I am a teng sua nang

I am looking for the lyrics of this song, so if any one remembers it - and i'm speaking to Jacq and Anne in particular, will you please send it to me.

The bits i have are

I am a tend sua nang
I come from Sembawang
I play my lang ting tang
From morning to petang
...
I met a lorry
He told me to gostan
I masuk dalam longkang
and had a big kai tan

Now most of this will be indecipherable unless you are Singaporean. But if you are, then through the magic of osmosis, you would have absorbed the Hokkien and Malay words and understood what most of this song is, irrespective of your ethnic background. However, i must say, i am not quite sure what a lang ting tang is, and Ma said last night as i was singing this to Oisin and a corpsing mother in an effort to keep her awake as she drove back from Donegal at 10 pm last night, that it is something like a ukelele. I always thought that it would be more like an er-woo, but i am willing to be corrected on this matter, not being a teng sua nang from Sembawang.

When i think of when this song was written, or created by the blessed boy scouts of Singapore, or girl guides, who knows, Sembawang would have been this really Ulu place. in fact i had met a Singaporean in England from Sembawang who told me he had never been to Orchard Road. It would been farmland, probably mostly pig rearing because the Chinese love their pigs, although there is a story about hot water springs and pineapple cultivation as well. Now that most of Singapore is roads - roads and flats and some shopping centres, it's hard to remember what a trip out Sembawang was. There were far more forms of habitation and habitats. Kelongs, mudflat estuaries, villages, little towns and of course the big city. There were also fishing villages by the sea and huge bungalows which let lots of sea breeze and evenings in - but using attap leaves, kept the hot afternoons out. Now that the entire island is filled with concrete and the rainforests are being decimated Singapore is unbearable, except through the use of airconditioner.

I was watching this thing with Prince charles appealing about the rainforest and there was scientist which was saying that the amount of water vapour which the rainforests produced was critical to keeping the temperature of the equator habitable. It reminded me of the water vapour curtains which they create on Orchard Road now, ironically using up oil and creating more climate change in the process. This was always a speculation in my head for a few years now, but it was now confirmed. The destruction of the rainforests HAD increased the median temperature of a unchanging climate of the Equator.

Lets hope people who are in power have this sense as well to go out to the remaining rainforests that exist, to see what perfect equilibrium looks like and then understand how much IS being destroyed. The lessons we can learn from nature. Something real, instead of having their head buried in dusty books and dry statistics - instruments they use to nurture their neuroses and keep life at bay - to be alive. Then perhaps they will be able to look after life, not dead material things.

OK, must go now. We're heading to the steam railway - the only steam train in Ireland to go to Inch Abbey an early Christian site built by Cistercian monks. I have charged the camera, so there will be photos!