Homesick

Posted on by

Ugh. That phrase. Yuk. Don’t you just hate it? Brings out the 12-year-old in me. I don’t want to be all needy and sad, it’s tiresome. So I’ve stuck the feeling in a pot, drawn my specs down to the end of my nose and am inspecting it as if it’s one of my son’s little woolly caterpillars from off the path.

This week I am definitely ‘homesick’, but what’s it all about? A bit like that condition Vertigo, which doesn’t necessarily mean you are scared of heights, this homesickness I have is something different to what the name might suggest, something unplaceable (I’m afraid I can’t work out quite what, I’m altogether too homesick to focus).

It’s a misnomer, this business, because I’m not sick, and not ‘sick of home’. And I don’t think I actually want to go home. Well, maybe I do, in fact yes of course I do, but it’s odd because at the same time I very much don’t want to go home just yet – and that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Yes I badly miss my family and friends, almost physically, but what will be at home when I get there? And how would I feel if I landed back there tomorrow, literally in 24 hours? It’s not that. Is it the date? Fifth November, fireworks, bangers, bobby dazzlers on the Heath all scarfed up? Nope. And it’s not that I hate it here, that I loathe every day and want to actually leave. Mostly it is all lovely: my apartment looks like something out of a magazine, I can swim any time I want, I don’t have to wear much so getting dressed is a dream for a lazy dresser like me, and even if it rains my bones are warm. Oh, and there are palm trees outside my window. So it’s nice, this life.

But this week I am homesick to the point that I find it hard to get out of bed, I go to sleep sad and I wake up sad. Food tastes sad, I don’t even want ice cream, so at lunchtime I am sad and by dinnertime I am still sad. It’s got nothing to do with the amount of brilliant people I’ve met since arriving and without whom I would definitely be going home. And it’s got nothing to do with the brilliantly lovely people I’ve left behind.

I’m told it takes six months ‘to settle’, whatever settling involves, and we are three months in so I will just have to hunker down and weather it. Oh boy though – the lights might be on but I am definitely not in.

Neither here nor there

Posted on by

This is Malaysia. Pangkor Island, to be precise, about two thirds of the way up the west coast, south of Penang and north of KL. It takes an hour and a half to fly from Singapore to Ipoh, then the same distance by road to Lumut where, finally, we board a ferry for the half-hour chug to Pangkor’s palmy shores, cooling sea breezes, soft sands and warm waters.

We first came here eleven years ago, the two of us, choosing to stay in a resort that is closed off from the rest of the island. If you wish to explore you can take a pink cab round the winding roads to look at the temple, Dutch fort, fishing village and other more colourful beaches, before slipping back through the gate again and lying down in the shade.

Second time round we brought our small son, then three, who loved skipping along the shoreline scuttling after crabs. Last Christmas we were back in Pangkor again, this time with my sister and our two dads staying a few beaches down. And now, fourth time lucky and for October half term, we are back at the resort, looking for calm after weeks of frazzled ‘settling’. The place soon does the trick, unwinding us in that oiled-massage, easy living sort of a way that these kinds of places do so well. This is our tropical idyll, perhaps not representative of the ‘real’ Malaysia but a place we adore all the same.

The real Malaysia, I suspect, was what we saw in glimpses through the window of the cab that dashed us to the dock from a two-day stay with our aunt in Ipoh. Dusty shacks down tracks off-road, tin roof eateries with stacked plastic chairs, electrical and tyre shops closed for Sunday, half-built malls, rubble piling up with the unused brick stacks, short fat palms like the ones in Where The Wild Things Are, grown for oil in military rows through which more huddled shacks squat, blue-fronted mosques with faded bronze domes, stringy durian stalls, baked car lots, Chinese cemeteries with lines of curved brick shrines, and miles and miles of dust.

All of which you might call charming – one hundred characterful photo opps ticker-taping by in a heat haze as our driver navigated the trucks and vans en route to the jetty. But we didn’t pull over to take shots as my mother might have done. We headed straight to the pier, got a ferry right to the hotel and arrived in the cool beachfront lobby where SmallMonkey span about like a mechanical beetle, overwhelmed with the contrasting luxury after our dusty Ipoh stop-over.

In a sense we are keeping family tradition alive by coming back here, to a resort that has been around for years. Once known as the Golden Sands, the hotel’s retro name has faded along with the beachy picnic snaps in my father-in-law’s cracked family album back in the UK. When they lived in Ipoh they came here all the time, popping over for weekends and once, so the story goes, getting shipwrecked during a boat trip. I can’t imagine a better place for a Swallows and Amazons adventure although I know my mother-in-law was mortified about them not being married at the time (I do wonder, sometimes, whether someone hadn’t tweaked the engine).

