Escalator Etiquette

Mahatma Gandhi suggested that you could tell a lot about a society from the way it used escalators. That's a slight paraphrasal—I think his original statement mentioned animals rather that escalators, but the idea, I'm sure you'll agree, remains the same.

By that criteria, my hometown of Adelaide is in a sorry state. Unlike London, or Sydney, or any other major city in the civilised world, people do not stand to one side to allow faster moving traffic clear thoroughfare. Instead, they just stand there like zombies on a day trip to the big smoke. And unlike many cities, there are no helpful signs here to dissuade people from this behaviour.

Surely this is a little thing, I hear you say. You may well be right, but because I have little else to gripe about today, I prefer to see it as emphatic evidence of a far deeper societal malaise. Have these people no manners or common sense? Are they utterly oblivious to the needs of others and to the world about them? Is it selfishness, lack of education, drugs or just simple stupidity?

And is this an Adelaide thing, or does it happen in your city too? Ben Harris at Metroblogging Bangkok bemoans the cummulative time lost in his life waiting for people while they prepare to mount escalators. What is your escalator experience?

Strange thoughts on train

As one who so enjoys driving, I find my morning train commutes into the city of Adelaide to be journeys of continual revelation. A car, at least for most men, is so much an expression of the self and a buffer against the world that would intrude upon that self. The initial choice of model, colour, accessories; the music or radio shows in which you envelope yourself; even perhaps the routes you chose are, in some small way, about control, self-expression, the ego.

By contrast, trains gently force you to relinquish control, and to interact with the world and others in that curious, usually wordless way that is unique to rail transport. I often reflect on the fact that a train contains a vast collection of untold stories. Its like a massive bookshop containing only new releases by as yet unheard of writers. As you share a journey with these writers you get to know just a little about them by what they read, the way they dress, walk, browse the other passengers and how they converse with their companions. It's like reading the dust covers in the bookshop.

Often you see the same people on a daily basis and suddenly you seem to be in a relationship. I passed a man in the street the other day whom I recognised as a fellow rail traveller. We acknowledged each other shortly but with more than a hint of warmth because we shared a previous connection in a place where we would both otherwise have been disconnected from everyone.

And at the end of the day, these tiny connections are the lifeblood of existence. The hankering for connectedness of any sort is one of the major drivers for most people; the lack of that connectedness the principle cause of sadness.

On the morning journey, staring out of one of the scratched and hazy expanses of Perspex which pass for windows on South Australian trains and listening to Laurie Anderson's 'Big Science' on mp3, I was suddenly a little overwhelmed by this unextraordinary moment and wished my son were there to share it with me. Perhaps that too is inherent in human nature--through connection with others we can turn ordinary experiences into something more. But then it occurred to me that even of he were there, we would not be sharing my experience, but sharing a moment in which we were having different experiences. Those moments in life in which you look at someone else and have a deep sense that your experience or thoughts have genuinely aligned are extremely rare, and beyond price.

Happy Birthday, Clive

No, it's not my birthday, but that's less than three months away, so feel free to start saving now. However, there is another Clive on the other side of the world who is celebrating his birthday today. I don't know his surname or anyting else about him, only that on this day last year my friend Sebastian and I were in the Cinque Port town of Sandwich in Kent, and came across this sign attached at the base of another sign:

Purely by accident, I happened to find this picture today and noticed it's exactly a year on. So Happpy Birthday, Clive, whoever and wherever you are!

technorati tags:England, UK

Hastings High Street

Here's a rather amusing photo I took in Hastings. Click on the image to look at it more closely.

Battle Abbey

The Battle of Hastings was, interestingly, not fought at the Sussex beachfront town of Hastings at all, but many miles inland at the site of the town now known as Battle. At that sight, William the Conqueror founded a magnificent Abbey in 1070, with the altar stone at the precise point where King Harold fell.

This photo is taken from the lower level of the Monks' Dormitory Range, in the Monk's Common room. A very moving place to visit.

You can find more information at English Heritage's Battle Abbey website.

It's been a long time, now I'm coming back home

So sang The Beatles, back in the day, in that happy-tinged-with-melancholy number 'Wait'.

