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Leeds Castle

2012-02-01T02:40:00.000+08:00

Today we got up early - or rather, early for me, which means extracting myself from bed before 9:30 in the a.m. and then getting in the car and hurtling down to Junction 7 of the M20.

Then realising that Leeds Castle is near Junction 8 of the M20, and having to go round the roundabout again, get back on the motorway and hurtle a bit more.

It was snowing today, a desultory sprinkling of little white flecks that didn't settle, but that left us chilled to the bone as we walked from the entrance to the castle. It felt like a very long way, past all sorts of swans, past coots and geese and ducks, but eventually we arrived at the gatehouse of the castle.

Then we had to walk round the castle to get in, because the entrance to the castle isn't at the entrance, it's through the cellars. It began to feel as though my entire day was going in the wrong directions.
Inside, the castle was warm, which helped to restore some joy to me. It's strange; Leeds Castle has been open to the public for years, and many of the rooms have been decorated to show how they would have looked in the period when they were used, and yet it feels somehow sterile, as though it was never lived in and this was an artificial construct.

Which, I suppose, it always was. Lady Baille had parts of the castle reconstructed or redecorated in the 1920s to look like they had in medieval times, so there's always been some sort of artifice to it. But perhaps because we didn't have a guide to take us around and fill us in on the scandals, it didn't feel as alive as other places have. (I'm comparing it with Blenheim Palace, which at one point displayed the schoolboy letters of Winston Churchill, which didn't always show him in the very best light possible.) There have been scandals at Leeds Castle - Queen Isabelle turns up, is told to shove off, and in retaliation the guy who was in residence got hung and beheaded - but it would be nice to have a few more salacious details.

Or perhaps I should read more gossip magazines.

After lunch, we avoided the maze - why get lost among hedges in freezing temperatures if you don't have to? Instead, we went to the aviary, which is well stocked with rare birds, including Balinese starlings (now extinct in the wild) and a parrot that yelled out increasingly creepy things.

Sometimes it would say 'hello', sometimes it would identify itself by shouting 'parrot!' and sometimes we seemed to hear it calling our names in the wind. I'm fine with a parrot that asks me who's a pretty boy then, or tells me that Polly wants a cracker, but a bird that seems to be trying to engage in active conversation, that's a whole different kettle of fish.

Kettle of birds.

Kettle of bird.

Whatever. We weren't hanging around to mix metaphors - we hurtled back to the car as fast as we could, and took off, fleeing from the wilds of Kent back to civilisation.

Well, Beckenham, at least. Which is still in Kent, but doesn't have any haunted parrots, as far as I know.

Deleted!

2012-02-01T02:33:00.001+08:00

Things were going swimmingly; I'd hammered out twenty reviews of things last night, I'd been to Leeds Castle and been freaked out by a parrot that kept shouting "parrot!" as we walked past its cage, and I'd come home to find my review count for the year was up to 200. A milestone of meaninglessness, but a milestone nonetheless.

Then I got cocky. I pointed out the problem with a review of Starbucks. I have a deep revulsion for anyone who tries to pad out their review count by reviewing Starbucks willy-nilly. Since the coffee is exactly the same in every one you ever go to, you're hardly adding to the corpus of useful advice for travellers if you tell people for the nth time that Starbucks serve coffee in 4 different sizes and that you can get a blueberry muffin with your latte.

I didn't complain about that. I just added feedback to show that somebody had reviewed the Starbucks in Sai Kung, on the page for the Starbucks in the New World Tower in Hong Kong. As these are thirty miles apart, I figured it might add clarity to the world to distinguish the two of them. After all, a traveller might go to the Starbucks in the New World Tower and expect to get a latte and a blueberry muffin, and - oh, hang on, that's what they'd get.

But if you're going to be pedantic, you need to be pedantic, so I added my feedback that one of the reviews was for the wrong restaurant.

And shortly, my published review count went from 200 to 199. Was this karmic retribution? A malfunction? Enemy action? The trouble with writing about 160 reviews in less than a month is you begin to lose track of what you've reviewed, so I can't tell which review has vanished. And since I haven't been told there's a problem with any of my reviews, I don't know if it's because I've said something wrong, or if there's been some sort of subterfuge. I suppose I'll have to go back to keeping my separate log of everything I've spouted off about, to see if I can tell what's vanished... Which becomes something of a drudge, when you're looking at hundreds of things every month and writing about them.

Struggling under a great weight

2012-01-31T17:29:00.001+08:00

While we were in Oxford, we bought more books. That was probably a bad idea, as we haven't finished the books we started 2012 with, and we were given books as wedding presents, and we now have a knee-high pile of weight-limit defying paper to transport back to Hong Kong.

Oops.

To cheer myself up I decided to check how many reviews I'd written on Tripadvisor, and to my consternation I was still 28 behind my ever-prolific bete noire. He or she has stooped to the undignified low of reviewing branches of McDonald's, and I'm not so desperate. Yet. Still, I hammered out 20 more while my wife slumbered beside me, as I came up with the perverse desire that the M25 could be classified as a tourist attraction so I could review it.

Does that make me a bad person? Probably. Still, one of the many fine things about reading the biography of Willie Donaldson, You Cannot Live As I Have And Not End Up Like This is that it reassures you that you could still be a worse person if you tried.

And so to Leeds Castle...