I love it here just as much as they did, love the two pools, the beach just a flip-flop away, the tufty green outcrops at the end of the headland with the big round boulders and the endless milky horizon puddling into the distance under eagle filled skies. This is our fourth visit to Pangkor, third to the resort, and it may not be the real Malaysia but still you can pretend to be adventurous, hiring a kayak by the hour and skirting the jellyfish before they die and dot the shoreline like discarded jellies from the dinner trolley. In no time I have acclimatised, floating in the sea, oiled and flat and flipping over with the little fishes that have escaped from the nets of the wooden boats bobbing by.

Next I assume the position on a sun lounger for five days of heavy reading, reaching out now and then for a satay stick or beer. I excuse myself from any soft tourist guilt safe in the knowledge that in a few weeks I’ll be back up-country seeing the real Malaysia from our aunt’s concrete forecourt, searching for sleep in the heat-stuffed back bedroom or sitting out a midnight storm in front of the flickering telly, waiting in companionable silence with our aunt under a stern picture of great Grandma, enjoying the sense of family her house gives us for two brief nights.

For now, then, I indulge, and when the time comes to tug our bags back onto the ferry it is hard, and not just because my muscles have begun to melt into my fat stores. It is strange to think that this time our return trip will not be a journey halfway round the world but instead a short hop down south, and what’s most tricky is answering our son’s question ‘are we going home?’ After a short beat he provides the prompt himself – not London, he says, not Singapore. Just, you know, back to ‘normal’? It is a good question but one I cannot answer. This quick trip has given us time to stop and reflect, a relaxed platform on which to look back over the last two chaotic months and come to the same conclusion, all three of us – that at this stage in our South-east Asian journey, none of us has a clue where home is any more.

Not in Kansas any more

Posted on by

Two months in and I

  • Hold bank notes and business cards at each end, with two hands
  • Skip across storm drains
  • Say ‘can’ instead of ‘that is possible’
  • Stand on the left side of the escalator
  • No longer rush out when it’s sunny
  • Recommend just leaving the football in the hedge
  • Dry the plates with a cloth, not air
  • Don’t flinch when I’m crossing a road and the counter starts
  • No longer tidy up for Skype calls
  • Answer the phone to strange numbers – it might be an actual someone
  • Can’t really taste it if it doesn’t have chilli
  • Check the floor for ants
  • Check the beds for bugs
  • Eat fast with chopsticks
  • Appreciate a smile in a shop
  • Expect to be followed around the shop
  • Take a lot more cabs
  • Buckle up in those cabs
  • Run for buses – ten whole minutes til the next one
  • Would literally be lost without my phone
  • Check emails underground
  • Always pack an umbrella
  • Never check the weather
  • Would not dream of eating on the tube
  • Seldom dream
  • Seldom run
  • Get woken by heat, not cold
  • Look for ‘large’ and ‘extra large’
  • Drink whatever is cheapest, not what I actually prefer
  • Feel queasy at the thought of jeans
  • Drink water by the litre, and then drink some more
  • Slow down on the phone
  • Wish the gecko would come back to the kitchen

Colour and light

Posted on by

Mid-Autumn full moon in Singapore and lantern festivals took place all over town this weekend. Also called the Moon Festival, this is when the bright full moon marks the summer harvest, so out come the mooncakes and lanterns: food and light. We took a trip to Chinese Garden, a lake-strewn, bonsai-dotted park nearby, which had things going on, but this is an evening festival (hence the lanterns and fireworks) and turning up in the scorching midday wasn’t the best timing. Still the temples and pagodas were pretty. Next year we’ll make a night of it.

Il pleut

Posted on by

My mother-in-law was terrified of rain. Living as she did in the UK this always seemed a rather extreme reaction to what was only ever, as I saw it, a few drops. She was terrified of the stuff, horrified if we allowed her small grandson to play in it without full waxed-up coat and boots, and she point-blank refused to go for a walk if the clouds were looming. I chalked it up as one of her sweet idiosyncrasies and left it at that – and then we started visiting SE Asia, her neck of the woods, and the phobia began to make sense.

Tonight (well, today) it is raining in the UK and this fact has made me homesick because it is tangible news, familiar, something that I can imagine. Actually it’s major news, has taken over all the big websites in the way that large storms back home tend to – our home country is getting the sort of lashing for which my mother-in-law would have gone into total lockdown. Still (and I know it’s not a competition) I can’t help but compare it to what I have been seeing from the safety of our apartment.

When the skies open here the whole world is shiny. I’m often cosily tapping away at my computer when it hits and from our living room window the rain is so thick that it obscures the view. I can just about see across to the pool where the droplets have blurred the blue depths: you can actually see them, double-size, dashing down in needle-straight lines from the clouds. But this rain has not made front-page news, it is normal. People are walking in it. The bloke fixing the flat upstairs has simply moved his drilling inside. Cars are going past. No one is building an ark.

