Big in Japan*

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As a Londoner I have always wondered what it must be like to be a tourist in Oxford Circus Underground station, standing with all my bags piled up in the middle of the exits, straight off the train from Heathrow, impossibly in the way and trying to work out what to do with no knowledge of the language or even the alphabet.
Now I know, because this was us, just two hours off a flight from Singapore and delivered with an efficient click of our train’s smooth rolling heels right into the middle of Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku Station, where in one frantic second we had to exchange our pre-bought train vouchers, navigate the spaghetti metro with a crumpled map from Arrivals, work out where we were staying from the very organised airbnb man’s printout and do all that while propping up a tired child. We had been warned about the tangled train lines, lack of English-speakers, chaos of rush hour, and everyone was right. What was great about Japan, we’ve since found out, is that it was all entirely possible.
The build-up of city from Tokyo to Narita Airport extends for miles and miles, with suburbs stretching out just like they do around London, only multiplied several times. Millions of people live in the capital, one third of the entire population of Japan stuffed into one city, so we were told. The same friend told us the sea had been about five miles out of town when he was a boy. Like Singapore, the land has now taken over and the sea is no longer anywhere near.
Our week-long circuitous route would go from Tokyo to Kyoto and Nara then back to Tokyo again, taking in all of Japan’s capital cities in reverse order. We were lucky that we marked the start of our trip by seeing two sets of friends, local families both now relocated back to their hometown of Tokyo. They kindly showed us around, ordered our food, got us our first train tickets and gave us a load of useful info with which to arm ourselves for the next stop. Yes, in effect, we cheated, but so what? I’d do it again in a heartbeat, because that dash of local flavour got our trip off to such a great start. And what a trip.
It ended up having three distinct flavours: Tokyo was London in autumn, a crunch underfoot, metro bustle. Fashions were at once reserved and eclectic. If you weren’t in muted officewear or dark autumn styles you could well be decked out in a blaze of fake schoolgirl attire, stuck forever at 17 with dolly pink rouge and fake freckles, trilby hats, bold pairings of yellow and black, fake pearls and ruffles, all entirely intended and worn so well by hundred of girls around town. I’d not seen a ra-ra skirt for years, yet here they were in abundance, worn with no hint of irony and the whole effect magnified for me by a whiff of that very retro 1980s perfume Anais Anais, tickling my nose with a passing puff on a metro carriage, and giving me such a sharp Mum-pang that I almost dropped my bags. That scent always makes me think of the 1980s, and my cousin Kate, and us two trying on new ra-ra skirts from Camden Market in my bedroom with my Culture Club cassette jamming and de-ribboning as we played and rewound it to learn the words, spritzing each other with that funny floral scent (the first and only one Mum ever wore during my childhood) all around the room. See? That’s what Tokyo does – yanks you back to Nostalgia Town and holds you down while you drink it all in. When people describe something as ‘an assault on the senses’, Tokyo is pretty much what they mean.
The family theme continued with architecture. Kate’s sister Sadie is an architect as was their dad, my late Uncle Jack (also a boatman), and my sister also works with Sadie, and they would all have so loved our funky downtown airbnb rental with its bonkers bath and toilet. The bathroom was in a pod in the kitchen (a proper ‘head’ like on boats), and the toilet was in a pod by the door and the top of the toilet was actually a sink with a tap that ran when you activated the flush, enabling you to wash your hands and fill the cistern at the same time. Awesome! Every bathroom had some element of ‘pod’, which I thought Jack would have liked.
At times I wondered if I was enjoying the city so much because it was so, well, London-like, but then something funky would happen, like a woman in a kimono standing by the bread counter, or one of those ra-ra skirts hopping onto our metro carriage with no irony at all, and I would remember that it wasn’t a bit like my home city at all.
If Tokyo was nostalgia, Kyoto was a pleasing blend of two more of my favourite places, Bruges and Bali. Temples here were gorgeously orange, be-scrolled and towering, vast and wide, with flashes of gold to perfectly complement the red leaves and evening sunsets. Some were smaller, Bali-like, tucked up terraces and dotting side streets. Those temple-builders knew their salt, just like my uncle knew his pods, and to make those old buildings all the more wonderful the town had a romantic canal cut right through it, a perfect dash of old Bruges. That European city, in which Mr PC proposed (to me, of course) was instantly recognisable in the famous old waterway path known as Philosopher’s Walk, where gnarled trees hung over tiny riverside houses all stacked up above the waterway, and cats (real ones, for once, see entry on ‘Cats’) lolled about on benches. Thanks to being proposed at in Bruges, any canal walk reminds me of that wonderful weekend and so I spent the afternoon drizzling along behind the boys with a dreamy smirk while they scampered up ahead.
Autumn here had bluer skies and cooler nights. From the temples and canal we marched down to the city centre packed full of early evening shoppers, a chill settling on the town as the night lights came up, tinny music fluting from lamppost speakers in such a very Christmassy way that I came over all English again and nearly bought a scarf. I could live in Kyoto, I decided. It’s got things like the very trendy and laid-back Manga Museum, where uber-cool staff efficiently found a grisly book for SM that we didn’t even know he knew, occupying him for the entire time while we browsed the weird comic prints. Then there was a beautifully preserved Shogun castle with a wooden floor built to squeak with every single footstep so as to alert occupants of intruders. For once, SM attempted silence, only to find noise with every socked footfall. There’s a winding souvenir street just like somewhere Cornish, possibly Padstow or Penzance; an inky lamplit park just begging for crispy firework nights with a massive temple all lit up in the middle; then a whopping great modern station a la St Pancras, and a winding old abandoned rail track on the outskirts of town. What’s that all like, I ask you? I have no idea but the combination was brilliant.
After the supreme wonderfulness of Kyoto came our last stop, Nara, which was not so much nostalgic as fun. Parts of it looked a bit like Slough but it redeemed itself by having a pretty station plus a packed high street with great shopping, and a huge sprawling park, which was the reason for our visit. The park is notable for being sacred, and full of equally sacred dotty deer biting your bottom for crackers. They’re revered and protected so you can’t bite them back, you just have to do lots of of schoolgirl running and shrieking, which was fun, and when you tire of that you’ve got two arcades stuffed full of deer-related tat to add to what little shopping your bank has allowed so far. There is also an enormous Buddha, worth taking the long park walk and paying the entry fee just to gaze up at His enormous ears. You could have fitted SM from giant wooden lobe to tip.
Various observations made this an extremely different trip to all the others, more action-packed, buoyant, familiar and odd all at once as if we’d gone on a weird travel-hop like Alice, or out through a wardobe into a Narnia land of wonder. I’ve never felt all at once so far away and so close to home and because of this I’ve had to jot down all my ideas in snapshot format. I don’t want to forget a thing, because when we come to leave this bit of the world and I get to adding up what’s left to see, I must be sure to remember that Japan is big and beautiful and full of so much more for us to explore.

