Drawn to it

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Last weekend the Affordable Air Fair came to town, setting up behind the Flyer for the third time since I’ve been living here. This was my second visit; last time I went to the bunfight of the opening night and spent the entire evening being careful not to spill my bubbles on the artwork. This time I went early one Saturday, going along for the ride with the same friend who took me before. She’s an art buff, she knows her apples, and she can recommend what to look for. She can also tell you what she likes and doesn’t like – she’ll give you a polite: ‘hmmm…’ if you show her something unsatisfactory. If she likes it she’ll propel you right up to the exhibit like a member of Miami Dade police at a house raid. While I prefer to dot in and out of the cubicles, firmly telling people I’m ‘just looking’ (as you have to here in the shops to avoid being hassled), ArtFriend is falling over herself to accept those grabbing hands. She gets drawn in by vendor after vendor, asking for cards, adding her name to lists, asking all the right questions, and – in fact – usually walking away with some other stunning bit of kit to go with the growing gallery that makes up her beautiful home. Watching her work the floors is as satisfying as the artworks themselves. Me, I just like to potter.

I did go to art school, actually – ArtFriend was surprised to learn this as we drove away from the show in a halo of good art vibes. Oh yes, I got a degree in printmaking, having spent my second year putting the painting tutor to the test by doodling a series of scrappy Tony Hancock-style feet in ‘simplistic style’ and being heralded as someone funky and innovate when, in fact, I’d just scribbled a few toes. That taught me, and in my third and final year I moved on to screenprinting, where the nuts and bolts of the technique blended with my passion for writing and I completed a series of sarcastic prints that heaved me up and over the precipice (along with a competent thesis) of a shabby Third and got me the 2:2 degree I didn’t really deserve. As a result of my cynicism I didn’t leave college with a great deal of knowledge about or love for modern art, but those years at art school at least left me with an idea of what I like on my wall. I go through phases: it was portraits for a while, and for that I had London’s National Portrait Gallery, a place I now realise I never visited enough. Now I’m in Asia Lite I find myself drawn to paintings of goldfish, for some reason, and I found several of those as I wandered around the galleries last weekend, sipping my free [brand name] espresso.

Although my happiness at blagging a precious ticket to the AAF wasn’t so much about ‘getting something’ but was more about dipping a tentative toe back into the art arena, I did love the venue and I loved the show, room after room of fun, fascinating, clever, poignant and funky pieces of original art, with friendly faces to tell you all about it and that nice free coffee thrown in. In fact I loved about 80 per cent of the pieces on show and after a while found myself seeking out local artists, looking for something different, something fun but not garish, most importantly something to put my current life in context.

I’m never going back with ArtFriend again, that’s for sure – she was far too good at the whole thing. It’s because of her that our dining room wall will, in about three weeks, look substantially more beautiful, and that whatever holiday fund we were hanging onto just went down to zero. It was definitely worth it. The ‘local’ context has ended up being a somewhat more far-off blend of Shanghai and London, but it will do. There are also no goldfish, but the fun theme is there and so is the beauty – it’s going to look amazing, and to top it all off the artist went to St Martins School of Art, where Mum went in the 50s. I think she’d have been happy with all that.

As for naughty ArtFriend, she is banned from taking me anywhere else for a while (though if there’s any more of that free coffee I might come along for the ride).

Relativity

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As our summer trip to the UK approaches I am remembering what it was like to be pregnant or have a small baby. It’s not an obvious connection – and it started with a new-mum friend from home posting on FB about how annoyed she gets with people’s attitudes to the whole sleep thing, and it reminded me of all the questions I hated, and the bump thing as well: I was ‘huge’ to one person and ‘tiny’ to another, and really, who cared but me?

‘Is she sleeping through the night yet?’ they ask my friend, pointing at her four-month-old daughter. ‘Well,’ replies my friend, ‘I’m not sleeping through the night yet, and I’m 32’.

It’s the same with the How Long Have You Been Here question. ‘Almost two years,’ I am now telling people and always, ALWAYS I get a raised eyebrow and ‘Oh, is that all?’ in response. What? Is what all? What? I have no idea how long I am supposed to have been here before I elicit a different response, and when I do get a different one, what will it be? And again, who really cares?