And it certainly has been a long time between blog posting for me, but I have a good excuse, honest. My UK holiday which turned into temporary relocation came to an end in December, and another relocation was required, back to sunny Adelaide. Since then I've been setting up a new business, home office and life. And now I feel like a little lie down.

I've missed blogging immensely, though — the interaction with readers, with the blogosphere as a whole and above all with myself and the dark recesses of my mind which tend to be explored and illuminated through writing.

So Eebahgum, Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, Live long and prosper and so on to you all, and welcome back to normal trasmission.

I've finally sung at St John's College, Cambridge!

At a fortnight's notice I was offered the opportunity to sing with the English Arts Chorale in their performance of the Bach B Minor Mass at St John's College, Cambridge last Saturday. Anyone who is familiar with the work will realise that it's one of the hardest sings in the repertoire—long, relentless and tiring. Having not sung it since the early 90s, I was a little sceptical that they'd actually take me at such short notice, but I was encouraged to come along and try out. I had dreamt of singing at Cambridge all my life, so how could I refuse?

So I showed up to the ante-penultimate rehearsal, got some of it right although I fumbled my way through several of the cruel runs at conductor Leslie Olive's cracking tempo. I was pronounced adequate without having to undergo their usual audition ordeal, and it was Cambridge, here we come. At this first rehearsal I was struck by the choir's excellent handling of the rapid bits, and real sense of ensemble and subtlety in the delicate bits. Les encourages everyone to sing the very least they need to create a good tone, and pursues a bright clear 'young' sound, and it works. The choir has a good blend of strong voices and for an amateur choir of 45 or 50 voices is very good indeed.

We arrived at St John's College on Saturday last for the big day. The College is lovely, dating back to the early 16th century. The Chapel, which is world famous for its choir and its acoustic is, surprisingly, much newer, having been built in the 1860s. It is nevertheless a beautiful building, with a magnificent polished floor, lovely roof treatment and austere dark woodwork. There's a Quicktime movie you can scroll around on St John's College website which you might like to check out. The place is long and thin, with the organ mounted above the Quire on the Cantoris side. One look at the place and you can see the sound is going to be nice and detailed in the front half, and a wash of meaningless noise at the back, and that's pretty much how it is.

We had been practicing at my son's school in Reigate, accompanied by piano. The dress rehearsal in this completely different space, now with organ and chamber ensemble was, frankly, a disaster. Suddenly without the percussive authority of the piano, tired from more than two hours travel, and perhaps a little overawed by the occasion, heads went down and timing went out the window. To add to the disaster, the oboist's music was lost, and the tenor soloist was clearly under-rehearsed. This could be ugly.

But as I said earlier, this is a pretty decent choir. With three hours between rehearsal and concert, would we get our heads together in time? Would there be anyone in the audience to care? And most urgently, how was I going to get my fat neck into the tiny bow tie with which I had been provided?

In the end, I need not have worried too much. Joanna fixed the bow tie with the ingenious application of safety pins--a girl thing if ever there were one. The audience was just shy of 250 which in a college chapel is pretty good. The tenor soloist had been working hard between times and was fine. Soloists were very good all round, and the violin, horn, flute and oboe generally excellent—top class players all. And the choir were suitably transformed—they sang well, with reasonable tightness and authority until the inevitable 'wall of tiredness' which affects every choir I've ever heard about two-thirds of the way through the Bach B Minor. After a couple of ensemble wobblies at that point, they recovered to a very musical conclusion. They could have been a little tighter on the day, and perhaps just a little more sophisticated in places, but overall it was pretty good, and in several places, brilliant. And the star of the show was Ian Le Grice, the choir's accompanist, on the organ.

So all told, a very good show. And what a joy it is to sing in that incredibly famous chapel. As wave after wave of audience applause washed over us at the end, I was high on the space and the sound, and just did not want to get off the stage, knowing I may never have this opportunity again—an absolute buzz.

