“It must be surreal for you,” wrote a friend in a recent email, “spending Christmas out there in the tropics.”

“Not really,” I replied, “this is the fourth year running that we’ve had a hot one.”

That’s odd, chimed in one of my many internal voices (the one in the elf suit). For a homebird like you who, apart from the last four years, has only spent a few Christmases away from Cornwall (London, Marlow and once, randomly, Portugal) – that is a very odd statement indeed.

He had a point, my elf-voice. Our Christmases were always spent in Cornwall at the cottage, where the only other location decision we had to make was whether to spend it with one set of grandparents on the south coast, or with the other set on the north and then in whose house. Stockings were dragged into Mum and Dad’s bed, and then we’d meet with cousins for the big lunch.

We kids always had to wait until after the meal to open the big presents under the tree (yawn). The youngest child was postman, and went around the room lobbing gifts onto people’s laps, often without really reading the label, so that Granny was often in danger of unwrapping a wrench set or HMV voucher. Sometimes we’d play a game. We always watched a Christmas film. There was always Quality Street, and we always had a walk on the beach at some point. Our best set of crackers was bought by Mum and contained frilly knickers; there’s a photo of me, my sister, cousin and aunt having a race to jump into the pants over our tights: good, clean family fun. We always had a banquet, and I would count the separate dishes: turkey or goose, a big juicy ham, sausages tucked up in bacon, both mash and roasties, parsnips, sprouts, peas and carrots, swede (not the pop group, the vegetable), two types of gravy, a nut roast, stuffing, cranberry sauce and bread sauce, then Christmas pud, Christmas cake and mince pies. Sausage rolls, often, for later on. We had an adults’ and a kids’ table: Schloer for us, bubbles for them. I can smell the log fires crackling. Yep, I suppose in my heart Christmas will always be about Cornwall.

Yet here I am again in the tropics, and as I just don’t seem to be able to get myself back to the UK for the festivities these days, I adopt a tropical enthusiasm for Dec 25 and I’m perfectly fine about dollops of melting whipped cream on the mince pies, Santa hat selfies on white beaches and ice cool beer replacing mulled wine (although I do still stubbornly make my mulled wine, and why ever not). Doesn’t really sound too bad, does it?

What matters most is who we spend the day with, and for me there should always be either a crowd or family – preferably both, but I’ll take them separately if I have to. This year we’ve a small group, just the three PCs and my sister, who is sledding into Changi just in time for lunch on the big day. Our Dads won’t be there but they’ve both got the next trips already in their sights, and just knowing that makes it OK. I’ve already got the crackers and Quality Street; we’re ready.

May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be spent just how and where you want them.

Mum’s popped up again. I don’t write about her much, in the same way that I don’t talk about my breakfasts or my shoe size, but she appears now and then as I may have mentioned briefly before. Like I said, it’s never in a haunting way – she’s not in the wardrobe or sitting next to me on the bus. In a weird reflection of the real-life Mum, our meetings are ad-hoc and surprisingly intense. Last month, having not swung by for ages, she was suddenly filtering down through my self-tour headphones at the Changi War Museum, making me sit on a bench to catch my breath with the immediacy of her arrival. As emotional as that museum was, I’m not sure the sudden sensation of her presence (or memory of her, whatever you want to call it) was entirely down to the harrowing prisoner stories and sad sepia photos. I reckon it was because of the beautiful hymns being sung into my ears – although she was by no means madly religious, Mum loved a hymn or two, and that’s for sure what caused her to pop up then. Well, she’s back again, and this time I blame the carols – and the baubles.

Mum had an interesting approach to Christmas. With her it began in August, and an out-of-the-cornflower-blue-sky email to each family member asking where we thought we might be many miles ahead, on Dec 25. We would then all be required to engage in a series of slightly bad-tempered messages until we ended up in Cornwall, or London, or wherever, and then there’d be nothing, nothing at all, in fact if you mentioned it again she’d sound harassed.

As with most people it would be about now, mid to late November, that my sister and I would begin to email each other again about the festivities. We would share lists, float ideas, place Amazon orders, email the folks and the cousins and get the whole thing going. With carols in the shops and the first light flurry of party bookings falling onto our diaries, the mighty cogs of Christmas would start to turn.

