I said in my last post that I needed to get back to studying my current location a bit more. That’s paraphrased, it was a long post and it held a lot more depth than that. But all the same, how timely it was that a few days after sending that out into the big beyond, Vesak Day (Buddha’s birthday) came to these shores. I failed again, sadly. I could have got the bum boat back to Pulau Ubin and watched the little temple on that funny mangrove-laced Singaporean relic light up with celebrations, as reported in a fellow blogger’s diary, but instead I went for a run.

Of course nothing here is ‘normal’ for long, and as I crested one of the few hills on that route, I saw an elderly local man running towards me holding a large Olympic-style flame (lit). We exchanged running smiles and carried on. That was the only sign for me that something was going on, apart from the hairdresser being closed and various people making the most of the holiday by leaving the island and the condo falling very quiet.

I still haven’t researched that eerie torch sighting, mainly because odd stuff happens here all the time. To prove the point, a few days before that I had walked under a tree and narrowly avoided being hit on the head by a falling mango (which came down with a huge crack) as did a little lady just in front of me. Neither of us picked it up and took it home, it was quite squashed, in any case I was more interested in jotting down this strange happening than fishing around for a spare plastic bag. The other day I was waiting for the school bus at the condo gate when I saw a girl carrying a huge parrot down the road. As you do. And in January on a daytrip to Sentosa, we saw a woman with a Brahmani kite on her arm. I only ever see those in the zoo or on tropical islands far up in the sky. ‘Exotic’ doesn’t really cut it.

The point is, I really don’t have to do much to experience a feeling of extreme distance from London and all that was previously familiar. It’s all around me, enough material to fill countless iPad Note pages, and I know I won’t have to wait long before the next Weird Thing happens.

For now, I’m going to put the laundry out on the deck as the lightning risk has passed after this morning’s tropical storm. Once that’s done I must find the ant gel and deal with the latest infestation in SM’s bedroom, before checking the cucumber plant out front, which is shooting up faster than anything ever did in our muddy UK window boxes.

#postcardsfromthehedge

‘How are your parents?’ the teacher asked Mr PC, who shot me a wry look, and I know he was suppressing the urge to tell her that one of them was no longer alive, but instead he said: ‘They are fine, thank you.’

‘Are your parents busy?’ she persisted.

‘Yes,’ he lied, ‘they are both very busy.’

‘Are YOUR parents busy?’ she asked me…

…and I looked at her and then at my husband, and it was as if all the words had exploded into the air around us because they were Mandarin words, slanted whooshes and terse ‘s’ sounds, coming out of our pencils with crossed lines and little hats and tiny boxes like miraculous mahjong chips, and all of them now falling slowly around my husband’s head as he sat waiting expectantly for me to reply.

‘Could you just go over it again?’ I asked in English.

I think that out of all the new outfits I have been pulling on in the great changing room that is Singapore, Mandarin might be one of those reserved for the dressing up box.

That’s all folks: Chinese New Year is almost over. We’ve only had one Singapore CNY prior to this but already I know the drill – first, the fairy lights get taken down from outside Cold Storage. They’ve been up for ages – since November, when they went up for Christmas – and they’ve stayed up right through til now. The music in the aisles will return to ‘normal’: bluesy melodies by artists beginning with the letter ‘B’ (Bangles, Beach Boys, Belinda Carlisle). Like the lights, we’ve had festive tunes since November. Disney carols segueing neatly into upbeat renditions of the classic Gong Xi Gong Xi tune piping out from behind the boxes of pineapple tarts. After that it’s all fairly academic: shops take down the red hanging horses (snakes last year), sales come to a sad end, lions stop dancing around shopping malls, receptionists stop putting you on hold and pick up the phone, and there is a definite Return-To-Duties kind of feel about the place.

Chinese New Year is enormous over here and goes on for longer than many other festivals worldwide, with the general theme being about happiness and good fortune, and it does seem to make people genuinely happy. Singapore heralds itself as a city full of overjoyed people, or so we are told via numerous cinema and television adverts – but during New Year it really is. I shall miss the constant well wishes and genuine smiles at every turn; it’s been a real pleasure to witness the excitement at close quarters.

This weekend we saw a big parade that just so happened to begin at the top of our road; we only knew about it thanks to the road closure signs on the lampposts. Just as the first rains of the year fell (someone in charge of climate scheduling needs to look at that for next time) a series of huge floats set off for the city from the top of our street, amidst fire-cracker gun-bursts and the throb of pop tunes booming from the top of an enormous flashing Merlion: truly marvellous stuff. The resulting fog was a lot like the Haze, only happy.