My '6-week' world tour started last Christmas, but somehow didn’t involve any singing until quite recently. Of late I have performed Brahms Requiem with the Surrey Choral Festival, rehearsed Spem in Alium with the Tallis Scholars (yes THE Tallis Scholars), and soon I have another Spem with the highly regarded Exmoor Singers of London in early November, followed by yet another Spem with the English Arts Chorale at Arundel Cathedral, along with the Faure and Brahms Requiems. But in this 500th anniversary of Tallis's birth, every Spem is sacred, every Spem is great!

Gaudi's Barcelona

In 1987 I bought the Alan Parsons Project CD Gaudi. Despite being from my favourite band of the time, the album was pretty awful, apart from one and a half tracks. But the subject matter, the life and works of the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi, had me hooked. At the time I promised myself that I would one day get myself to Barcelona to experience some of Gaudi's work first-hand, in particular the magnificent La Sagrada Familia.



Finally, after 18 years, that dream was realised last week, as Jonathan and I spent three whirlwind days in Barcelona. It's a marvellous place, full of wonderful high-class shopping, fascinating markets, and a Mecca for lovers of the Avant Garde and surrealism. And despite the prominent influence of artists such as Picasso, Dali and Miro on Barcelona, and it on them, one figure reigns supreme over the Barcelona skyline and, it seemed to me, the Catalonian mentality—Antonio Gaudi.



I'm not going to go into intimate details of Gaudi's biography (which you can read at Wikipedia here), or a deep meaningful analysis of his work. To me, his structures are more than architecture—they are a weird form of organic art into which you can immerse yourself and somehow feel connected with the transcendent, but your mileage may differ. Certainly, they are all more amazing in actuality than in photographs, but here are a few more anyway. I'll be adding more to this page over the next week or two:





(6 Megapixel images from my Nikon D70 are available on request. More images to come...)

McDonalds Spanglish

With the self-assurance that comes from having listened to Spanish lessons in mp3 files on my phone for 10 minutes a day last week, and having spent a whole day in Barcelona without being lost, pick-pocketed or kidnapped, I sauntered into El McDonaldos and confidently asked for "uno hamburguese ab fromatge por favor". The accent was impeccable, the prounciation perfect, even if I do say so myself—I sounded exactly like an Anglo-Australian tourist mumbling in broken Spanish. It was now that I remembered the problem with learning foreign languages, when the customer service officer replied in a barrage of rapid Spanish, none of which I recognised. Unperturbed and with great self-assurance, I replied, as one does, "Huh?".

I think it's back to those Spanish mp3s for me!

Reflections on Fleet Street and Aston Martin

The name Fleet Street is so evocative of the newspapers, good and bad, that many visitors to London are confused when they can find little or no journalism actually going on there. You might argue that in the corridors of The Sun or The Daily Mirror it was ever thus, but Fleet Street is now no more than a collection of journalism’s ghosts. Major papers have been moving away for three decades, and that exodus was just about completed this week when Reuters vacated the area after 66 years. That leaves only one newspaper publisher, D C Thomson, best known for those esteemed literary periodicals The Dandy and Beano, to which I owe much of my development.

If great names have been performing something of an ereptation from Fleet Street, one of motoring’s greatest names is making a return to hallowed ground this weekend. Aston Martin, eebahgum’s favourite carmaker, is returning to Le Mans, where it was last sighted in 1959. Aston Martin DBR1s came first and second on that day and Aston will be hoping history is repeated with the DBR9 to support its ambitious plan of more than doubling production this year to 5,000 vehicles. Not that demand has been much of an issue lately for Ford’s most prestigious marque. The current waiting list for a new Aston is more than 18 months. I guess that gives me some time to save.

In the streets of Chelsea, Premiership Champions

It was 50 years coming, but Chelsea finally won the Premiership title on Saturday night. And rather than complaining about how they had to buy an entirely new team to do it, or bemoaning their sometimes negative football, I wish them all the best. They were clearly the best team for the better part of the year. Their success was built, not merely on a bottomless wallet, but also on strong management from Mourinho; superb defence, most notably from John Terry and Petr Cech; a strong midfield who can track back but also generate drive and score goals; and a very creative attack. Joe Cole, for example, has blossomed into an inventive and exciting player for both Chelsea and England.