What about Mum? Stuck in the office, glued to the phone, totally ignoring the jolly hollies in an effort to shove the latest deadline out of the way.

Then the Amazon orders would start to arrive and my sister and I would confirm what we’d got, and add to or subtract from our lists, and while we were at it we’d put in some last-minute warnings about being overhung on this, or this, or this date.

Mum? Off to Bognor to meet a man about a statue, then tea with the girls the next day, a PMSA meeting or two, all the while doggedly dealing with the same tortuous deadline.

First person to mention the C word, last one to do anything about it, Mum always managed to somehow be utterly late to the party yet was still one of the best gift-buyers I’ve ever known. The choices were at times random, unusual, but almost always spot-on, an impressive fact when you knew that she did absolutely all her shopping at breakneck speed somewhere between the 20 and 23 of December. When all our gifts were serenely wrapped, stacked and ready to go, we’d get a bossy email fired into the inbox, lit up with a red ‘URGENT’ flag, full of bold text, shouty underlines and panicky jokes. There’d be far-out ideas for Dad that we’d already nixed several weeks before during a rushed cup of tea. There’d be a blindingly clever way of doing absolutely all of the cousins’ kids, late but perfect ideas for close friends and other rellies, and at the same time she and Dad would rattle off 142 Christmas cards, machine-gunned through every letter-box on the block at the speed of light, while attending roughly three drinks parties a day in that last crazy festive week.

Usually on around 23 December the hire car would heave onto the M40 and limp towards Cornwall, where the gifts would be dragged through the inky rain into the upstairs bedroom until the next night, when wrapping would finally commence in earnest with a glass of something strong at about 7pm on Christmas Eve. At least one present a year was left in London. A little something for later on, we’d all agree, kindly.

Back to now, and another Christmas in the tropics. Orchard Road lights are pink this year, with glorious unicorns and strange pyramids stacking slightly athletic Santas under puce stars swinging in the warm rain. It’s a confectioner’s dream, with absolutely no link to the baby Jesus or any little donkeys, pine trees or puddings, and Mum would have absolutely loved it all, especially the huge golden hanging globes. Every year part of her amazing speed-of-light shopping would include a new bauble for each family member: beautiful glass creations, hand-blown and webbed with delicate colours in just the right shade for each of us. How she picked them all out in time, got them so beautifully right, I’ll never know.

Nowadays, I do the same for her. This year’s choice is a little hanging horse for the lunar zodiac, made by hand-knitted Cambodians, purple with pretty silver detail.

Photo of pink unicorn by TheThompsons

Merry baubles, Mum. Hope you like it.

Two little words that take me right back. Flashes of daffodils in the damp Lake District and Kendal Mint Cake for Mum and Dad. Dorset bunk rooms and a bar of fudge for sister, best friend. Postcards sweetly sent from home waiting for me on the post table in the dining room and those long, long nights. How I hated school trips.

Of course we try hard not to pass down our insecurities, don’t we, and so it was that when SM came home with news of a school trip, some three days after the start of his term, I replied only in the positive, careful to give an impression of excitement, not gloom. Wary about putting too mad a spin on things I spoke to him evenly and with interest about The Trip, allowing him to come to me with news and updates and letting him draw the subject out, just as someone once told me you’re meant to deal with sex education: “Answer only the question asked, then any forthcoming questions – never lead the discussion.” That’s what I did and it seemed to work because he reached a point where he was almost – almost – excited about going.

But Tuesday arrived, mean old thing, a bleak and very early morning, and no matter how consistently positive I had been poor SM was as introverted as I’d hoped he wouldn’t be. He sat in the back of the cab quiet and clenched, hot paw curled tightly into mine as we shot far too fast through the dark morning, all the traffic lights horribly green.

“Bye then,” he told me in the busy school hall, hating fuss, wanting to blend, turning his back dismally and shuffling off to stand with his friends, quietly ready for the sign-up, the coach, the ferry taking them all off to their Indonesian adventure. Dismissed, I paced three times around the entrance doorway then found a cab, and cried the whole way home.

