Postman Prat

My regular readers will be aware that the lovely Chris and I have decamped to France for the summer.  I'm happy to report that Lola is still enjoying the freedom of the garden and we're starting to get worried about how she will re-adapt to life in a Singapore apartment.  Normal Notes from Singapore service will be resumed on our return, but in the meantime, I hope to entertain you with tales of life in the French countryside.


The first of these concerns French letters (I know, it's cheap and obvious, but I couldn't help myself), or more accurately, French letter boxes.  If you've spent time in France you may well have noticed that houses do not have letter boxes in the front door, the way they do in the U.K.  Apparently this is because of the rural nature of France, whereby the French postie would be spending half of his or her life walking to houses hundreds of yards away from the road which would mean that the French Post Office would ned twice the number of posties to do the job and stamps would be twice as expensive.  The law requires that French residents have a postbox which easily enables the rural postperson to deliver the mail, preferably without getting out of his or her van.  As we have never had a postbox worthy of the name, we have, in the past, had any mail sent to us in France re-directed to Singapore.  That doesn't work so well when we are in France for a few months at a time, so I invested in a postbox last week.  It is a fetching shade of beige and has the regulation lock that enables the postie to unlock the box and place parcels from Amazon inside - more of which in a later post.


Post box in hand, I departed down the path towards the road to look for a suitable place to position it.  Easier said than done.  Where we are is pretty rural, so there is no convenient wall to attach the box to, and I wasn't sure that attaching it to the nearest tree would be acceptable, or even noticeable.  So I set off up the path again for a pow wow with TLC.  We finally decided that positioning the box on top of the cement frame that contains the various meters for the house would be the smart thing to do, so it was off to the local DIY store to purchase some of that fixative that sticks one thing to something else without the use of nails.  Fixative and postbox in hand, I set off down the path once more, reading the label on the sticky stuff as I went (it's quite a long way).  As I got to the bottom of the hill I realised that, while said sticky stuff would stick anything to anything else inside a house, it was not meant for external use.  Back to the local DIY shop where I purchased the sort of glue that would enable a climber to adhere themselves to the sheer side of Mont Blanc for the duration of the fiercest winter in the history of mankind without losing any grip whatsoever and set off down the path again.


All seemed to go well.  The sticky stuff worked like a dream and I glued the postbox to the cement structure very neatly, with the little door facing the road.  24 hours later, I trotted down the path to check that the box was still stuck fast and indeed it was.  Very.  Unfortunately, I had managed to glue the door shut as well,  and to glue it shut with the sort of stuff that would enable a climber to adhere themselves to the sheer side of Mont Blanc etc. etc. By now you will have worked that the title of this post is not in any way a slur on the French postal service, but a reference to my good self.  


What do do?  Well, I got a thin sharp knife and spent the next half hour worrying away at the quarter inch at the bottom of the box that needed to be freed until the door was well and truly liberated, then trotted back up the path for a celebratory glass of wine.  

Parisian pleasures

It's been a few years since I last spent any time in Paris (apart from in  a car, on the ring road - see last post) - and I had promised myself  a few days there on our next trip to France, so I took a few days of girl time in the middle of August and hopped on a train, heading for the City of Light.  I'd taken the train from Carcassonne to Paris once before - a very civilised experience - but the SNCF were not on top of their game this time round.  First off, they had changed the train from a single storey to a double decker, so none of the seat reservations made any sense.  You would think they would announce the problem and just tell passengers to sit where they wanted, but the train staff decided to let chaos reign instead.  No fisticuffs though; perhaps the French are comfortable with anarchy in the train service.  Surprised as I was at the reaction to the seating debacle, I was amazed that people did not storm the train manager's office when he announced that, due to an absence of personnel, there would be no restaurant service for the entire journey.  He graciously conceded that water would be provided in the restaurant car - free of charge!  

