January, 2017 - cushtie.com

Month: January 2017

  • Lost in transit once more

    I got a taxi to the airport with plenty of time to spare, assuming there’d be all kinds of extra hassle getting through security. I was wrong; from arriving curbside to dropping off my bags took less than five minutes. Of course, if I’d left a bit later I might have remembered to pack my […]

  • Marathon training – week 6 of 14 (too much too young)

    I ended last week by slacking off and not doing my long Sunday run. That left me unexpectedly fresh on Monday, so when I went to the track I ran (in epically wet conditions) a surprisingly consistent set of 400m repeats. Pretty much every lap was under 1:25, and they were almost all within a […]

  • Peter Gabriel and Us

    This afternoon I played La Serpiente and Destroyer some Peter Gabriel. All his best tunes aren’t on Spotify but the videos are on YouTube, so they got to see the utter wierdness/dreadful early 90s CGI that accompanied Steam, along with the no-less-inspired oddness of Sledgehammer. Both my daughters were transfixed by the sights that flickered […]

  • Sleeping through it

    I had a fairly long run this morning, up and down the biggest hills I could find, and then as it was Chinese New Year today, there was nowhere open for coffee. We had all gone to bed quite early last night, only for the midnight fireworks to wake up La Serpiente, so I should […]

  • End of the year

    It’s the last day of the Year of the Monkey today, and music is wafting from Chinatown towards our eyrie on the 40th floor. Today I walked through a shopping centre in the middle of town, and there were a series of recommendations from an astrologer, put up on placards. Staunch stuff like: don’t expect […]

  • The Sympathizer

    Today I finished The Sympathizer, another of the books I discovered via the bookshop in Suvarbharmi Airport. It was really strong, even if the last chapters seemed to fade in strength – or perhaps that was my own fatigue.  The Sympathizer is about a double agent in the South Vietnamese secret police, eventually escaping to […]

  • Not sleeping

    I couldn’t sleep last night, an aggravating state of affairs where I lay wide awake at 3am, cursing my alertness and regularly getting up to settle La Serpiente, who has been beset with nightmares, falling out of bed and plain awkwardness, like when, after I had finally got to sleep about 4, she came in […]

  • Pete The Cat And His Four Groovy Buttons

    This was a book I chose for La Serpiente at the library a couple of weeks ago. It stars Pete, a real hep cat with a coat with four groovy buttons. As the story goes on, the groovy buttons pop off his coat one by one and roll away. But does Pete get upset? Goodness […]

  • Marathon training – week 5 of 14 (slacking off)

    I’m back from running round the track in torrential, chilling rain, and looking back on last week, a week where I didn’t do all that I should have done. A week that culminated in defeat and a margarita pizza.

  • Pasir Ris Park

    This morning we went to Pasir Ris Park. Pasir Ris is right at the end of the East West MRT line, so the name had a passing familiarity, although it’s never somewhere I’d been before. I wasn’t feeling that great: two hard days of running behind me, and we’d been out til midnight at a […]