While the plan is to cut down, and in fact terminate, my Newport association at the end of June, I’d still like to retain links with Singapore, colloquially known as Singers. In that connection, I had a busy week there in February. It’s the year of the rabbit of course, and they are everywhere. Mostly red, for good luck, but you occasionally come across white ones.
This red one is bound for Walthamstowe but may have to have some of its accoutrements docked before it falls into the hands of young Elowen. One of my conference colleagues, from Japan actually, insisted on taking a picture of me in front of the rarer white ones in the hotel foyer. I’m not sure who looks more rabbit like.
Once again, the weather here hasn’t been that cooperative. It’s been the rainiest Monsoon period that people can remember with the occasional terrific thunderstorm echoing around the tower blocks. So it’s not been conducive to one of my favourite activities, namely lounging around a swimming pool, doing some improving reading and trying to work off some of the excess calories that are really extremely difficult to avoid absorbing in Singapore. This is a country that takes food very seriously and the locals will ask you solicitously whether you have had lunch (or whatever) when first meeting you. The result can be imagined. Hence the need for some slow swimming up and down the Olympic sized pool at the Tanglin Club, where fortunately I was blessed with a little bit of reasonable weather, before everything went very dark as torrential rain bucketed down. I also abjured taxis and went by MRT (the underground) or on foot as I did when rabbit-hunting in Chinatown. Although it was cloudy it is still quite hot and one arrives anywhere not looking as suave as one would wish.
I was interested to see that although the authorities have stopped checking on whether one has a full vaccination record on entry to the country, there’s still a lot of mask wearing. On the MRT it is still mandatory in fact, and people working in restaurants and hotels do too. The very large and recent influx of tourists from China, which no doubt brings with it strains of the Covid variants they have had since the end of their zero-tolerance policy, seems to be responsible for this, although in the Far East (to be politically incorrect for a moment) people are much less resistant to mask wearing after their SARS experience. I found the humidity and heat made masks noticeably more uncomfortable – perhaps being less used to it.
The highlight of my last day was being invited to lunch for a chat at a really nice French restaurant in Chinatown by a bunch of people in the shipping industry. They were all very friendly and candid about the issues raised, in particular by the Ukraine war - the Russians’ ‘dark fleet’ and other ways of getting round the sanctions. Some parts of the West’s shipping industry were suffering badly, most obviously the tanker trade for Russian oil, but others were making money hand over fist. It was an interesting session in an area quite new to me, so I was on a steep learning curve. I also enjoyed the first lamb I’ve had for a long time.
When I came out I ran straight into what looked like a wedding party, with a very pretty girl in a huge, voluminous wedding dress. Apparently the custom here is that before they get married, the couple go round with a bunch of professional photographers and have pictures taken of themselves at all their favourite places. It was quite a performance in a narrow little Chinatown street all dressed up in broiling sunshine.
It’s not a good photo, but it also shows a nice example of a refurbished shop-house. Although the Singaporeans stupidly tore down far too much of their old attractive historic buildings in the 1960s – just like we did- they’ve learnt the lesson and now preserve as much as they can of what’s left (which is actually more than the casual visitor might think). Originally, as the name suggests, there would have been a shop of some sort on the ground floor with storage and accommodation for the family on the two floors above. They’re typically one room wide but go back a long way and the grander ones have a kind of mini-courtyard open to the sky in the middle. You can just make out another feature which is that the ground floor is set back so in effect there’s a cool, colonnaded front walking area to all shop-house blocks. They’re exactly 5 feet wide, all thanks to the directions of that remarkable man, Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of modern Singapore in 1819. He had an amazing eye for detail. Nicely done up as most of them now are, shop-houses are attractive and decorated in styles that afficionadoes can easily date. A lot are now restaurants, or boutiques but many are still lived in by the rich. They’re sought after and expensive but not as much as ‘landed properties’ (which means houses with a garden). The old ‘black-and-white’ tudor-looking houses that we Brits put up before and after the war have large gardens and are worth an absolute fortune, at least once brought up to modern standards. A few are still in British military hands, and very nice they are too.
Anyhow I’m shortly on my way to our own black and white, which is certainly ‘landed’ and excites a lot of admiring but frankly disbelieving reactions from my colleagues here in their small little island of tower block accommodation. Each to his/her own I suppose. By the way, not all the places Cherry and I used to go to were quite so elegant. In fact, with a couple of our New Zealand I revisited a favourite if somewhat less salubrious little place also in Chinatown that sports the following notice in what passes for a loo. It made me laugh anyway.