So my beloved Gunners have no doubt being beaten by the better team this year, and there’s no shame in that. And being such a good loser, I thought we’d head down to Fulham Road, Chelsea on Saturday night to absorb some of the premiership-winning atmosphere. I have to admit, when I went to Stamford Bridge to see Chelsea thump Pompey earlier this season, there was a distinct lack of atmosphere, as if Chelsea were already too used to winning. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case this time. Instead there was a great deal of singing and merriment, every second person advertising Fly Emirates or waving a blue and white flag. Every car horn blared and every glass and voice was raised, except those that had been thrown in the middle of the road to be crushed by cars. Glasses, I mean, not voices. The vocal throng didn’t seem to have a huge repertoire, but at least most of it was clean and good-spirited, which was lucky considering Jonathan and Joanna were with me, and I was resplendent in red and white!

I was amused when the crowd outside a pub started singing “Are you watching Arsenal?” There’s a certain comfort in the fact that even as the new champions, Chelsea fans still seem to measure their success by comparison with their illustrious North London neighbours.

Clive and Jonathan on Brighton pier

Dusk at the seaside resort of Brighton in Sussex, unretouched

Walking like an Englishman

Could someone please explain to me why the English, who drive on the left, prefer to walk on the right? When walking towards someone in Australia, most people instinctively move to the left and allow the other person to pass on their right, as they would drive. In England, expect the opposite. Go figure.

For that matter, where did driving on the left come from? I'm told it goes back to the Middle Ages, where armed men would pass each other on the 'non-sword' side so as to avoid attack. That seems sensible enough. Why then did Europeans and Americans choose the opposite way? Ah, the great questions of existence...

I'll be home a little late, Mum...

When I left Adelaide on Boxing Day I was fully expecting to back by early Feb, but with Joanna and Jonathan already in Poland, and no work in prospect the door was open for a grand adventure. And so it has proven to be.

After meeting J and J in Berlin and spending a few excellent days there, we took the train over to Poland, arriving in Miedzyrzecz where Joanna's mum works as a psychiatrist at the local hospital. A week and a half there and then on to Krakow for a few days—a marvelous city dripping with history and photo ops. A flying visit to the ski slopes of the Tatra mountains (there and back in a day), then I was off to England with Joanna and Jonathan set to join me a couple of weeks down the track.

On my arrival in England I received an email from a headhunter, and the next morning donned my only travelling suit and went off to an interview, and a few days later had a job offer for 6 months or so. With no job to return to, the opportunity to be closer to Joanna's family in Poland for a while and the chance to spend more time in the land of my Father, replete as it is with childhood memories, it was a no-brainer really. Why then did it consume so much brain for so long? Well, I had to worry about accommodation, schooling, transport, the exorbitant cost of living, commitments in Australia like home, mortgage, car lease, choirs, badminton club, not to mention friends, etc. I found myself changing my mind several times a day, swinging from one absolute certainty to the opposite one. But with no work in Adelaide the alternative was to work in Sydney or Melbourne and commute home to Adelaide on weekends. Ultimately, England seemed easier.

So here we are, living in Redhill, Surrey in a 2 bedroom exec apartment costing 3 times what it would in Adelaide. We are strolling distance to supermarkets, trains and buses, which you need to be when without a car and when petrol costs more than twice as much as you're used to. I am working for a firm in the financial sector in the adjoining town of Reigate, where Jonathan is also going to school. London is half an hour away by train, but trains are expensive, and the trip is tiring once you factor the underground connections and the amount of walking you typically have to do.

But this extended working holiday has already allowed me to fulfill a few dreams. I have been to see the Arsenal play at Highbury for the first time in 37 years as a supporter. I have been to Disneyland, Paris (purely for Jonathan's sake, of course). I have visited a few childhood haunts I have not seen for more than 30 years including the idyllic township of Wisborough Green in Sussex where I lived briefly as a child. I have been to Stonehenge, Brighton, Hastings, Salisbury Cathedral and just last week seen Les Arts Florissants doing Rameau at the Barbican Hall.

Detailed coverage to come. Meanwhile, the grand adventure continues...

Where's that wally Clive?