Oxford

2012-01-30T04:58:00.000+08:00

Last night we drove to Oxford, and stayed in a strange hotel down towards Henley. It was odd in many ways; the photos on the website suggested it was a small building, when it turned out to be a maze of converted barns, joined together by a multiplicity of corridors. The exterior and the entrance way were incredibly grand, but the room (when we reached it, after trudging through an eternity of fire doors) was somehow basic and utilitarian. Yes, it had a bed, and a carpet, and a lovely view of the river, but it felt most suitable for a conference or a joyless affair conducted after work. Odd, that.

Lastly, there was something strange about our receptionist. Neither of us could say what it was, exactly, but she seemed devoid of affect, somehow sinister, like an alien doing a slightly unconvincing impression of a human. Or perhaps it was just her blue eyeshadow.

Still, we got to sleep and weren't replaced by pod people in the night, and in the morning we went for a wander around the grounds, which were full of birds. Although we both agreed about the Canada geese, we argued back and forth about whether one large grey bird was a pigeon or not. My wife has spent too long in Hong Kong, where the only birds are chickens, in cages, so her ornithological identifications are clearly suspect, whereas I, a country boy born and bred, know all about birds. Oh yes, the things I could tell you about birds.

They have wings, you know. And feathers. And stuff.

We took a taxi into town because I'm scared of one-way systems, and of grinding up the potential future Prime Minister of England and her bicycle under my car wheels, then walked around. I showed my wife such delights as the Radcliffe Camera, perhaps one tenth of the bookshops of Oxford, one sandwich shop, and then as soon as we'd both purchased some footwear, we headed back to London. A good day - relaxing. Or at least until we encounter traffic...

Cheers

2012-01-29T22:27:00.001+08:00

Last night we had the third and final round of our wedding celebrations, in the Punch Tavern on Fleet Street. When we arrived at 4:30 I was a bit worried as there seemed to be lots of people I didn't know, but they all cleared off around 5 as the first of my friends began to stream in.

As with our wedding in Halifax, we'd erred on the side of caution too much, with the result that at the end of the night we still had vast vats of hot food waiting to be eaten, and two halves of wedding cake. My rugby playing workmate arrived in the nick of time and made a valiant, Stakhanovite effort to polish off as much as he could, which made up for our miscalculation.

We had seven hours of drinking and eating and talking to people, some of whom I hadn't seen at all in the last decade. I began to wish that I'd printed up some laminated cards that would explain the passage of my life over the last 10 years, so we could get past explaining what I'd been up to and talk about other things. Or concentrate on putting more Guinness into my face.

But it was a joy to see everyone after so long, whether it was university stalwarts, fellow survivors of the south London comprehensive school system, or some of the many and varied boozehounds that I've been mountainbiking with. Or, indeed, anyone who's had to accomodate my neuroses in the workplace or in a family environment.

I drank and jabbered and held my wife up in the air for the benefit of the photographers, and wished the night could have been twice as long so I could have spent more time with everyone. And maybe drunk slightly less beer and slightly more water.

We're now richer to the tune of one CNCed breadboard, six dessert forks, a copious supply of books, plus all the other presents that I was too inebriated to focus on by the end of the night, and also reminded how rich we are in friends.

And hence to bed, in what appears to have been the hottest room in a hotel with the world's thinnest walls. Sauna-like conditions helped me sweat out my hangover, and thin walls meant our next door neighbour's alarm clock helpfully woke us up today. At five thirty this morning.

Somerset House

2012-01-28T23:42:00.001+08:00

Today we had a few hours to kill before getting ready for our party, so we walked down from Fleet Street to the Strand, and visited Somerset House.

There's a couple of very interesting exhibitions there right now. First we went to the black-bin-bag-clad Forgotten Spaces, which displays various ideas for regenerating spaces around London, turning unused or unlovely areas into things that would be good for the people around them again. There's a plan to build a microbrewery on the corner of Loughborough Junction, a cafe under Hungerford Bridge, and over a hundred other ideas to reuse spaces that have fallen into disuse, or were never anything more than dumping grounds at the edge of industrial expansion.

It's really uplifting to see the amount of creativity there. Rather than thinking we can solve our woes by constructing enormous phallic symbols like the Gherkin or the Shard, these projects all concentrate on creating small, achievable things that would make life more pleasant. Clapham High Street is a minor hell of fried chicken outlets and traffic; wouldn't it be improved by a subterreanean climbing wall?

At the same time, when I saw a project for Hackney Marshes to ameliorate the impact of the Olympics on community facilities, I was annoyed. When the Olympic project began, they demolished various communal facilities in order to build places for high-end sport, unlikely to be used much by locals. The promise was that afterwards, these white elephants would be accompanied by things usable by normal people as well as world class athletes, but with the economic crunch from 2008 and onward, that goal has apparently fallen by the wayside.

The legacy of 2012 will be that we demolished people's heritage to construct a velodrome that few residents of London will ever use, on top of the Eastway cycle circuit that was something for everyone. I suppose the Eastway track wasn't something that could display big corporate logos in the way that a shiny new building could. I still think that if you'd realised part way through that there wasn't enough money for everything, you'd concentrate on things that were useful for Londoners, not part of some dick-swinging exercise for a few politicians to show off about. But I suppose the IOC would have built some watertight contracts so the UK couldn't stop building white elephants just because it didn't make sense.