Yes, rain stops play here, makes things tricky. The school bus will be late, the public bus will be late, you can’t get a cab and you don’t want to be stuck somewhere other than the place you want to be when it hits because you might be there for a while. Don’t bother with any kind of proper footwear here, and don’t expect to wear trousers and not have them stick to your legs. One of the first cabs I ordered was made to wait for me and SmallMonkey because we were faffing. They rang me twice in five minutes. ‘Ma’am,’ begged the operator on his second call, ‘please hurry up it’s about to rain.’ Still, for all the palaver, it is normal palaver, very expected. And we’ve not even hit proper rainy season yet, weather that I saw last Christmas on a brief tourist trip here, when the water levels rose so high one day that walking about in my (ridiculous, I soon realised) flip-flops gave me blister burns that have left permanent scars.

I can feel myself turning into my mother-in-law, adopting her sense of drama about it all. Take last Friday, mid-afternoon: I was cooking in the kitchen when several very large explosions went off somewhere down our street, or so it seemed to me. But at the window no one was running, the sky was not full of flames, no sirens, no bells, just an old lorry chugging past and a maid walking a dog on the grassy sidewalk and duly tidying up after it, all on laid-back stroll-time. I skidded through to the living room, yanked open the patio door, beckoned to a neighbour: ‘Was that thunder?’, and she gave me a sympathetic nod.

Not such a stupid question if you’d heard it yourself. This was no chubby rumble but a sound I’d never heard before like crazy sharp static, and not just one explosion but a series of them, crack crack crack, and a deluge to follow that was like the prolonged unzipping of a giant market stall covering that might have been sagging in a storm and eventually split but then didn’t stop. Re-enact the scene in your mind and then make it go on for half an hour and you’ll get the picture.

Ten minutes later SmallMonkey hopped off the school bus like a sparrow in a birdbath, and as I held our ridiculous bought-for-Singapore golf umbrella over his head (and I will never tease Mr PartlyCloudy again for buying it) I strained to hear my boy’s voice over the water clatter:

‘It’s OK Mummy, I told the driver how to get home in the storm.’

At least someone in this family has a bit of common sense.

ECAs

Posted on by

SmallMonkey has chosen his Extra Curricular Activities (ECAs) at school and blow me down if, after years of being uninterested in anything ‘craft’-ish, he has gone for stained glass and Chinese calligraphy. I find this selection a bit weird but whatever makes his homesick little heart happy. Fortunately Singapore has plenty of art galleries in which he can display his new talents and earn enough money for sweets at the school canteen.

SM loves the canteen – he now prefers me not to pack snacks so that he can ‘buy stuff’. I give him three bucks a week and that’s his lot: we are all happy about how much he loves this little slice of independence (and SM loves the end results), but I can see the dentist’s bill looming.

I have picked out my own ECA, too, started it last night. On Saturday I met a woman at a small dinner party who talked me into joining her school choir. ‘Its OK,’ she said, ‘just a bit of fun.’ And it seemed my mouth had its own plans that night because it immediately formed the word ‘Yes’ – I recall it as a slow-motion thing like in the films, a time-delayed karate punch of a response to a mad idea.

What’s odd is that I would never, in all my born days, arrange to meet a virtual stranger in a random school car park after dark and sing loudly in front of a load of other strangers (sober). I did time in school choir for years, have staggered about after various weddings doing the New York New York cancan, and played my imaginary air guitar in Lucky Voice Karaoke a few times, but vodka has always played a large part.

Well sometimes there just isn’t a hip-flask to hand, and in fact when your own reality has been turned on its head and the world is quite literally upside down then you can pretty much do anything you want, I am finding. Go on, ask me to do something bonkers: there’s a good chance I’ll do it.

Anyway I booked the cab (SmallMonkey suitably open-mouthed at me ‘going to sing with some strangers’) and took a chair on the end of the Alto row, and I’m very glad I did because the strawberry margaritas in the local bar afterwards were close to perfection. We might even skip the music bit of things, next week.

Unpacking

Posted on by

I feel different, and my knives and forks feel different too, when I hold them again after our five-week separation. Stands to reason, I suppose: if things have changed for me then the same will apply to everything else. We’re pulling stuff out of boxes and it’s all looking very good indeed, and perhaps it’s just that we’re so glad to see it all. How is it possible to be that fond of a spoon? And how come the bedroom dresser suddenly looks like something out of Celebrity Homes? Our home is shaping up and I’m so happy to be welcoming in the tea towels, so delighted to unpack my spotty broom and put up the shoe rack, settling the cutlery into the right drawers with care. These are our gap years, I find myself telling the metal whisk and a small white milk jug. Get ready for some adventures! I suppose I am not quite over the jet lag yet…