AUTUMN
I can’t mention enough how precious this was. I’m a heat lover and quite enjoy living in a sultry country full of Haze with no seasons and eternal daytime hours of 7 to 7. That is, I usually enjoy it. This trip reminded me just how enlivening it is to feel autumn on your skin, to get all excited about the changing seasons, to have that weird sense of fun about it getting dark at 5.30pm (how is that ‘fun’ once it gets to February in Britain, I know, yet somehow it just was). Trees turning to red, a run of high blue skies, some soft Cornish rain and a general crunch underfoot all reminded me so much of England as it approaches Christmas. From a practical stance we had forgotten how much further we could walk without humidity: we walked for miles, and couldn’t have done that in Singapore, not at all.

BUSES
Ever seen My Friend Totoro? Remember the cat bus? The town buses of Kyoto reminded me of these furry, friendly vehicles. Rounded, warm chrome havens, smooth as butter and politely picking up and dropping off inhabitants all around town. A man whispers announcements, and the stops flash up in advance. You pay when you get off, not when you get on, which somehow makes a world of sense. It’s all so easy (and spookily reminiscent of Trumpton).

CABS
Taxis come in Lada shapes with chrome emblems bolted on to the roof. Drivers wear gloves and official hats. Don’t shut the doors! They close automatically. Taxis are very clean and rather expensive, so we only went in one. In Kyoto the bolted-on rooftop emblems were often heart-shaped, and some had the letter ‘M’ in neon red dots.

CATS
Are everywhere – every-of-the-where – but I don’t mean real ones. They are on bags, dangling from key chains, folded into scarves, drizzled onto coffee-tops, pastried onto airline meal buns, hat-shaped, apron-decorating, stuffed onto the end of pastry rollers, using kitten paws as furniture protectors and tiny bootees for babies, inside and outside shop windows, hanging from menus, whiskering you from billboard ads, all over everything and everywhere. This is cat central. If you don’t like cats, there are a few pandas and some deer. But it’s mainly cats.

