Hero workshop

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Those of us who have a good relationship with our parents can remember the time when we realised our dads were not, after all, heroes. I was around 10 years old. It was night time and we were coming back from an evening out, all four of us. It wasn’t such a huge incident compared with those who’ve been less fortunate: we’d parked and were walking to our apartment block when we saw someone being beaten up. We took him upstairs to our flat and my folks bathed his wounds and called the police. The guy couldn’t stop crying (stark memory of this grown-up young man sobbing) and nothing my parents said could calm him. I remember Dad looking so worried and I suddenly had the realisation that nothing had been able to stop the attack, and nothing would stop another one. The flat didn’t feel safe, and Dad was no longer wearing his pants over his trousers. (Actually, the same event taught me about the kindness of strangers, and another thing too – that if someone is too scared to thank you, it doesn’t mean they’re not grateful.)

Well, there goes my hero just now, packed into a cab after three weeks of top-quality Dad/Daughter time. He’s mid-70s, I’m mid-40s, and we’re neither of us too old to get a bit wet around the eyes on departure. SmallMonkey (reverting to diminutive name forms for sentimental moments) is sobbing in the shower as I write – proper small-boy sobbing – and I’ve had to sit down in a quiet room alone and take a minute or two.

I’ve talked about this business of minding the gap before, each time Dad goes – about how empty things are without him, how I miss his way with nature, his passion for education, the energy and enthusiasm that comes with him into our home and is unpacked all over the spare room, seeping into everything we do with a happy stain, and I realise I might be painting him out to be some kind of idolised Dr Doolittle, but I know he isn’t. He’s a good friend, though, increasingly so.

This parent-child friendship – those of us lucky enough to have it – comes later, doesn’t it, after the anti-hero teen angst has passed (if all is going to plan). By the time I was at college, and people were telling stories about their bonkers parents with cool habits and funny ways, starting sentences with: ‘Oh my folks are just SO HILARIOUS’, or, ‘Oh you know what parents are like!’ – I already had the strong conviction that no-one else’s parents would ever be quite like mine.

He’s not perfect, though, he has faults like everyone (the outdoor table still has a scorch mark from one of his experiments, and I’m happy to see the back of the bathroom bunting of pants, hankies and flannels), but the amazingness doesn’t seem to be fading with age, it just gets stronger. And delightfully, it all gets passed down – most noticeable this trip was the growing friendship between Dad and Grandson: proper chats, proper holiday room sharing, lots of shared schoolwork and the sort of general mellow hanging-out vibe that you see in feelgood films. Nice work, family.

You can’t really ask for more than a Grandpa who borrows your waterpistol to chase away oriole pests threatening the bulbul nest that’s just under your balcony, can you? Who else even notices there’s a bulbul nest under the balcony? We thought it was all just tropical squawking until Grandpa revealed there was a whole bird battle going on in the condo clearing, right under our noses, with bulbuls, starlings, mynahs and orioles battling it out for leadership. Who else has a Grandpa standing by to take a water pop right over the downstairs four-piece table set? I don’t think Jonah’s condo friend, popping round to play last Sunday, is ever going to forget the sight of one pump action Nerf and two smaller waterpistols all set up to go, aimed between the wooden railings at the big palm as the orioles hovered in wait. Yep, he’ll be back again, soon as his mum lets him.

Since we moved here in June, I’ve had no idea that the mad after-dark frog noise outside is a nightjar, and that there’s a dollar bird in the tree at the end of the road. The huge black bird dragging something stringy in its claws hadn’t caught something, it was just a racket-tailed drongo and that’s how they look. Nettles are like tiny glass needles, did you know that? Over at Haw Par Villa, those funny old tortoises in the pond are eating all the fish, so don’t feel sorry for them. And the carp at our own condo, meanwhile, are not sweetly coming up for feeding time, they’re gasping for oxygen, so I’ll need to get onto that.

I’ve talked in other posts – here, here and here – about how time with Dad helps me see things in a different way; how I spend the entire time quietly taking notes. You’re never too old to learn. And you’re never too old to crumple into a heap when your hero has to get in a cab to Changi. Better pull myself together, there’s a nest to look after.

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Leap Year

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I can ask Mr PC to marry me (again) today. I can also wish my friend Scott a very happy birthday (married with two kids, he is just 9, or is it 10 years old). Today is Leap Year, the one time every four years that February has 29 days. I know exactly what I was up to last time round. I probably thought about all of the above at some point but mostly I remember very clearly that Mr PC had the day off work because something was being fixed in the flat. I was working at home as always, writing that novel that was never and will never be published (whispers: it was rubbish). The cats were probably being adorable and Jonah was definitely at school. It was Wednesday.

He had a playdate afterwards with a friend and, it still being the wintry months, it was after dark when I picked him up and started the long walk back uphill to home. I remember being unable to concentrate on his chatter as I led him along. This was because, at some point earlier that afternoon, my husband had stopped what he was doing with the flat to take an interesting phone call from work, during which a subject had cropped up that would change our lives forever.
I remember he put down the phone, came into the office room where I was thinking up another rubbish paragraph that would never be seen (whispers: it was really, really rubbish), and sat down on the couch behind me with one of those sheepish looks, as if to say: ‘stand by’.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Singapore’s come up again.’
And I turned around, ditched the Word document, and Googled: ‘S-c-h-o-o-l-s i-n-…’ etc.
Happy LeapYear anniversary Mr PC – four years but a lifetime of happenings. It’s been fun.

Sri Lanka Pt 2: One More for the Road

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Just one more post on Sri Lanka and then I think I’m done. The further away we move from that frantic week, the more I realise that we probably did it a little bit wrong: way too much way too fast. A friend and fellow blogger has just moved to Delhi and is experiencing her first proper writer’s block, senses pulled this way and that as India absorbs her into its new adventures. She has managed her first post and there is going to be a lot for her to grasp. Sri Lanka being a neighbour of India, and sharing certain similarities, I find I’m undergoing my own case of tongue-tie. Just four more snippets.

