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.