CHILDREN
I had read online that there were fewer women on the streets than men, and that a lot of men wore black business suits and white shirts, a la Men In Black, and both of those facts turned out to be oddly true. I also noticed fewer children dotted about, possibly due to the Asian trend for having a ton of homework. We found a playpark for smaller tots one day, went to a kids’ fun mall with friends, but other than that most children we saw were tourists. Said friends (four of them all roughly SM’s age) spent the first weekend with us, and to hear about their schooldays and lifestyles was interesting and (apart from those extra hours of tuition), not dissimilar to SM’s. Only once was a man in uniform stern with SM and rightly so, telling him off for using his yo-yo in a public place – when I say ‘using’ I mean swinging wildly sideways in a metre-sized arc. So yes, not such a great idea.
Let’s face it, boredom gets the better of ten-year-olds after one temple too many. If yours are old enough to manhandle a big camera give them the responsibility of taking all of the official temple shots. This means they’ll be hanging back to snap every two seconds but who’s in a rush? We’re still waiting to edit ours.

FACILITIES
Not all toilets in Japan are flashy. You’ve got your bog-standard flushers, your holes in the floor, and your zooty Shinkansen-type shiny ones with all the buttons and levers. The latter must be tried out at least once. Well, more than once. We’ve never been so clean. Let’s just leave it at that.

FOOD
The food here is good, and it’s not all cold fish and rice balls. There’s lots to explore but be sure to set off with level expectations. Expect not to find food easily. Expect not to be understood. Be brave and point and ask, otherwise you might end up with something you really don’t want. If you get it right, you could just be in gourmet heaven, as we usually were. Here’s where walking comes in. Know that you will often end up walking miles to find something that you want. Take a few tips off the internet and try to make some advance bookings. Pointing really will get you a long way, as will being polite and knowing how to say please and thank you in Japanese at the very least. Hand-wipes should be mentioned here: they are given out at the start of a meal, just as they are elsewhere in the world, but don’t wait until the end of the meal to use them. The idea is that you wipe before you eat. Makes sense, no? You can still use them again at the end.
We liked Yakkitori sticks, Japanese curry, and noodles, while SM particularly enjoyed one huge teppenyaki steak (expensive tastes, that one). Our top spots:
• Hakata Ippodo Ramen, Kyoto for perfect gyoza dumplings and bowls of steaming ramen. This was an online recommendation. In all the best places you will have to queue, as with this place, but our queue moved fast and there was a bench to sit on. The website is in Japanese, sorry about that, but here’s a map. I have NO idea how we eventually stumbled upon the place (in fact I think that IS how) but how about printing out the link in advance and showing it to your hotel’s desk staff? It will be worth it.
• M&C Café, Oazo Building, Maranouchi. Friends took us to this upmarket Tokyo cafe for plates of Japan’s famed hushed beef curry. This queue is inside the English section of a bookshop. Once at the top of the queue, ask (OK, gesture) for a windowseat that looks out over Tokyo’s train tracks, so you can watch the activity while you eat.

HOTELS
Don’t drag your bag across the tatami mats in a ryokan. There are designated places for your luggage, ensuring the mats stay undamaged and your room stays orderly.
Everywhere we stayed – hotel, apartment, ryokan – had pod-like bathrooms. Pod-crazy, I tell you.

MONEY
Japan is crushingly expensive, on a par with Singapore, London and Norway. I couldn’t buy proper presents, just small bits. I couldn’t bring myself to buy a kimono, tea set, lacquered tray, wall-hanging, any of those things I’d thought about bringing back. We tried to have street snacks instead of real meals but found ourselves hungry again at meal times. Just spend the money and eat, why don’t you – the food is so yummy you’ll forget you’re spending your pension, and you’ll walk it all off finding the next restaurant.
Notes themselves are predictably pretty. At shop counters money is given and returned via little plastic trays. No coin-dropping, no hesitation about who gives what and into which hand. There is a five-yen coin with a hole in the middle that is so olde-worlde that I wanted to keep them all, and the one-yen coins are so light they reminded me of plastic sweet shop money.

METRO
You know those film clips of people bracing under the flight paths of planes taking off for a buzz? Go and stand in the middle of Tokyo or Shinjuku metro stations at rush hour. Add a massive suitcase each, plus shoulder bag, plus ten-year-old. This is Japan, crazybusy just as promised, but eerily ordered. As with most city underground systems you will likely only get bumped into if you’re in the way, so don’t get in the way and you should be OK. There are methods of getting through: rights and lefts on escalators and stairways, arrows and signposts, colour-coded lines with numbered stations so it’s just a case of joining the dots, plus arrows on either side of station names (that are in English as well as Japanese) pointing out the stations before and after. Keep your wits about you and you can get through the crush. If you’ve been brought up on the Underground, you really have no excuse not to give it a go. By the end of our week we were cruising the tunnels with ease, at one point rousing SM from a lying-down-and-reading position. Totally at home.