It wasn’t all bad. For the next week I kept busy, making the most of the peace and quiet. I bought some gifts and a dress, saw two films with Mr PC, had one night out with the girls, spent four mornings at the museum and crossed a shed-load of chores off the list. Mornings were worst and last thing at night, and by the time Friday arrived I was two hours early for the ferry, jostling for a spot with all the other giddy parents, and when the glass Arrivals doors slid open the beginnings of a giant hoot went up.

Like air squeaking out of a failed balloon, we piped down as we caught sight of the first boatload trudging across the concourse towards us. Soldiers returning from war, pale-faced, big-eyed and pulling their bulging cases along, they herded patiently into class packs and waited for us to pluck them out one by one. Teachers looked shell-shocked, sand-sore. More than a few beers would have gone down that night, and well earned. SM caught my crazy waving figure in the crowd and turned his eyes to the sky, whispered something to his best mate and shoved his hat down over his face. Home, then.

In many ways I think you could call that a successful outcome. Rather this new teenage specimen buddying up in public than a frantic skid across the marble floors into my arms. He opted to sleep at a friend’s on his second night back, which was another plus point as I knew that the trip – with all its scary high-wires, exhausting kayak adventures, and older boy scares – hadn’t put him off nights away from home.

As for Mint Cake, SM came back with a pretty batik phone-holder and wooden bracelet, both for me, and a vicious case of Bintan Belly for him. I’ve yet to get a proper update but I think I’m actually a little bit jealous when you compare it to 1980s coach trips to the Lakes.

Aunty Rosy is here, visiting for the long weekend from Ipoh. Yay! Positives are too numerous to list and we are, as always, thrilled that she is here.

Negatives? Well there is this strange business of having to be told, every time, that you have put on weight. In effect, that you are fat. She’s candid like that.

I can’t wait to be 74. I might comment on nose shape too. And bad breath.

Bring it.

Dad has been and gone. So precious are those days that there’s no room for writing, no time for anything but bug-foraging, story-telling, island-exploring and plenty of tea drinking while we talk. How I miss those talks, and him.

When Dad comes out there’s not a minute to lose, we want to show him everything: one day we’re getting a $2 bumboat ride to Pulau Ubin with a group of spotty evangelists; next day we’re in a private air-con car humming towards the border with silky tunes oozing from the wipe-clean dash. Another time we’re picking through the Botanic Gardens looking for touch-me-not ferns; next we’re pounding hot concrete in a playpark, watching SmallMonkey dangle from the bars. I take a museum tour, and Dad is in the background as I recite heritage facts to my small and willing group; they nod, and follow me to the next cabinet. Dad’s proud and I’m a bit proud too. But he’s independent and chatty, and quite able to chalk up his own encounters – like the ones with the Man Who Made Kites and the Leafblower In The Woods, both of whom gave him their own impromptu history lessons that were of more value than any hour-long schlep around a gallery.

There’s a different flavour every day: we borrow other peoples’ clubs (British, Tanglin), throwing SM into Olympic-sized pools while we sip coffee on the side. We go up the East Coast to crack chilli crab in a seafood restaurant that once did actually stand by the sea. Then it’s Indian curry at the local hawker, western soup in an MRT mall, pork pau picnics with hairy yam balls, roti canai, cendol, rendang, even a bit of German sausage for good measure: the food supply is relentless, bountiful. We scale the Pinnacles, swim with tankers, host an Easter barbecue, do an egg hunt, go to school by bus, come back by cab, sit it out at endless soccer sessions, do the Night Safari. We drop Dad off at parks and shops and for the odd meeting in town, and each time we enjoy the stories of how he gets back home again. We break for the border twice and escape to Malaysia, east coast first, then west: real sand beneath our feet, durian scents wafting up from the drains: aaahhh.

Exhausted? Yes, he probably was by the end, but only as much as the next person. At least two total strangers commented, in that candid local way, about how they couldn’t believe that he was my father. Yeah, I’m still not sure how to take that.