Perhaps we really do want some nice, Stalinist architecture, on a scale with the "Hello, we have no personality but we do have a really big open concrete space" Olympic stadium in Beijing. A shame we don't think of more things like Forgotten Spaces, and less of ways to shove concrete up in the sky.

After working myself up about that, we went to Frontline: A Year of Journalism and Conflict.

Sponsored by Sky News, it gave the impression that Sky was the only news organisation to cover the London riots or the Arab Spring. I suppose News International has to do something to improve its image after last year. Well, something apart from Rupert Murdoch's wife punching a pie-flinging bloke in the face.

It's still impressive to see a journalist brave or daft enough to film a gang of youths wrecking the shops around Clapham Junction. I was away getting married during the Great Riot of London so I'd never appreciated the scale of violence and idiocy that went on. Some things I found a bit off. I don't think it illustrates much to ask some teenagers why they're riotting and have them say because they wanted to; teenagers aren't paragons of morality or intelligent thought more than anyone else, so we shouldn't act shocked when they nick a widescreen TV "because they can".

Between that and the man using 'riot' in an innovative new way ("we're going to riot you back!"), and some coppers rather ineptly beating a youth with a truncheon (it takes five men in body armour to subdue one teenager in a tracksuit, which suggests that a productivity gap in policing is going to be a key problem in the UK's future) I felt a bit embarrassed for the country I came from. I wonder if all those Forgotten Spaces projects would reduce the feelings of rage across London to prevent future riots.

Or perhaps they were trying to commemorate my wedding, and misunderstood me saying it was going to be a riot and we'd all get on like a house on fire.

What, me, egocentric? I'm just in tune with the mood of the nation...

The Office

2012-01-28T04:21:00.001+08:00

Today I had to go into the office to get some work done; I didn't really feel like breaking my holiday up, but with some urgent deadlines at the start of next month I needed to do something, rather than risk the chance of standing next to a smoking crater with a guilty look on my face in two weeks' time.

Every two years I've returned to London, and every two years my company moves offices in London. I'm sure it would be cheaper and less disruptive of business for them to just tell me I shouldn't come round any more, but they persist in this. The previous move was from the very convenient, but horrendously cramped confines of Soho Square, to what appeared to be an enormous, spacious office in Covent Garden. In less than two years they outgrew that space, and decamped to Islington, to an amazing building near Angel tube.

From the outside it was a large cube of glass; the insdie was really wonderful - every meeting room is decorated differently, the walls are large blocks of white or exciting colours, and everywhere you look there's pleasant sights, whether it's the cheery slogans on the walls or the not-too-bright colours of the desks, or the coffee machines that don't spew caffeinated bacterial broth when you ask for an espresso.

I'm not sure if the forces of entropy and age will bring it down to some fetid level in a few years time, but right now it's a very pleasant place to work.

As long as you remember to bring a laptop that you can actually dock into the workstations, and not like me be stuck craned over your keyboard all day long, getting home at 8 with a neck that's bent three times over and thus incapable of much except for lying on your back and staring up at the ceiling. I may not be in the gutter, but I'm seeing stars.

I worked flat out all day, wrestling recalcitrant spreadsheets into some semblence of order, which probably means I have nothing of any great note to relate that wouldn't transgress some non-disclosure agreement or otherwise contravene the terms of my continuing employment, and I do rather like having money every month to feed my landlord and my credit card, so I will cease at this point. I'll just point out that the Misery Line up to Euston was not as horrible as I remembered, and that although the underground train carriages are bigger in Hong Kong than London, fewer people were trying to stuff themselves into my personal space this morning, so perhaps it wasn't as bad as I made out yesterday after all.

Slight return

2012-01-27T07:00:00.000+08:00

They say you can never go back. You can, but it can get confusing...

Take the London Underground, for example. For years I knew it was an unpleasant, but fairly efficient way of transporting vast numbers of people around London. You might have your face crammed into the armpit of your fellow commuter for half an hour, but you got to where you were going, and that was something to be proud of, dammit.

And then I return to London after a two-year absence, and all of a sudden I notice how Victoria is a confused mess of corridors, milling people, metal barriers and staircases that just doesn't make sense, and how the underground trains are laughably small, and as well as their tiny circumference, have implausibly impractically small doors to make it as hard as possible for people to get on and off. Mind The Gap indeed, there's a yawning chasm between the efficiency of the Hong Kong MTR and what Londoners endure. OK, we had a hundred year head start in London, but couldn't we have used some of that time to do things right, not just have a grindingly painful antique infrastructure?

More pleasantly, I took the Tube to South Kensington, and went back to the Victoria and Albert. It's been well over two years since last I visited - probably only when I was living full time in London, back in 2008, and each time I go, I'm flabberghasted by how big it is, and by how many things I see that I've never seen before.

I jabbered on about it a bit on my travel review blog so I don't want to repeat myself much here, but wow. Despite half the Cast Hall being closed while they renovate statues, and inconveniently visiting at a point just after an exhibition had finished but before a new one had opened, there was just so much to see. After five hours or so we'd both got museum fatigue and had to clear off, but before then we'd seen so much wonderful stuff. I think my favourite things were the modern sculptures in the ceramic rooms up on the 6th floor (something I'd never even known about before, which is rather worrying), and the large statues down on the ground floor. All the netsuke and other Japanese art is very nice, but I suppose having come all the way from Asia, you feel more like seeing some European things rather than what we took from the Orient. I have a few hundred photos to go through now and upload to flickr, once I've filleted out all the unfocussed, poorly exposed or just plain rubbish ones. So I'll have a few photos to upload to flickr, anyway...