Hotel/motel
My family tease me for being a WhiteFluffyTowel girl, a fact that I continue to reject: I do NOT need my towels to be white and fluffy, you can put me where you like, as long as there are marks of thoughtfulness, and as long as we get a solid base to decamp before setting off again. Good food and a peaceful night’s sleep are also up there on the requirements list and actually any old towel will do and I only need one, and I’m happy to share that one between the three of us, but it must be clean, free from stains and at least slightly absorbent. That’s it. Not always so easy to find.
We are a family who enjoy a bit of this and a bit of that – to ensure we maximise our travel lust we are careful with the cash, but mindful of things like bed bugs and rubbish quality sleep. Armed with those requirements, we found it hard to plot a mid-course through Sri Lankan guest houses.
Everyone we talked to had gone four stars or higher (apart from the 20-something backpacker brigade on Tripadvisor, making friends with bed bugs as they worked their way around the country). During the planning stages, our driver had generously insisted on doing all the bookings. First he read us wrong and took the top-star route, lavishly booking us into places with names like Cinnamon, Jetwing, Lighthouse – expensive boutique places that we felt weren’t necessary. Trouble is, once you’ve turned that lot down, there’s a whole different line-up of interesting experiences just waiting to bite you on the lower leg or rustle in your ear all night. When we asked him to tone it down a bit we found ourselves looking down the half-star barrels of places that had not – and will never – get anywhere near Agoda. We got there in the end, but it was a stringy assortment of places, some good, one really very lovely, and others notsogood.
It’s hard to plan for guests when you’ve never met them, and it didn’t always work out the way we all wanted. Most disarming was the two examples of us pulling up to the door of a great-sounding guest house (and we knew they were great-sounding because we had researched them all at home and then printed out all the details, as you do when you can’t quite leave the bookings to someone else) only to notice as our driver parked up and switched off the engine that the name above the door was entirely different to the one on our list.
‘Ah well,’ Gamini would wince, ‘in the end, very hard to get into that place so we are here instead.’
‘A little notice, please,’ seemed a completely foreign concept because, well, it is. Change is just how things happen in SL. Too bad. Here’s how it worked out in the end:

Night One, Kumudu Valley, Negombo: Neglected riverside shabby without the chic, the only good fortune being that we were in it for the least amount of time. Evil-looking guards, stained sheets, a rash of bites on Jonah’s legs and no guests. Dismal. Our worst night.
Night Two, Mountain Breeze, Kandy: Simple guesthouse on a mountainside road: peace & quiet, good food, great views and lovely people. Highly recommended.
Night Three, Araliya Green Hills, Nuwara Eliya: Not the Hill Club, then? No. Not the sepia-tinted, much written about fancy hotel, our token posh hotel for which we had packed one posh outfit for the one posh meal in the one posh restaurant? No. Instead this was a just-built, over-blown, faux posh layer of corridors and carpets that made it second to the bottom of our list, thanks to being unfriendly, uninteresting and unfinished with plastic food, zero ambience, guards swarming the entrance, minus points for unhelpfulness at Reception and a nasty wobble to the lifts. You can keep your white linen tablecloths, I was only after a map of the town.
Night Four, Ambiente, Ella Gap: Not the Ella Gap Panorama, then? Oh God, never mind – for Mr PC at least, this place turned out to be a favourite but got minus points from me thanks to serious mould and dilapidation and what seemed on arrival to be zero niceness. In fact we were soon won over by our awesome slow-cooked curry dinner and the loveliness of the staff. We’d arrived in the dark, in the rain, after the mother of all train rides and could only guess we were at a high altitude because of the way the car had been taking ominously tight turns on approach, and because of how we had all been pointing very definitely up on our ascent. Next morning when I drew back the curtains I was cross to find that we’d been given a room facing a white wall – but no, that whiteness was sky, miles and miles of it, with astounding views of tiny roads far, far below and elegant birds flying some way under our terrace. While Mr PC lost himself in curry pleasure (again) in the breakfast room, I took pictures of far-off waterfalls on mountainsides several hundred metres below us, and fretted about how on earth we were ever going to get down.
Night Five, Dickshon Campsite, Yala: Gamini insisted on us staying here, despite it having no write-ups anywhere. In the end a write-up suddenly appeared just before we left, and I talked to the guy who wrote it because he scored it rather low. Having been assured by the writer that it was a safe place, just not fantastic, we pressed on with plans to stay. It’s a newish place, that’s all, run by a kind family trying to make a go of life. ‘For once,’ said Mr PC, ‘won’t you just leave something to chance?’ So we did. And it was bonkers, and it was a bit half-ready, but, you know, it was lovely, actually. Jonah scored this place highest, because ‘the dogs were kind’. We loved its peaceful location by a lotus-filled lake. After four dusty days on the road, to unfurl among herons and waders, with bee-eaters playing chase through the trees, the sun setting over straw rooftops and Jonah throwing sticks for the kind dogs, was heaven on earth. Even massive holes in the mossie nets, scrappy curtains not covering the windows, dead things in the shower and flies all over the beds at night didn’t detract from its simple gorgeousness, and extra marks given for the super-nicest hosts of our trip.
Nights Six & Seven, Mama’s Guest House, Galle: Being a town girl this was my fave, the only one we booked ourselves, and the place we stayed at for longest (two whole nights). A rooftop restaurant with just two rooms, ours had a perfect view right down the street to the ocean. It was a bit noisy at night but so pretty, in an amazing spot full of cafes, little shops and buzzing with life, and with a yummy evening meal and fantastic roti breakfast, all with unbeatable views of the Lighthouse and walls, from both rooftop and room. Did I mention the location? Very recommended.

Food
Curry. Divine. Don’t have Western, at best you’ll get oven fries, at worst a wet tomato sandwich. Curry is what the country is famous for, so soak it all up. We also liked curd (a form of yoghurt) with honey, and naughty sesame candy. John gamely tried a weird stinky fruit that, rather like durian, tasted better than it smelled (he said). Jackfruit, rambutan and watermelon can all be found and papaya is everywhere. Our favourite roadside snack came in the form of salted husks of boiled sweetcorn sold in bags and so searing hot that you had to hang them from your fingertips before eating – if you’ve been foolish enough to self-drive, don’t do both at the same time.

