Apologia

 

This something as a time placing apologia. The last few weeks have been hectic with three separate trips to India, Newport and Singapore. The notion of a relaxed  Summer to get on top of things hasn’t happened yet but now will, since I have no foreign commitments until October. And as I will show later there is a lot to catch up with. I am also stymied by the fact that, whatever I try I just cannot get either of my phones to send on the photos I took – they stay resolutely in the queued box. As a result I will not be able to conceal the fact that this transmission is as dull as ditchwater by some nice illustrations ! On top of that the prize exhibit,  a caricature of me drawn by one of my Indian students, has gone missing

So here we go, with apologies. The first trip was a last (?) venture to Newport. Much less arduous and good fun. My hotel overlooked the sea. It was an opportunity to see old friends and familiar places again. It was very nice to meet up with former colleagues but a bit sad to hear the news about how badly they have been affected by the various “reforms” being introduced by the terrible Pete Hegseth. The current President of the Naval War College, is energetic, committed and able – but black so he’s being retired. Surprise, surprise. It’s all so stupid, as the College is an enormous source of ‘soft power’ for American interests and disembowelling it like it is totally counter-productive. I doubt the programme I’m associated with will survive.

But one bonus of the Newport trip was that it also allowed me to tie off – at long last -  the task of recovering the contents of a closed HSBC bank account which got transferred to the State of Rhode Island’s ‘Unclaimed Property Division.’ Registering a claim to get it back and finally achieving this took nearly a year and a half ! It made a big difference when I was finally able to establish a personal relationship with one of their people, but their procedures were glacial. So many precautions against fraud and money-laundering and a banking system that still prefers cheques over electronic transfer, and even that is done by wire not SWIFT. Oh, and we never send cheques abroad ! Still it’s done now and safely tucked up in my US bank. I also spend a couple of hours there inside the naval base transferring the equivalent by wire to the UK with a very helpful young lady and a very large desk-top. Complicated stuff.

A few days later there was India, another in a flurry of surprise invitations. It’s as though the word has got around that I am down-sizing and people conclude I am bowing out and want a swan song. This is kind-of half true. So I don’t mind being seen this way if they do !

           One unexpected 'freebie' from it - and there were lots of them, all good to decorate the garage with - was that caricature of me drawn by a student, I mentioned earlier. The directing staff thought it so unfair they debated getting rid of it ! An uncanny resemblance to Yoda, but with bigger ears. Despite that the whole trip went off very well and I was thoroughly looked after throughout. The only issue was the overnight flights out and back with brief stopovers in Qatar - a war zone, though once there you would never think it.

Also the weather wasn’t what I expected. Grey skies, heavy rain and strong Monsoon winds, blowing the sea white and madly tossing the palms around. It was very humid too. It was a very posh hotel full of locals taking advantage of the off-season rates and watching the waves crashing against the defended dockside jetty of the old Portuguese fort. I was the only non Indian there. This should have been the view from my balcony. Although I had a large sheltered protected balcony, it was only equipped with two recliners which were the most fiendishly uncomfortable I have ever come across with all the bends in quite the wrong places, so I couldn’t spend much time there.

I was royally entertained and taken for a trip to another fort nearby and several churches. Sadly two were closed and the third jam-packed for the funeral of someone who was obviously very popular. Just a quick peak inside, full of bells and smells, a large traditional choir – all very Portuguese, of course.

Finally Singapore, helping run a course on Maritime Security for getting on for 150 naval/coastguard officers mainly from Southeast Asia but other parts of the world as well. Totally painless with eating out, a nice hotel and a very enjoyable couple of days in the Singapore National Archive reading up on the 1930s. Fascinating stuff. Most of the week was at the naval base, but I also had a few days at the RSIS for meetings and giving a staff presentation.

So, naturally tired, what did I come home to ?