And so, to the city itself.  I was staying in the Odeon district, a first for me, and a real joy.  My hotel was in a street that specialised in Japanese restaurants and book stores.  A bizarre combination, but it worked for me.  I spent my first day exploring La Defense and the area round the Bois de Boulogne -  fabulous modern architecture followed by rural bliss in the middle of a busy city, then treated myself to a yummy seafood lunch at the Brasserie Dab.  Had there not been so many other tempting places to eat within 500 yards of my hotel, the Dab would have received a return visit.  If you visit Paris sometime soon, I thoroughly recommend both the Dab and Le Comptoir, in the Carrefour de L'Odeon.  
Fitting in a movie was on my list for the visit and I managed to see Lars von Trier's Melancholia.  A bizarre film, par for the course for Mr von Trier, and one I would like to see again in order to re-interpret the beginning now that I know the end.  If I were to haiku review it, I would say:


Kirsten is depressed
The world is about to end
She's probably right!


A more uplifting experience by far was my visit to the Musee Rodin, a lovely building in its own right as well as hosting some of the most breathtakingly beautiful sculpture in the world.  I took lots of photos but thought I would leave you with just one - Le Baiser, or The Kiss.  Rodin infuses such feeling into this, that I just lose myself in the moment.

Rodin's Le Baiser.
Who would not want to be kissed like that?

Pickled

Fig and plum world cup chutney

I'm taking advantage of the fact that we are currently in France and that the lovely Chris is engrossed in the rugby World Cup to spend some quality time in the kitchen.  In my dream life, I am some combination of Martha Stewart (without the criminal record), Nigella Lawson (without the hips, although I'd be very happy with her tiny waist and her somewhat larger bank balance), Jamie Oliver (without the front bottom bits, obviously) and Catherine Deneuve as she was in Belle de Jour.  I've no idea whether the lovely Catherine can cook, but I'm sure she appreciates good food, and may well spend her "resting" days cooking up a batch of fig jam with the fruits of her country house garden.


As my garden has produced barely enough to generate a tablespoon of jam, rather than the shelves heaving with bottles and jars of my imagination, I had no choice but to revert to buying the raw materials, and returned to the house a couple of weekends ago with 16 kilos of tomatoes and a great deal of enthusiasm.  My friend Kerry was staying with us for a few days and she is a committed pickler, so the two of us rolled up our sleeves and got to it.  I had previously found a fantastic sounding recipe for a hot and spicy tomato based chutney on the net (see below) and this was the first one that we tried.  Great success, although we cooked it for considerably longer than the recipe suggests to achieve the right consistency.  
http://www.drmcdougall.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11855
Emboldened by our first attempt, we continued to experiment with the tomatoes over the weekend and produced several jars of aubergine, red pepper and tomato with a hint of smoked paprika (this one was Chris's recipe - great with cheese and cold meats), tomato and onion with pink peppercorns, tomato and apple and several more jars of the hot and spicy one -  the unanimous favourite.  We didn't bother with a lot of Kilner jar malarkey, we just filled up  some pretty (clean, obviously) jam jars and popped them in the freezer once the contents had cooled.  The defrosted chutney will last at least a week in the fridge, although it's so delicious that we haven't managed to make a jar last more than three days .  We had some French friends for dinner the following week and "les chutneys" were a great success.


I've just finished my latest attempt, a fig and plum, without any added sugar.  If you are keen to take care of yourself but don't wish to sacrifice tastiness, don't follow the traditional chutney recipes which call for large amounts of both vinegar and sugar.  Use a bit of balsamic instead, and a drop of red wine if you fancy.  The sweetness of the fruit is enough of its own, or you can add a bit of stevia based sweetener if you like.  This will not produce the sort of traditional chutney that will keep for a long period in a store cupboard; you will need to  freeze it if you plan to keep it for any length of time, but the end result is a joy, and a healthy joy to boot.   Bon appetit!

French leave

Bonjour!  Greetings from the sunshine of Southern France.  No sooner had we decanted ourselves from Ardmore Park into our new place in Singapore than we hopped on a plane (well two different planes, actually, but that's another story) to head off for an extended stay in France.  I'd like to say we were tempted to stay and clear up everything from the move before we left - but that would be a lie; it was wonderful to leave it behind, even though it will still be there to come back to. But hey, we'll probably have forgotten that we ever had half the stuff in the first place and feel able to give it all away.


