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Art After Dark
This evening I went to ‘Art After Dark’, an outdoor event at the hipster enclave of Gilman Barracks, where there were lots of art exhibits, some live music, and a lot of pop-up restaurants.
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Life is a beach, whether you like it or not
Let’s get this out of the way: I can’t stand beaches. I don’t know if that’s because I grew up in England, where we don’t have beaches, redolent of golden sand and happiness. We have ‘the seaside’ where you go to get lashed with salty gales and sit in a car drinking from a thermos […]
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Flying kites
We bought a jellyfish shaped kite the first time we went to Margaret River, and today, after it had languished on a shelf for more than a year, we took it down to the Marina Barrage to fly it. I was annoyed to discover that the string for it was missing – something lost among […]
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A tug of the forelock
Today I went to MOM, the maternally-named Ministry Of Manpower, because my old Employment Pass was due to expire and I needed to get a new one. I’ve had the same photograph on my EP since 2012 when I moved to Singapore, and apparently it was time to update my biometrics, which is the fancy […]
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Distractions at Chinese New Year
Today was the first day of the Year Of The Dog, so we got the day off. But most of everything was shut, so there wasn’t so much to do. At least Starbucks, having no sensitivity to any culture, ignores all public holidays and remains open to serve coffee.
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Becoming a hipster and hammertime
This afternoon I went to Toa Payoh and bought a scooter, for myself. Not an electric scooter. Not a Vespa. An honest-to-goodness overgrown child’s scooter, for me. This was a premeditated act of hipsterness. See also: learning to juggle, facial hair, artisanal gin, etc. It’s also a little bit scary. Compared to a bike, the […]
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Goodbye, barefoot running shoes
Two and a half years after the Singapore climate claimed a perfectly good pair of shoes, I have another victim: my Merrell Roadgloves, an incredibly comfortable pair of shoes from the height of the barefoot running boom. (And thus at least five years old, but it’s the mileage, never the age…)
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Househunting
Our current lease ends in February and the landlord is selling the unit, so we’re moving out. So today we started looking at flats. In Singapore there are two property listing websites, PropertyGuru and 99.co. 99.co is the upstart in the market, and has a better user interface but nobody seems to bother to update […]
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Deepavali 2017
Deepavali means Wednesday was a holiday in Singapore, so we went with the girls to the Botanic Gardens and they whizzed around on their scooters for a while with some friends, and then got tetchy, and screamed at us, and then we went to a cafe and ate vaguely disappointing sandwiches, ok pasta and ever-reliable […]
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It doesn’t smell like victory
I don’t know how, but we got La Serpiente out of the house fairly quickly this morning and bustled downstairs, intent on visiting the Tiong Bahru Bakery for another pain au chocolat. Stepping out of the lift, I smelt the unmistakable odour of fresh human sewage, and gagged. La Serpiente carried blithely on. We went […]
