Memories

I am 38 years old now. I turned 38 about a week ago, exactly a week ago actually. We celebrated with a solstice party and i had a wonderful group of women around. I forget that the house is larger now and i can take moe women, so i will have more women the next time. This time of the year is always about excess, so when i said bring a dish, i should have remembered i was inviting women, not men who would show up with six tins of larger a one tube of pringles. We had parsnip and apple soup, chocolate cake, a massive and wonderful apple crumble, with apples grown in the chef's own garden, quinoa and belugar salad, box of Green and Blacks, a cheese platter, smoked salmon and wheaten bread - added to this my own beef and guiness stew, christmas cake and i restrained myself and did not make a starter, and good thing i didn't too. I did however make mulled cider. And there was some whiskey for those who wanted it alcoholic.

We read poems and stories and attempted to light a wet log fire. It didn't work of course, but the room was so packed that it didn't matter. It would have been nice to have a fire though.

I had food for the next week - we still haven't made a dent on a cheese platter. Everyone was so full by the time dessert came round that no one attempted the cheese. And i think they only ate the Christmas cake cos i had baked it. Magically the two month old cake turned out alright. And it has now almost been eaten. It was suspiciously squidggey in the middle, but my very chritable friends said that they liked it so squidggey. Why does it have to be so bloody sweet though? All that fruit. I think the next time i WILL make my chocolate cake. Which was certainly less bother. But i can now say that i CAN make Christmas cake, i have done it. And perhaps one christmas cake is all we should be allowed to make in a lifetime.

I have never baked so much in my life. The gingerbread houses, all kinds of cakes, all kinds of bread, etc. Not without disaster now, it must be said. My favourite part is of course when it turns out great. It's like a little miracle. When i was a young woman cakes collapsed unaccountably on me. So much so that i used to think i could not say a single thing in the kitchen, lest the kitchen sprites got annoyed with me and the cakes collapsed. Now having two children, i could set off several detonations, and be relatively confident that the cakes will rise. Other funny superstitions i had. Never ever open the oven door. Bread will collapse. I once insisted that i could make meriengue with a whisk when i was 8. My mother allowed me to do this. Probably to teach me a lesson. I have never tried making meriengue again. I keep telling myself that i'll get a whisk, an electric whisk. I keep forgetting.

Another thing i want to get is a handheld vaccuum cleaner. You know the small ones you can hav in cars. I will get that actually. That will be my Christmas present to myself. From Argos, today.

Little lessons. Yesterday we were watching Riverdance on TV when Ghin began to pull Peter up. What is it Ghin, he asked. What it was was he wanted to dance. And it was really funny, because before we watched Riverdance, we watched You've Been Framed! which is the lowest of low comedy where people who have been in accidents send in footage of themselves having those accidents. I asusme that the subcontext is, like th marrator that lives, if the person is telling the story they are still alive and therefore it is more funny than tragic. So Ghin combined the two. He would jump up and down very quickly and then after five seconds throw himself up in the air and onto the floor and laugh. He looked like a fecking eeejit.

Ghin has become so heavy now - and is talking non stop. His main funtion is talking is instructing. Clean this. Get that. Put it on. Leaf it. Sometimes he pretends that he can really really talk and then he babbles - and always ends it qith a question, looking at you meaningfully, so that you have to say to him, oh yes Ghin, i agree entirely, even if you haven't understood a single thing. He has a temper. Oh he has a temper. Yesterday in Ikea he shoved aside a nine year old who was playing with the TV screens they have around Ikea to keep the children quiet, and began jabbing the screen with his finger. I used to worry about him being so shy. Oh no, when he wants to, he can certainly come into his own.

I'd have lived in Northern Ireland for almost 12 years now. Imagine that. As the years go by i miss my family in Singapore more and more, probably because i know that time will one day run out for all of us. It is illogical of course - because time could run out at any moment, what with falling pianos and meteorites, deadly diseases and car accidents, but i still do miss them. Singapore however has changed out of all recognition. Be that as it may, over the last few years i have been making the effort to look up old friends when i get back, and the response has been so delightful that i am so grateful that they are such nice people. Such wonderful people.

It is inevitable when a self-exiled person returns for short stay that they ask themselves, could i stay in Singapore? For pragmatic and psychological reasons, the answer must be no. The truth is that, what is there not to stay for? I have a loving and supportive, Peter wold say overindulgent family, who live comfortably and seem quite happy with life. Singapore itself is peaceful and the weather is ok. It is in an interesting part of the world where cultures mix and the place itself, although i never realised this, was very interesting. That's probably because i've grown up a bit and know how to make it a bit more interesting for myself. Could i live in Singapore? I think in all honesty, the answer has to be yes. But that said, i think at this stage in myself, i could live in any part of the world, but i would not surprise myself if i did return to South East Asia.

And apart from family, i don't miss anything else. Things i don't miss. The food. This is strange non? I don't miss the food. I don't really miss the swimming pool either. I mean i enjoy it when i'm there and i would miss it if i was there and wasn't able to get there, but i don't really miss it. Oh i lie, i miss the different festivals. Chinese New Year, Hari Raya, Deepavali - i miss speaking Malay. I miss walking around HDB estates. Last year Jacq and i went to Potong Pasir and we sat in a coffee shop and watched the tattooed and biceped durian sellers smoking and putting up their lights in what was intended to be a piazza. At the table next to us a really big time game of chinese chess was going on with two men in their seventies. It was watched by a crowd of other men - at various ages. They drank ABC stout and Tiger beer. A couple of nine year olds leaned against the rickety red plastic table, concentrating hard as well. Just outside the tent, in the heat of the waning three o'clock sun, a woman in her seventies clutched a filthy plastic bag that was filled with empties. And when someone finished their drink she would pounce on the tin and add it to her bursting bag. This was the other Singapore. She had a pinched but worn face. Her stare was vacant and resigned. This is what life has done to me, she said. I suffer. I have no one. I am abandoned. Alone. And I'm sure that she was. And she was the only woman there, apart from myself and Jacq.

And why did Jacw and i go to Potong Pasir? Because i wanted to see Singapore as it was, before all the development on steroid began. Since it is an opposition ward, the PAP have ensured that it is treated like a disowned child - albeit a child who disowned itself. Never one for grace under fire, or dignity in defeat, or generosity in spirit (all typical chinese traits - you shamed me, i'll screw you, never ever forgive you and may all your children and descendents be cursed till the end of their days, the stuff of countless cookie cutter Taiwanese and Cantonese soap serials which consist of grown men being regularly beaten by their arthritic parents and children of the second mother finally getting their come uppance against the children of their first mother), the PAP(A) ensures that whatever 'upgrading' goes on in the whole of Singapore, that the street adjacent to Potong Pasir always gets the first and the best of the bestest upgrading. The brightest colours for their flats, the shinest playgrounds, the most well lit of underpasses. In contrast, the first thing that greeted us when we got out of our car in the car park was a planter around an angsana tree. But not just any old planter. A planter that had been made out of a bumper of car. How ingeneous is that? Someone, had decided that they could recycle this bumper and that it could be made into a planter. Around this particular tree. In it, to complete localise the look, was an ancestral tablet and a few smoking jossticks. It was so cool. I think if i moved back to Singapore i would have to live in Potong Pasir.

It never occurs to the PAP that perhaps, jut perhaps, there are people who are as laid back and as chilled as the scene depicted in the paragraph two up. That there are people who don't really want to live the super duper hyper dyper life which they promulgate. So if you ever wanted to see a Singapore which is unregulated, which has said, no, i'm getting off the carousel, the merry go ground, you go to Potong Pasir. They could actually run tours based on this.