We took Lola with us - her first time ever in a plane and I'm happy to say she is now a fully fledged intercontinental dog.  In fact, she did much better on the flight than we did, as both Chris and I touched down with horrible colds, which seems to happen every time we fly.  It's got so bad that we actually explored the option of returning to Singapore by boat, which is doable, but it would take a month and I'm afraid we'd both be stir crazy by then.


The journey from Paris was quite an adventure, starting with finding each other at Charles de Gaulle airport.  Chris and Lola got in first, so I had to find them when my plane landed an hour or so later.  No problem in principle - I knew where they were and it would all have been pretty straightforward apart from the fact that I had four pieces of luggage, plus a handbag.  No issue while I was able to manhandle the cases (Samsonite Cosmolite in red, in case you're interested)  on to a trolley and wheel them around, but a teensy bit more difficult (given that I'm  not an octopus) when I reached the point beyond which trolleys were not permitted and had to hand wheel all four of them onto and off the escalator and into the airport shuttle train and off again.  Ah well, it all supports my emerging philosophy of a simpler life.......

So we found each other, I gave the lovely Chris and the equally lovely Lola a big kiss (no tongues for Lola, though) and we set off to pick up the car.  All was going really well until we discovered that the car they gave us was a different model than the one we had ordered and had a smaller boot (remember what I said about my four cases?), but we managed to pack it all in, including Lola's air transport crate, with barely a centimetre to spare and were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves until we discovered that the satnav spoke Portuguese.  Now, I have no problem with Portugal - lovely country and Lisbon is one of my favourite cities - and had the satnav been fluent in other languages as well, I'd have been delighted about the Portuguese thing.  However, this satnav was no polyglot and insisted on speaking to us in Portuguese and Portuguese only until we had the lassie from the car hire desk give it a stiff talking to and sort it out.  


One of the reasons for getting a car with satnav was to enable us to drive to Limoux without having to go though Paris.  Alas, we did not get our wish.  Perhaps the system was a bit miffed with us and decided to get its own back by abusing our trust in its abilities, but in any case, we ended up on the inner ring road, driving through roadworks for the new tram system and generally getting quite grumpy.  As soon as we were on the way south though, things improved and we made trip in really good time and, amazingly, on one tank of petrol!  We were home in time for dinner - a gorgeous Cavaillon melon with Serrano ham, prawns with remoulade sauce and a spot of salad and cheese.  Yum.


Lola took to her new surroundings like a duck to water and just loves the freedom of being off the leash and able to rove around the garden and the olive grove.  She has a new bed, red with white polkadots - very chic - and seems to love going up and down the stairs, two at a time.  She did give us a real fright on our second day though.  We were sitting at lunch; Lola was beside us, an then she wasn't.  No answer when we called her name.  Panic ensued.  I ran off to explore the garden and down the drive while Chris sped off in the car to look further afield.  I caught sight of her just as I reached the bottom of the drive, trotting up the road towards  me, perfectly happy.  Big sighs of relief all round. 


A bientot.

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.

Here comes summer

Yesterday was the longest day in the UK, a day I  used to look forward to with great excitement when I lived there.  When I lived in Aberdeen, in northern Scotland, the summer solstice was particularly special.  Aberdeen is further north than Moscow so the summer days are long (if not always warm!) and the favourite way to celebrate was to climb a local mountain, Bennachie, in time for sunset (some time after 10 pm) and party till sunrise, at about 4 am.  Why is it that staying up all night is the thing to do when you are young?  It was fun though, and much easier than staying up all night would be in Singapore, at any time of year, since we have 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness throughout the year.  That said, I will be up jolly early tomorrow, as I am taking the train to Malaysia at 4.30 am. 


Now the 4.30 train was not my first choice, but these next few days are the last opportunity to take the train from the wonderful art deco railway station at Tanjong Pagar. Although the station is situated in Singapore, the land on which is sits is owned by the Malaysian railway operator and it was agreed last year that the station will cease to operate from the end of this month and train services will be transferred to the north of Singapore, near the checkpoint for the crossing into Malaysia.  Despite never having taken the train before (the journey to Kuala Lumpur takes about 6 hours, compared to one hour by air), I wanted to make sure I made a journey from the station before the close.  Alas, the whole of Singapore seems to be thinking the same thing, so I had to queue for a ticket and the only service not sold out for tomorrow was the 4.30 am.   