Last year we were needy, getting over the shell-shock of the move. Another year down the expat timeline we’re nicely bedded in – confident, casual tour leaders trying to show as much as we can, possibly showing off a little, and it’s all effortlessly enjoyable. SM in particular benefited from those days with Grandpa, from the shared cabins on the beach, bonding moments on double bus seats, swapping stories from opposite ends of the growth charts. With newfound confidence, though, often comes a lack of attention to detail. When we paused to consider how a newcomer might view things, we realized that we’d forgotten quite how bonkers Singapore could be for beginners.

Dad’s a grown-up so he can cope just fine. He’s a teacher and philosopher, though, with a special interest in the cultural ramifications of children who move around the globe, so he wants to know stuff. First off, to have one of his kids living out the finer details of just what he talks and writes about must be fascinating. We were expats before of course, in the 70s when we lived in Baltimore for a year with Dad teaching science in one school and us girls hopping on the big yellow bus to the nearby elementary. But our expat existence was not remotely like the one we are living now. We went out on a wing and a prayer, bringing as much bank trouble as we had optimism. We were frugal, local, immersed ourselves in the community, wore halter necks and denims, ate Hostess Twinkies and drank Grape Kool Aid in a tent in the back yard with the neighbours’ kids, went walking in the rain and the snow to suitable soundtracks, hosed each other down in summer. There were no members’ clubs to borrow, no handy blue cabs, and the most exotic thing was to try out the new ‘Bubble Yum’ flavor ice cream at Baskin Robbins.

So this shiny new life of mine, it turns out, is a petri dish of some peculiarity for Dad. ‘Didn’t you work in international schools for 40+ years?’ I ask him, but I know it’s different on the other side of the desk: studying a pattern is one thing, living the dream is quite another. Eventually, somewhere around the middle of Dad’s trip, questions began to arise. Some were factual, and could be answered by a quick Google (Q: what is the population of Singapore? A: 5.6m). Some had physical solutions (Q: where and what are HDBs? A: pointing from bus: there, there and there). Some, I’m afraid, just couldn’t be answered at all (Q: where do you see yourself in 10 years? A:…)

There were lots of subjects that weren’t actually questions but still begged answers: long restaurant bills, lavish living rooms, sparkling swimming pools, tropical trips for kids who don’t know they’re born, chores taken care of without request, malls and malls with endless possibilities for those with the wallet and the time – and those who don’t have either of those things were very politely not spoken of, which in itself gave rise to many other questions to do with social demographics and cultural comparisons. Finally, on top of all that, there was a layer of personal posers that I might have given slightly defensive responses to in sheer frustration of not knowing the appropriate answers – or perhaps choosing not to know. Eventually I stopped trying to answer anything at all.

We got a lot of information from cab drivers, some of it very real and some quite possibly the result of 16 hours on the road. Towards the end of the trip I introduced Dad to a local friend, also with a background in education and also a fan of philosophy, and he gave Dad more knowledge in two-and-a-half hours than I had in two-and-a-half weeks. What you don’t need an expert to tell you is that Singapore is an ongoing project with hazy origins and blurred lines, and just as you’ve got to grips with a concept you need to stand back as the building that housed it comes down and a new one goes up.

I wish I could have been more helpful; I am left wondering if there’s a way of catching up. I feel like I have missed an entire chapter of revision and, to make matters worse, then turned up to the exam a day late. Like I’ve been caught watching telly when I should have been doing my homework. I tried to answer what I could because it wasn’t enough to glibly say: ‘Oh have another mai tai’. Most of the time, you see (OK, all of the time) this was exactly Dad’s point.

Funny, isn’t it? I thought I had come so far, but in settling down there’s a lot that gets left behind, because you just can’t take it all with you. A good method for battling homesickness is to employ the vertigo technique of not looking down, concentrating only on looking up and out, which is what I spent most of last year doing. I can explain to people that in order to adapt I have most likely changed a bit – but in doing so I must accept that what is now normal to me might not be so normal to them. I now realize that I’ve left a Mrs PC-shaped cocoon back in London, into which I probably won’t ever fit again, and not just because of the pork pau.