MOUNT FUJI
The iconic shape of Mount Fuji is one of the big images of Japan, along with Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’ and geisha hair. When you go past that peak on a train travelling at 240 mph, you can see why. Fuji looms above the mountain range from afar, then comes up surprisingly close (at least on our Kyoto line, anyway) and hovers suspended between overhead cables for a good ten minutes. It is colossal and stately and truly, utterly beautiful. A friend had climbed it the week before – I can’t say that’s on my wishlist but when I saw it from my window I could quite appreciate her excitement.

TEMPLES
Are everywhere. All over the place. Big and grandiose, in silver, gold, orange and dark wood. Stacked behind one another down tiny town alleys, stuffed full of people cramming perilously onto its hillside wooden platform as with Kyoto’s Kiyomizu-dera Temple (see picture below), high up on mountains, and right in the middle of the cities. Some you can visit, some you can’t. The rules are the same as with most: Always take off your shoes. Always maintain order and quiet. You can ring the bell at the entrance if you like and sometimes you can light an incense stick. Some have views outside, some are awesome on the inside. Nara’s Tōdai-ji Temple contained the big Buddha, the biggest covered one in the world, stuffed under its roof. As I said before, you could fit our ten-year-old lying flat out on His outstretched hand. Behind the Buddha was a wooden pillar, at the bottom of which was a hole at floor level through which small children were invited to wriggle through to seek yet more enlightenment. Hoards of schoolkids were lining up to have a go, some getting scarily stuck halfway. The porkier ones who made it through looked relieved rather than enlightened, in particular one especially big kid who wobbled off having been coaxed through with great cheers and frantic tugs. SM, who could have slipped through like a matchstick, declined.
Local behaviour in temples varies. An entire coachload of screaming schoolchildren trod all over our feet through one temple, pushing past us to get to Buddha. In Nara’s Gangō-ji Temple, a senior group knelt quietly on tatami mats and answered questions from their host – I wished I had understood, because that tour looked a lot more fun.
The beautiful graveyard of Gangō-ji gave me another missing-Mum-moment, because she would have so loved the little stone lines with tiny figurines dotted about the grass, sculptural, serene and ordered, against the stunning backdrop of one of those autumn days. She gets around, does Mum.

TRAINS
Hauling up the platform steps at Tokyo to get to the Shinkansen, we saw a side door open at foot level and out scuttled about 12 women in pink uniforms, who then dashed on ahead as in some Pixel kids’ film, and spread out down the platform, waiting for the train just where the doors would open. We’d been told about them the night before by our friend – they are the Shinkansen train-cleaners, and they have just 7 minutes to get on board, clean the train, and get out again before you all pile on. On completion they pause at the door, make a three-cornered temple-style salute, then get off, head for the stairs and vanish back down the hole. Pure Disney. Or Alice. Or Narnia.
And boy do those Shinkansens move. The fastest, Nozomo, was’t covered by our tourist rail pass but the second-fastest Hikari spat us down to Kyoto in half the time it would have usually taken. As we whizzed smoothly through the countryside (with English announcements en route from a disembodied Hitchhiker’s Guide voice that sounded like that Julie Peasgood from 1990s voiceover advert fame (and don’t ask me how I remember her), we took slow-mo filmettes and speeded up clips that looked nonsensically quick when played back. “It’s actually not that fast,” proffered SM in a lofty attempt at indiffierence, but he only said it because he couldn’t feel the judder like you would do on normal trains anywhere else in the world (apart form Norway, whose trains are equally awesome in my book).
Train carriages are clearly marked, so there’s no dashing to the end of Platform 9 where you THINK carriage 4 is only to find it is carriage 18, then cursing as you lug your suitcase all the way back down the rocking corridors to carriage no 4. If it says carriage 4 on your ticket, simply stand at the appropriate place on the platform and you will magically enter the train straight into the right carriage. Splendid.
Finally: the art of folding. So much of Japan is to do with folding, it translates into everything, including train travel. You know when you buy a takeout coffee and pick up a paper cuff to hold it? When you buy a rail ticket the vendor passes you the little paper slips and you can then pick up a small paper folder from a stack on the counter and tuck your tickets inside. I loved this. Even inside train carriages the skill is apparent. We saw a woman get on, put her hand on the metal backrest of a double-seat, and shove it forward with a clang, so that the whole seating format magically changed for her from being a big double area to a compact twin-set facing the other way.
‘You know,’ said my friend as we waited on the platform on Day One, ‘we really don’t go on trains that often, and there is a word for people who love them.’ We worked out it probably translated as ‘train-spotter’. If that’s the case then I’ll gladly become one.