This goes on ad nauseum, I’m guessing. I might do a deal – when my friend’s baby sleeps through the night I’ll start telling people how long I’ve been here.

Strange fruit

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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

Where am I?

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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.

You recently flew with Tiger Air, tell us what you think

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Well the cost was good; so good that we chose to fly with you instead of another leading airline – on which our friends booked, and whose flight we waved off as we waited at Changi Gate 59 (out of 60) for our own flight to Bali to join them for a very short girls’ weekend. This should probably have been our first clue, since nothing that cheap is ever going to come without a snag.

That our plane on the tarmac had a big engineering truck beside it and a man in a yellow jacket fiddling with his undercarriage should have been our second clue. Three tannoy mumbles later (none of which included a full explanation other than ‘technical issues’) and we had decamped to the nearest airport pub and ordered drinks and nibbles. The food worked, there was a live band, it was almost like a Friday night out, and as we clinked our tall drinks the three-hour delay didn’t seem quite so bad.

Well into our 14th gossip topic and a new tannoy message fizzled faintly over the din of the band, suggesting a number rather similar to the one on our tickets, but it was only thanks to my Changi app that we checked and saw you had actually changed the boarding time again, this time cheekily pulling it back by a sizeable two hours, leaving us an Olympic five minutes to get to the gate. (If I was a refund sort of girl I might suggest it here – had I known we were having a mere one-hour delay instead of three hours as initially suggested, I would never have ordered the second vodka, which I ended up leaving untouched as we scrambled to pay and leave.)

Having photo-bombed several groups taking selfies in front of the tropical orchid display as we knocked people out of the way to get to The Furthest Gate In The World, we were slammed into our seats only to then sit in them for a further half-hour while everyone else was herded back from their own untouched vodkas. Once in the air, our Singapore Slings tasted of nail polish remover and the duty-free bottle I wanted was the only one unavailable. That was Outgoing. For Return we had another delay, a man’s knees in my back thanks to the cosy seating plan, and four out of eight meal options out of stock.

The crew, I must say, were all lovely – upbeat and diligent with an average age of around 12 years old. I’m glad we didn’t have to adopt the brace position, as I would have felt very maternal towards at least half of them. The Band-Aid one of them got my companion after she cut her thumb opening the Sling bottle arrived promptly, and the little boy reciting the remaining meal options knew them all off by heart, including which pictures to point to: ten out of ten. I didn’t even mind that the kitchen curtain got caught in the toilet door every time I went (which wasn’t often, happily, as I hadn’t eaten or drunk much).

I’m not a money-back sort of person but we got to the villa so late on Friday that everyone had gone to bed and there was no wine left, and home again on Sunday so late that Monday had already arrived. I loved the friendly crew but I would rather have got to where I needed to get in time, well-fed and with the correct bottle of liquor in my tote bag.

Hope the feedback is helpful. Lots of love to all the girls and boys.

PS I think I left my kindle in your seatback. This would not have happened if I’d paid a bit more and booked onto the same flight as our other friend who had a bigger plane with free food and films, giving her no cause to pack her kindle and subsequently lose it.

Dog days

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We are in drought; everywhere is brown. Leaves are falling and lawns are dead. The on/off Haze is fanned by Saharan winds, hairdryer-hot. Cat bowls dot the pavements untouched. Dogs don’t even go out, let alone lie in the shade. Normally we curse the storms and welcome the dry heat, but these days there is something sinister about the bright white light filtering through the stick-dry trees. From the safety of indoors it can all look rather tempting but venture out for any length of time and the atmosphere is oven-hot, intense. This is not normal.

Images of autumn leaves have always been a memento mori, a whimsy reminder of the fragile cycle of life. Golden forests for mourning cards, fall backdrops for minor-key film credits, dead bracken for sad book covers. This week the piles of fallen leaves are particularly symbolic, because something autumnal has happened in this safe haven of ours, a sudden spanner in the works of our jolly wheel of fortune, cutting into a happy family unit and blotting out their sun, making everything grey.