A lot of domestic business, getting the house insured . and its ancient electrics tested, the car serviced, doctor’s appointments sorted – no easy task these days, etc etc,  all behind schedule and in part a justification for cutting down. Worst of all the view of the garden from all my windows. The combination of weeks without rain, my absence and a totally invisible gardener who doesn’t do phone calls or emails has reduced it to the worst it’s ever been, with dead and dying things wherever one looks. These two dystopian pictures of our once elegant gravel garden and breakfast patio gives you some indication of the focus of my attention over the next couple of months – I hope.

There's no place like home ?

 

 

When I got back from my last long teaching spell in Singapore, I rather thought that I would have  a lot more time and opportunity to correct the cumulative neglect of house and garden that has been the inevitable consequence of so much time away. My first sight of home indeed underlined the point that such tasks were eminently worthwhile and urgent. After an over-enthusiastic adhesion to ‘no-mow-May’ by my gardening team (in a state of transition because Nathan my original after 15 years or so had selfishly decided to get married and move to the New Forest) the house and garden looked abandoned. I was pleased to find there were no squatters in it. Perhaps that was because as I gather one passer-by in the All Cannings Gardening Club reportedly said ‘you can’t see Geoff’s house anymore.'

Lest I be drummed out of the Club, things had to be done.  For a few days all went very well on both fronts, house business and garden. . I was both surprised and delighted to hear that the State of Rhode Island had at last got its act together and sent a cheque covering the contents of my closed down American HSBC bank account to my poste restante in Newport. That took over a year of sometimes quite consolidated effort- and I’ve still got to find a way of cashing in a paper check now that UK banks have stopped doing so for ones in foreign currencies. Another complication is that my US bank is on the naval base at Newport and I don’t have access to it anymore. But I’ll cross that bridge shortly when I go there in a week or so’s time.

The peripatetic academic life style which this illustrates for some reason seems to be accelerating rather than winding down. The invitations keep coming; it’s as though they have heard that I am down-sizing and want a last chance to get me before I finally go gaga. It’s not the travel so much, but all the administrative nausea that goes with it, which I find so time-consuming and sometimes get badly wrong. But one completely out-of-the-blue example was a bit of an exception in some ways. The Tug Owners of Europe had got wind of me through an ex-Marine Colonel I knew from Greenwich days whose son worked for them and who thought I would be a good choice for a talk on the background to a recent European Union directive for them to think about their security in a time of much enhanced risk. .

They were preparing a big conference in Istanbul, which I like and so jumped at. It was held in a pretty spectacular hotel on the Bosphorus. An ex-palace actually, the sort of place where they give you 8 different choices of the kind of pillow you want. My balcony was right beside one of its Arc de Triomphe type entrances.

It was all very grand, with a Dinner Jacketed, gala dinner on the waterside, an opportunity to sail the startlingly blue Bosphorus and another dinner in another ex-palace. An Army colleague and I managed to squeeze in a grockling trip to yet a third one with lovely waterside grounds. All very over-the top and Trumpian. The Sultans did like their palaces. The conference was interesting too, and I found I knew several of the attendees. I learned a lot more about tugs than I had known before. Here’s me pontificating.

On the gardening front, a major achievement was finally to secure the services of Martin my new part-time gardener. So far so good. I also had time to engage in some useful wilderness-taming, especially hacking into shape my roadside hedge, replacing long-withered bean plants and putting in new ones to get the veggie garden back on track. Things are now looking a lot more reasonable. Indeed over my now customary breakfast or evening G&T spot in the pond-side mini patio recently I suddenly thought how nice everything was now looking. Admittedly from here you can't see that the pond has a leak and is full of pondweed that I need to get rid of. Moreover my memory for plant names is almost as bad as my memory for peoples' so I don't know what I'm looking at, more a question of wild geraniums, white things, poppies, robinia, purple things, yellow things and ornamental grasses. Most I don't remember planting. They are just there. 

All the same, though, perhaps something of a response to the jaundiced view of my barber recently, who said that after foreign travel, you realised ‘how rubbish everything was in this country.’ She was a very nice lady (even using the air blower down my shirt because I was so hot) but I forbore to ask what she had in mind, fearing political discord with someone with scissors in her hand. I merely said that wasn’t how I felt, mentioning the general look of the place and our much more gracious driving standards than, say, Singapore. But I guess I’m lucky living where and as I do, and so not in the best position to judge. So far, my home is still my castle and sanctuary, if not quite on the scale of the Sultan's.