People
I’ve not really noticed my femininity for a while. I don’t really do bikinis any more and I’m mindful of what I wear, but happy enough with my shape: it’s all I’ve got, it’s impossible to change and it will have to do. Luckily I live somewhere where none of this really matters – clothing in Singapore is minimal because it’s just too hot to wear very much, so legs and arms are exposed most of the time, apart from in air con (often) or when we go into temples (not often). The national costume is ‘casual’, and it’s not unusual to see professional and office workers in teeny cocktail dresses and short shorts. I’m speaking in general terms and don’t mean anything by it – I love the fact that I’ve not worn tights in four years.
Hit Sri Lanka and it’s a different story. The locals are marketed as being smiley, happy people, another sweeping generalisation, and it’s certainly true that we met some completely lovely people. My aforementioned Delhi friend has just written in her first blogpost after moving to India that she is getting used to going for walks all the while being observed by ‘silent starers’, something that just doesn’t happen that often here, and that’s something I noticed in Sri Lanka too. I felt self-conscious for the first time in ages. Fortunately I’d had an idea that this might be the case and had packed appropriately, taking sensible outfits like long sleeves and trousers, and demure calf-length dresses, and wearing shorts only when I knew it was completely OK. Even so, I spent most of the time feeling like I was walking around half naked.
On a sunset stroll in Galle, when the whole town comes out to walk the walls before nightfall, the boys left my side to go and look at something for all of two minutes. In the very short while that they were gone I was approached no less than three times by different groups of men asking where I was from and who I was with. I wasn’t wearing a bikini or juggling ping pong balls, just doing a very ordinary bit of fully clothed walking. Clearly, I have been spoilt, here in bare-limbed, casually-attired Singapore. I’ve forgotten that the lone female traveller must always keep her wits about her wherever she is. The lone *any* traveller. Common sense, I guess.

Tsunami
You can’t get around Sri Lanka without this subject coming up, it is the biggest elephant in the room. ‘I won’t ask Gamini about it,’ I’d said on Day One in a show of Touristic Magnanimity. ‘I reckon he’s bound to be tired of everyone asking.’ What nonsense. The Tsunami of 2004 has become so much a part of Sri Lankan history that to not talk about it would have been more hurtful, and in the end he brought it up first, not me.
The year after the Tsunami, he said on our safari evening, as we sat by the bonfire, there were virtually no tourists in Sri Lanka. He said it has taken the full ten-plus years to get back to something approaching ‘normal’ in terms of tourism at least. He and his family, living in Kandy, were fine but yes, he knew of people affected.
As we journeyed through Sri Lanka with Gamini, his job as a tour guide and driver involved pointing stuff out, birds, temples, events on the road (monk’s funeral, sports day, food stands). It was only as we drove along the south coast from east to west that the snippets became interjected with Tsunami miscellania: ‘there’s a memorial… there’s a cemetary… place where entire train drowned… ruins of houses… more ruins… ruins again…’
I thought about my O Level school trip to the Somme in 1984 where lines of white gravestones dotted Vimy Ridge, and how it had been the first time I’d come close to appreciating a school outing, possibly because it was the first time I’d been able to compare the theory of something written down with the awful reality of it having happened.
I caught a bit of WiFi in Galle and did some research – by the time we were driving north to Colombo and the airport, Tsunami facts were embedded in my virtual scrap book. View of the cricket stadium from the Galle walls? That’s where they were all stuck on the top floor until the waters went down. Beautiful train tracks right by the beach? That’s why the train toppled over. Piled high with passengers, few of them stood a chance.
‘No one had seen anything like it,’ said Gamini. ‘The fishermen – everyone – all came down to the beaches to see what was going on. And, then, the wave.’
During another story, he talked about what happened next. A few days later, he said, they all drove down south to see what they could do. Everyone wanted to help. What they saw… He waved an arm helplessly around the driver’s space, nodding at the land speeding past outside our car window and shaking his head. He didn’t need to spell it out.
You just can’t come here and not think about it, so go ahead and give it a bit of your time. I think everyone should.

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Sri Lanka Pt 1: Points of View

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Don’t even try and do all that stuff on your list – that’s my first tip. Scrap half of it and play the rest by ear. We packed a lot into our seven-day half term, but we’re optimistic like that, and we came home exhausted. Standard. There is a way of getting to see all those hotspots – and that is to hire someone to take you bumping over the top of the country. You’ll end up seeing most of it from the back of a Prius Hybrid but you’ll go home with a series of intense snapshot impressions:

  • Fairy lights draped around a bank
  • Cows in the middle of a football game
  • Smells and colours popping out: putrid rubbish, hot pink saris
  • In Galle, somebody tap-tapping on an old typewriter from the back of a shop (hi, Mum)
  • In Yala, fireflies on a night safari, and a bird flapping around in the back of our jeep
  • Tsnuami memorial by the train track where an entire train drowned
  • Big turtle playing in surf. Elephant’s bottom disappearing in the darkness
  • Cheeky schoolkids asking for sweets at the rail station
  • Perilous-looking miniature ferris wheel powered by steam
  • Birds, birds, birds, curry, curry, curry, more pink saris

Roads
Just don’t do it. Roads in SL are hell. If you’re adventurous then take the train or bus – the former is cheap and wonderful but slightly chaotic, the latter is just chaotic. Otherwise, find yourself a good driver. Much better to have someone else threading you in and out of the clotted traffic, so all you have to do is sit back and relax, watching tuk tuks and buses come at you head on as you overtake on perilous mountain roads.

Drivers
We accidentally had two – the one I’d been talking to via email, who had insisted on also doing all our bookings and being our guide, only to suffer a diabetic slump a few days before we arrived (the email chain suddenly went quiet). All credit to him, he managed to organise a replacement for us, from his sick bed, but the first we knew of it was when we rocked up to the airport at 10.30pm to find that the man holding the sign didn’t look at all like the man I’d seen in photos, being a whole foot shorter, with a slight afro. (It’s quite funny now. It wasn’t at the time. And I do realise that having diabetes isn’t funny either)
In fact, Sunil turned out to be one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, straight up, a gentle hard worker with no less than three major careers on the go: music teacher, rice farmer, tour guide. Endlessly kind, thoughtful and funny. We’d got used to Sunil when our original guy, Gamini, arrived to take over, well recovered and wisely avoiding all our travel sweets. He was more fluent in English so he made a slightly better tour guide, but they both drove beautifully. Worth the dollars (and not a lot at that), these guys bust a gut to get you places. Sunil dropped us at a leaky mountain guest house in the dark, caught a few hours kip, then was on the 5.30am bus back home where he then had just two days to perfect his students’ band music for the annual school sports meet.
Four days later, Gamini dropped us at the airport at 10.30pm then had to do a three-hour drive back home through night-time mountain roads. He’d sensibly planned the next week off, otherwise his next tour would have been directly after ours. Somehow they stay awake and do it all with a smile – well, the good ones do.