The observant among you may have noticed that there’s been not a whole lot of blogging going on at eebahgum! I had hoped that my trip to Europe would give me plenty of photos and material for blogging, and so it has been. On the other hand, it’s been so frantic, and internet access so intermittent and funds, at times, so short, and…well you get the idea.

The good news, depending on your perspective, is that eebahgum! is back on-line, albeit from a different part of the world. The bald bloke from Oz is, for the time being at least, the bald bloke from Surrey in the UK. But more on all of that soon!

Travelog: Spy games and a flasher (picture below) in Berlin

Everything I knew about Berlin I learnt from spy novels and reruns of Hogan’s Heroes. Len Deighton and John le Carré in particular served as my pre-visit guidebooks, and taught me that the simple act of calling a thoroughfare ‘strasse’ rather than street would transform it, at least in the mind’s eye, into a place of history and culture, with a delicious hint of intrigue.

As my flight arrived at 9 am, with my eventual destination being Poland, I thought of spending a day sightseeing. Then Joanna and Jonathan, who had preceded me to Poland, suggested they join me. So I set about finding a hotel using Google and the words ‘cheap’, ‘budget’ and the like. That’s how I happened upon the Hotel Crystal, on Kantstrasse, relatively low-cost and close to everything. Reviewers on the web seemed to think the place clean, but what really caught my attention were phrases such as “a piece of the old Germany” and “like something out of a Cold War novel”. I was in like a bullet from a Kaleshnikov.

The Hotel turned out to be everything I could have imagined. The small darkly wooded reception area with ancient Chesterfields led to a tiny archaic lift in which no self-respecting woman could have travelled mit baggage. Worn carpet led through a twist of gloomy corridor to the small dark brown door which was to be ours. The room itself had a very high dark brown ceiling, joined to the heavily worn carpet by fading 60s wallpaper. It was clean, had a large and respectable bathroom, and was charmingly daggy. I was not disappointed.

That was before I had sampled the beds, of course. The wretched things, composed of two single mattresses in a double frame, sagged like huge sagging things (the only decent simile I could think of was unpleasant) and started me on a procession of backaches I was to endure for some weeks. I found myself sleeping perched on the very edge because it was the only firm spot from which I would not roll into the bottomless abyss which lay in the middle.

What this bed needed, I opined on several occasions, was a ruddy great board under the mattresses. On our last day, as we were packing to leave, I searched under the beds for anything we may have dropped, and lo and behold, under each mattress was a cupboard door, matching the cupboard in our room. So much for my initial hypothesis. New working hypothesis (which I unfortunately did not have time to test): what this bed needed was to be thrown from an upper story window.

Of course, what ultimately makes a place is the people, and so it was with the Hotel Crystal. The owner was a small, angular and quite elderly woman with a huge, frizzy blonde wig, who insisted on wearing tight animal print leggings and alligator stilettos. It’s almost too obvious to say she looked like the Madam of Berlin brothel. Joanna was reminded of the Leonard Cohen song Closing Time:

My very sweet companion gets me full and gets me laughing
She’s a hundred but she’s wearing something tight.

But the character of the moment was the Day Manager, Vasco. From the outset he wore the drole smirk of an eccentric public school master, and amused himself by making obtuse comments about anything and everything. We were at a loss to decide whether he was rude, weird, very funny, or some combination of all three. What Vasco Said became a daily topic of conversation. As time passed we grew to like him increasingly, and actually found him helpful in an indirect way as he clearly started to warm to us as well.

Vasco was in our room one morning attempting unsuccessfully to fix our telephone which had lost the somewhat defining ability to make telephone calls. Somehow the conversation turned to names, and under some badgering from us he confessed that his surname was ‘Flasher’. Apparently telephone enquirers regularly hung up on hearing this, and when he sent out confirmation faxes there were an unusually high number of no-shows.



But it gets worse. His father’s name was Alfonse, which to an Englishman is smarmy enough, but in many parts of Europe actually means ‘pimp’. Alfonse Flasher. The mind boggles.