Farewell drinkies in a shop-house

 

Farewell drinkies in a shop house

This month in Singapore has just whizzed by and was much busier frankly than I had anticipated. Usefully and enjoyably so, though. Part of this was the fact that I got in a bit of teaching at SAFTI, the Singapore Staff college. I do actually enjoy teaching – one of the reasons why I was  bit sad to say I definitely wasn’t going to do my 4 month Elective again last time. I’ll still have my so-called ‘Advisor’ role, though. Because it takes so long for Elective courses to go through the Approval process, a new colleague has been drafted to teach it as well as set up his alternative course for later. He’s panicking a bit and I will probably be doing a bit of the ‘teach the teacher’ work the next time I come in July.

But this time in addition to doing all the usual things, I’ve been particularly engaged with Singapore’s wild-life this time around. When he set up Singapore as an independent state in 1965, he was determined to make the place a ‘green city’.  In addition to the usual feng shui reasons of appeasing the gods and trying to make the place a nice one to live in, he wanted everyone to see that Singapore, was enlightened, rich and sufficiently organised to engage in and maintain parks and streets thickly lined with attractive trees and bushes. This is in striking contrast to other cities in Southeast Asia where if there are any green spaces at all they often look accidental, stunted and neglected. One of the most striking examples of this is Bidari park, which a couple of my colleagues took me to one weekend. This is a relatively new development in part based on a Japanese Garden created in the British era and an old cemetery. It’s quite extraordinary and although closely surrounded by tall apartment blocks and shopping malls on every side, you are plunged into kind of manicured rain forest absolutely packed with exotic birds, lizards, squirrels and most amazing of all otters which you see splashing around in the small lake catching and eating fish. It was a terrific visit. The challenge for Singapore is how to keep going with a rapidly expanding population, with new building going on everywhere. The population has got half as big again since 2000 and is still rising. Necessary but difficult to cope with. Maybe a third are temporary workers from overseas, especially southern Asia.

There was a downside to my green adventure though. It was blisteringly hot and extremely humid. Glasses, binoculars and camera kept fogging up  and I was absolutely dripping so trying to capture humming birds fluttering about in the leaves was a real challenge. Even my colleagues (Indonesian and Singaporean) had a definite sheen to them. There are less exotic things to see in the UK, but climate is not such a problem. 

Another problem aspect of the climate is sudden little warning torrential and often very loud thunderstorms. Really ferocious as these two shots taken out of my window suggest. Caught outside and even with an umbrella you can be completely soaked in a minute.

             

I  encountered another local challenge when walking alongside the river another day, not doing any harm to anyone. All of a sudden there was a big bang on the top of my head. I had been dive-bombed from behind by a crow. It did it a second time, until I turned on it and in an undignified way chased it away from its perch. The ‘attack’ was quite painful, but there didn’t seem to be any blood. I suppose it must have taken exception to my white hair, because you don’t see a lot of it in Singapore. Sunday is the day when hordes of Philippine and Burmese maids congregate for pic-nic get-togethers in the public parks and there was a group nearby; they were very concerned and sympathetic to a poor old chap being attacked like that. It was in the bunch of trees on the other side of the river, opposite the famous Fullerton Hotel/Old Post office and by the-almost- as-famous Glaswegian built Cavenagh bridge of 1869 which takes you over to the splendid Asian Civilisations Museum.

The other commitment has been a sometimes hectic series of social engagements in striking contrast to my normal life at home. Last week there were six of them ! One of the most interesting of these was a visit to a hawker centre where one of the stalls was run by the auntie-in-law of my colleague Jane. First time I’ve eaten pig-tail, shrimp and noodles – it wasn’t too bad, but I’m not sure I would go out of my way to choose it again.