Safari
It’s said that African safaris are better, but when you’re 11 and spotting crocodiles from the back of a jeep, you’re not really going to judge. You’re also not going to care if there aren’t any leopards because you’ve just seen bison having a bath, a family of elephants throwing mud around, huge peacocks, several funny diggy little mongoose (mongi?), jackals, massive monitors, and those crocodiles. Plus spotted deer.

Camping
Well, sort of. My family will do an amazed ‘whoop’ but then there’ll be raised eyebrows when they hear that the tents were huts, and had a flushing toilet each. But, fairplay to fussy me, there was a proper need for the mossie nets and those we had were covered in holes, there was a dead cricket in the shower (yes alright there was a shower), a spider nesting above the toilet*, and no light once the generator went off (but yes, we had electric lights). But, you know, camping! Jonah love love love loved it until we noticed the beds were covered in beetles and flies at night (cue small boy horrified face and imaginary death music), but once the mossie nets were up that was sorted. Well, actually, no, it was only a little bit sorted but I’m not telling Jonah that, and none of us sleeps with our mouth open, so all good. Yes I would do it again. I’m just glad I didn’t hear about the baby snake until we left, which is also just as we spotted a herd of bison wandering through the neighbouring field. THAT close.

Farms
I like my farms spread out over hills in swathes of green like a giant furry duvet (tea country, check), or dotted with happy cows (foothills, check), or fringed with lush waving rice tips (lowlands, check). I’m not at all keen on squat metal shacks with penned-in livestock, stinking tiny calves and dirty rabbits lying in cramped hutches in the dark. I’m sure there’s a reason for that kind of farming. I have probably been eating it. Maybe I need to be vegetarian? Don’t bother with New Zealand Farm if you share the same preferences.
On the night we arrived, Sunil had spent the whole day farming his own rice paddy. He’d paid people to finish the job so that he could switch to being a driver for us. Sri Lanka’s main outcrop is rice, with tea also bringing in the rupees. Tea farms are dotted with the bright saris of pickers. You can buy whole boxes of the stuff and have it shipped home, and you should expect to drink it absolutely everywhere. Orange Pekoe, please.

Heights
Another of my numerous fears, and the prospect of spending approximately half of the trip some 1800m above sea level meant I packed a strip of Xanax. Thanks to our great drivers I didn’t need them for the car, in fact the views were delightful, but a waterfall walk didn’t go so well. Got halfway to the viewing point then requested to be left to wait, hanging on to the shrubbery on my left and avoiding the drop on the right. After 10 minutes my eyes had convinced me that I was on some perilous ledge, rather than the ample footpath that small children were scampering up and down, and by the time I was collected for the return meagre 20-metre stroll back up to restaurant level, my knees were playing the tom-toms. I really don’t need heights. I can see from the car, honest.

Train
Why, then, did the heights on the train not bother me so much? I can’t say. The whole three hours was so surreal, surely it wasn’t actually me flying through the sky in a weighty blood-red carriage around the very edge of the very top of a massive mountain? I’m a convert, I want to do it again. If you’re doing the train, (and I hate the word ‘should’, but you should), you should make sure that one of your journeys is the route that takes you high up into the mountains and beyond.
Mr PC was distraught when he saw that Gamini had booked us ‘First Class’ tickets, devastated at the thought of the promised ‘butler’ coming round and serving us drinks on trays, while air con froze us rigid. No, silly, this is Sri Lanka! And that website must have been written in 1548. First we waited for an hour. Then when the very late train strolled up we had to literally climb up the ladder on the side to get in. There was air con, yes, but it wasn’t switched on because the windows had all either been opened or had fallen open approximately 30 years before. Doors also stayed open for a purpose I will outline in a few sentences. What butler? There was a kitchen that looked like one of those Channel 4 programmes: ‘Hoarders From Hell’. Mr PC loved it, and made us both a nice enough cuppa in a proper mug, then hung out of the open doorway to drink it.
There were curtains – or had been, once, but I’ve no idea why the remains were still there. Tattered scraps simply got in the way of people sticking their heads outside, posing for pictures taken by someone else hanging out of the carriage door. A cheeky train guard joined in the fun by pretending to push a tourist out onto the track. Oh how she laughed. No, she really did.
Springs on these trains are as big as a large dustbin, so screaming around tight corners on viaduct bridges with absolutely nothing under you but air – well, that’s why those springs are huge. Honks of steam announced us at every station and road crossing. Walkers strolled along the tracks behind us, and when we finally chugged up to our stop in the dark, we had to get off onto the line itself then cross over and shimmy up onto the platform, helped up by fellow waiting passengers.
Our train was so late that the last hour of the journey was sadly in darkness, not sunset as planned, but this simply made it all the more atmospheric, and brought out the carriage’s bonkers golden-stencil patterns on the walls. There should have been a detective with a moustache and a 1930s love angst scene. We stopped in the pitch black at one point for a while, engine ticking in the quiet night, crickets chattering. I think there were cows on the line. Quite, quite bonkers and an absolute should-do.

Soundtrack
All the best holidays have one, and ours came from Sunil’s collection of ‘Best Of’ albums all weirdly beginning with the letter B: Bob Marley, Boney M (oh, those Russians), Buddha Bar and Best Deep House. Divine choices for whatever scenery we were passing, which was just as well since we had the whole lot on a loop. I’ll leave you with my favourite, which will forever remind me of a series of switchback mountain roads in tea country, through which we cruised gently with Sunil at the wheel, tapping his hands in time. I felt like Bridget Jones before her hair went wrong, and frankly, every girl should be treated to at least one car trip where she feels like that.

I’m so sorry, but there’s more. So so much more. I’ll do it once I’ve come down from tea land. I might be some time.

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*Just to say it was a very wobbly toilet with a curtain dividing it from the bedroom. I couldn’t see my feet in the dark. And a cockroach climbed into Mr PC’s washbag and came with us to the next guest house. But, you know – camping!

