Since PC ceased posting in 2018, wordfairy.co.uk has taken over. Do pay a visit for any writing, editing or blogging requirements.

I wrote most of this in a local library, the same one in which I did all my A-level revision some 30 years ago. I chose a table in Crime, an appropriate area to sit in since I’d come to the library to escape the chaos of our patio being dug up to make way for our house renovation.

Libraries are serene places of refuge and I can see myself visiting a lot. They’re also good places to work in; when we move into our temporary home for work to be done, I think this library will be my office. After writing this entry I started work on a new blog and edited my CV, a first step in ensuring I don’t spend the rest of my life hanging out in such places.

Of all the things I miss about Singapore, and there are many, work is a big one. I look out for office dresses in warmer fabrics, forgetting that I don’t need them at the moment. I don’t have a business card and I don’t write up events any more and even if I did, who would want to know about the amazing meal I just had? (apart from Mr PC, who always wants to know about amazing meals). You can always network, though, even without a card, and while in the library I drew up a list of all the new women I had met that week at a social I’d attended.

When we lived here before, there was a formidable local ladies’ group, membership of which approximated to work for many of the expat friends I knew. Most knew the group as a settling resource but to me, a Londoner from birth, the club seemed wholly alien, full of dynamic women racing around Doing Things. There was also quite a lot of yoga, something I’ve only lately realised is neither a threat or a social benchmark (just a nice way of stretching, says my new OverseasSelf to my former Londoner).

I wasn’t part of the group but I sieved out a selection who shared my slightly lax approach to mothering. We did ‘Wine Before Pickup’, gathered on Friday afternoons to unlock the patio doors and let the five-year-olds go feral as we ate Kettle Chips around a kitchen table. Most of this crowd had club membership, but I resisted joining. What was the point when I was local to the core, and had enough trouble juggling the friends I already had?

Now I’m the expat outsider, ‘home’ to an alien land and reaching out for new contacts. And so it was that I joined a welcome coffee morning with the club in a nearby pub. Any nerves about attendance were minimised by the thought of my son having to do his own networking every day in a class of strangers, having to ask all over again for directions, and work out who to hang out with at break. In comparison to his tough new schedule, my morning coffee was a breeze.

It was also what I hope will be a positive new start, and I know I’ll soon be exploring my old town with fresh eyes – Singapore behind me and new lands ahead. I had no idea what was in store five years ago and now I’m none the wiser, but trips to the local library and networking groups are just the beginning.

As for Partly Cloudy, a blog about life as an expat family in Asia, it’s probably time to park up and make way for new stories, though it pains me to say it. Thanks to family and friends old and new for the loyalty, encouragement and lovely words in response to mine. It has been so much fun. May the adventures always lead me to your doors.

This little elephant tucked into a red-brick London garden reminded me of the ones in Singapore. Home from home…

A small boy looks out on his strange new habitat, Aug 2012

In Chinese temples you enter via the dragon door and exit through the tiger, having moved in a counterclockwise direction through the building. If I throw a load of pins on a map of the Far East I can’t see a clear counterclockwise route, but I know that we’ve roared through a huge part of that bit of the world, and exited through the best gift shop life could have presented us with. Jonah’s Insta byline trots out that line about leaving with ‘only your memories’ or something and it’s a cliche but a good one for a pre-teen who could just as easily have picked something rubbish – the message is a gift in itself after five years of travels.

I wrote most of this at 32,000 feet, returning to the UK after a counterclockwise trip to Australia. The route home to London made no sense at all in the planning but plenty in reality, leaving at nightime after a fog of tears and alcohol,then heading further away from England to the east of Oz, landiing on wild and sandy Tangalooma Island where we found pelicans, dolphins, whales and the Connors family, who snuffed out any sadness by filling our three beachy days with as much activity as possible. What a great exit plan, I thought, as I slid down a 25-foot sanddune on a piece of chipboard and snorkelled with wobbegongs.

Arriving home after another week of catchups with friends on east and west coasts, two flights, five airline meals, several sky-high glasses of fizz and eight and a half films, and there was Grandpa at Heathrow, then a cab ride from west to north London and suddenly we were back in the room – four years and 11 months after we shut the big black door and heaved our bags into a cab.

That our connecting flight from Perth to Sing to London whipped us through Changi at breakneck speed was a good thing. The farewells of 11 days before had been enough, and our bolt from gates 10 to 4 meant a merciful plaster-rip from there to here. If you bagsy the window seat you can have a little weep as the tankers tilt at funny angles beneath you for the last time – that’s my best tip for leaving Singapore.

Five days on and I’m slowly acclimatising. The weather is making it easy, sunny days on the Heath with friends, and every day a grassy picnic (narrowing my capsule wardrobe by the hour as my waistline widens), and into the diary a nice dotted trail of happy reunions to come, and I can’t wait for all of that. My new sim card is plugged in, I’m wearing boots again (which feel like hooves) having picked up a pair in Australia. I’ve registered a new Oyster card and Jonah’s done a morning at school. But it’s not like we never left, not at all.