In fact I didn’t choose it this time ! The whole thing was really interesting, especially chatting to Auntie. The stall was in Chinatown and as it turns out directly above the place where I get my Lapsang Souchong tea. Auntie and her family have been running the stall for 40 years, but it’s  a hard life. She gets up at 0200 to prepare everything and works until about 1400 on her feet all the time. She had a friend even older than she was helping out. Some of these stalls have a 3000 dollar rental per month. Since the average price of her meals is less than 10 dollars, and she has food, costs, staff, transport, and energy costs as well it’s not an easy way to make a living.

     The centre is one of many in Singapore and also one of the biggest. At a Monday lunchtime it was absolutely packed with office and others queuing for their delicacies, but the government is concerned that this distinctive aspect of Singapore life is getting harder to sustain. They provide subsidies to help keep it going. There must have been hundreds of locals there, (I didn’t see a single non-local) of all ages; they love eating there but don’t want to undertake such responsibilities themselves. A familiar problem. Like every other developed country they have a labour shortage in such jobs and often employ temporary immigrants from the area, though Auntie doesn’t. Real old school. Appropriate since one of the diners was Singapore’s leading historian, sitting opposite me.

Talking of heritage, a very different experience was attending a farewell drinkies part at one of Singapore's iconic shop-houses. Built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they have very narrow frontages but go back a long way. The shop would be in the front room, with an open air fountain or water source in the middle and accommodation and storage rooms behind. This one was converted into five mini-flats one of which was being rented by a departing colleague of mine who I have known for decades. Nowadays highly valued as heritage, they have a price to match. This one is worth about five million Sing dollars. Very enviable. Singapore like us went through a bad period in the late 1960s and 1970s in disregarding heritage, but they now protect it scrupulously. 

Since this is my last week here for a while I have been finishing things off and starting to pack up. A bigger job than usual since I am taking back the stuff I needed for the apartment I needed for longer stays and have left here for the past couple of years. I shall need to abandon some it though.  I thought I should show a picture of my main place of work at NTU. My office is quite a posh one reserved for visitors and overlooking the greenery and the trees on the other side of the building.

And talking of greenery again, I have squeezed in some more walking trips to the Botanic Gardens and got some nice shots of birds and general views, but they are all on a camera disc which I can’t currently access as I forgot to bring any of my disc readers and couldn’t face buying yet another one. Getting them will be a job for later this week when I get back to the UK. I did however manage to record a cooperative monitor lizard on my phone. Modestly sized he or she ( I don’t know how you sex a monitor) is one of hundreds at the gardens   

 

Oh to be in England, now that May is there

 

And yes, I know it’s really April, but it will do. Before departing for Singapore for a month, I managed to squeeze in a trip to the New Forest. Then the muted browns and dark greens of winter still predominated, but in the garden spring was bursting out all over and floppy bright light greens were everywhere. May is my favourite month and it’s a shame that my teaching at the Singapore staff college always appears at that time, but I’ll be back soon and hope that by the time I am the late ash and oak will be out as well. However my two (! ) temporary gardeners will have been observing ‘no mow May’ so it will look very lush and abandoned I expect.

In fact I had to leave a bit earlier than usual as I had been invited by the High Commission to an engagement session of the Five Power Defence Arrangements in Malaysia, at the enormous Butterworth air force base near Penang. Penang was one of our favourite places in the old days especially the truly iconic E&O (Eastern and Oriental) Hotel – which is Penang’s answer to Singapore’s Raffles and originally operated by the same entrepreneurial pair of Armenian brothers back in the late 19^th Century. Really stylish and surely one of the nicest swimming pools anywhere.  The old city itself is fascinating too redolent of the same period and predominantly Chinese in atmosphere. Not quite so well-manicured as Singapore with bits of romantic decay here and there – especially the local cemetery. Unfortunately, I wasn’t housed there and only drove through it en route from and to the airport. Instead, I was in another ultramodern hotel (but much less offensive than the Rotterdam one) still on the island rather than the mainland but quite far away. In an any case it was all jam-packed so not much time either. See if you can pick me out in the inevitable closing session.