YUKATAS
Women wearing yukatas, or kimonos, are everywhere. Not to be confused with geishas (the women with chalk-white faces), these ladies are simply going about their daily business wearing kimonos. It took me a good three days to stop gawking every time one stood at a bus stop or glided onto the escalator in front of us. An entire table of matching kimono women sat beside us in a café one night. When I asked our friend if this was normal, she frowned slightly, and said: ‘well, yes’ – so I stopped taking so many pics. All the same: wow.

LEFTOVERS
So what did we not do? Lots: didn’t have an onsen bath or a tea ceremony, didn’t walk down Gion or have any ninja training, didn’t see a geisha, never climbed Mount Fuji (OK so it might be on the list, a little bit), and didn’t have eel. I won’t be going back for that one, though.

*TITLE NOTE: Well, I had to get it somewhere, didn’t I? And after eating our way around Japan it’s apt.

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The Haze – a call for clarity

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While scientists step up the search for life on Mars, it’s all we can do down here on the Red Dot to see the outline of the MBS building on the horizon.
We shouldn’t really grumble, as we’re lucky here in Singapore. First of all, we’re lucky just to be here (I could stop there but I won’t). We don’t get typhoons, hurricanes, tsunamis or earthquakes. Dark things do happen but not half as much as in other countries. We get the odd Outrage of Modesty or Shoplift, but serious crime is rare. That said, to coin Adam Levene, it’s not always rainbows and butterflies, and we do have our own little menu of minor points:
1 Lightning bolts – we’re a topspot for this very real and present danger. There are alarms beside most public and school swimming pools and they sound out when they need to.
2 Flash floods – Orchard Road, of all places, floods every few years. That’s like Oxford Street being shut because it’s knee-high in rainwater.
3 Sunburn – another very real danger for idiots like me who go to Sentosa for the day but forget to ‘do’ their back. Am hiding from the skin doctor for a few months until the strap marks go.
4 Dengue Fever – we lived in a red zone for this last year, several friends caught it, one entire family checking in to a hospital ward together for several days: nasty.
Most of these things are avoidable though. You don’t have to go swimming in a storm. You can stock up on mossie stuff (though the buggers sometimes get you anyway). I’ll leave out snakes, spiders and monkeys because then we’re getting into household pets, sort of. Number Five, though, is a beast that’s hard to beat:
5 Yup, The Haze – smoke drifting across our country from seasonal crop-burning of peat fields in neighbouring Indonesia. Compared with other bits of Southeast Asia we are again lucky here, as it’s far worse for those living in the areas themselves than it is for us.
Here, it’s bad for those with dodgy lungs, but it’s mainly just a pest. At best the air smells smoky and you can’t see the sun. At worst, pharmacies run out of N95 masks, schools close and a small percentage of the population do feel properly ill in the lung department.
On really bad days, though, you simply can’t go out. You might sprint to a local shop if you need to, but you come back fast and wear your mask en route. You can taste it in the air. When it rains it’s dusty rain: very strange. Eyes prickle, throats hurt. Most schools had to close across Singapore last Friday – that’s an entire country of closed schools – and in parts of Malaysia schools were shut for three days on the trot, and still are closed on and off. Kids are running feral in the condo. We let them out to play on all but the worst of days, because we’re now in Week Four of the annual phenomenon that is only ever meant to last a week or so at most, and the children are all going bonkers.
Our school canteen – exposed to the air on several sides (as is the style here) – is closed every day this week, so children must take in food and eat in the classrooms. No huge hardship but a bummer if, like SM, you’re addicted to canteen pizzas and hate sandwiches, not to mention the knock-on financial effect for our catering supplier. Dogs and cats feel the choke too: no one escapes it.