Yesterday was also somewhat retrospective, as we returned to the National Portrait Gallery, but again, that was salted with strangeness. According to my wife we'd been upstairs two years ago, but I could conjure up no memory of this: as far as I was concerned, we'd been to the shop in the basement and that was that. Odd. There was the annual photographic portrait competition being exhibited, with some lovely images. I'm not sure if I liked the badtempered model, dressed as a nun, standing next to a llama, most, or the redheaded Welsh girl with the enormous guinea pig. There's something for everyone there.

Lastly, we went to the Crown and Sceptre for a pint tonight. This was yet another case of this weird London voodoo, where the old and familiar became strange and confusing. In this particular case, I followed a spiral, only reaching the pub after several decreasing concentric circles around it, like a dog padding down the ground before going to sleep. Thankfully, the pub was reliable as ever: there was still the same strange picture of two women with shotguns and raw meat above the bar, there was still strawberry beer, and there was still a capacity crowd of businesspeople drinking. On a Thursday night. Good grief. I thought January was when everyone stayed in because they were skint after Christmas.

Half cut on just a pint of Guinness (how shameful) I feel I haven't done the V&A justice - I'll have to try again tomorrow to summarise the joy I felt at seeing all this beautiful stuff in one place. But now I should really be getting to bed, recharging my batteries, and hoping not to wake up at 6 am, wondering where and who and why I am...

Sleepwalking to Nando's

2012-01-26T23:13:00.001+08:00

My internal clock is still off: today I woke at six a.m., stumbled around in the dark for an hour or two, and by nine I'd had breakfast and wanted to go back to bed to sleep for the rest of the day.

However, since I had exactly the same experience every day in Seattle and in Hong Kong, I don't think this is jet lag. It's just inconvenient.

The sky over London is bright and blue today; there's the promise of it being warm - warm! - in January. It's a few degrees cooler than Hong Kong, the unlikely result of it being stupidly cold in the fragrant harbour and unseasonably warm in England.

Yesterday it was a bit chillier, and we'd gone to Nando's, the chicken chain that now has a claw in Beckenham high street. Everything at Nando's comes with peri peri sauce: the chicken, the chips, the houmous. (They don't have hummus at Nando's, but perhaps I should have asked.) You can probably get a milkshake with peri peri stirred into it, if you're very good, and then finish things off with a hot sauce sundae.

Not wanting to boast, but I requested hot, while my wife would only go for medium. This was odd for two reasons: firstly, my wife can eat hot food while if I have anything with even a hint of spice, I lose the power of speech, my face turns purple and I begin to sweat like a madman.

Secondly, I've been hurt before. I went to the Nando's in Islington a few years ago, and ordered something that was hot. Hot? It was thermonuclear. Halfway into it I had to get up, go outside, buy some milk and come back in, weeping, to find that the woman I was with at the time had not only told everyone else in the restaurant that I couldn't handle the heat, but had also eaten all my chips.

Bitter? No, just milk.

However, the spice thermostat must be calibrated differently in Beckenham; apart from a few hiccups and a slight flicker of tingling pain on my lips, nothing. Or I've become an insensate beast, dead to feeling and emotion, capable only of shuddering and roaring as I crash and bang through my existence.

And on that cheery note, we went off to the V&A today.

Toilets

2012-01-25T22:40:00.001+08:00

Apparently Cathay Pacific are still having toilet trouble: by the time we were approaching Heathrow, at least two of the toilets were out of order. Were they blocked by foreign objects? Isn't every object foreign when you're in international airspace?

The toilets in Heathrow airport were fully operational, but that was their only resemblance to the Death Star. Not as though you want Imperial stormtroopers or some loon with a lightsabre while you're micturating, of course.

I'm not going to spend all my time talking about toilets' there is so much else that London has to offer, apart from lavatories.

However, when at lunch I desended to the toilets in the pub, I was presented by a strange point of etiquette. As I entered, I was whistling. There was a man at one of the urinals, and I went into the stall. As I closed the door, he began to whistle a cheery tune. I recognised this, and wondered whether I should join in or not. Would that be considered impolite? A come-on? What if I'd started accompanying him, then accidentally veered off into Sergio Morricone's Once Upon A Time In The West?

Is this something they should have taught us about in schools?

2012 progress report

2012-01-24T14:15:00.001+08:00

Sat in the lounge at Hong Kong airport, waiting for a plane to take me away to London, it's time to reflect on the month so far. I'm only 24 days into the year so it feels a little premature to think about resolutions, but it's good to take the opportunity when it's available.

Measure and modify: writing this now is part of this goal. I'll identify here some concrete goals for the next month.

Comedy: definitely slacked off here. I haven't performed since the 16th of December; my travel schedule has kept me far from anything funny so far this year, but I haven't been writing a new set for when I'm in Singapore. On the one hand, it's going to be easier to work up material for Singapore when I'm in Singapore, but that's no excuse for not practicing. For the next month, I should try to write or rehearse a bit every day.

