The last six months has been split into countdowns. It has been inevitable and I’m not sure how I could have prevented it. In rough order we have had: departure, arrival, school, half term, Christmas, sister, New Year, Lunar New Year and now Easter. With Easter comes Dad and with Dad comes another injection of home and it’s naughty to look forward to that and it’s cheating, in a way, but I can’t help it. I wish I could just take the days as they come but the stepping-stones keep getting thrown down and to veer off the emotional path just hasn’t seemed worth it. So I’m counting down for Dad’s arrival and it is addictive.

I’m in Cold Storage and I want to show him the seaweed crackers. I’m on the bus coming back from school and I want him to see the fairy lights at the corner of Holland Avenue. In my mall there are some exotic frocks that I know Mum would have loved – I want to show him those, don’t know why. Today a bus took me past miles and miles of big bushy trees and there was a glimpse of reservoir: there are monkeys in there and snakes, I want to tell him. I can see him nodding, giving me an excited shoulder-nudge. I want to subject him to a school assembly, ask him to check the plants outside the spare room and tell me what they are, get caught in a storm with him, ask if he can hear the crickets at night, see if he can catch the gecko in the kitchen, watch him watching SmallMonkey skateboard, sit with him at a bus stop in the heat, hear him talk to the funny stubby cats down our road, cool off with him over a beer at my favourite outside bar. Don’t even get me started on the dumplings and stir-fries I have already ordered.

There are just under five weeks between now and then and in that time I have another much-wanted guest to stay, nice nights out, several gym-things, the sameoldsameold book to chip away at, all that. Hopefully the sun will come out at some point so I can lie beneath it; my nails could do with another session. I should be trying to find work, planning our Easter Borneo trip, organising a school coffee morning, trying to find more work, exploring – I should take a bus to the end of the island and back, book a daytrip to Ubin. I should be setting up those Mandarin classes that by now we thought we’d be halfway through.

In fact I know that the most important thing I should be doing, starting from today, is to simply enjoy every single one of these things for what they are, as and when they happen, because otherwise this whole life-switch-experiment of ours is going to dissolve into a big blob of wishing and dreaming and then the carriage will revert back to a pumpkin and I’ll be back in the room and wishing from another point of view entirely.

Let me just take one more peek at the calendar…

Or ‘things you notice when you stop complaining’

1 There is a swimming pool right outside my window. A proper one, good for lengths and everything, blue and clean with loungers, a ladder and a life ring. I’m still not jumping in it every day but it’s there.

2 January birthdays can be sunny. SmallMonkey turns eight next week, and back in the UK around about this time of year I would be booking an indoor hall, flicking on the neon strip lights and cranky heater, hauling coats into a pile and mopping up the muddy boot tracks afterwards. This year the dress code is minimal: all the kids need is a swimsuit and sunscreen. Yay!

3 Aquafit could be fun. Odd concept I know but I’ve always secretly wanted to do this, just couldn’t bear the thought of heaving myself from a stuffy changing room into an overheated indoor pool like a hippo. Lessons begin next week at a friend’s condo: splashing about outside with just a small dress to change into afterwards (well it will be small when I’m done) after a nice little stretch in the sun. It’s an hour of sunbathing, frankly, isn’t it? How fun is that?

4 I feel safe. Of course I touch wood when I say this, but I think nothing here of beetling about on my own after dark. I already know that on our return to the UK I will keep a big stash of cash for cabs, sorry Mr PartlyCloudy, because I aint doing that tense late-night Tube thing any more, not if I can get away with it. Out here you can drift on and off trains and buses any time of day or night, feeling fine. I’ve seen a few crowds of shouty kids but that’s all, and even then they’ve just been skaters on a sugar high. Journeys at night in Singsong are bliss for the lone woman traveller and rightfully so. World, take note.

5 We live under big skies. You don’t always notice this here. Cloudy skies, often, scary skies when lightning strikes. But with the monsoon on its way out the curtains have been pulled back and I can see how tall our tropical sky is. Skies make all the difference to a person’s mood. I have been whining about ours since October (although that makes a change from whining about them 12 months of the year back in the UK). Just recently, though, the rainy patches have been just that, patches, and the sky’s turned blue and the sun is so strong that we are bent over beneath it. Bliss if you like that kind of thing, as I do.

6 You will never go hungry in this town. Not a chance. Every mall has a food court, in addition to all the restaurants. You can’t help but eat*, it is impossible to avoid. Hurray!

7 It’s all good. A bit of a platitude, this one, but worth a grudging mention. Even when things are bad, my family will have something valuable to stick in the virtual album. Catch me grizzling in a corner and offer me tickets back home for good and I will decline, preferring instead to take our allocated amount of time here to its conclusion, thanks, because who knows when we’ll get the chance again? And there are so many pork buns* still to consume…

* See point three for follow-up care

In my four months on this island I have trudged a chalked out circle that roughly encompasses Bukit Timah to the north, Esplanade to the east, Sentosa to the south and Chinese Gardens to the west. This is a fairly typical expat pattern, and every now and then I poke a toe through the invisible bubble and have an adventure. Today I did this and fell in love.

I had a meeting in the top floor of an old shophouse on Amoy Street, a narrow road full of old shophouses. I had arrived by MRT, head in a book the whole way, and when I popped out at the steaming station entrance I braced myself for the usual map-jabbing phone nonsense but it was an easy place to find, and that was the first of many lovely things about the day. The route took me up a busy road and through a very London-looking park (clean London, of course, not Tenants Extra Dead Pigeon London) and then there was this sudden sweep of colourful wooden windows, a row of shutter-fronted gorgeousness with a tiny temple squidged in at the hooked right angle of the road, just where a mad sea of blue Comfort cabs offloaded workers arriving back in time for lunch.

Lunch? The most enormous hawker centre clearly serving the office staff of the entire area was already bubbling with noonday chatter but I fell into a little cafe, because the sign on the door had promised me chocolate. The resulting molten muffin was bought for the boy but I scoffed it by accident while I waited absent-mindedly at a bus stop a little later, dreaming of those primary coloured shutters and golden temple antlers.

You know, I can’t be bothered to do that coy ‘keeping it a secret’ thing so that no one goes there. Hundreds of people already go there, it was packed out, but in a calm and self-contained way with everyone having a purpose and a spot of soothing chanting thrown in for good measure from the more prominent Thian Hock Keng temple down next door’s Telok Ayer Street. Go there if you like, I’ve already shared the name and in any case it has been more than discovered and for good reason. Go there tomorrow*, it will make your day, as it did mine.

*If you do not currently live in Singapore then save up for a flight out here and I will take you to Amoy Street in person, providing I am not already down there having lunch in the food court since I didn’t visit it today.