Winter, suddenly, has frozen the timeline of a man who should have been pottering through his own colourful summer. Panning out in the global wake of the much broader crisis of the missing jumbo jet, this family’s stark and surreal event has been closer to home, a cold crisis on an intricate scale: domestic, undiluted.

Observing from the sidelines under incongruous sun-shiny skies, we are heavy hearted as the news trickles through the interlinked social networks. Like the dry spell, there is nothing we can do, no solace to be found. A very bad thing has happened to a friend, someone very good, a man who coloured the world and who should not (cannot) have gone. Normality has been tipped up, undone, all reason evaporated. Like the drought and the jet, this was not supposed to happen. It is wrong, unscheduled, not in the manual.

Rain is finally expected this weekend. If and when that happens, we look forward to our lawns and leaves shining once more. For one family, though, life will never be quite as shiny again.

Lycra rage

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Nothing gets my goat more than people making assumptions (I do it all the time of course, but I’m not writing about me). Like sportswear designers, for example.

It costs money, you know, to sign up to these organized sporting events but as the runs, walks and swims are all for chariddy I don’t usually mind. Besides, you get a goody bag and a T-shirt, sometimes even some fruit. No doubt a lot of our donated cash goes on the sportswear you get in these goody bags. The outfit for this weekend’s event was an unusual T and shorts combination, the bottom half being a nice little addition – sadly, ‘little’ being the key word.

It’s bad enough that I carry about an extra fifth of the weight that I used to be, that I’m not the shape I was when I was 18 and never will be, that my age and stupid hormones mean I pile on the pounds fast then just can’t get rid of them again (and yes, that I have a cake habit that suits none of the above). But then why not go and boot me when I’m down by designing fitness clothes that only a child’s teddy bear might wear? It wasn’t like I’d tried to stuff myself into a Medium or even a Large. I’d given up, this time, on pretending that the clothes sizes would apply to anyone normal and ordered a Supersize.

I tried on the shorts and T combo in front of Mr PC, who had that mute, wide-eyed expression that men get when they are about to be asked a ‘how-do-I-look?’ question and the resulting answer must be very, very carefully given. He had no chance – I couldn’t even get the shorts over my calves, let alone knees or any further up, and as I hobbled sideways in a tangle of tiny Lycra we ended up giggling about how ridiculously miniscule the outfit was. ‘Are you sure they’re XL?’ he managed. The designer, clearly, was blind, or just very stupid.

Joking aside I’m really livid about this. You come to expect overly small sizes when you live in Southeast Asia because in this part of the world there is a mythological design belief that women’s clothes should be made for a short Kate Moss, or thinner. Quite why I have no idea because it is NOT true that all Asian women are tiny; I’ve seen large ones as well as small ones – here in Singapore there is just as wide a range of people as there is in any other country in the world: there are tiny western women here just as there are tiny Singaporean women. Big ones and small ones, we are built in all shapes and sizes no matter where we live and no matter where we come from.

It’s not enough that us westerners in Singapore get the blunt end of the stout stick in shops, but then to bring it into the realms of fitness – well, just who do you suppose is running these races? We’re not all going to be stick insects, are we? Some of us are running to LOSE THE WEIGHT so please, do us women a favour and create some designs that might fit real people.

PMM

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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.

Ni baba mama hao ma?

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‘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.

Not like me

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Sorry for banging on about it, as anyone who knows me knows I have been lately, but I just cannot believe that last weekend I threw myself into the sea and swam three-quarters of a kilometre and then ran all around the southernmost part of Sentosa Island for five whole more kilometres. Dressed in a tri-suit. And no one paid me, I paid them.

If you had ever told me, in the past, that I’d be doing something like this I would have spat my tea up my nose. I am the person who, aged 15, hated sports so much that I forged my sick notes and went home, went for a walk, did that morning’s washing up, even agreed to take part in some dreaded voluntary service – something/anything rather than motivate my skinny little body into doing anything sporty. Sporty girls were that generation’s mean girls. Sporty girls shouted at us on the netball pitch when we shot the ball off over the wrong net or watched it drizzle away into the bushes. Sporty girls yelled at us as we chatted about our favourite new 45 on the far reaches of the outfield (well, EXCUSE me, but we were trying to have a converSATION, thanks). No. Sports was for sharp girls in white socks with lithe, bendy bodies and boyfriends in the year above. Give me a packet of Bourbon biscuits and a cup of Sainsburys Red Leaf any day (or, sadly, 10 B&H, but that’s a whole other story and not a proud one).

