The last supper



Supper by candlelight

 We have been amongst the most fortunate of expats in our 4 years in Singapore, having had the privilege of staying in one of the island's loveliest and most sought after apartment blocks, Ardmore Park.  If you have visited us here, you will be aware of how lovely it is, but sadly, today marks the end of our stay.  I say sadly, because, alas, we do not have the £5 million or so needed to buy a place here.  If you think that's expensive for a flat, then ponder this:  We recently received a flyer from a real estate firm about a "VVIP preview" of a new development which consists of 43 apartments, each priced at 16.8 million Singapore dollars - apart from the penthouse, that is, which comes in at 60 million!!!!!!!  Needless to say, we won't be calling for an appointment.

We are moving to a new apartment, in a block called the Arte, which we pronounce "ART" but which our interior designer pronounces "ARTAY".  I've no idea which of us is right, and who cares anyway.  The funniest thing about the move (and let's be honest, there is very little that is funny about moving house) is that I discovered recently that our new address - Jalan Raja Udang (it's Malay) means King Prawn Street.  Really.  Not a word of a lie.  Honestly.  Those of you who know me will think this is incredibly apt, as I am a fiend for the king prawn and its many relatives.  I must find out how it came to have this name, as I seriously doubt that it's in honour of me.

Anyway, back to the last supper of the title.  We figured, with bits of furniture disappearing around us, that we should celebrate the life that was Ardmore, in an appropriate way.  This took two forms.  The first was a dinner last Saturday for 10 of our good friends, a sort of full monty event with fine wine, pretty decent food and great conversation.  There were fancy little canapes on Chinese porcelain spoons, slow cooked lamb (a big hit this one), rare roast beef and summer berries three different ways.  To be fair to my guests, I think two of the three ways worked pretty well, but the third was no more than so-so.  We live and learn.

This was the end to formal  entertaining at Ardmore, which has seen formal dinners for up to 24, catered by my lovely sister and myself and we gave the place a pretty good send off, I think.  Last night was quite different.  We had spent the day with the movers taking our stuff to France, of which we thought there was very little but it turned out to be 69 boxes.  Weird, n'est-ce pas?  France and 69?  If you don't get it, I can't help you, I'm afraid.  Don't call, just ask your friends.......



This was so good!



Suffice to say, we were jolly tired at the end of the day and did not feel like cooking, so we ordered in from our favourite local Indian, the Song of India http://www.thesongofindia.com/, for our last supper.  Chris is a frequent flyer there, so he knows the menu pretty well, which is handy, as they don't actually publish it anywhere, even though they have a website. Go figure.

We were in the mood for a spot of pampering, so we ordered the lobster moiley (lobster in a lovely creamy, mildly spicy sauce) and some potato with cauliflower (aloo gobi) as an accompaniment.  Both were delicious, although the aloo gobi was a tad hot, so much so that I had to issue a formal apology to my bottom this morning.  Still not sure if it's been accepted......

I'm never gonna move again

To paraphrase George Michael: 

I'm never gonna move again

Guilty hoarding comes to haunt me

I want to throw it all away

The way I did before

"The way I did before" refers to moving out of our London house just over a year ago, at which time I swore faithfully - only to myself of course, so it probably doesn't count - that I would de-hoard in Singapore right away, I would file and shred like a demon, de-paper by transferring as as much as possible to my ludicrously large external hard drive (one terabyte, for those of you in the know).  If you don't know how big that is, a TB, is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. That is 1,024 times a gigabyte (GB) or 1,048,576 times a megabyte (MB), which is a million million bytes.  To put it another way, it's very, very big.  To put it yet another way, it's over 2 million pages of text, or about 730,000 pf those old floppy disks that we used to use, which weren't actually floppy, but I digress.  It's as big as a very big thing, and I have taken up barely any space on it.  Must try harder.

If I ever recover from the near hysteria induced by the sounds of packing tape being deployed onto cardboard cartons, I will blog my Perth story.  In the meantime, think positive thoughts.  I need every one that I can get!

The end of the line



Inside the art deco station building

Yesterday the last train left the Tanjong Pagar railway station in downtown Singapore.  From today, all trains will run from the Woodlands checkpoint, in the north of the island, the crossing point into Malaysia.  It was a seminal moment in the history of Singapore and a huge crowd came to mark the occasion.