The comparable memories of our departure from England are as clear to me as if they happened yesterday. Where were we? There was a birthday party with a garden full of kids. Goodbye to the cats. Crazy Olympic trip with Pa and T. Sobbing on the pavement with Kate. A desperate goodbye to the folks outside 72. Emerging into the neon moonscape of Holland Residences. Discovering delightful Chip Bee Gardens and Holland V. My first swim on Sentosa. Stifling heat both day and night. Birdsong sounding like ringtones. Sharp homesick pangs coupled with an instant love of the palm trees in my neigbourhood hedges.

To say a lot has happened in between times would be an understatement. I am the same and also not the same. Our Sing leaving party was so much like our UK goodbyes (and our wedding, actually) in terms of the balance of people; we seem to pick the same kinds of lovelies to hang out with now just as we always did back then, so I know we are the same in our core, us PartlyCloudies, choosing and being chosen by kind and kindred spirits wherever we are.

And now home (our London home, that is – this will be confusing for some time, I suspect). We came in through the dragon and we left via the tiger, in with a flash of London farewells and out with a similar pop of festive hankie-waving. If we can make the next five years as amazing as the last five, there is a lot to look forward to.

As I finished writing this, London suburbs emerged far below, the Thames winding through suburban outskirts into the corner of my window – a sewed blanket replacing the dotted tankers.

Pastures new. A treasury of friends back there and here. The biggest going home presents we could have hoped for.

On on.

Home, July 2017

As the timer’s counted down, I’ve spent a lot of time whizzing about the city in cabs, most of which are tuned in to Singapore’s bluesy, drowsy retro radio stations. WHY there is this national interest in cheesy schmooze I have no clue, but after five years of golden oldies I now can’t browse the vegetable aisle at Cold Storage without humming along to 10cc, and all those cab rides have allowed me to compile my own Goodbye Playlist. I’d like to thank Gold 905 FM, my running mixtapes and YouTube.

This morning’s mental playlist, in approximate order:

Gun laws and mental health legislation
Singapore laws and clean pavements
The man on the MRT
The wealth of Nassim
The Myanmar embassy
Ceiling fans, exterior and interior
Jason the fan-mender
My artwork, currently bubble-wrapped
Jacky Tsai
Shelving
Shelving and Well Walk
Kitchen linoleum and wooden shutters
Bank accounts
Holidays to Japan
Mount Fuji
Scotland and Glencoe
Cornwall
Christmas
Mum
Family health
Weight loss and knee pain
Play to end

My library card expired. At the same time I knew I was about to start a new research project for the next exhibition at TPM, so I thought I’d renew the card and get ready for some swotting at the same time. I had a load of books to give away so I took them to the public library up at Bishan, being a) a branch that was on my MRT line, b) a branch that has shelves for dropping off old books and picking up new ones, c) somewhere I still hadn’t yet explored.

Bishan was spacious, windy and smelled of lunch, which immediately put me in a bad mood because I’d started the stupid Farce Diet and was feeling the starvation just as I walked past Simply Bread’s croissant-rich air outlet.

A nice lady at the library counter confused me completely by telling me that the card itself had not expired but that I still needed to pay. This she helped me do at a ‘kiosk’ where you press in your card and wait, stamp in some codes, wait, out comes card chip facing up, wait, put card back in chip facing down, wait, slide, wait, tap in more words, buttons go ping, card pops out. Yes, that is why she helped me.

Having dropped off the books and updated my card I did a big smug tick-motion with my arm off the imaginary list and stepped gaily towards the MRT (ignoring mean old Simply Bread very bravely), but the stupid list got all needy again two weeks later, when I got a payment renewal notice by post. So today I popped in to my favourite Singapore library branch, the very central National Library on Victoria Street, partly to challenge my own private vertigo by going up and down in the glass lifts that are stuck to the outside of the building, but partly also to ask, politely, WTFpleaseandthankyou.

So I did that, nicely, and the nice lady (they are all VERY nice at libraries here, please go and see for yourselves) told me that in fact I didn’t need to pay anything until October and that everything was fine. She said that sometimes, just every now and then, they will send you a little note to remind you that at some point, in the future, you will probably need to pay something.

Seriously.

I’m doing a tour tomorrow and I’m always nervous the night before. Then I walk through those pretty double doors of The Peranakan Museum, past the blue eagles (high-flyers, protectors of the elite, just the job for taking care of the schoolboys who once went in and out of the place), and I’m fine.

Guiding aside, I knew there was a reason for me taking that docent-training course last year and it came to me yesterday, on a trip to a dusty junk shop. Tucked down the side of one cavernous room was a low red chest with metal decorations. I loved it, as did my friends, and we spent a long time fondling the gorgeous thing, wondering what it had been used for. Some symbols gave clues as to its story.

For starters, the dresser had bat handles – bats are signs of good luck because the Chinese word for ‘luck’, ‘Fu’, sounds like the word for bat, and very often the bat character is portrayed upside down, emptying its luck out on those below. There were two birds on the front – parrots or maybe pairs of phoenixes, queen of the birds and another emblem for good luck in marriage. There was the colour itself, lucky red – trademark pantone choice for auspicious events. Finally, right on the top, was the giveaway side-by-side symbol for ‘double happiness’. I looked for another chest because if there were two, then… and yes, tucked away deep in the next room was the matching twin: a pair of lucky double happiness wedding chests no doubt given as a wedding present. Douze points and smugface.

Have not gone back to buy them yet. I may have passed the symbolism test but I need to convince Mr PC that my wedding trousseau is still missing something.