it I like to think it is). Bought running shoes. Started getting up in the dark to use them. Stopped mainlining coffee. Started drinking teh tarik, which is probably worse. Stopped obsessively looking at pictures of the cats. Stopped obsessively counting down to holidays.*

*almost: see you in -37 days, UK, and -14 hours, Tioman