First Mud

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The boys go on a hash run every fortnight, through various bits of jungle around Singapore on alternate Sundays. This is keeping it in the family for Mr Partly Cloudy, whose parents met through a regular hash run in Ipoh, Malaysia in the 1960s. He’s been enjoying a local kids’ version with Jonah, and they’ve both wanted me to come along too. ‘If you can do Bukit Brown,’ said Mr PC this week, ‘it’s not that much harder.’ I know, I know. We didn’t need a crystal ball to tell us that in this sort of weather, those might be famous last words. No matter, I’m now the proud owner of a pair of properly muddy post-hash trainers, and I’ve got vine splinters. And yes, there is satisfaction to be gained. And yep, I might even do it again. Talk about a baptism of fire, though. Or water.

You jungle-doubters, there is thick foliage here in Singapore, you just have to look for it. It helps to have a group of willing explorers happy to spend their free time trekking through the undergrowth, tying hankies around trees and bits of rope up steep slopes so that nutters like us can crash through a few hours later. The prize at the end is a back-of-the-van meal for kids and a beer tent for adults. Nice one.

It’s plain to see why the boys have been persuading me to join, but I have always had an excuse up my sleeve. This week, though, after Mr PC knocked his ribs in a game of football and began wheezing and slowing down, I decided that the only way to stop him running the course was to join in. Little did I know that my first ever hash would coincide with a whopper of a monsoon storm.

Stop a minute here and just take some time to think about what you need to do when marching through a bit of jungle. We’re told, don’t stray off the path, snakes are there. We’re told, don’t touch the tree trunks, you don’t know what’s perched on them, creeping along under them or slithering around them, and that’s before we’ve even started on the possibility of poisonous plants and huge giants crashing through undergrowth eating all the villagers. OK not that last bit, but the other stuff, definitely. Would you ever, in your stupidest moments, give a tropical trunk a full body hug, or lie down in thick jungle mud and slide your way from A to B? Course not, because that would be silly. But wet weather conspired against us and turned the course into a slipway, which meant that as cautious drops turned to full on downpour, not holding on would have been even stupider.

We all fell over, slipped along, tore our skin and got mud in our eye. Thorny vine? Give it here. Three-inch-thick mud slope? Sit right down and slide, why not? And actually, to begin with it was quite fun whacking through vines like Sylvester Stallone in First Blood, and Starskying across fallen trees in an effort to keep up. Fortyfive minutes of that, combined with comedy buckets of rain, and let me tell you I was limping along grabbing handfulls of sodden foliage wherever I could, crashing over trunks like a shot elk, pushing my shoulder into the bottom of the stranger in front as she limped wetly up an incline, in a desperate effort to just move the whole thing along. Time crawled, like us – it was all taking a wee bit longer than planned. My specs frosted over with rain; the kid in front of me noted the clouds of steam puffing up from me and Mr PC any time we paused. I began to wonder when it might get dark; if we’d ever get home. Jonah, at first a buoyant and proud guide, showing me the ropes, lost his bravado and took it in turns with me to alternate moods: one of us would nobly shout ON ON! while the other mewed about a sore foot or hurty shoe, and all the while Mr PC darted between us, helping us up and down steep banks and around spiky tree trunks. Fun for all the family.

All the normal people in our group took the short route, but Jonah chose the 5k signpost and so it was that we ended up sliding through thicker and thicker soup, wondering when the helicopters would start circling, and wishing we had opted for the home option, the one that came with telly and a nice cup of tea. I’d just been persuaded to stop sobbing for the third or fourth time when a big hoot went up from my friend up ahead, and out we popped onto the Green Corridor, an old train track and well known running trail. We ran the last 500 metres to the beer tent; Tiger never tasted so good.

I apologise to all the small children I pushed out of the way when I saw that patch of white sky as jungle gave way to clearing. I’m sorry to my friend and also to my husband for having a proper weep at that very tricky slippy bit. And most of all I’m sorry to my bottom for giving it such a very muddy afternoon when all it really wanted was to sit on the sofa at home. In the end we did a grand total of 2.4 miles. It took the best part of two hours. We forgot to pack bus cards and did not dare call a cab, so totally caked in mud were we, so we had to walk to a bus stop and pay a full ten dollars for the three of us just to go about 8 stops, standing in the pram space the whole way home, stinking slightly of mulch. A caterpillar appeared on my vest, and bits of mud fell off Mr PC’s arm every time the bus changed gear.

I might go back next time. I will have to think about it. I liked the crowd, the theory of it all and the beer. I do admit to feeling brilliant at the end, with that pleasing muscle ache a few hours later that lets you know you’ve actually done something with your body. Where would you ever see jungle like this if you didn’t follow such trails? I think the people who set the routes are amazing, and I love how they do it, and yes, it is organised, and yes, it is good fun. So I’ll be back for some more Rambo fun shortly. If it rains, though, you know where to find me: #sofaplease