It's too hot in Europe in winter

I was born and lived my early life in the tropics (Ghana and Nigeria respectively) and have resided in Australia for the last three decades. With that backdrop, there’s no doubting that Europe feels cold in winter. Temperatures in Berlin during my stay ranged from 0°C to 4°C, and there was often mild drizzle. Of course, I had travelled with hat, scarf and gloves, but found myself buying new gloves because I couldn’t operate the camera in my existing ones (who’d have thought of checking that in Australia where it had been 36°C the day before I left?) and a new beanie.



Thus attired, I was able to cope pretty well with the cold. My nose ran regularly (but noses run in my family, har de har) and it’s rather amusing to go to a street food vendor asking for a cold drink and be given one of the counter, because the drinks outside are colder than the ones in the fridge.

The real problem I found with the cold was, in fact, the heat indoors. Every hotel room, house and shop I have seen in Germany or Poland is too damned hot. The locals may consider that snug, but it’s past that, with the effect that the air is often too dry and still. Sleeping with so little humidity left me dry, parched and itchy-eyed, and on our return to the hotel each evening we found ourselves turning off the central heating and opening up all the windows.

The other annoyance was having to dress and undress all the time. Every time I walked into a shop I was suddenly boiling and had to take of hat, scarf, gloves, coat, warm layer and sometimes mid layer. The sort of adventure shops at which I buy my warmwear encourage us to dress in layers, and that’s great advice for flexibility, light travel weight, etc. But it is, conspicuously, not what the locals tend to do. Many of them have huge, thick coats with fur-lined collars that seem precisely made for the temperature differential between indoors and out. That's not a real alternative for travellers simply becasue of the bulk, but perhaps when I acquire my chateau on the French Reviera I shall keep a collection of such coats there in readiness for my next visit.

Travelog: Frankfurt Airport

Frankfurt Airport is apparently the second largest in Europe but is ancient, dated and grubby for the most part. By some cruel accident of fate I was stuck with a little over two hours in transit. Not long enough to sleep nor leave, so I set about exploring. Alluring signs promised the hope of endless high class shopping, but it was 6 in the morning and they seemed only to lead, via long stationary travelators, to austere polished granite corridors with a few closed and barred shops. The slightest hint of stale cigarette odour hung delicately in the empty corridors, something I was to encounter regularly in Germany.



As a child I remember being completely overwhelmed with excitement at the solitary bleakness of such airports. But that was the late 1960s in Calcutta, Bahrain, Damascus. In 2004 Germany it was less impressive.

So I set about finding departure lounge A18 for my flight to Berlin. Being an EU passport holder, I lined up in the ‘express lane’ with a slight buzz of excitement—this was the first time I was, as it were, using my EU passport in anger. The only problem was, everyone else there was an EU passport holder as well, so the express lane moved like a drunken bratwurst, while the non-express lane was empty.

Finally I was waved through with the reluctant instruction to “go to left, one hundred meters, red door”. If I had hoped this would take me to my destination I was sadly mistaken. It took me instead to a 500 m corridor with static travelators, which took me to another, then another, before I finally arrived at a small lift well. This took me up two floors to a (you guessed it) 500 m corridor with static travelators, then another, before another lift took me back down two floors to another corridor and series of gates which led me to a (yawn) corridor with…

You may be forgiven for thinking I am exaggerating the extent of my tour of the Frankfurt sites, but I assure you, it’s not far off the mark. This sojourn finally took me to a far more modern corridor with actual people and a coffee shop and stuff, and lo and behold, my departure lounge! This was clearly a much newer section of the airport and was actually quite modern and attractive in a slightly austere way.

I alighted atop a stool with a good cup of German English Breakfast, and watched an interesting transaction between the waitress and a whining young American tourist. He was already the third I had seen who seemed to think Germany backward because he was having difficulty understanding the money, menus and language. Whining Americans are a site familiar to most travellers, I imagine. It seems there is a conscious attempt on the part of some of them to give the US a bad name, as if US foreign policy were not enough. They should be given a crash course in Cultural Respect 101 before allowing them to leave the country.