Otherwise, I had a much more leisurely trip over to Jakarta to perform for their naval staff college and the University of Indonesia, plus meeting some colleagues, now known for sometime and having a number of interesting meals as usual.

Here's me looking rather serious. Limited didn't refer to my expertise (or at least I don't think so) It meant by invitation only. It was all very informal and I wore my blue batik shirt for the occasion. 

At the former I was presented with yet another shield that I inadvertently left on the returning aircraft. I had some excuse for this as most unusually for Singapore Airlines it didn’t go like clockwork. For a start, the RSIS team jumped into a flight earlier than booked. Then just as we were about to take-off the news came in that Changi airport was closed because of bad weather. So we had to sit tight on the tarmac for a couple of hours waiting for it to clear. Fortunately, I was able to keep myself entertained by plugging into 5 episodes of HBO’s ‘Veep,’  profane but funny. We eventually made it, still an hour ahead of that originally planned. It really had been a heavy storm, with a fair amount of flooding. Its unusually hot and muggy here at the moment 33-37 and really, really humid. What some ex-pats call ‘three shirt weather’. Heaven only knows how our Victorian predecessors – who made absolutely no concession to the climate – bore it with their elaborate dresses, ties, frock and waist coats. No wonder they died early. The following two shots taken from my window perhaps 5 minutes apart capture the spirit of a the tropical downpours usual in the afternoon accompanied of course by loud cracks of thunder and lightening. So that’s another reason for wistful thoughts about the crisper English versions of May.

Even so, I’ve had one or two minor excursions to favoured places, that have to be planned around the ferocious and torrential showers that happen most days . Almost everywhere there’s construction going on reducing the green spaces that Lee Kwan Yew insisted on as a visible emphasis of building his Singapore. Despite a hugely inflated population, they just about manage an impressive balance – between the green and the concrete, the old and new. The potential threat is illustrated by this slightly skewed shot of the out of window of a MRT carriage window of new-building cranes crowding around the Chinese Gardens.

It looks terrible but will probably be OK in the end. All the same Singapore is a lot better designed and built than either Jakarta or KL, but it’s not easy or free. A tribute towards the concept of ‘guided democracy’ perhaps ! Certainly, that’s how it seems given the crazy consequences of the unguided versions in the US and Europe. It all contributes to the widespread gloom about the state of things globally, that I encounter amongst my colleagues everywhere I go. 

But the best way of looking on the brighter side is indeed to plunge into nature, whether to grow cabbages, spot birds, supervise the cutting down of dead trees or just wander about enjoying it in the Botanic gardens here or back home next month.  Something else to keep one going and to look forward to.    

Grandfather's back

 

But no I don’t mean me, Instead I’m referring to the family longcase clock. About 6 months ago, ‘his’ rope broke. This is a circular loop of rope used to wind he mechanism. To make  the required loop , one end has to be spliced with the other. This is a skilled and lengthy process but always produces a join which inevitably acts as  a critical point of failure however well done. For this reason more modern long case clocks have chains rather than ropes. When it finally went, I had to dismantle the clock and take his innards to a very traditional clock doctor in Salisbury whose family have been looking after him since the 1950s. I remember the first time that I assumed responsibility for arranging his care when they came to my mother’s house in the mid 1970s. ‘Ooo’ they said ‘this an oldie….look an external striking mechanism.’ Soon after I did some research on the maker – a John Price of Chichester who was active for a brief period in the 1780s, when the clock probably came into the family, then living at West Dean five miles north of Chichester. Anyhow, he’s now back tick-tocking away remarkably accurately despite his 250 years. Not worth much, as such clock aren’t in fashion but very nice for someone like me to have around still. I really missed him.

It’s the family associations as much as anything of course. My father, an engineer, did much too reconstitute his workings and polish him up apparently, so family lore says after a couple of decades of black-faced silence, propped up against an angled floor in a Portsmouth house condemned as it was sliding into a bog ! And that sort of association goes for much else in the house that many others might well regard as clutter.