Keep writing. Here's something I can feel proud of: in the first 24 days of January, I've written and had published 111 reviews on Tripadvisor. (There are a few extra in the 'pending' list but I work off the total published, as that's the easiest to verify and compare against others.) I'm not sure if I can maintain this pace for the rest of the year (that would imply around 1,600 reviews for the year) but to put that in some sort of perspective, in the previous four years I'd written about 56 reviews. It's shocking how productive I can be if I want to.

However, all those reviews aren't contributing to me redrafting my novel; I need to spend some more time on that. I wonder whether it's time to recruit a reader to get some constructive feedback yet.

Finish things. Diet Croydon is now available for sale on Amazon's Kindle store, and I'm happy with that, even though it felt like something I should have done some time ago. I feel a logical consequence is that I should write another book, on publishing books on the Kindle platform, and price that cheaply. Then perhaps people will buy that, and then buy Diet Croydon too, although it will be a bit of a strange cross-fertilisation. I haven't done anything on the rabbit film, except to discover that I don't have the right software to edit it, which is a bit of an obstacle. Next goal there, then, is to get some video editting software, learn to use it, and stick things together in a satisfactory manner.

I haven't read quite as many of the books as I set out to - I hit a block with the Great Irish Kitten Killing Novel whilst in Seattle, but it shouldn't be too hard to catch up on these once we're back from London. (We made a conscious decision not to travel back to London loaded down with too many books, so this pause is acceptable.)

Keep fit. Oh dear. Again, I can blame travel for this, but I've run for maybe 45 minutes so far this year, and my slowly increasing weight is testament to this. Something to fix in London and beyond.

Keep in contact. Well, throwing a big party in London for all my friends and family should count for something, although it has already illustrated to me that Facebook is an unreliable conduit for inviting people to events. I suppose since most people's feeds are so clogged with ephemera, it's hard to stand out and get attention sometimes.

Learn to dance, learn a foreign language, count my blessings. Er... Failing on all three of these. It's my hope that with my wife in the same country as me for the next month that we can work together on the first. For the second, I'm concerned about finding the time; for the third, I need to get up a bit earlier, pause, look around, and then get going again. What could be easier, right?

Happy New Year

2012-01-23T22:25:00.001+08:00

Today is the start of the year of the Dragon. I commemorated this by skulking in my cave, guarding my mounds of gold. Well, hanging onto the duvet, which is close enough, if you value continental quilts.

Last night it seemed that all of Hong Kong was staying up late to see the New Year in. We avoided most of the festivities by being up in Fanling, deep in the New Territories, and then being so exhausted from playing on a Kinect with a seven year old child that even if we'd wanted to get up and do something today, our bodies would have rebelled.

Thus I wish I'd done something better with my life today than write a review of a restaurant on Tripadvisor and pilot an imaginary car around a computerised racetrack, but 'twas not to be. Ah well.
I did think about spending years and millions of dollars redesigning Siri, the voice recognition system on Apple's iPhone, to give it a bad attitude.

"I feel like sushi."
"I feel like not dealing with your inane statements. How about you get a proper job, you clown?"

Not sure that it will catch on, but I can always try, right?

As it's the start of the year, I should be reviewing my new year's resolutions, but I think I have plenty of time to do that on the plane tomorrow. I'm just hoping that we don't spend 12 hours without electricity or power again - fun though it was once, I don't want to repeat the experience...

Snot all it's cracked up to be

2012-01-22T22:24:00.000+08:00

Having been away from Hong Kong for ten days, I'd missed out on its many beautiful sights, not least a man picking his nose on the platform of the MTR.

Today we saw a particularly fine specimen. I'm not sure if it was his bright red blazer, or his oily combover, or the way he could fit his left index finger into his nose, right up to the second joint.
I was entranced by this. I sometimes wonder if a generation of Chinese men enjoyed Total Recall so much that they are continually reenacting the scene where Arnie pulls a bug out of his brain through his nostril. What better homage to the Austrian powerhouse could there be than that?

Still, trying to fit your arm into your face, right up to the elbow, can't be that healthy. What was odder was the expression of surprise on his face when he retracted his hand. He peered in shock and awe at it, as though he'd been fumbling in the front of his face for something and couldn't understand why he hadn't found it?

What was he looking for? A lottery ticket? A pair of socks? His car keys? A ham sandwich? A roll of hundred dollar bills? A map of the final location of the Sierra Madre?

He was disappointed though, because none of those things was attached to his finger when he withdrew it. With a look of gloom and despair, he'd wipe his finger on his white t-shirt, and then resume the hunt. Over time, the fossilised record of his explorations of his nasal cavities would form some obscure message across his shirt. Perhaps he was preserving wisdom for future generations. A few words might be missing, because from time to time he'd run his fingers through his hair instead of across his clothes.
Clearly this was a man without respect for preserving the history of nasal mucus. I really needed to have a word with him.

However, I don't have very good Chinese. Actually, I have very little Chinese beyond "faster!" and "stop the taxi now!", which would both be of limited use in this situation. This isn't such a bad thing; if I could say things like "That's a disgusting thing to do in public, you should find a tissue" then I'd probably get a slap, and it's embarassing to get a beatdown in Admiralty station from a man dressed like an attendant from a slightly dodgy golf club.

Though perhaps there's a gap in the market for combined Chinese language, deportment and self-defence classes. I'll be cleaning up.

Cleaning up snot on the Hong Kong MTR, that is.

