Monthly Archives: April 2017

Special delivery

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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

There will now be a short intermission

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Writer’s block. First time in five years. The bin is full of scrumpled up introductions. That country cannot be put into words, it is just not possible, and since I have been unable to write real or imagined postcards I’ll stick up a few snapshots shortly.

Perhaps the writer’s block is also to do with Mr PC beginning the slow dismantle of the condo in preparation for his next big move, back to the UK and to our new lives.

So the pen is pretty dry this week. Talk amongst yourselves.

New Zealand for starters

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The decision not to christen their children was on balance one of my parents’ better ones, I’ve always thought. I’m grateful that they left it up to my sister and me to decide, even though since a very young age I’ve often found the internal debate too much for my mortal head to take. Most times I’m absolutely sure about my views, other times less so, and on nights like this – hunkered down in a motel room in New Zealand’s Lake Taupo, waiting for a cyclone to hit – I do wonder whether prayer might sometimes come in handy.

Taupo is on North Island, and we are four days into our tour of this uppermost half of NZ, a slow ride from bottom to top compared with the frenzied scamper of the last two weeks around South Island (blog postcards to follow). South was for tourist-trekking whereas North is to be reserved for slow catch-ups with friends and family. We’ve ticked off one cousin so far in Welly (plus his new family and tiny new baby), but thanks to Taupo’s current extreme weather watch I doubt we’ll see the friends that are scheduled to arrive tomorrow. After this it’s meant to be Auckland and one more friend, then on back to Singapore.

Anyway I’ve gone right off the topic, which was Religion, a subject I thought about a lot while touring down South, where Nature gives you a whole different slideshow. Not just daily but several times an hour, it has seemed, amazing sights took our breath away so that even Jonah, lately full of pre-teen angst, couldn’t help but gasp along with us as mountains dropped, peaks gleamed white, fields dipped and turned with unexpected mountain switchbacks, glaciers rumbled and dolphins leapt beneath us out of sparkling deep seas. Earth, Water, Sky splashed across our retinas in a palette of dazzling colours with no space to catch breath before the next snapshot appeared.

“It’s all just so Godly,” I remarked to Mr PC as yet another jaw-dropping vista hove into view on the road coming into Queenstown. And it really is, and that’s coming from a girl who hasn’t ever really had The Lord in her house, but it is the sort of landscape that makes you think about the Origin, the start of things, about prehistorical, jurassic, basic times, and what might have caused those insane angles to work their way onto the edge of mountain roads, to rise up from land to sky, pushing Beauty into your face so that there is simply nothing for it but to allow your senses to take that vertical teeter down the winding switchback trails, splash about in powder blue creek water, stuff mossy air into creaky lungs. If I’m sounding a bit trippy it’s because this country has so far been one massive eyeball festival, tweaking every sense into sharp awareness, an other-worldly, eerie series of days. We might possibly also be a bit tired.

Postcard blog notes will follow, from South Island at least, but they won’t do the place justice. No camera, no description can accurately shape into words just how stunning South Island is. I can’t yet fully comment on the North – having only just got here we’ve spent most of our time cuddling a tiny baby (gorgeous, again), poking around Wellington (gorgeous, again), driving through mossy volcanic deserts (gorgeous, again – I think we can already tell how North Island’s going to be, eh?)

And once the storm’s passed (oh please let it pass) we’ll get out from under the bed and go for a stomp around Taupo, our current spot, and no doubt have more eyeball festivals. Until then I’ll spend the next 24 hours holed up in my head recreating white peaks, mossy passes and stubby sun-shadowed boulders jutting out alongside those empty, empty roads. Hope I can find the words to get those dreams from brain to keyboard.