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Bukit Brown for beginners

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Several tours are recommended if you live on the Red Dot. Today’s tour of Bukit Brown cemetery had been on my list for a long time – especially as the whole place is currently being cut up to make way for a big road, with ancestors being dislodged and moved to stacked vertical resting places (or worse, but we won’t think about that).
‘Whoohh,’ said my Mandarin teacher last night when I told her of this morning’s trip, ‘is it still there?’ And when I replied that it was, she said with a note of suspicion: ‘Er, we don’t really go to cemeteries very often.’
I know what she means, it’s not an obvious choice for a fun day out, but when you think about all the famous cemeteries of the world (Highgate cemetery in London with Karl Marx, Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris with Jim Morrison) then the prospect of a guided tour around some tombstones becomes a perfectly sensible suggestion.
And that’s why we found ourselves on a morning ramble, my friend and I, threading our way through thickets and brambles with 16 other guests, crashing to scare off potential snakes while our leader, herself a relative of some Bukit Brown residents, gamely pushed giant morning cobwebs out of our way (meanwhile my friend apologised to anyone we stepped on by accident).
It’s because we are tour guides that we were invited on the morning tour today, although you can always go round yourselves (and there were people dog-walking, horse-riding and scootering). Isn’t it always a bonus to have someone guide you, though? And not just to chase off the spiders.
Some might say you actually need a tour guide here, because Bukit Brown is a proper adventure – a thick, bushy maze of partially obscured graves scattered over several hillsides. In these hallowed acres lie whole families, grouped war victims, famous local personalities. The person showing us around is also a guide at the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall, and it was invaluable to have her help decode the traditional Chinese lettering and point the way around the woody place. We found tombstones tucked deep in brambles. Other graves had been tidied up, untangled, so you could clearly see the stark geometric art deco carving, the orange brickwork and Victoriana tiles. Some were exposed all on their own by the road, others placed neatly side by side or dotted one over the other up and down the sides of the hills, backed with sweeping armchair-shaped walls and guarded by stone gods, creatures, figures.
Many had little rocks placed on top, some trapping a slip of paper. Don’t move them, we were told, this is a visitor’s way of telling the ancestors, I’m here – I’ve come to see you. I did a little Google of this when I got home and it seems it’s a Jewish tradition too. Some say it means the relative is anchored in place. Whatever the reason the stones looked reverential, thoughtful, an earthy equivalent to the cut flowers you see in western graveyards.
You’d need a hard heart not to have been moved by our visit but it wasn’t an entirely solemn morning at all, quite the opposite. Our guide lead her long-trousered chatty crocodile with energy: ‘This way!’ she would shout, suddenly off-roading to the left beneath a hanging curtain of lianas, with us scrambling along behind in a cloud of Deet.
She saved the best til last – the biggest grave in Bukit Brown. After a vertical stomp the jungle opens up to a clearing with the most enormous Chinese armchair-shaped memorial. This grave belongs to prominent businessman Ong Sam Leong, who clearly did very well for himself. Once surrounded by a fish-filled moat, the tomb covers 600 square metres, has its own skate-rink sized forecourt of beautiful tiles, and is guarded by stone lions and mossy soldiers. Most graves have their own earth stone deity off to one side – not this one: this one has an entire earth god tomb all to itself.
What a morning, one of the best tours I’ve experienced since moving here: fun, exciting, and very precious to be able to see the stones before the threatened eight-lane highway swallows them up. You can take yourself off to Bukit Brown; driving is best, and there are parking spots along the roads. There’s an unopened MRT station, but who knows when that will come into play (or if we ever actually want it to). Or you can hop in a cab and get dropped off for a stroll.
When I see my Chinese teacher next week I will recommend she pops by and says hello, before the ancestors melt away into history.
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About a Boy

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Throughout this diary I have referred to our son as ‘SM’, SmallMonkey. He was seven when I started writing this; I wanted to keep him secret. Well you can’t hide forever, especially not when you’re getting taller, older. So he’s not SM any more he’s Jonah, and today he turns 11.

Previous SM birthdays have been celebrated with anecdotes like this and this.

But 2015 was a funny old year, with a different flavour of discussions. Not adult, not yet – there’s still a petulant twang to the voice and a big lower lip. He’s not reading War and Peace (yet) and he’s not splitting the atom, although he likes a good science project. He’s our Only, and he often feels the weight of that, for whatever reason. He does make me laugh (mostly in a good way), but this was not a year of hilarious anecodotes. Have we just had a growth year? Or are we going backwards?

School’s busy. Evenings are hectic and often end in homework sulks, belligerent demands for toast, ice cream, nachos, never mind what we actually have in stock. From me there are shouted commands (TIDY, SHOWER, TEETH, BED!) and mornings have the same code (SHOES, BAG, BUS!) – this isn’t family chatter, this is boot camp. And don’t get me started on the high school debates.
How long until the XBox? Can we skip tennis? Sleep over? Tonight? Why not? Ditch homework / piano / chores? Can the entire condo have pizza? Why not? Can everyone have lunch here? Can he have lunch there? Why do we have to do that? Can’t we watch a film? Why is it too old? Half the class has seen it. Yes they have. Well their mums must be wrong. Why are we having fish? Who in the house likes ginger? Can he leave it? Why temples, why not the mall? Why does he have to do swimming, football, rugby, tennis, swimming, football, rugby, football, tennis? Can we have pudding on the sofa? Can he have more food? Less food? Better food? Why can’t he have a phone?
With this kind of debating prowess he will surely build legacies; communities; cities.

Never mind. They’re all at it, and within all of this can be found the flashes of kindness and genuine moral standing that anyone who knows Jonah will know he possesses. When homework is forgotten an email is swiftly tapped out to the teacher, sweetly phrased with apologies and constructive ideas. I am sad one day, and, placing a kind paw on my arm, he suggests a Grandpa Skype (it always works for him, he says). He comes back from a neighbour very full. What did he eat? He says, Mum it was all German, and I was the only kid who tried anything, I felt so sorry for her, so I kept eating whatever she offered.

I always have an ear out for howlers but this year has been rather thin on the ground. I’ve copied down three, all in the last few weeks, that sum him up:

EXISTENTIAL JONAH
We were having a little chat about Death, as you do.
‘Do you know that you’re going to die?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘From the moment you’re born, it’s the one certainty.’
‘But do we know exactly when? And how do we know what happens after we’ve died? For instance a guy – say he’s called Steve or something – dies and then maybe he gets transported into my body. Because you can’t just lie there all day in the dark when you’re dead, can you? Maybe it’s like sleeping and you can’t feel anything? Wish I could work it out.’

COMEDY JONAH
Muddy-faced after PE, Jonah is challenged by the head of the girl bulllies:
Her: ‘Ugh! What happened to your face?’
Him: ‘I’ve been playing rugby, what’s your excuse?’

EXPAT JONAH
Heading back to class after a guitar lesson at school.
Teacher: ‘Where are you going next?’
Him: ‘Sri Lanka’

Happy birthday, you big monkey (and in the Year of the Monkey too, your year). Keep up with the comebacks and don’t fret the BigEverAfter.