I was thinking about his on my latest foreign trip, a brief hop-over o Rotterdam where the conference organisers have put me up – and I do mean ‘up’ – on the top 23^rd  floor of an uncompromisingly modern hotel by the harbour. It’s one of those pretentious places I most dislike. It could be anywhere, its avowedly minimalist, with no handles to the drawers, the cupboard doors or the coffee mug. In its desire to be different even the wood in the three cornered pencil is black. There’s no place to put anything, or even to work despite the generous size of the room. The coffee set is crammed onto a tiny space too small to operate it in. You have to take stuff out and put it on the floor. For all its determined stylishness, the whole place is ridiculous  - and I daresay not cheap. Give me my clutter anyday !

This break in the UK has been almost free of academic endeavour and very refreshing too, though equally busy. Lots of family events (including family trips to Bodiam castle and Bowood House and adventure playground)  which I won’t recount as many of my audience have participated in them but a joy for me having been away from them all so long. All sorts of other little things too, like being reminded that it’s not just Singapore that has fantastic trees – this 

‘weeping plane’ was amazing.

 

Some family history of course, especially in the form of side-trips when going to, and returning from, Burgess Hill which provides options for explorations of different  bits of ‘Till Country’. On one of them I even managed a walk in the New Forest and seeing signs of in-coming spring all around.

More recently, when returning from shopping in Devizes, I saw that I still had 12 ‘free’ electric miles on the clock and on an impulse decided to visit Adam’s grave on the hills behind the house. Partly to see whether I could make it, when feeling slightly under the weather. Pleased to say I could. Threading my way through thousands of cow-slips  I got to the top. Magnificent views all around and apart from the wind I had it all to myself. A first encounter with larks ascending. Downland is my favourite country I think, perhaps not surprising since the family seems to have lived in it for a thousand years !

It was all very quiet and peaceful – in strong contrast to the roar of battle here back in 715 when the Mercians first attacked and defeated the forces of Wessex. Looking north it was easy to see the way they would have come following the little modern road snaking its way through a valley in the downs. From there it was only a gentle though long rise to the earthen fortifications around the Adam’s grave burial mound where the Wessex force had probably established themselves. Behind the Wessex forces a steep drop down into Pewsey vale, awful country for a retreat after defeat. Wessex got its revenge however a century later in 825 at nearby Wroughton.

Then there were two exhibitions at the British Museum one on the Samurai (with a dramatic battle rendition clearly echoing the first one in the Tom Cruise film) and another on Hawaii (with a cloak made of the feathers of what must have been thousands of little birds) .

Add to that an ‘Old Boys’ session at a village pub south of Salisbury, a Friends of Wiltshire Churches meeting, checking on one’s various life support systems, linking up with long-term colleague etc, together with  restoring the garden, getting the tractor mended, arranging for a new gardener and having some tree surgeons in, I haven’t been idle. Less constructively but equally necessary, a huge variety of dangerously overdue business affairs, not least of which has been trying to access a long closed bank account in the US. The byzantine convolutions one has to go through in order to lay one’s hands on one’s own money is quite staggering. Much more pleasant to potter about in the garden building up collapsed brick vegetable patch surrounds, get things mowed, feeding the birds, putting in more beans,  and so on. 

But I have to say that this little trip to Rotterdam illustrates the point that the academics haven’t entirely gone away. Stuff is still coming in on the internet and always in the background Ukraine and Trump’s ‘Epic Fury’ against Iran (or Epic something else – a 6 lettered hyphenated word with the same first two letters, as its known in the Washington think-tank community.)  It won’t be long before I’m fully immersed in such stuff again as I return to Singapore, if only for quite a brief while.  