Pleasantly surprised

2012-01-21T16:17:00.001+08:00

When I checked in for my flight to Tokyo, I saw that there was a seat free in row 28. This was a few rows ahead of where I'd been assigned, and also the row in front of the exit row, so I figured I'd be able to recline my seat fully without feeling any guilt about the knees of the person behind me.

What I hadn't realised was that between row 28 and the exit row there wasn't just a bit of extra legroom. Instead, I'd chosen the row right next to the toilets. I braced myself for eight hours of smelling other people's farts and not being able to put my chair back at all, while the person in front of me battered my patellas.

Things turned out better than expected: despite having a partition wall behind me, my seat would still recline. Most people on the flight had strong bladders and/or sphincters, because there were no ominous smells or noises through the flight.

Best of all, nobody had picked 28B. I had that rising feeling of hope and worry as the plane began to fill up, but nobody ever came to sit beside me, and after an hour of reading reviews of Zone One and then rereading Zone One, I pushed the armrest up and bent myself into a Z shape across the seats, and was out like a light.

I woke up occasionally, once long enough to watch a Japanese thriller called Unfair, which veered between serial killer horror and police action, and felt as if a quarter of the script had been skipped over. Probably while the director was watching the latest Sherlock Holmes and being impressed by all the flashbacks and flashforwards. Then again, it had a man with a nailgun, which was ruddy terrifying. There's often something more visceral about a maniac with a quotidien weapon in a film. Just like the kitchen knife section in City Of Violence is far more gruesome than if it were just men with swords chopping at one another, so the contents of the woodwork cabinet can feel more painful - it feels more real than some ersatz villain with a claw.

It was very cold on the plane, so I was glad for my lack of companion - I got to shelter beneath two blankets. The cabin crew were remarkably friendly and cheerful, which is in marked contrast to any other flight on an American airline that I've had across an ocean. They even got my meal right, which is a wonderful surprise, even when it shouldn't be.

And thus I'm feeling a bit groggy as I sit in Narita, but not deathly. We'll have to see tonight whether sleeping on the plane has banjaxed my diurnal rhythms, but since we've only got 3 more days before we fly to London, it's not going to make much difference. Ah, sweet, sweet dislocation...

Leaving Bellevue

2012-01-21T00:30:00.001+08:00

Exhausted, I went to sleep at 10:30 last night, which of course meant I woke up at 4:30 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. I've given myself jet lag.

I spent a couple of hours fumbling in my room, packing my suitcase and enraging myself at the futility of flying all my running gear across the Pacific Ocean, when the most exercise I had this week was a ten minute run on a treadmill. I just hope my diet of fried food, cheese, and fried cheese hasn't led to my blood turning into clarified butter by the time I get back to Hong Kong.

There had been promises that the snow would dissipate today, but I looked out the window to see things still clear and crisp and even. At least I've slept well enough that I can view this with equanimity, rather than utter rage. You can't get mad at meterological conditions.

I did mean to get mad at my neighbours. The suite that adjoins my room has a connecting door, and every half hour the occupant of that suite would rattle the handle of the door, as if they were hunting for extra wardrobe space and couldn't figure out why that door didn't open for them. This carried on all yesterday afternoon, and I suppose the logical thing would have been to retaliate. I should have banged on the door and demanded they open up, claiming to be the hotel police and needing to make an urgent inspection.

It would, of course, be embarassing to then discover there was a small child, or a dog, on the other side of the door. There are a lot of dogs in the hotel today, which strikes me as wasteful. They're covered in fur and should be well suited for gambolling in the snow. Keeping them indoors is like keeping huskies in subtropical environments, and it's not like anyone does that.

Except for Hong Kong and Singapore, of course. Again, maybe it's time to retaliate: I should have brought a komodo dragon to Seattle as a pet.

Enough of this: I have a plane to catch. And a taxi to take me to the plane, or at least the promise that a vehicle might materialise this morning to take me away from all this.

Wintermission

2012-01-20T13:47:00.001+08:00

The snow continued to fall today - we were promised nothing but warm(er) rain, but instead there was pretty snow bedecking all the buildings. Cajoled by a colleague, I went to the office, to find a ghost town of abandoned cubicles. Every meeting was cancelled, something that provoked me to paroxysms of rage. It was as if nobody else had ever thought of using the telephone to communicate: like emus, if they can't see you, some people in the office think they can't hear you either.

What rages I could fly to today. Sleep deprivation is fun, at least in retrospect, because you get these massive mood swings from being fairly chipper to spitting bloody feathers and back again. It's hardly the whole gamut of emotion, but I suppose it's some sort of variety.

Anyway, I'm low on battery and I may have a delayed flight tomorrow, but at least I'm not being woken up by the police. One of my Kentish chums was awoken by the local constabulary visiting his next door neighbour. At 1:30 am. And using their shoes to open the door. Heaven knows why.

Well, I'm not being woken up by the police yet. Give it another day, and as starvation and madness set in at the hotel, the looters/zombie hordes/Occupy Bellevue will all be at the gates, and the militia will have to round up every able-bodied man (and me) to help defend things. Which will be exciting, especially as I have a plane to catch.

I had to say something about having a lot of big boned skeletons in my closet, but it will be better on a good night's sleep.

