Only in Sing #2

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• My friend’s newly hatched chicks from the bird’s nest on her patio got stolen by a large monkey that was spotted a few days earlier running across the outside wall of her condo. It’s a jungle out there

• Our exciting swamp-ish Easter plans now carry a Foreign Office caution thanks to rebels occupying parts of Sabah. It is highly unlikely that anything will happen to us but still: it’s not working out to be a jolly hike in the Norfolk Broads

• Our living room roller blind jammed and when I wiggled it, out fell a very flat gecko #flowerpressanyone

• Pulling the bookshelves apart to wipe down mould is a weekly chore

• The skateboard instructor is about two years older than my son

• The next six weekends are booked up. Only in Sing.

Bad language

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SmallMonkey said a rude word over dinner, and not for the first time over the last few weeks. This was all naughty enough but then he ignored my mild admonishment (I’ll react gently now, I thought, and pick it up later – but I never got the chance), and went and texted the word to a friend. Again, not for the first time. “Ping!” went my phone. Sadly for him he’d picked a mate whose mother bears no truck with this sort of thing – quite rightly – and as a result he now has one less pal on the block, at least until the curfew is off.

This is one of the tricky things about expat living. It’s not just Mandarin that we need to learn to speak out here, it’s all the social languages too, and each person you meet will have a different code and all those codes need to be filed away and then you can only hope that the kids remember all the social rules too and sometimes they do and sometimes, well…

All the lovely pals I’ve met out here only know me because I happen to be living in the same country as them at the same time. We didn’t meet in the playground and establish a long-lasting friendship. We didn’t get together at work and stay friends, or buddy up at the local NCT class, at the school gate. We only have current conversation to go by, and if that doesn’t work out then there’s not a lot left over; no history. You can’t get away with the same things that you got away with at home, and it’s the same no matter how old you are. SmallMonkey’s situation is not so far removed from a dodgy coffee morning or a not-so-good night out where I’ve not quite got my point across in the way I intended. At least I am old enough to tell myself off, and I don’t get my iTouch taken away for two weeks. Poor little s*d (whoops), as if he wasn’t already isolated enough just by being out here.

In the same way that I sometimes find myself having to dial down my ‘eccentric Londoner’ act when I sense people are finding it a bit too much, my son now has to learn that the new stuff he is bringing home from school is just as illegal in our Singapore kitchen as it is in our London home. Rude words are just as banned here – they are not just part of the excitement of going to a new school and giggling in a new corner with new friends and it’s not OK to then experiment with the new words on all your other new friends out here, because they will be just as insulted as your friends back home would have been. As will their mothers. Our eccentricities, his and mine, can cut short a coffee morning or a playdate if we are not too careful.

Whatever. There are many levels to what was essentially kind of a minor incident and I tackled the most obvious ones first, those being Internet safety and messaging protocol:

‘Those words you’re writing don’t just flutter about in the air,’ I said, ‘they go into someone’s house, and that person reads them, and that person’s mother reads them and then you are in trouble.’ (‘And then so are you,’ he added, to his credit.)

Learning about swear words might not be any better at home but I do wish, a little bit, that we hadn’t quite reached this stage yet, because not only is he dealing with a life away from the norm but if he was swotting for all those ‘Inappropriate Language’ exams back in the UK at least he’d be doing it amongst people who know him and have a bit of history to go on, who can make the distinction between the new kid with the foul mouth and the small child with the exemplary social record.

We both have our mouths shut for now but I do see this ‘communication’ theme as one that is bound to crop up again…

Only in Sing #1

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Am on MRT and have found a space where I can lean against partition, balance bag, get phone out and send a quick WhatsApp before I get to the station. Race to finish sending message before train pulls in. Shuffle forward ready to get off. Train slows. Tap out last words “…just on train” then press send. Doors open, step off…

…straight into the person I was texting, who was waiting patiently for doors to open watching me through the glass and laughing. Really only in Sing.