I can’t remember who it was that told me how her parents don’t ever come out because ‘they think we have moved to the moon, that it’s all bamboo huts and jungle.’ In many ways this is just the sort of woody, chaotic scenario that people who don’t like Singapore’s sleek chrome lines would much rather come to. If you’re planning a trip out to see us, then (and not many can do the trip, granted, but just for the record), you might as well be warned right now that many things in our life are new and shiny, and a lot of them have a western tang because this is Singapore, a teenager of a country still playing with its brand new iPad. Much is very similar to our old life in terms of what we do at weekends, with a few climate- and culture-based exceptions. In fact we don’t always eat with chopsticks, we embrace Sentosa for the splashy fun park that it is, ignoring the fact that this is where Singapore fell to the Japanese in WWII. We joke that our deck is looking ‘old’, having been completed in early 2012, and we’re seemingly oblivious to the island-wide construction that never stops, not even on Sundays. We might get a month of smog or a mini drought but we continue to drink the water and spray it all over our gardens, filling up our swimming pools regardless.

Thanks to Dad’s visit I now know I have a long way to go in terms of catching up with those expat notes I was frantically scribbling last year. What happened to sticking a pin in the map once a week? I’ve passed one test but what about the others? I take my own Peranakan tours confident in the route with my bullet points refreshed in advance by a quick spin round the rooms, but I have to admit that I’m quietly still unsure as to what ‘Peranakan‘ really means. An expert once told me that our son is Peranakan because of his paternal/maternal lineage. I look at him sometimes and I think: if he’s Peranakan then I might as well be Bedouin. But like everything else that’s happening here, I must take it all at face value – and keep on looking up and out.

With Dad back home, the questions have stopped and life is quiet and, frankly, rather empty, and possibly not entirely right for us since he fits in so very well to our family unit. No matter, SmallMonkey reminded me in a rare pragmatic moment during the cab ride back from the dreaded airport drop that Grandpa must return to what he does and we must do the same, and that before long we will be back for our summer break doing jungle-treks on the Heath. He’s got a good point. For now I’ll carry on ‘trekking’ through napkin-sized corners of untouched land out here, following SM round the back of the condo as he pretends to be an explorer, and all the time I’ll try and take notes that might be of some value further down the line. And perhaps when we’re back in London this summer, standing in the deli queue to buy our Heath picnics, I might take a fresh look at my surroundings, remind myself who I am and where I’m from. It will probably be the M&S deli queue that I’m standing in, but at least it’ll be a start.

There are times when you just can’t help but give in to a little bit of Smugness. Sorry not sorry for relaying the following event from last week:

It’s Saturday and we’re in a posh piano shop in downtown Singapore, where several models of Yamaha stand around waiting to be played by small sticky fingered customers. I say ‘played’: crowds of over-hyped kids are racing around bashing out off-key octaves on an array of poor unsuspecting keyboards. I’m guessing only the oldest back-room pianos have been put out for sledgehammer hands to wallop.
SM – at first annoyed to find himself in yet another chore-shop – is delighted that he can flutter between the keyboards like a bee in a honeyfield, while I wait at the counter for someone to help me buy what his piano teacher has requested.
It’s a proper din in there though, a right old racket, and I don’t know how the assistants assist, it’s like a scene from one of those 1970s Mad comics. But after a while I hear a clear warble float from the scrum, a crystal bell above the din. I realise these are little passages from the pieces SM is currently practising at home.
I try and spot him amidst the melee and there he is, settling down on a piano stool to play in earnest. I’m glad I don’t have to drag him away, he’s loving it and no one seems to mind. In fact after a while SM has drawn a few onlookers, just a modest handful. I hope he doesn’t notice and stop because he’s playing better than he ever does at home.
Then I’m distracted by a headache-riven assistant who is finally free to deal with me and I get into discussion about what I need. In the time it takes me to ask my question SM has returned, face cloudy and turned down, pressing himself close to my side. He whispers out of the side of his mouth: ‘why was everyone watching me?’
As I type this I can hear him getting a simple scale wrong again and again. But hey, you take your PMMs when you can.
First public concert, SM, and you didn’t even know it. Nice one.