Lastly, it feels like an eternity but it can only have been last week that I was leaning out of my apartment window on the 12th floor, dangling my laptop out above the street to let a friend see Hong Kong via my webcam. Today, I did the same in order to provide a tour of my hotel room. When I got as far as opening the windows to show off the snow, the wifi connection died instantly, suggesting network bandwidth is a bit like steam, vanishing instantly when cold air rushes in. I'll never be a network engineer.

Snow again

2012-01-19T14:46:00.000+08:00

After yesterday's frankly lacklustre effort, the Northwest made up for things with a big dump of the white stuff all over Seattle. I looked out the window and it was like Christmas morning all over again.
What am I saying? Christmas morning had no snow, I was in Indonesia on a (possibly) mosquito laden beach. Or being driven at breakneck speed down narrow roads in a Toyota minivan.

Thus today, driving very slowly through snowfilled streets, then sitting in a temperature-controlled office fifteen stories above the ground was hardly like Christmas at all. I had some meetings, used Google Hangouts for the first time (and found it useful, wonder of wonders), drank too much coffee, held a drywipe marker next to my face and developed a mindbending headache. So all in all, very productive.

The day went on too long though; having got out of bed for a 6am call at 5.30, and having stayed up late last night on a similar call (supporting multiple time zones is a horror, especially when you got up the previous day at 5.30 as well when you couldn't remember which day was which) by about 4pm I was really struggling to cope with the world, and the meetings never ended. Having got rid of all my North American appointments, at 6pm the Asian ones started up - three hour-long meetings, with an hour's interval between each one. This is ok if you start at nine in the morning and trundle on until 2pm and then stop for lunch; less good if you're trying to go foraging for food in the snowy tracts of Bellevue, and really, really need some sleep.

I less-than-gracefully bowed out of a couple of meetings - the fact that I could neither talk nor think meant I wasn't going to contribute to anything - had a little bit of food, and then came back to the computer to catch up on the emails that have multiplied in my absence. Now, only one more meeting stands between me and sweet, sweet oblivion for the night. I suppose at least when I fly home and have massive jet lag, it won't feel much different to how I am right now.

The wrong kind of snow

2012-01-18T14:17:00.000+08:00

Another day passes, and Seattle inches closer to Snowmageddon, or Snowpocalypse, or Holofrost, or some other world-ending event with a chilly theme.

I looked out of my hotel window this morning, and the snow had cleared from the road. There was still a little sitting on the roofs, but nothing else. Even so, as we drove in to the office today, some cars passed completely coated in snow. It felt a bit like the early stages of a zombie film; occasionally the Infected would show up, but only as a hint of the terrifying hordes that would roll in later.

Just like the middle section of a generic zombie film, the offices were mostly deserted again today. There were perhaps a few more people than yesterday, but when the snow began to fall at midday, everyone scarpered, fleeing like a tide of lemmings away from Bellevue.

We remained. We were made of stronger stuff, or perhaps it was because we had visitors who had flown in and therefore we couldn't show weakness in front of them.

It wasn't really snow to begin with. When I first looked out the window, it looked more like hail, large hailstones, like polystyrene beads from the packaging of a 1990s electronic device. Yes, and just as joyful as that suggests. Within ten minutes, the roof outside the meeting room was white, and then the precipitation intensified. It snowed harder. Whatever.

It wasn't very nice snow. It's not been nice snow all week. I don't know if that is because it's too dry, or too wet, or too cold, but we haven't got soft, fluffy snow, the kind you're meant to make into snowballs and fling at people. No, we've got nasty hard, icy snow, the kind that people make into snowballs and fling at people when they're intent on hurting them. So in good conscience I couldn't enlist the others in a snowball fight, not unless I wanted to hang around with concussed, bruised colleagues as somebody from HR took me through disciplinary procedures.

With no way to go out in the snow, I had to stay indoors.

This was not without its amusements. One of the visitors had a malfunctioning laptop, which required him to enter his password but decided that only a quarter of the keys on the keyboard would work. Maybe it was too cold, poor thing. After turning it off and on half a dozen times, he resorted to stripping the battery out of the back and squeezing the case of the machine. It behaved itself when it was put back together again after that. I think that wasn't because of the battery, but because the computer heard me recommending we douse it in Dr Pepper and roll a chair over it.

Ah yes, they have Dr Pepper here. So everything starts to remind me of the year 2000, in that I was in a country that didn't seem to be able to cope with snow, and I was drinking Dr Pepper, and I had a laptop that wasn't very good.

These are poetic parallels, the kind that will bring tears to the eyes of anyone who reads them in a century's time. It's hard that I had to fly all the way to Seattle to expose my heart to such beauty, but that is the nature of things. Earlier, I pointed out a Wittgensteinian point about language that a barista made this morning while producing lattes.

That, or the anti-malarial hallucinations are kicking in at last.

Snowing, working and sleeping

2012-01-17T14:16:00.001+08:00

Today I looked out the window, to see snow, glittering on the trees outside the hotel. I had my breakfast and then got driven up to the hotel, with the dread warning that there would be no car to ferry me home in the evening, because of the snow.

When I got to the office, there was nobody else there. I assumed it was because I'd got in so early (jet lag and a Mercedes Benz had propelled me to my desk before 8am) but as the hours ticked by and most of the office didn't appear, I realised that snow business meant no business.

