Sorry Singers, it’s not that I don’t like coming back to you, it’s just that I wasn’t quite ready yet. SM’s first international soccer tournament had a load of us piling onto a plane heading north for a quick weekend trip to the Thai capital but then yanked us sharply back again like a load of spitballs out of a rubber band, allowing us zero time to explore, and that’s a shame because I think the place could well turn out to be a high scorer in the MrsPartlyCloudy Favourite City Charts, all of which seem to start with a B: Berlin, Bruges, Bilbao, and now (potentially) Bangkok.

There just wasn’t the time. We nipped next door to a supermarket to get snacks for the players. We saw a LOT of the motorway because the traffic was rubbish, and even more of it on the way back home because the coach driver got confused and set off for entirely the wrong airport (it’s OK, we spotted it and re-routed). We saw no riots (*see below). We wore a lot of yellow for the King, who was having a birthday weekend – so was Jen and so was Jack, so there was a lot of cake involved and that’s always nice.

Someone who lives there told me that Bangkok is ‘a real place, very hip and modern’, and I’d have loved to put that to the test. [Just as a sidenote here, most places in the world are real compared to the bubble that is SingSong. Don’t get me wrong, I like coming home to the vacuum, stepping onto the fragrant carpets at Changi, popping the passport into the Machine That Goes Beep and snapping the cab door closed only 5 minutes after getting off the plane, before swooshing down the fast, clean roads to home. I know nasty things happen here but most people can relax in a way that is not possible in most other major cities, and then comes the irony – that the city’s security buys you all the freedom in the world to do just the risky sorts of things that you’d never really think of doing in a place like this because they just don’t crop up, so in the end it’s all a bit of a false promise. Apart from the odd riot there’s not a lot of scope for public shouting here, and those riots are very much one-offs, much less prevalent than *the now-and-then ones in Bangkok. Not that I want to do risky things but if I DID want to, I’d have to work hard at getting a group together… Anyway, sidetracked. Forget it. Carry on.]

Ah yes: Bangkers. Those who had been to the city before told us we really needed to do a proper visit; us first-timers got a very good vibe from what we saw, and agreed it needed more days. The fresh, Spanish-warm weather helped, perfectly blue skies and breezy heat allowing the children the physical ability to play six hard matches in a row on Saturday (or was it five?) and three on the Sunday, without passing out from humidity like in Sing, or searing their feet on 45°C astroturf.

And what a great tournament, so well organised and comfy. Festive, basically, with stalls and claxons and a bloke on the tannoy and lots of shiny happy people. The team put up a good fight but it was pretty ugly, as predicted. We were carved up over the course of the weekend like chopped peanuts in a wilting popiah, matched against epic teams who would have done well playing proper grown-ups. Time and again the kids picked themselves up and went back out for more. The other teams’ balletic movements were at best captivating and at worst – well, I saw SM do a little elbow-shove at one point (Naughty! Mum would have loved that). We came out OK and hobbled onto the bus home in an oddly buoyant mood (even when we realised we were heading the wrong way) and the kids’ only concern was who was digging up the most diamonds on Whinecraft.

Predictably we water-glided to a stop on the tarmac at Changi because of rain lashing down, then waded back to an apartment stinking of mould after only two days without us. The Christmas cards instantly called out to be filled in and stamped and the next batch of coursework was sulking as it hadn’t had a single glance all weekend. Not to mention both boys coming home with potential colds.

So you win this time, ‘Kockers, and thank you for having us – I think we’ll be right back.

I’ve worn glasses since I was two years old, so I like to think I know what works for me and what doesn’t. What I don’t need is someone following me round the shelves making me try on pairs and pairs of random and bizarre frames straight from a nine-year-old’s dressing up box. I don’t mind my husband doing this, or my son or a good friend, but I do mind YOU, Mr Total Stranger Shopowner, giving me your utterly useless tuppence ha’penny.

This was my first experience of spec-shopping since leaving England, a place where you often get the opposite – no service at all, big chunks of your lunch hour spent quietly queuing until someone is free to get THAT pair down to try on. On the flipside I’m also familiar with having a broad range of shapes and styles from which I can make a well-balanced choice; these blasted specs are welded to my persona so I have to get it right. Sadly, due to a recent age-related change in prescription meaning that I can no longer read without actually taking my specs off (a novel thing for me), I can’t have what I want any more and I need new ones and they can’t be any old shape because they need to work in more ways than just one. When SmallMonkey updated his prescription recently, Mr PC nagged me to get a new pair, too, and so it was that we spent the best part of half an hour today having a good laugh at my expense (that’s OK, I’m used to it from those two).

An ordeal, to be frank. It’s been a long time since someone asked me to (no, insisted that I) put on a pair of bright purple frames, then some pink ones with orange sparkle, then a mad Gucci pair with fat gold logo all down the sides. Really? My friend’s family had a charity fancy dress party in the 1990s in a rented out Oxfam shop. Huge fun, I have the dusty pics somewhere. I think I tried on some crazy specs on that day – twenty years ago. For sunglasses I think a bit of show is OK, but when I mentioned to The Two Ronnies that I had to wear these things all day (like, when I’m eating my Cheerios, when I’m waiting with the other mums for the school bus, when I’m pretending to be a tour guide in front of total strangers) it fell on deaf ears. Or blind eyes. Whatever.

The biggest laugh came from a pair that made me look just like Grandpa Bryan. I loved Grandpa Bryan so very much, and in fact he looked alright, you know, quite handsome in his younger years, but that doesn’t mean I want to actually look like him. What I wear on my face, absolutely all of the day, defines me and gives people an impression of who I am straight away, no second chances. Later they can find out who I am, and might realise that the first impression was not what they thought. But it has to fit, to be innocuous, that first time. So it really pays, spec-shop-owners, to put yourselves in the customer’s shoes when forcing random frames on a punter – would YOU want to wear the bright orange ones or the Mister Magoo specials? Then why would I?

Sale lost.

NaBloPoMo: one post every day throughout November

Goodbye NaBloPoMo – goodbye to posting every day throughout November. I’ll miss you, but it will be nice to going back to posting when I feel like it, not because I have to. Thank you for teaching me that one-liners can be fun.