Love from your PC parents xxx
TinyJonah:3 weeks

Life, the Universe and Everything

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This was going to be entitled Life on Mars, but then David Bowie died, so that was that. Then I thought about calling it January: I like it as a name, plus I was having a sleepless little think, just now, about how January is the weirdest of all months, a cold, long time of year full of desperate ambition, sepia retrospect, diets. Also full of birthdays: Mum’s on the 4th, SM’s on the 21st, my best friend and also my mother-in-law, on the 28th and 29th. Mum always said it was a great time of year to have a birthday because just as everyone’s Christmas was petering out with a fizzle, along came the 4th to cheer everything up. She had lots of these brave sentiments, was sometimes quite outspoken. Friends phoned to get her measured, even opinion on all sorts of things. She was on the radio, telly. I even thought about calling the other day, to go through a few Christmas ideas: stupid, like itching a leg that’s no longer there. She’d have had a lot to say over a cuppa about Bowie, and Rickman. I wish I could hear it.
January’s very weird for us this year, transported back from our old life after the holiday visit. Two whirlwind weeks in the cool and now shot back through the dark and into the light again: vast worlds apart, eight whole hours difference, and the jetlag this time round has been colossal, and the chasm between both worlds more immense than ever before.
You can call it January blues. Keep your diets, I just want to be the right way up. My new Christmas Fitbit tells me that I average four hours sleep a night: I’m Margaret Thatcher, a proper robot! This month I have mostly been using the stuffy small hours to think about my current life (I can’t say ‘new’ because it isn’t so new any more), in comparison to our old one, the one we’ve just arrived Home from. When I lie awake it makes me breathless to think of how everyone is – right at that minute – pottering about on the planet at a completely different time making tea, buying the paper, pressing ‘print’ at work, popping down into the Tube, forgetting their umbrella. How do we all function at such different times? It’s one in the morning Here – 5pm Over There. This must be why I am still awake, it’s just been tea time.
Home is now Here, where my stuff is, where my family are, but half my family are back There in OtherHome, and when we return, half my heart will always be Here. It keeps me awake. It has kept me awake tonight. I’ve given up, got up, put on the kettle and flipped open the winking white screen: lucky me, pouring it all into words when I can’t do anything else about It.
I know what I’d ask Mum about Bowie, and Rickman. I would ask her if she thought that big public deaths might sometimes offer people a safe way of spreading out whatever private grief they have, to anchor it. Especially if they’ve just had a very real death in the house themselves, like above-mentioned Best Friend, who lost her partner two short months ago. This is the current theme of the waking hours, that the dark elastic miles make it impossible to be There to help sweep up the fallout. I can only be Here, sending futile keyboard kisses across the ether, and it doesn’t really work. When the global tsunami of two very famous deaths hits the headlines one after the other, grief is unlocked and open: free for all. I would have asked Mum if she thought it sometimes helped people cushion the loss, just a little. I know, though, that of course it doesn’t, it probably just makes it all much, much worse.
Keyboard clicks verify this: my girl’s not had a good day. Nothing helps, time doesn’t help, crying probably doesn’t help, not all the cups of tea in China. Not even Chai tea, her favourite. Of course I don’t really know because I’m halfway around the world, aren’t I, and she’s far away somewhere to the left-and-up-of-me, drinking tea and crying while I hang upside down in a dark bedroom, thinking of her, and him, and them, and me and my impossibly lovely-but-tricky dual life. I think I might learn to meditate, to just be, but the sleepless phone screen is by my side and happy to tell me when things are not right in NeverLand. I’ll switch off in a minute, shut down. In my two worlds I can always escape: if I don’t like it Here, I can always go There. At least through my keyboard, if not in person.
I’m not the only existential fretter in the house. SM quite often pads down the hall late at night into our room, pale and baggy, worried about Life, The Universe and Everything. He wants to know where it all begins and where it ends, and I’m with him every sleepless step of the way because I wonder, too, how each hot black night Here draws us closer to There, pulls us nearer to dark conclusions of our own, answers to the kinds of questions that we don’t want to ask, don’t want to think about. Some people don’t get the luxury of putting on the kettle and going back to bed – when I think about this, I know I never want to arrive at that awful point. It’s unfathomable and unanswerable.
So we get up, have cocoa, he goes back to bed with a ruffle of the head, I pop online and check the news, first Here, then There. Are you OK over there? I’m here, I’m thinking of you.

Christmas on Mars

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It still amazes me that simply by sitting down for 14 hours (12 without a headwind), we can transport ourselves from one planet to another. Well OK, to another country, but when you’re changing seasons as well as cultures, you might as well be arriving on a different planet.
Having not experienced a winter since 2011, popping out of the rabbit hole from boiling hot Singers into a dark and icy London morning was alien and magical. While SM pinched his fingers to keep warm as we pushed our luggage towards the Heathrow Express at 6.30am, I did a happy little shuffle, so glad to be back for the season, revelling in the cold against my skin (maybe regretting packing our coats deep within the bags, but ah well, lesson learned).
Alright. Now you’re going to tell me it was the warmest Christmas since 1248, but for us it was baltic, a shock to our systems. I bought a better jacket on day one, and proper socks, Grandpa took SM to buy gloves. We wore scarves and woollen hats, got dressed to go to bed, blasted out the heaters in every home we stayed in, kept the electric blankets on for as long as we could, and it was lovely – properly festive, sense-tingling and sparkly, with dark black nights, soft winter sunrises and a real use for mulled wine.
I’ve always championed a warm Christmas, because when you think about it, half the world can’t help having one, so we might as well accept them. Out of the other half, around 70 per cent probably think that it’s wrong to have Christmas in the tropics, and the remaining 30 per cent of us quite enjoy the blow-up snowmen bobbing against hot blue skies, curry dinners on the beach and celebratory dips in hot oceans wearing Santa hats. (For some people, you don’t need a hot sea to do this – the cousins went for a mad Christmas Day dip in sub-temperature seas, the chilly weirdos.)
Still, after four tropical Christmases on the trot, it was nice to have a proper wintry backdrop for the tinsel, to be dashing about under stormy* winds and fetching bags of goodies in and out of cars with the weather whipping rolls of wrap and scattering rain over our shopping. This is the proper way of burning off all those deeply bad foods trolleyed out in spades: meats soaked in naughty fats with sausages and spuds, fruity puddings and cakes, crisps, nuts, wine, stocking treats, and chocolates enjoyed at a slow pace with no fear of anything melting into the foil.
A London Christmas involves the same chores, visits and drinks as always but with a more thoughtful attitude to things like dress (tights and coats) and time of day (8am to 3pm and that’s it) than in sultry Singapore. In London, sparkles are reflected in colder puddles, heating is inside not out. Stuffed into a packed hire car, setting off for the wild west, I got SM to count Christmas trees in windows just as we’d always done when we were small (scoring a lamentable seven, distracted by the joys of high class snacking from posh service stations: never had THOSE in the oldene days.)
Put me in our Cornish cottage at this time of year and I am retro happy, sitting at my desk in the upstairs double room, transported back to the ghosts of Christmas past – legwarmers, rainbow jumpers, Wham! topping the charts and that first ever boyfriend Christmas card curling slightly in my happy hand.
These days, walks on the beach with cousins become double-layered: two sets of cousins from two generations, with us now falling behind and them now running up ahead, bobble-hatted and wet-ankled.
And these days it’s me tip-toeing into the smaller back bedroom, stashing a fat stocking at the foot of a bed and sneaking backwards, already two tired hours into the big day and covered in bits of tape and glitter from the snowstorm of wrapping, and just a few short hours before SM heaves his treat-laden stocking into our bedroom, just as we did with our own parents for so many years. To have Grandpa and Auntie in on it too – special, wondrous and well worth the night-time sit across many lands and seas to get to them.
We’re planning next Christmas already, no doubt a hot one, though I might try and recreate the chill as I’m beginning to think it does work a bit better. To start the planning now is a good way of padding out the holes in our hearts, gaps created when we make that long return sit to pop out once again in palm tree land, where the lights are still on the tree that we left behind some two weeks before. Traces of fat stocking debris leading up the hallway to a small back bedroom in this other world of ours tell us that it wasn’t all a dream, and grey monsoon skies outside are doing a fair job of helping me merge the planets so the distance is not quite so wide.
Happy New Year one and all, whichever planet you’re on.
* apologies to those who suffered in the real storms Up North. You would probably all have preferred a tropical one this year
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Food with everything