It’s been lovely to have my annual sadness at the end of Western Christmas softened by the upbeat activites of this borrowed Lunar new year party. January* has always been a special month for us, housing the birthdays of our son, our two mothers and my best friend. Now it has another trophy to its display case.

*Or February, depending when the calendar falls. February is now fine, too.

I just walked back home from the shops on my own after dark. It was a completely innocuous experience, if anything I rather enjoyed it. I’ve never been able to say that with such certainty – in fact, in most parts of the developed world the statement is outside of the norm. Don’t we shroud ourselves in psychological armour when we step out of the house after dark? I know I do in London, but not here.

This is one of the best things about living in Singapore and for me it houses an important message. Every carefree step I take after dark, without fear, hammers the point home: that freedom to wander at whatever hour is something we should all be allowed to do: it is OUR RIGHT. Is any city ever really safe, though – hasn’t crime always been part of our lives? In the bubble that is Singapore it’s just not something you see very often.

I’m not saying life is a bowl of cherries out here, we know that sh@t does happen, that it’s not entirely an episode of Trumpton. Now and then you will see a propped up police placard asking for help with a ‘Housebreaking’ matter, or the bizarrely worded ‘Outrage of modesty‘. I’ve heard first-hand accounts of housebreaks, bicycle thefts, bag snatches, one or two sightings of odd blokes, such stories always accompanied by the phrase: low crime is not no crime. I can think of several friends who would be justified in jumping right onto this post and setting the record straight. More than one chatty cab driver has alluded to dark stories that confirm the cops do indeed have a job to do, more than rescuing cats from trees. Once me and SmallMonkey sat next to a nutter on a bus: but in reality he just wanted to chat… Still the rules and codes by which Singapore citizens must abide give the whole place a veneer of peaceful harmony, the bad stuff tucked away seemingly neatly and without fuss.

There’s a patch on my morning run that’s a bit deserted, no bus stops, the nearest HDB block set back from the main road and nothing more than a field of croaking bull frogs chirruping into the night. That’s about as spooky as it gets for me. I don’t want to think about the undercurrents too much, I just want to know what the model is for Singapore’s surface success, then bottle it and take it home.

Lately I’ve been lining up the soft toys on the sofa and talking to them about culture and identity. They listen attentively, sometimes putting up a paw to ask a question that I answer in a flash, eloquently and easily. Sometimes I’ll use the eight-year-old Himself, telling him all I know about Southeast Asian symbolism, about the use of design and motifs in Chinese art, the passage of trade from ancient China down the Straits of Malacca and the difference between Jawa and Chitti Peranakans. By this coming Tuesday I will be able to tell him all I know about Buddhism. Sometimes he escapes through the patio doors and then I bring back the stuffed toys and continue on. Sometimes I just talk to myself.

On early morning jogs I discuss heritage with the cracks in the pavement, on the bus into town I have heated debates with my reflection in the window about exactly who lived in the place we now call Singapore before the traders all piled in (I mean the olden day traders, although we could translate this topic to current events). I can’t go past a picture in someone’s house without imagining how I would tell everyone in the room all about it, though I haven’t yet caught myself doing that out loud.

Such is life as a trainee ‘docent’ (museum guide), where every waking minute is infused with thoughts on how I might show someone around a museum, tell someone a story. Every Tuesday and Friday I can be found in the lecture halls at either the Peranakan or Asian Civilisation Museum, chewing a pencil and putting up my hand to out-clever the person next to me. I have been brave with a capital B. I did my first talk on the word ‘Phoenix’ and didn’t stutter once (albeit in front of only eight people, but still), and I did such great background research that when they sprung on us the fact that the talk would be ‘in situ’, I had already visited that very ‘situ’ the day before, thankyouverymuch, so I did all my pointing and nodding like a professional and really looked the part, or so they told me. Take that, tour group leaders. Yeah, I’m on it.

It’s bloomin’ hard work though. There’s chapters to read, tours to go on, notes to transcribe, talks to prepare and give (gulp), and those talks will get longer and longer, building up to an hour long by the time we hit Christmas, apparently. Plus there’s the simple business of getting my brain to look and listen like it hasn’t looked and listened in a very long time. The skills I’m absorbing on this three-month course will one day be turned into talks that I will give to fascinated tourists as they follow my elegant figure through the gallery rooms, listening with respect as I recount such interesting tales that they line up at the end for more, writing in the visitors book: she was AMAZING.

That’s what they tell me, anyway. Watch this [exhibition] space.