The station building will be preserved, and is in desperate need of some care and attention, but it is a real shame to see it go.  I'll add some pictures to the next post, if my iPhone delivers the goods.

Woo hoo!

The title of this post indicates a special double bill - the Wailers' gig last week and Lola's and my attendance at doggy training classes.  Woo hoo, or a rough approximation of same, is the noise Lola makes when she is excited about something, which happens a lot and it's pretty much the cry I found myself emitting last Saturday night to express my appreciation of the Wailers.  I was particularly appreciative of one of the two lead singers - the one in the picture on the left, who looks like a Jamaican Javier Bardem.  Yum! 


The venue was the Hard Rock Hotel on Sentosa, part of the  integrated resort/casino complex that opened there last year.  My regular readers may remember the description of our first trip there, in the post contributed by the lovely Chris entitled "Casino banal".   Suffice to say we were mightily disappointed.  However, this time was quite different, partly because I was above ground, but also because the place is really quite amazing.   I started the evening at the Palio restaurant which is part of the hotel Michael, one of six hotels in the complex. Each of the hotels has a different feel; the Michael is very much the hotel for art lovers.  Its name is a  tribute to Michael Graves, the American architect who designed Resorts World, and the Michael is probably the hotel I would choose to stay in if I went on a mini-break a la Bridget Jones.

Boy with dreadlocks on his hat

The Palio is an Italian restaurant - one of its many plus points.  In fact the only downside as far as I was concerned was that it was rather full, especially of noisy children, but then again, I'm all for introducing kids to the delights of Italian cuisine at an early age, so what can you do?  What I did was to sample their wonderful wood fired pizza, which came close to a 10 on the Doverty register of deliciousness and was the perfect pre-cursor to a night of leaping up and down in front of the Wailers.  And when I say in front, I mean it, as I managed to get a place in the second row from the stage.  This was a standing event and it's been a while since I did one of those, but it couldn't have been any other way.  The crowd was really into it, although one or two of the older members of the audience (not me obviously - I'm still 33 in my mind and can woo hoo with the best of them) looked a little uncomfortable, as if they didn't quite know how to get with the vibe.  The guy next to me was really into the whole Jamaican thing; he had on a red gold and green hat with little dreadlocks attached, which you can just see in the photo on the right. 

I could have done with that hat a couple of Sundays ago, which was Lola's first doggy obedience class.  It was also the day that the rain came down so hard that it flooded the Tanglin Mall (that's rain in the photo, not an indoor waterfall!).  The class itself was under cover, but it was almost impossible to get a taxi home, as TLC was in France and I did not want to drive there myself.  I'm a bit funny about driving in Singapore, but that's probably the subject of a whole post on its own, so I'm not going to go there.  The first class was theory, which Lola didn't really take to as her reading skills are not up to much, but last Sunday was the first practical class.  I would love to say that she excelled, but it would be a lie.  Frankly, the two words "Lola" and "obedience" do not often occur in the same sentence, as those of you who have met her can confirm, but I live in hope, inspired by one of the demonstration dogs - a beautiful Siberian husky.  He was a rescue dog who had suffered abuse for several years, but is now both incredibly obedient and affectionate.  TLC is worried that Lola will lose her joie de vivre if she becomes obedient to our commands, but she has so much of the stuff she could probably share hers with all the dogs in Singapore and still have plenty left over.  I'll keep you posted on progress (hopefully there will be some to report!).  

Chinatown

Having just published my Laos post a couple of days ago, I thought I would wait a little before offering up this next one.  My mind was changed for me by a mosquito that decided to dive-bomb me in bed at 6 am on Saturday and the alternative to hunkering down under the sheet and toughing it out was to get up and do something.  It's a funny thing about mosquitoes.  I've been bitten many times and it's itchy and annoying, but no more than that really, so why is it that the high pitched-drone of a mosquito intent on its next meal at my expense should engender such horror?  I'd be happy to come to an arrangement whereby I stick out an arm, have it snack on that, rub on some anti-histamine ointment and get back to sleep, but oh no, that's not how Ms Mosquito works.  Small digression here: did you know that it's the females (bitches!) who do the bloodsucking?  Apparently the male mosquito typically feeds on nectar and plant juices, but the wifie mosquito needs a blood meal in order to produce eggs.  Perhaps the answer is to keep a stash of black pudding by the bed? 