Following it all online, and working out the PSI count (PM10? PSI? AQI?) is a sport for some, a dinner party topic for others, a real concern for those who need to see if and how The Haze is going to affect them that day/week/month. The fog brings out the best and the worst in people. Politicians go through the annual motions:
Singapore politely offers help. Indonesia accepts and then declines, pointing out that its neighbours are among the countries who buy into the whole farming thing in the first place, and noting that the same neighbours also don’t complain when it’s fresh air from Indonesia blowing their way. Fires are at last put out, sometimes after a longer while than usual, and then we do it all over again next year.
Meanwhile, monkeys die (as do some humans, according to the odd news report) and people’s houses burn down. Those who don’t have a computer at all won’t care about reading up on any of this, they’ll just want to survive another year of it. What the answer might be is beyond our guesses but frustrations are rising, notably amongst the expat communities who head to Bali and Phuket when things get really bad. This year seems to be an El Nino of a Haze, and flights to clearer skies can be had at the moment for the price of a bottle of wine here in Singapore (wine IS expensive, though).
This year the whole foggy business has touched base with fashionistas, as a natty range of fancypants masks is selling out across the island. We’ve got ours already: free 24-hour courier delivery, perfect fit and pretty trendy if I do say so. I don’t go anywhere without mine, though I do find it hard to enjoy a glass of white while wearing it.
I’m a some-time dodgy lung person so I don’t especially enjoy our foggy days but the worst that’s happened to me of late is that I mistakenly took my mask out to the school bus stop as well as a cup of coffee, then couldn’t decide on the best use of my mouth. October trips were planned this week for years 4 through 9 but camps were all cancelled, every single one of them. For the school it’s a huge headache, for the kids [OK, for some kids] it’s disappointing, for the camps I should imagine it’s a logistical and financial nightmare. For me it means steering a much more painful path through a three-day social marathon that would have been entirely doable had I not had to get someone up every morning and tackle the horrors of homework, shower and bedtime every night. And I can’t go road running, so my next planned event, in December, will be much more painful than previously anticipated. That’s it, though – could be worse.
We’re off to Japan in two weeks time and as our flight steers a carbon-ripping trail through hazy skies I’ll breathe a big old oxygenated sigh of relief at eight days of Nippon air. The best I can do on return is look for Palm Oil products in shops, and then ban them, and sign any petition I can find that needs signing.

Doctor dread

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I took SmallMonkey to the doctor. Unexplained pains – I think he’s just stretching. The doctor was one we hadn’t yet seen: a classic local elderly medic, serious, very Singaporean and stern. He rattled out questions, directing them all to SM, who stuttered his answers. When I asked if I should leave the room while all the prodding was being carried out he shot back: ‘Why should you not be here? You’re his mother.’

The elderly doc worked his way around my small son’s skinny little form, palpating and prodding with wizened fingers, and when everything had been poked (standard appendicitis ‘push’ test carried out, a little sample presented and deemed negative), SM was prescribed painkillers and told he had wind. And at this point the elderly man totally changed demeanour like one of those Chinese New Year face-changers, breaking into a lovely smile and telling us how pleased he was that everything was OK, and making sure SM personally knew that he had to come back if anything at all was wrong again.

How I hate it when I judge books by their covers.

For C

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You know those times when there is only one person on your mind, and every song that comes on the radio is written for them, and every thought that you have links back to them, and the world is suddenly a different place because of them – or lack of them? This blog is about me and what I do, but every now and then I might have to write about things that have no real interest to anyone other than a small group of likeminded or linked people. That’s this week, that is.
Caroline, this came on the radio yesterday, and I wanted you to have it. I can’t recall if it was on your List Of Strong Tunes, so it might not have a link to you and it might not make any sense (much like a lot of things in the world this week). Still, the song is strange and strong and I like it (much like you). Here you are, have it, wherever you now are:

random weird song

[See? Even an accordion for Viktor]

The saddest cab

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Today I had to interview someone for a feature, which meant that instead of pottering down to the office on foot, I ordered a cab. It arrived straight away, unusual for a weekday morning.
‘So lucky,’ said the driver, ‘you are going exactly where I need to be, that’s why I picked you.’
The luck soon oozed out of our cab, though, because it transpired that the reason why the driver was ‘lucky’ was that after my fare, he was on his way to a funeral that was close to my location. His good friend, another cab driver, had been in a smash on Sunday (just three days before), killed outright after a cement truck cut a red light. Four kids. Youngest 6 months. Oldest 7 years.
‘We only had breakfast together that Sunday morning.’
The story was longer than that, and it came out in bits and pieces as we travelled, leaking out of the driver in sad little sentences as we nudged through traffic. He weaved a few HappyandGrateful comments into the tale (as we often do when we’re grieving) – what God had given him, how lucky he was to have picked my route – but the chatter kept on slumping back to sad silence as we digested each fact, him in front and me in back, and all the while he rubbed his eyes as he drove, apologising for the tears.

I know that a lot of cabs *are* in accidents, and I thought about this as we drove, and the driver gulped back tears.
‘We get so tired,’ he said, as if to confirm.
Usually I check the rearview mirror in a cab to see if the driver is falling asleep, but today I checked for tears. I’m not sure what’s worse.