(til I came out here):

1 Pau for lunch again?

2 Don’t leave your flip-flops on the deck, they’ll melt

3 The man is coming to fix the Jacuzzi tomorrow

4 Please stop kicking the football into the sea

5 Yes I’ll do that 5k with you

6 I couldn’t eat another dim sum*

7 Go and get the football out of the swimming pool RIGHT NOW

8 What a fuss, it’s only a gecko, here, let me get it

9 Shall we just stay home this half term?

10 Them: ‘Have you been in Southeast Asia long?’ Me: ‘A year’

*Actually I don’t ever say that but wouldn’t it be funny if I did?

I won’t do a rain dance, I won’t, I won’t. I’ve waited TEN LONG MONTHS for the famed ‘dry breezy’ season to get here and what happens? WHAT HAPPENS? A huge great bonfire, that’s what, smoke from Indonesian land-clearing wafting over our picket fence and tampering with our laundry. We need clouds and rain to put it out and measures are being put in place, with talk of an elegantly named process known as “cloud seeding“. Sounds romantic but it’s actually very necessary because the haze (a mild term that really doesn’t do justice to the grey menace hanging over this town) is very bad this time round, but to pray for rain: really? Rain, my old enemy, my nemesis and one of the main reasons for my hesitation in moving here (because surely going from one rainy country to another was just bonkers?).

Yet here I am checking the skies and crossing my fingers. I can’t see much up there, mind you, it is all white with a hint of yellowy brown. The sunrise over the last two days has had an odd sunset flavour; twilight segues into night much more gradually than the usual light/dark plummet; at lunchtime when the PSI reached an all-time peak I honestly couldn’t  see the buildings at the very end of our road. Now I know what ‘acrid’ means; now I know, having had mild asthma-type twinges for the last few years, what it is like to have a properly tight chest, to find proper relief from those little blue puffers I’ve had rattling in my handbag for years. The local pharmacies have run out of the coveted N95 masks (you can’t just stick a paper mask on, it could actually make things more uncomfortable), my eyes are itchy and I’ve had a sore throat for the last two days, but enough about me. If it’s like this for us I hate to think what it’s like over there, not to mention how the wildlife is coping: orangs and birds who have escaped the tree-felling will now be living in a toxic haze.

So a prayer for rain it is, then, for the remaining six days before we fly back to another kind of rain, the cold, UK kind. As SmallMonkey has been pulled from school this week, with threats of further closure hanging over next week, I will be stocking up on hip flasks as well as n95 masks (when I can find them).

I love the way Singapore allows you to return to things, unconsciously and easily. When Dad was here we did the park connectors walk, which both of us loved. It was a special day, the one with our first golden oriole and first snake (a pale green wiggly tree snake in Hort Park) and I know he will remember it with pleasure, as I do. Coming down to a stretch of main road we noticed some black and whites off to one side of the bridge, high up on a little lane partially hidden by greenery. We wondered who might live there, had a little chat about the history of these beautiful houses, remarked on what a great spot it was and continued on.

Fast forward two months and I’m following up a call to collect a barbecue cover that goes with the Weber I have just bought from a woman online. She would like me to pick it up this week, she is moving house. I look up the road: I can make the visit on Tuesday morning, fitting it in between lots of other small chores in other places I haven’t been to yet, and I set off with my favourite app and am soon hopping off a bus and thumbing the phone map, head down, focusing on the four square foot immediately in front of me until before too long I’m trudging up a leafy side road full of black and whites and realising…

Here’s a photo from the other side, Dad:

Pretty tiles at the entrance to the Singapore Art Museum

I’ve been gallery going, partly to shake off a spot of homesickness and partly because I felt I owed it to the city that is temporarily housing me to do some research. I threw in some art for good measure and have managed to get three recent visits under my belt, one of which I did with Dad and two just on my own. It was definitely more fun with Dad but I do find that being alone allows you to lose yourself entirely if you so wish, or to get out quick if it’s rubbish. The following list must be added to and expanded if I am to make any sense of the place that I currently call home.

Peranakan Museum, Armenian Street

I had high hopes for this one, which was was nicely laid out in a proper old schoolhouse down an arty street, but it didn’t quite do it for me. Telling the history of the bubbling social melting pot that is Peranakan culture in Singapore, the museum uses stories to discuss what the term ‘Peranakan’ means. In a pub quiz I now think I could do it: the term describes the descendants of Chinese and Indian immigrants to Malaysia and Singapore, is it? The fact that I’m still not sure perhaps indicates a need for clearer slides next to the photos. Either that or I wasn’t concentrating.

Most rooms offer simple examples of family trees that weave in and out of neighbouring countries and cultures and the room that starts you off has photos of modern-day Peranakans all around the walls, with a quote under each one. This was a nice intro but would have been a great chance to really explore how each family collaboration occurred and to dig about beneath the roots of each family tree. Instead we have simple items under glass (a cloak here, a wedding tiara there), single signposts towards the blend of cultures that has formed Singapore, but the descriptions are only surface. More details please.