Anyway, when it came to voluntary service, we (my partner in crime was my best friend, a girl who hated the S word even more than me) were sent back to our much-hated primary school, stuck in the two bottom infant classes and told to take over while the ragged teachers staggered to the staff room for a fag. We preferred watching the school guinea pig pee itself on the reading mat, rather than join our team mates on the netball courts.

One day the children had a black paint fight. I was happier tidying it up with wet newspaper than puffing up and down Parliament Hill on cross-country, or standing on some cold sports field, or getting bussed out to the Lea Valley like convicts only to spend the entire afternoon tipping canoes over while we sat in them (whose stupid idea was that?). Me and my friend would do anything, I tell you, anything rather than do any of the above. I personally would have signed up for extra maths. I would have retaken my history O Level mock exam. A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G. We had an unspoken agreement that you lived and died by the bunk-off note, and after a while we started bunking off voluntary service, too: first person to get the kettle on and put the flame under the pancake pan was that afternoon’s winner. I think that’s when I really fell in love with The Kinks’ Face to Face album, as that was the LP I most recall bunking off to, back at mine, munching pancakes while the needle crackled.

And now I do duathlons. ‘What next?’ asks my sister (who also regularly asks me, in all-caps: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY SISTER?)

Well. Our soccer moms’ group has started a little training regime on Wednesdays while the kids do their practice. I’ve banned it up til now but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to have a kickaround. There’s a nice-sounding 5k next month that I’ve already signed up for. I got a bike last weekend for Christmas and today I wobbled all the way to a friends’ house for lunch and back again. Doubt I worked off the wine but it was a nod to health. There’s talk of proper swimming lessons, which would help if I ever signed up to a swim event again, since the worst bit of Sunday’s race was being churned around like an odd sock in a washing machine while I puffed up and down with my ‘old lady’ breast stroke as all the other white-caps sliced through the waves with their sporty front crawls. There was a clue in the category title ‘Sprint’ that I might have to go faster than my current Blue Rinse speed and I suppose I could do with learning how to go a bit faster, and how to do it properly.

I think it’s not that I hate and loathe sport or can’t manage it, I think it’s actually the opposite: I share the deep-seated competitive gene that my mother had and that my sister, I suspect, might also have. Tucked away in the recesses of our emotional motherboard is a small switch dialed for all eternity to ‘GAME ON’. (My sister hates board games for the very same reason, though she would argue that she just hates board games). Once I understood, for instance, that many of the mums at the sports day hoop race some four or five years ago had actually cheated their way to the finish line (apart from second-to-last me), I was back bigger and better next year and from then on I either won or came second year on year. And don’t say it was ‘just’ an egg and spoon, I owned it and you can’t take that away.

I feel sure that this brief hiatus to my rounded, sedentary lifestyle will retreat, once I am back in the UK, along with the rest of my tropical pool-blue memories. I hope it doesn’t, and I’m gluing all the ribbons into a scrapbook just to make sure I really earned them. One day I might even take them to my friend’s house and get her to put some pancakes on. Or maybe, as my sister suspects, I really have been stolen by aliens seeking lazy cake-lovers to populate a planet that needs people to bake the best ever buns, while sporty replicas get put on earth instead? I’d be a great choice for the baking if so, though of course I’m not competitive about it at all.

PS I’d like to thank my trisuit, which I borrowed, and which not only kept it all in but looked rather good in the process. I’d also like to thank the friend who lent it to me. And finally I’d like to thank the random men who, every now and then, would bark out: COME ON ANZA! Only halfway round the run did I remember that I’d borrowed a suit that had the ANZA group logo all over it. They were such a nice bunch, I might even consider joining up.