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I didn’t want to like it, honest. I thought I would skim over the top of the activities, spend the entire weekend avoiding people, stay in our room, sunbathe in private on the balcony, make full use of the food and then come home again. I didn’t expect, when we booked another last-minute weekend break to cover a public and school holiday that I would spend my time learning Pilates, sailing on a boat steered by my son, going on a jungle walk and even getting some work done, but I ended up doing all that. It’s like that at #clubmed (there, I said the C word), you can’t help but get stuck in.
There would have been absolutely no point to NOT make full use of the facilities on offer: heaps of activities day and night; the best white-powder beach I have seen since Western Australia; the bowls of fresh curry, trays of fish, platters of carved fruit, mountains of puddings on tiny dishes and exquisite little salads on individual plates that changed on rotation every day, with a choice of four flavours per sitting – that’s four at lunch, four new ones at dinner, different ones again the next day, etc – yes, I counted. Plus free-flow cocktails at every bar you visited (three) whatever time of day, as well as snacks at regular intervals if you hung out at the right kiosk. All manned by the kind of hardworking, smiling staff you only see in the movies, ready to see to your every beck and call. Plus blue skies, white sands, warm sea. Yuk, horrible holidays, who needs all that?
Guiltily booked just a month after our flight back from Tokyo, what a change from Japan was this trip – far from Kyoto’s creaking teak temple floors, Nara’s sacred woods, Shinjuku’s sky-high neon, the point of this lazy ferry flop across the waters south of Singapore to an Indonesian island (no carbon footprints, just sandy ones) was all about leisure, aggressive pampering of every guest until we could do nothing but smile as we lay back on massage bed, beach lounger, Pilates mat, getting up only to head back to the buffet for seconds, even thirds.
Knowing that’d be me, I wisely packed my running gear and signed up for Pilates as soon as we arrived, happy to learn a new health technique since it was all paid for. This was a whole new string to my fitness bow, and while I wasn’t able to find my core, I did love how the instructor gave me an encouraging little squeak for doing good press-ups. I didn’t even know I could do press-ups. For the boys this was bliss. While I bent myself into interesting angles in the fitness block, they threw themselves into every single sporting event they could pack into three days. When I was chopping up and down in the sea, they shot arrows into targets. While I laced my trainers and went running along the sands, they climbed a tiny ladder and lunged forward on the trapeze, and while I signed up to an organised power-walk, they took kayaks out to the far buoys and back. My power-walk was a little under-subscribed, just me and the sports rep, so I got to hear all about life at CM, and I’m not sure whether I’m either completely gullible or just a bit stupid, but it really does sound like a great place to live and work. Or maybe by then I’d just been zen-ified into such a trance that I couldn’t tell fact from fiction. They all seemed happy enough.
SM avoided the kids’ club (wisely for him, those sorts of things not being everyone’s cup of tea) but signed up for everything he could with Mr PC happily taking him round in a sporting corona of happiness. A nightly football tournament took place on the gardens out front. We had to badger SM into taking part on Day One, but by Day Three he was hurrying to join. I’m told he enjoyed it; sadly the closest I came to watching was trotting past on the way back from the spa, and I also grabbed a(nother) cocktail one night and sat on the pool steps to catch the last 5 minutes. I did hear the comments afterwards, though, and one rep’s passing remark (“That boy’s got skills”) was just about the best going-home gift the boy could get, giving him some much-needed confidence to take back to his hugely competitive sporty school. Better than any candy-wrapped certificate (although he did get one of those, too).
Evening entertainments for two nights out of three consisted of stuffing our faces and then heading back to the room for family Netflix time. We caught the hotel show on day one – a Circus act, amazing, with beautifully toned bendy staff performing unbelievable swinging trapeze tricks that you would usually buy tickets to see. Until, that is, they grabbed SM and got him up on stage for the closing song. If you know SM, or even bothered to catch sight of his stony face as you pulled him by his skinny little arm onto the top stage under those spotlights, you would know that this was perhaps the worst thing you could do to an almost 11-year-old kid who likes football, fight scenes, ninja warfare and parkour. But there you go, it was about the only fault I could pick with the place, plus one portion of rather chewy lamb.
This is a good place to reroute yourself, away from the busyness of crazy old SingSong. You’re still busy here, just busy in a selfishly, fatly, utterly spoilt sort of way. Despite all the sports, two of us came back a bit larger than before. SM was glum on the ferry home. He said it was one of the best holidays he’d ever been on and let’s face it, he’s been on a lot. If this sounds promotional, I apologise. It was good, is all. Really very good.
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