The exhibition is slightly uneven, with an entire floor dedicated to weddings and a funeral room with a wailing soundtrack that could have been shared with last year’s Harry Potter exhibition down at the Arts & Science Museum. I will go back for another look because I really do want to crack this subject, but I might take some earplugs.

Singapore Art Museum, Queen Street

I went to art college for four years and I’ve always been a bit sad that I never got on well. I wasn’t very good at it and didn’t much like going to art shows and it’s put me off, on the whole. This place, though: what a find. I loved the building and I loved the current show, President’s Young Talents – doing just what it said on the tin and showing off rising stars.

You can never really tell, with modern art, how seriously you are meant to take things. Should you nod sagely, squint-eyed, or can you just shrug things off and head next door if you don’t like it? Such is the beauty of lone visits: do what you want. So it was that I stared for hours at the flock of birds drifting up into the air from a line of Chinese text on the floor; giggled at the emergency box that asks you to break the glass if you have a ‘good idea’; peered hard at a room full of would-be pop art before doing an about-turn (not on my wall, mate). Another beauty of an old building, peaceful and cool, and a team of helpful, happy staff. I’ll be back here too.

Asian Civilisations Museum, Empress Place

This is the winning entry so far, just along from the Fullerton Hotel. Up the grand staircase and to the left is a little set of rooms that houses the ‘Singapore River’ exhibition, and here I was lost in pages of books and little wooden cases showing snippets of colour and noise from the short river that gave Singapore its long story. This is a compelling and gentle start to an amazing collection of artefacts, and I need to go back because an hour and a half in and I’d still only been down the river and back, let alone crossed the border to other countries in the main rooms of the museum. I’ll have to give it at least a day next time because there was so obviously a huge amount more to see.

Singapore houses its art so well and just hanging out in these places is a treat. Watch this space: I could get quite cultured.

I don’t think there’s anyone in this town that allows their body hair to grow, you know, naturally. It’s a delicate topic, personal hygiene, but out here we discuss it freely. It is as mandatory as having a visa, this waxing lark: land at airport, show passport, book wax package (Singapore loves a good package, where you buy an amount of something and get one free plus some other handy treat, in this case, for me, a free facial once the beard has gone. I jest about the beard).

Us girls probably all waxed at home from a young age, wherever we grew up – razored the pits cautiously as teens, de-fuzzed with that awful-smelling cream the night before the school disco. Not many wildebeests left in this world, are there? And male wildebeests do it too, oh yes they do, plenty of them known to me personally. But out here it’s a proper sport, a real talking point, I suppose because there is good reason for being as smooth and as hairless as you can be – it’s hot, it’s sweaty, we stuff ourselves into swimsuits a lot and no one wears very much in the way of clothing, so the process of hair removal is more pressing and everyone has their own personal method of getting it off, from expensive laser treatments booked through a Groupon deal to the self-inflicted tazering of the thighs with one of those little hand-held electric nippers, or via the more routine salon visit, back room towel-covered benches discovered by going on forums or chatting over coffee.

We love or loathe these places and everyone has a hairy story: mine involves accidentally ending up in a very popular boutique chain where I was led into a dark back room, told to take EVERYTHING off and… well there were plastic pants involved, wet wipes and a carefully angled spotlight, and a woman with a mask who asked me where I was going on my holidays. It wasn’t what I asked for but I couldn’t go back and complain, I’m far too British and in any case, I decided, there wasn’t an awful lot they could have done. I declined the package.

Anyway, we’ve all got a story and we pass on the details helpfully and discuss the subject endlessly (yes we do, you do it too, don’t pretend you don’t – well if you don’t do it out loud then don’t tell me you don’t at least think about it a lot), and the main question that arises is exactly how bare we all dare to go.

Very often these days there is the assumption that you will want it all off, and I’m not just talking about expat living, it happens at home too. A journalist friend of mine in the UK covered this very topic for her newspaper recently, drawing huge interest and even a spot of protest, in all sorts of directions. It’s a right old hot topic, this whapping off of every last follicle, and we talk about it openly and long may that last because it’s, well, interesting, actually. Conversations become much more personal much faster out here, and I am getting quite comfortable with the scenario of meeting someone one minute and sharing intimate stories the next; I’ve long since stopped spitting out my tea.

My own bad-wax story is one of my favourites but I’m more likely to give it an airing out here, happy to discuss the bad waxing times and the good ones and the ones where I’ve held up my hand to physically outline in the air what I want and the ones where… well, we seem to have run out of coffee.