ANOTHER NEW YEAR AND HOMEWARD BOUND

 

My time in Singapore this time has simply flashed by in part because I have been much busier than usual. I’ve finished with my last long teaching session, enjoying the student contact as much as ever. In fact they have been both the largest and arguably the best group I have ever had. Not just in their written work (where AI means one has to be wary of high standards these days) but in the presentations and class participation part of it as well. A nice bunch to end with. I was actually very touched when a Philippine student, who’s fine but not outstanding in the class, sidled up to me as I left and presented me with a bag of Philippine cakes and biscuits, for me ‘to have with your coffee.’ So that side of things, has been great,  though I am less enamoured with all the bureaucratic nausea that goes with teaching these days.  

Of course the big event of the last three weeks was Chinese New Year, when again I was invited to attend a family – and really its should be dynastic – celebration. A good 50 people all told with a lot of chattering (about half of which was in Hokkien or Mandarin) the rest in English or Singlish. This was, I have to say full on. I was there about 8 hours. Much eating - and drinking though I have noticed that the locals are much more abstemious  with alcoholl than most of us decadent westerners. One highlight is the ‘Prosperity Toss.’  All the ingredients of this are gathered ceremoniously into a representation of the year – in this case the Year of the Fire Horse. Hence the horse head picture of the plate.

All of the ingredients are ‘auspicious’ of something or other – health, wealth, good fortune, lots of children etc. Once assembled everyone pitches in with chop sticks and chants theoretically tossing the contents into the air to lock in the beneficial effects. Large numbers need to do it in relays ! Aficionados try to hit the ceiling but we didn’t have any of them. Its fun, but I’m not sure the video of my role in this will work.(it didn't)

The other major activity was Blackjack. The real thing – and it has to be with money, usually based on the Hong Bao money one gives out to kids – in ceremonial red packets. I had come prepared for this of course. Two and a half hours. I was pleased only to be down by 3 dollars  at the end. The real card sharps were the kids who can’t be seen in this pic. The other grandfather in the pic (and there were several present at various stages) seemed very stern, did everything in Hokkien, but lost ‘heavily’. Interestingly they didn’t allow increasing bets after the cards were dealt but had a lot of special cases to be remembered. It certainly passed the time !

That and related activity practically gutted one week and the one before saw us squeezing in a very compressed trip to Kuala Lumpur. Lots of academic interactions, including their defence University. But two of us (I must admit at my suggestion as a perpetual grockle) went off to look at what is now called the Seri Negara a rather grand summerhouse that used to be one of the major colonial headquarters. General Templar stayed there during the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s. It now houses a technically very upmarket museum of Malaya’s path to independence. It was fascinating to compare this with the special exhibition My colleagues and I had been shown round at Singapore’s National Library the week before.

This was based on the so-called  ‘Albatross file’ – something that had been kept secret since 1965. This up-ended the long assumption that Singapore, after years of difficult negotiations, had effectively been kicked out of the British inspired Malayan Federation (of Malaya, Brunei and Singapore) by the Malaysians – effectively Tunku Rahman. This led to Lee Kuan Yew famously crying on TV when he announced it to his people, believing that the city wouldn’t prosper on its own. The file showed in fact that there were a group of Singaporean senior politicians who thought that Malaysia would be an ‘albatross’ tied around Singapore’ neck and who actively strove for independence.

But the Malaysian exhibition literally didn’t even mention Singapore; nor did it have more than a passing reference to the ‘Confrontation’  of the 1960s with Indonesia, when British forces protected Singapore, Brunei, Sarawak and Sabah against Indonesian military attacks. There was also plenty of references to colonial exploitation generally not seen in Singapore. I found all this really interesting and illustrates the tensions below the surface in all the local relationships, of which the little local war between Cambodia and Thailand is another example. But as you can see, it was a delightful building and made for a very fulfilling visit.

          Of course, Singapore has indeed prospered on its own, doing much better than both Indonesia and Malaysia so far. But as this shot of KL at night time from the open air top floor bar and pool of my hotel shows, the city isn’t by any means a sleepy little town either. Though it has a much more extensive, scruffier, old ethnic Chinatown than Singapore. On one day we were invited to another full-on Chinese New Year lunch with prosperity tosses and all the rest of it in the  heart of that area which was really, really noisy and great fun. The only problem a programme mix-up meant this was our second big lunch of the day, having already had one at NDU. But our host had gone to so much trouble we all did our best. Fortunately the next stop was the airport.