Chickens on Orchard

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A few months ago, thanks to a friend of mine asking for company, I volunteered to do a National Parks bird count. We went to the Botanic Gardens for a quick morning’s basic training (out of a total of around 40 trainees I think there were only about three or four of us expats), during which we learned how to spot around 30 birds. The course was led by a girl who looked around 12 but who spoke with such confidence and clarity that it made you want to a) be her best friend, b) do whatever you could to be the best student ever. Sadly for me, exams were never my strong point and during the spot test at the end, while my friend had her arm in the air the whole time (“I’ve been practising,” she muttered) I kept my head low and wondered how I’d ever tell a Scarlet-Backed Flowerpecker from a Brown-Throated Sunbird.
In the end, since the actual bird count day coincided with Dad’s annual visit, I roped him in to help, and we headed up to our allocated spot – a beautiful section of Jurong Lake – at dawn one weekday morning. An ornithologist since childhood, Dad doesn’t just have bird-watching eyes in the back of his head, they’re all over his body, and we easily recorded a good collection of species to add to the NP Bird Count archives, from Collared Kingfishers and Pink-Necked Green Pigeons, to Yellow-Vented Bulbuls and more, plus a final and very special off-the-list glimpse of a buffy owl in a palm tree – awesome. The bird-count morning came right at the end of Dad’s trip and it was one of the high points for us both.
I definitely look and listen for more winged creatures these days. Javan Mynahs and Asian Glossy Starlings are everywhere, and not so special (they’re the Singaporean equivalent of London pigeons and crows), but they’re still exotic to me. I see flashes of Golden Oriole at the condo and the odd sunbird here and there, and I have always, since arriving, listened out for the frantic rising cry of the Koel, which a friend of mine christened the ‘For Real’ bird, thanks to its bonkers bugle call.
There is one more noisy type that was on our list. It’s called a Jungle Fowl and it’s a chicken, basically. You see them in all sorts of unlikely places (like the other night, on my way to see a film in a park, a mother and baby pecking around the back of the National Museum in the centre of town). Somewhere near our new apartment, which is nestled just behind a big road heading into Orchard Road (the equivalent of London’s Oxford Street), there are chickens. They’re very active in the morning and at dusk. Sometimes we get a midday toot as well, though I’m not always around to hear it. They are somewhere around the back, or possibly up a small jungly side road where there are a few big old black and white bungalows. I can picture them pecking around the lawns; I suppose those houses are ginormous enough that the occupants can hide away and not hear the noisy old chooks, but out on my little balcony I hear them loud and clear and I love them – they remind me of Cornwall, a shrill touch of home.

Dad at dawn

Dad at dawn

Thinking out loud

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This morning’s mental playlist, in approximate order:

Gun laws and mental health legislation
Singapore laws and clean pavements
The man on the MRT
The wealth of Nassim
The Myanmar embassy
Ceiling fans, exterior and interior
Jason the fan-mender
My artwork, currently bubble-wrapped
Jacky Tsai
Shelving
Shelving and Well Walk
Kitchen linoleum and wooden shutters
Bank accounts
Holidays to Japan
Mount Fuji
Scotland and Glencoe
Cornwall
Christmas
Mum
Family health
Weight loss and knee pain
Play to end

Small worries

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Dear SmallMonkey has the half-empty gene direct from my control panel, and his WorstCaseScenarios (WCSs) are quite astounding. It’s the end of the summer hols and tucking-up time earlier tonight was fraught with hazards forecast for the week to come:
• Playground bullies would jump out of lockers and wrestle small children to the ground
• The new teachers would pick kids out to stand on the desks and recite nonsense
• The Haze would infiltrate the lungs of half the class, who would then be rushed to hospital by very slow ambulance driven in fact by a scary clown
• The bus driver on his return journey would not collect SM from school
OK so I might have made up points 2 and 3, but we discussed the very real last point at length, especially as it was a new fear that hadn’t been voiced all summer, and mostly because the possibilities for disaster, according to SM, were endless. We agreed he could pack his [non-working] phone so that he could text or WhatsApp me if the worst really did happen.
“Where should I wait if they forget me?”
“At Junior Reception. But it won’t happen.”
“What will I say?”
“That the stinking bus has driven off without you. But that won’t happen.”
“Which Reception again?”
“You’ve been doing this for three years. It won’t happen.”
“But if it does you can get to me in, what, 15 minutes, can’t you?”
A little bit longer, actually, but he really didn’t need to know that.

If only I had enjoyed school more myself I could have painted lively pictures across that dark bedroom of the promise of playful and enthusiastic lessons the next day, of fun on the rugby pitch and hilarity in the lunch hall. Instead I played a slow and calm card, discussing favourite dinner options for after school and spending time attaching a funky new Boba Fett Lego keyring to the dreaded packed schoolbag, itself freshly locked and loaded for the numerous missions of the brand new term.
This time last year – when SM was a brand new student heading off to what was then a brand new school – I went bonkers in the kitchen and learnt how to make macaroons. Tomorrow I’ll have the office as my distraction, but I will be very early to that bus stop at 4.05pm, and my phone will be on and turned up loud all day.