Moving on to the original subject of this post, the lovely AnnMarie (my fish spa partner) and I hadn't seen each other for a while so we decided to meet up for lunch and fit in a walk beforehand.  Singapore is full of jungle walks, but we agreed on an urban adventure this time and headed for Chinatown.  The Chinatown of today has evolved from the area that was set up as part of Sir Stamford Raffles' master plan in the early 19th century and, although it is bounded on one side by the skyscrapers of the CBD, its character and appeal remain, as do the wonderful street names like Sago street, Pagoda street and Nankin street.  Chinatown is crazy busy and wonderfully decorated in the run-up to Lunar New Year as  Singaporeans  shop till they drop for all the New Year goodies, and strangely dead at the weekend.  Our outing was on a Friday, so it was quiet when we started out but busied up for the lunchtime rush.

Dried goji berries

We had no real master plan in mind, apart from looking up a couple of things in our guidebook, so it was a very pleasant wander that brought us first of all to a traditional Chinese medicine shop.  AnnMarie was in the market for some Goji berries, aka wolfberries, which are supposed to do wonders for - among other things - the liver and the eyes.  I'm always up for trying new alternative therapies in the quest for physical perfection (no giggling please), so I bought some too and off we trotted.  Our next stopping off point was the Yixing Xuan Teahouse, the first visit to a teahouse for both of us.  Of course I couldn't wait to sample the goji berries and thought they would go nicely with my lovely cup of white tea.  I sampled one, liked the initial sweet taste and offered one to my trusting companion.   Unfortunately, as she popped hers into her mouth, I got the aftertaste - not sweet at all, in fact very bitter.   It reminded me of the time I bit into an unripe persimmon, without peeling it (the first time I'd ever tried said fruit, so how was I to know?) To be fair, the persimmon incident was much worse - it dried up all my saliva and felt like I had eaten a mouthful of bitter-tasting, heavy duty underarm deodorant which stayed in my mouth and wouldn't go away.  Yukky.  So AnnMarie and I are sitting there, wondering how we are ever going to be able to eat these blessed things.  We're both Scottish, so perhaps the answer is to coat them in a nice sweet batter and deep fry them?  Maybe not.  All alternative ideas welcome.


Continuing with the food theme, our next stop was The Screening Room - "where food meets film".  Despite having lived in Singapore for almost 4 years, I have not visited here for either food or film, never mind the two in combination, but that's about to change.  The Screening Room is a great concept.  There are 5 separate floors, with a bistro on the bottom and a rooftop bar on the top and a malt vault, studio and film theatre in between.  Heaven!  

I tasted a bit of heaven earlier this week in The French Kitchen  restaurant.  If you live in Singapore, or come for a visit, this place is most definitely worth a try.  The set lunch is a steal, in my view - one of the best to be had in Singapore.  The room itself is beautiful and there is proper linen on the table and beautiful glassware.  The chef, the lovely Jean-Charles, came out to welcome me and we had a wee chat in French before my dining companion arrived.  We were served with home-made bread and salmon rillettes, then an amuse-bouche before the first course arrived.  We had both chosen the same dishes - fromage de chèvre chaud with spinach salad and walnut bread, confit de canard with truffled mash and marinated cherries and dark chocolate crème brûlée.     It was all delicious, although if I was being picky I would have liked the duck to be more willing to fall off the bone, rather than having to be persuaded to leave it behind.  

And finally, a movie review of London Boulevard, which  I saw at the weekend.  This is not a film that the lovely Chris would have wanted to see, so I took advantage of his temporary absence to go on my own.  The film stars Keira Knightley as a reclusive film star and Colin Farrell as a recently released  criminal.  Colin plays a blinder, and David Thewlis is fantastic as Keira's manager.  It's not for the squeamish, especially in the final scenes, and I did have to put my fingers in my ears a couple of times, so be warned.  Here the haiku:


London gangsters tale
No good deed goes unpunished
Colin Farrell rocks