On top of all this there were quite a few invites out and special events, so apart from staggering around the Botanic Gardens a few times, I found I had much less time for grockling than I had anticipated. But there’s always May, when all being well I shall be back for several weeks. After all this Allington will seem very quiet.   

Things old and new

 

It’s shortly the year of the Fire Horse and it would be hard for Singaporeans not to be aware of that. This one stands, or rather rears,  in the middle of New Bridge Street which is a busy road that runs alongside Chinatown.

Upper Hokkien street feeds into it. I mention that since that’s where I get my Lapsang Souchong tea from (though it costs a lot more here than it does in Devizes, make of that what you will). The horse appeared almost overnight – a nice illustration of the blending of old and new. Old ideas, new format. That goes for Chinatown too and in fact everywhere in Singapore despite the surface modernity of much of it. Look closely, or around the corner, and you’ll find bits of the original still hanging in there. It’s why I like it, I suppose. 

Behind the horse for example you can see the Majestic theatre. It looks like an Art Deco cinema, but actually it was a Cantonese Opera House built in 1927 so it’s not very likely that either my father or Cherry’s went there when stationed here or passing through before the war. Cantonese opera is an acquired taste. They would certainly have recognised Chinatown, though, and the Tiger and Tsingtao beer is probably much the same. 

            Perhaps that train of thought was set off by my re-visiting the refurbishing Singapore national museum last weekend. It’s in a splendidly recycled colonial era building – probably the biggest in Southeast Asia – founded in the mid 19^th Century. To cover up the on-going refurbishment they put on two big displays of Singapore’s history, mercifully free of the anti-Imperial cant so common these days. One was a kind of sound and light show that you walked through by descending a circular ramp, starting with today and going down to the remote past. It was very effective and photogenic.

I liked this portrayal of the old kampong days, and the awfulness of the war was particularly well done. Equally so, its depiction of the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse in December 1941. But the fore and after really comes across from old photos, like this one of the river just before the First World War.

 Now the river is almost completely empty apart from a few tourist boats chugging around – all the shipping has shifted now partly to Keppel Harbour and now to a brand-new ultra-modern, automated port at Tuas at the western end of the island. Building that was a gigantic project of extraordinary complexity that puts our shambling H2S to shame. There’s nothing like a bit of ‘guided democracy’ to get things done ! It’s the same at my university campus which was largely green when we first came here 20 odd years ago but now has no less than three underground stations being built on it with twisting overhead tracks all over the place. It’s still full of trees though. Likewise the shop-houses on the quayside behind the boats in the river are still there, though mainly restaurants and bars these days.

I go to college twice a week by public transport the underground -or MRT Mass Rapid Transport and bus (and once by minivan) and am always struck by how deeply underground my Downtown line is. The lift, if uninterrupted, takes a full minute travelling quite fast to get down to my platform. Some of the escalators are hugely long. And yet before the war when the military wanted to dig trenches on the Padang ( Singapore’s equivalent of a village green even with the cricket club nearby) for protection against Japanese planes, they were dissuaded by the locals who said the water table was so high they would flood. Or so we are told !

Anyhow enough of that.  I have been extremely busy teaching and participating in conferences and the like, not the leisured life I had been thinking of, but can still find time for the odd local excursion to favoured places. Unimaginative it might be, but the Botanical Garden just next door a great and easy lure. There’s nearly always something to see.

It might be a shot of a white-fronted waterhen picking his way across the lily-pads or a tiny Kingfisher, or this chap, a monitor lizard dozing at the water’s edge right by the path, so well camouflaged that most people walked past without seeing him, even though he was a good 5 feet long. 

I did spot him , and took the photo.  while I was so engaged, a small group of young French gentlemen came over to see. ‘Oooo la,la,’ one said, impressed. I didn’t know they really said that !

A sleeping dragon beginning to wake up. So, to summarise, out here one quietly continues to take delight in little things, be they old or new.