Day dreams

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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…

Same same but different

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You know when you’re on holiday and one place really reminds you of another? We’re getting that a lot at the moment. In this ‘Here And Not There’ life I suppose it’s only natural that we seek familiarity in all the new adventures.

Last Sunday, on a foray to the very chilled and lovely West Coast Park, Mr PartlyCloudy (propped up beside me under a shady tree) said: ‘It’s a bit like Hyde Park, isn’t it?’

It kind of was, a bit, sort of, except that Hyde Park is flat and vast. This place was tufty and lazy, sectioned off with dips and turns. It had a hawker centre and a McDonalds; I can’t think of an equivalent in Hyde Park. It had a random and jolly field full of enthusiastic campers in actual tents; I think it’s illegal to nail down a tent in Hyde Park unless you’re in the canvas bar at a concert. It was lined on one side by a dazzling crescent of harbour and had the hugest climbing frame from which our son, tiny against the big blue sky, was now waving, and it was all much hotter than it ever gets in Hyde Park: you could’ve fried eggs on that tall steel frame, no joke.

I knew what he meant, though, the place had something of the London park about it and so his brain had flicked through its virtual photo library and come up with a broad equivalent from home. I’ve done the same plenty of times in the last few months – Orchard Road is my Oxford Street, Botanic Gardens my Kenwood and Holland Village my Camden. (The west coast of Sentosa, we have agreed, is just like a party scene out of CSI Miami but that’s going to be another blog post altogether).

Why do we need such comparisons, and not just for places but also for things? Why are the expat websites full of threads about finding specific foods or brand names, favourite household gadgets or places to get something done just like you had it done at home? So often we qualify our new experiences with the reassuring line: ‘It was just like xxx’ [insert name of familiar and comforting place]. We all do it, me too. In amongst the embracing of a new culture we all need a little bit of Marmite on our toast.

I’ve always been teased for comparing places with my parents’ homeland, Cornwall. If I like a place and it looks a tiny bit Cornish then there I go, likening it to such and such a beach, to this village, to that pub. Mr PC is very patient with me about this but it must get jolly boring, and a bit daft at times.

Yes, I said eventually. I suppose it is a bit like Hyde Park, isn’t it?

Spot the difference

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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

Annual review

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JANUARY
Home from Malaysian holiday. Jonah turns 7. Mum’s and Anne’s birthdays.
John resumes running. Edit book.

FEBRUARY
Planning application submitted. Planning application rejected. Edit. Singapore. John stops running. Planning application no longer ‘urgent’.

MARCH
Google ‘schools in Singapore’.

APRIL
Nail new school. Inform current one. Tell friends. Edit. Cornwall in Easter. Sister’s birthday.

MAY
Packing list, to do list, house refurb list. John visits Singapore, chooses home. Finish book. Send to friends. Buy swimsuit, start diet.

JUNE
Queen’s birthday. My birthday. Cats leave. Sobbing. Sports day. John leaves. Wardrobe falls on Jonah. Give up diet.

JULY
School ends. Sobbing. Holidays, packing, eBay eBay eBay. Sob. Holiday camp. eBay. Felix and sadness. Temporary smoking. House sets sail. Move in with Dad. Begin goodbyes. Stop smoking, start drinking.

AUGUST
More goodbyes. John back. Olympics. Taxi sobbing. Airport sobbing. Singapore. Heat. Pool! jacuzzi, beer, pool! Pork buns. Orienteering. Storms. Universal studios. School uniform. School bus. Nightmares. Three in a bed.

SEPTEMBER
Coffee, school, boy-sobs, John back in training, coffee, jacuzzi, beer, jacuzzi, beer, jacuzzi, beer, coffee. Dad’s birthday. Skype. New book edit. Teacher terror. Skype. Boy sobbing. Karate. Skype. Lizards and monkeys.

