Great World City and a calm afternoon


An enormous chicken mural at Camp Kilo
An enormous chicken mural at Camp Kilo

This morning we went to Great World City, another mall in Singapore that’s not very different to the rest. There’s a Toys R Us for the kids to buy branded doodads in, there’s a Cotton On to buy their clothes in, there’s a Marks & Spencer and a Typo to buy kitsch nick-nacks. We went to the toyshop to buy the girls new toy cars; La Serpiente got a metallic purple VW bug and Destroyer a Beatles-themed Mini. And i got a 67 Ford Mustang, so I was happy too. This excursion took us a couple of hours when you factor in stopping for a croissant in Tiong Bahru, changing a nappy and all the other mucking around, which meant that the kids were ready for their naps. So tired, in fact, was La Serpiente that she ran around me screaming that she was too tired to walk and needed to be carried. Heartless parent that I am, I pointed out the discrepancy in this and made her walk to the bus stop.

They napped while I microwaved vegetarian sausages, and when they awoke we went to a friend’s birthday celebration over in Kampong Bugis. Bugis is one of the heavily congested, cramped parts of Singapore, full of malls and traffic, whereas Kampong Bugis, just over the river, is a sleepy collection of small buildings and trees, slowly being encroached upon by building sites for condominiums.

The venue was a booze and barbecue place called the Charcoal Club, and it was quite civilised, in that rather than accumulating a huge bill and then trying to split it between diners at the end, you paid for things as you went, like in a normal pub. We got patatas bravas that turned out to be made with Thai shrimp sauce, so that was no good for me, nor were the doughnuts. I had a beer to cheer myself up and concentrated on taking photos in between trying to stop the girls flinging themselves in the river or under a passing car.

Clearly in another month, when I could have sugar or drink more booze, I’d have been better off, but we survived. We got the kids home and our eldest pointedly ignored me until after her bath, when she fell asleep and I got the chance to get the photos off my camera and onto the internet. And thus, after a short run and a little more of the book I’m reading, to bed.


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