I didn't go yesterday, not being a big fan of crowds, but I was there last week, buying a ticket on Wednesday for the 4.30 am train on Thursday, the only train I could get without having to queue for ages.  I'd never taken the train  to Malaysia before, as for some inexplicable reason the journey to Kuala Lumpur takes 6 hours, and no-one I know had spoken kindly of either the journey or the trains themselves.  Well, they were not wrong.  The station itself must have been a beautiful building in its youth, but it has become very tired and dilapidated and the train was just horrible.  I was glad that I was just taking a short ride over the causeway and into Malaysia, then turning round and coming back again.  Living in Singapore, you become used to clean, efficient public transport, so the condition of the rolling stock was a bit of a shock to the system.  The land on which the station sits, as well as the railway track, belonged to Malaysia until midnight last night, and I believe that the trains did too, which probably explains their condition.  If you've visited Singapore and used the MRT (underground railway system) you will know that it is kept in a pristine state, quite different from the overground trains.    


 I didn't know quite what to expect when I got to the station at Johor Bahru (locally known as "JB"), but it was a temple of modernity, more like an airport terminal building than what I was expecting, and a complete contrast to its mate at the Singapore end.  I just had time to buy a return ticket and a curry puff for breakfast, have a bit of a wander round, and then it was time to board the train for the return journey. 

You may be asking yourselves two things at this point.  1) Why on earth did I not buy a return ticket at the Singapore end? and 2) Are curry puffs really a breakfast food?  The answer to the second is a resounding "yes", of course.  As for the first, read on.......

I did try to buy a return ticket, but you can only buy a ticket from Singapore at the Singapore end; you have to buy the other half at the Malaysia end.  No problem, I thought.  I have plenty of ringgit among my foreign currency stash, I'll just take some of those.  Except I forgot.  In my defence, I got up at the unholy hour of 3.30 am that morning, and I did remember my name and passport, so two out of three isn't bad.  Since Singapore and Malaysia are so closely linked, I thought I would be able to pay for the return ticket in Sing dollars, but not so.  When I offered to pay with a credit card the ticket lady gawped at me in amazement.  Only then did I realise that, while I had paid the Singapore dollar equivalent of £6.50 for the outbound ticket, a respectable amount to put on a credit card, the return ticket cost 3 ringgit - about 70 pence.  Some cost of living difference!

The return journey was in daylight, which was a lovely bonus, and the departure from Malaysia was trouble free.  I had been a been a bit concerned following recent headlines about two Singaporean women who had not had their passports stamped on the way into Malaysia for dinner at JB and who were detained and required to strip and perform squats (see link for the full story) http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_679677.html. but I was wearing my lucky knickers and all went well.  I say all went well, but there was a bit of a delay when we got to the Singapore checkpoint just over the border.  Normally, you are able to re-board the train after a few minutes, but we had to wait for almost an hour.  I was a bit concerned when I saw the sniffer dogs come through, but there was no announcement and we boarded shortly afterwards.  As it transpired, my train trip coincided with a foiled attempt to smuggle a quantity of drugs from Malaysia into Singapore, concealed in the spare wheel of a car.  Singapore has a very tough approach to drug smuggling, so heaven knows what they were thinking.

The station facade

I'm conscious that movies have not featured recently in this blog, so let me make amends right away.  The film in question, The Wind Blows Round,  was part of the recent Italian festival in Singapore and it made me realise how very little I know about Italian films in general and their more recent cinema in particular.  This was a movie that moved. The plot is, in many ways, slight, and not a lot happens during the course of the film.  Philippe Heraud, a teacher turned goatherd from southern France, moves into a small northern Italian village with his family because a nuclear plant is being built near their home in the Pyrenees.  Initially they are welcomed by the villagers for breathing new life into the village, since this is a place where no young families live any more, except in the houses which are occupied during the summer months by people from Turin who keep them as holiday homes.  Things happen, some good, many not so good, and they move out.

The elderly inhabitants of the village speak Occitan, an almost extinct language and are steeped in the traditions of mountain village life.  Philippe is a free spirit, who does not choose to have his house blessed by the priest or show the "appropriate" respect for tradition.  He and his wife are very different from the villagers and it is soon clear that conflict is inevitable.  The film feels incredibly real, partly because none of the actors are professionals and much of the action centres on people's daily lives.  There were elements in the film that reminded me of Jean de Florette, but the characters in this film are more nuanced, less black and white. Only one character, the mayor, stands out as being a really noble individual; the others are a mixture of kindness and cruelty - just like people are.

If you have a fondness for cinema that makes you think and makes you feel, look out for this film.  If ever a movie deserved a haiku, this one does.  My thanks to Chris for composing it.

Pride and prejudice

defeat the idyllic life

in the Occitan.