OCTOBER
Coffee, choir, beer, UN Day, half term, Ipoh, Aunty Rosy, chicken and rice, Pangkor, John’s birthday, edit, beer, posh buffet, more karate, book edit, Pam’s visit, witches by the pool.

NOVEMBER
Storms, beer, jacuzzi, Diwali, lights, tinsel, more storms, school carols, choir carols, book edit, Cold Storage carols, parent’s evening.

DECEMBER
Marathon, proud sweaty pictures, Christmas carols, Orchard carols, school hols, what book? Shop, shop, posting, shop, wrapping, shop, airport, sister! Beer, beer, Langkawi, beer. Sleep. Christmas. Sleep. Sun, swim, eat, sleep. Home, cousins, fireworks, beer, airport. Sob. Sleep.

RESOLUTIONS
Learn Mandarin. Finish the damn book. More holidays. More sun. More postcards. Less sobbing.

Christmas is coming, isn’t it?

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There’s a lot of talk, out here, about how hard it is to enjoy Christmas when the weather is so hot, about how wrong it all seems. Many travellers who’ve come to the east from colder climes seem to have had abrupt memory loss about the impassable snowdrifts, biting wind chill and awful misery of those cold December months, where ice inside windows and cars that won’t start herald every freezing dawn. Me, I don’t mind having a hot Christmas, I’ve had a few now. I think the fluffy trees with baubles bouncing about in afternoon storms are still festive, and though I agree it’s weird to be doing it all in a vest dress and flip-flops it’s just different, isn’t it? It’s not actually wrong.

Perhaps the discomfort is more to do with simple homesickness, that old roast chestnut, and if it’s seasonal spirit that’s missing then I guess I’m guilty too.

There’s no doubt I’ve been waiting for that skip inside that I usually get when I think of wrapping, clementines, stockings, bread sauce. Today for a big Christmas lunch I made piping hot mulled wine in a kitchen that must have been around 39C just to get that ruby waft of sugar and spice. Last Friday after the big choir concert I missed our aftershow party because the last beautiful descant of a carol that my mother had always loved made me so suddenly sad about her that I knew I could only walk home crying, instead of chat over the mince pies. And instead of the usual 698 cards I always send I have counted out just 35. I’m sorry about that but I feel somehow justified in cutting it down: it is my turn, this year, to forget.

I know what it is for me. My sister arrives in a week and I know I’m counting down every single slow-moving second until we are in a cab heading back from the airport together, and to a certain extent things are on hold until she unpacks the pre-ordered festive spirit here in our tropical back bedroom. Hope she hurries up, because until then you can find me stirring a hot pot of wine in a boiling kitchen with Slade on the radio and candy canes melting in the bottom of all the stockings.

Amoy amas amat

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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.

Gone shopping

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I went down Orchard Road yesterday (Singapore’s version of London’s Oxford Street). I don’t go down there very often and I am only sitting here writing this post today thanks to the sign below. If I hadn’t stopped to look I would still be in Wisma Atria, going up and down the bl**dy escalators trying to find the exits, living an underground life like Fantastic Mr Fox, never to be seen above ground again.

It’s not hard, is it, giving good clear instructions? But most of the signposts are concealed politely around corners or up so high that you don’t spot them until you’ve sailed past into the next huge shopping grid. I can’t march the holy tiles all day and I certainly don’t have the handbag capacity in my wardrobe for a mega shopping splurge. Often I resort to asking people: ‘how do I get out?’ and by then I am looking a little crazed but I don’t care, I just want to get home. No, I don’t go down Orchard very often.

It’s not all bad. Amongst the ‘Things I Like’ about Orchard are the plentiful food stores, clean and functional toilets, the welcome air con, the little baskets they give you at restaurants to put your bags in, the Bond Street-esque reminders of London and the all-round spotlessness of the place. There’s a downside to the tidyness, though: I’ve considered bringing a bag of snacks and leaving a trail to retrace my steps but of course I couldn’t because someone would have been along to sweep up.