My Lufthansa flight was much in keeping with Frankfurt airport—rather old and jaded, inferior even to a cheap Australian domestic flight, though the service was fine, and the plane had Recarro leather seats, stylish in a car, not much good for mass transit, especially for those of us with no hair! Never a fan of the touch of cold, clammy leather on the back of my head, I had to lean slightly forward for the entire flight, so was thankful to finally alight in Berlin just before 9 am.

Travelog: Bottomless Singapore

It was one of the first things that struck me—unlike their fat-arsed Australian counterparts, most Singaporeans have no bums. They are a slim, small-hipped people with very petite behinds. Sounds like the start of a bad joke. “So what do they sit on?” “Chairs!” Boom, boom!

Acknowledging the different local build, Marks & Spencers, that bastion of ordinary Englishness, have racks full of bras made specially for Asian women, though I’m sure they’d be happy to sell them to men or women of any ethnicity.



With only five hours between flights most sensible people would enjoy the air-conditioned sumptuousness of Changi airport, surely the world’s finest, with its magnificent shops, excellent eateries, free movie lounge. fitness centre, pool and tropical gardens.

But not I. I decided to make a dash through customs and jump on the SMRT (Singapore Mass Rail Transit system). With enthusiastic but unintelligible instructions from one of the station staff who seemed to think me his mission in life, I finally managed to work out where I was going and purchase a ticket. “Where to now?” I asked, because I couldn’t actually see the train station. “Now you just take the train,” he said, and pointed vaguely towards a huge atrium behind glass doors. So there I went, but where was the station? Where was the platform? Then I realised that this huge, spotless, shiny hall was the station and the platform, separated from the actual track by extensive sliding doors which only open when there’s a train on the other side of them. Neat, tidy, sensible and safe, words easily associated with many aspects of Singapore.



The train is smooth and quiet and became very full as we headed for the city. A fascinating ethnic mix of Malays, Indians, Chinese ignored me on mass, with odd sideways comments to a friend. I was conspicuously touristy, with functional lightweight travel gear, juggling a large map and with the Nikon D70 as a necklace. And I was conspicuously the only such person on the train.

In fact, for a city which hosted in excess of 8 million tourists in the last year alone, there were precious few of us about, even on Orchard Road, the heart of Singapore’s shopping precinct. The amazing range of shopping may appeal to tourists, but it exists primarily for locals. My theory is that Singapore shopping has evolved as a means to escape the oppressive humidity. Each time you cross the threshold into a shopping centre a cool wave of air-conditioning washes blissfully over your face. It’s an amazing relief, rather like the first 3 seconds at the urinal. On the other hand, walking back out into the humidity is the opposite experience. I cope with these conditions so badly now that I find it hard to believe I was born and brought up in the tropics.

Singapore at Christmas is a dazzling spectacle. Every shop, building and lamppost is awash with lights and colour, and even at 10 pm on a Sunday night on Boxing Day, there are people everywhere as most of the shops are still open. There’s a buzz in the air, though, which is much more than just petty consumerism at its most vigorous. There’s actually a genuine feeling of enjoyment, energy, and socialness as well. The air is rich with enthusiastic conversation and laughter, and the bright lights of the shopping centres are constantly punctuated by the flash of digital cameras. Suddenly I felt less like a tourist.



Outside one shopping centre was this lavish Christmas tree, and every passing group seemed to want to be photographed with it. But since everyone had a camera, everyone started photographing every group. This young couple with their chihuahuas must have had dozens of photos taken of them by complete strangers, and became amusingly embarrassed.



And if there is one memory I will take out of Singapore today, it’s that people were universally happy, enthusiastic and helpful. When I was last in Singers about 10 years ago, I only seemed to sense that in Little India. This time it was everywhere, from the airport staff to shopkeepers to taxi drivers. On the way back to the airport my driver actually asked me to add my email address to the several others in the back of his notebook. He’s passing them on to his wife and daughter so they can practice their English and learn about different parts of the world, and he insists I am to visit his family next time I am in town.

Frankly, that won’t be soon enough. Singapore really is a great place to visit, but I always seem to be here for only a few hours at a time, and therefore only do the touristy things. Next time round I am determined to take a few days and get out of the city and experience more of the place. It charms really do seem bottomless.