Notes from a new pool

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So sorry, let me just dry that off for you. Why yes, yes he is mine. No, those two are not. Yes, they are full of energy today. Yes, we are still on holiday, indeed, week EIGHT, yes! No that’s not vodka it’s water – with ice and lemon, yes. Yes, they are bit close to the edge, but they seem to have gone deaf over the holidays, it’s funny. Mmm, yes, they probably WILL slip and crack something in a minute, very slippy tiles. Especially after a few of these waters.
– Yes, he can’t wait to go to school, sweet thing, well to be honest he doesn’t have a huge say in it does he? I’ve already booked the bus and I’m ready to go a bit deaf myself when he’s got a funny tummy on Morning No. 1. Keeps fondling his scouts summer project: “Collecting Something”. He did bottle tops and we’ve quite a haul. Mainly beer.
– Oh I know, I’m so amazed I managed to get them outside, usually stuck to the electrics, aren’t they? Like getting Blu-Tac out of a ponytail. We’re doing cold turkey next weekend, honesttogoodness I wish I’d never bought any of those things. Not one of those gadgets flammable, either, we’ve tried.
– OH THEY REALLY ARE A WEE BIT LOUD, AREN’T THEY, YES. See what I mean? Quite, quite deaf. Apologies.
– Ah no, I’m not pregnant, just rather round, but yes, this sort of sundress really is so comfy when you’ve just had eight weeks of picnics!
– Well, off we go, better get them all inside, before one of them breaks something! None of the bedroom doors in this condo lock from the outside, do they? No, Thought not.

Pulling the cord

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Have you ever called the police? I’ve done it about three times in my life. Once for a noisy neighbour, once for a nutter and then just last night on a night-time train coming back from Kent in a carriage shared with a group of drunken passengers.
It started with Platform Loudness – you know the noise, it has a special kind of tone, a shouting that carries above the hubbub, a metallic clang of voices that you SO hope is just football chanting but you know, deep down, is messy and dark. What you don’t want to happen, as you sit clenched and waiting, is for the Shouters to board your carriage. As the cloud of angry wasps poured through the doors last night we felt the familiar stomach lurch that you get when you know you’ve picked the unlucky seats.
Dramas always seem to happen to us just after Mr PC has flown away (I’m reminded of the Wardrobe Falling On SM incident in particular, but that’s another story). So it was just me and SmallMonkey on the train, the third member of our family being many miles away in Sing, making me The Responsible Adult (and of course I still always expect a grown-up to come along and help me). At first SM sat bolt upright, almost dropping the iPad (because you just don’t get this sort of sh*t in Sing) then hunched right down, tapping away nervously. After a while I swapped seats with him, pushing him gently into the cosy shelter of the window seat and bravely taking on the aisle.
In fact it wasn’t all that bad, there was no actual punching and no blood, but after about 10 minutes of the air being filled with f**king, sh**ting and that most florid word of all beginning with the third letter, as well as some dangerous-looking stand-up posturing and a bit of quiet pleading from a member of the public, I quietly dialed the three magic numbers and got a nice lady who asked me about five times to explain the complicated location (“we are in the first carriage of the high-speed train from Herne Bay to St Pancras”) before promising to “patch me through” to someone.
While I answered her questions quietly and deliberately, SM sagged against the dark night-time window and sobbed silently, all thoughts of iPad joy miserably left in his lap, in an outward reflection of the inner thoughts of every carriage member. Good old 999, though, because sure enough at the next stop the theatre troupe were removed and the carriage returned to the normal chatter that I have so enjoyed on our many UK train journeys over the past month.
This was the good bit: SM could not believe it – problem solved with one phone call. That the police didn’t mount the train through the roof or shoot through the windows in a shatter of glass was surprising enough. That the offenders were led away in good humour, swaying as they tipsied off the step and into the arms of the jovial train driver, was amazing to him – no sieges, no armed guards and no loud explosions, just a strong arm and a nice cosy telling off.
For me this was all very homely, but maybe not in a good way. Having spent a month soaking up all the things I miss so badly – most of them human – I can’t say I ever hanker for the Saturday Night Party Crowd, because although cr@p does happen in Singapore it’s rare and controlled.
In the UK the world is three-dimensional and wide, full news reports get through all the time, people come up and talk at you for all sorts of reasons on the street and in shops, and this is all healthy, real and important, and I’ve loved being back in the thick of it all.
But you can take your Saturday night pub crowds and stick them right at the end of the World’s Longest Train Line and leave them there, thanks.