Or rather, most everyone was working from home, because slogging through icy roads and enduring skidding, screeching buses and kamikaze drivers wasn't top on their priorities. Although if they were working from home today, I wondered why they couldn't work from home every day. After all, a lot of unsociable people sit in their offices all day and never talk to anyone. Why pay for heating and lighting those offices when they could sit at home, never talking to anyone?

My team are quite gregarious, and they had all come in, but some other areas of the building were quite desolate. I wondered if we could shrink a few floors by outsourcing them to their homes, and then worried that without physical proximity, concepts like teamwork and helpfulness might fizzle out and fade away to nothing.
Then I stopped ruminating on matters philosophical, and ate a croissant.

We all react differently to stress. I eat baked goods, which is sometimes good and sometimes leaves me ten pounds heavier, with Danish pastry crumbs all round my mouth, and that's not a pretty sight.

Today was fairly calm though, or at least subdued. That may have been something to do with waking up at midnight, and 3am, and 5am, and then at 6am giving up and getting up. I'd hope that tomorrow I'd have a decent sleep, but as I have to be up at 6 to give a training session to people in Europe, I guess not.

Damn you, responsibilities, you're getting in the way of slumber!

Like driving on ice

2012-01-16T11:54:00.001+08:00

They don't salt the roads in Seattle, because the run-off would pollute the water and harm the fishing industries. Which is good for the environment and the salmon, but it means that with a little bit of snow like today, the roads get rather slippery.

Jet lag was catching up with me, as I I sat in the back of the taxi I was on the nod. That strange point where you're tired enough that you keep having micro naps, your head flopping forwards and then snapping back. I don't know if I was dreaming or having hallucinations, but either way a man was eating heads made from topiary, the size of cubes of battenberg cake. It was disturbing.

My attention was clawed back to the world when I saw a car ahead of us on the highway spin out of control. And spin, and spin, making several not so gentle revolutions as it drifted towards the central divider. My driver braked as we got closer, and either that, or reaching the same ice, meant that his back end slid out and now we were going sideways down the highway for a moment, before he turned into the skid and managed to straighten the car up again.

We drove slowly past the car. It had ended up pointing the right way down the road and didn't look damaged, but I imagine the side touching the concrete wall was pretty battered.

Perhaps Washingtonians have good self-preservation instincts, or drive crefully, or just stay in at night because we only saw three cars that had something wrong; the spinner, another car a hundred yards later, stationary in the left hand lane, and finally a BMW with its left flank caved in, sat next to a police car and an ambulance.

I felt a bit guilty putting my taxi driver through this and gave him a $15 tip, but I also felt bad for everyne in Wallingford, waiting on a street corner for the buses that had all been cancelled by snow. It seems regressive to me that the people who could only afford public transport would be the ones stuck out in the dark and the cold, while I got driven to a warm hotel room to watch Sons of Guns on TV, some sort of reality tv docusoap where men fire mortars and a woman in a spandex camouflage tank top and a gold AK-47 necklace simpers at them. I mean, really?

Seattle Museum of Art

2012-01-15T10:20:00.002+08:00

After not getting much sleep on the plane to Seattle, I managed to stick it out until midnight before going to sleep, and then woke up this morning feeling almost normal. I worked my way through a bowl of porridge and then went to get my beard trimmed. After that I was at a loss as to what to do next, so I strolled down the street, rain blowing in my face, cursing when I stopped by an awning and got dripped on the top of my head.

Not wanting to walk back to the hotel and sit around all day, and not feeling like spending my day in the shops, I walked round to the Seattle Art Museum. As I approached, I recognised the Hammering Man from Seoul outside. Or rather, I suppose when I went to Seoul and saw the Hammering Man statue there, I was actually looking at a copy of the statue outside the Seattle Art Museum. The one outside the museum has a number painted on one leg, apparently so the artist can track which one is which.

The number is at least 6 digits long, which suggests there's an awful lot of Hammering Men somewhere.

Inside, my sense of deja vu didn't let up, as the lobby has Inopportune, the installation of Ford Tauruses spiralling through the air, hanging from the ceiling. I'd seen this (and lots of other work by Cai Guo, whose name I'd forgotten until I read this entry) when I was in Taipei back in 2009. I began to worry that every piece of art exhibited in the museum was something I'd previously seen in Asia, and it got worse when I saw that the special exhibition on the top floor was a collection of Asian art. Thankfully, that was closed - if it had been the wholesale replication of the Museum of Chicken Art from Seoul, I might have run screaming into the Puget Sound.

The rest of the museum is pretty good. I didn't like some of the American art from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, because however you do it, a sculpture of a man in a cowboy hat on a horse is always going to look like it came out of the SkyMall magazine, and some of the modern work really left me cold, but it's good to expose yourself to art you don't like sometimes, and think about why you don't like it.

What I did like was the Mann und Maus sculpture by Katharina Fritsch, which is in one of the larger halls. At first I thought it was just a rather cute, enormous black mouse, standing on a white plinth. That alone was very striking, but when I got closer, I realised it wasn't just an enormous black mouse. The giant rodent was standing on top of the duvet of a bed with a sleeping man inside it. Initially it looks very funny, as any absurd incongruity does, but when you start to think about the terror you'd feel when you find a six foot tall rodent sitting atop your bed, staring down on you, holding up its forepaws like a begging dog. The more I thought about it, the more clever it was.

Or perhaps Katharina Fritsch just thought "wouldn't it be cool to build an enormous black mouse"? There's some sort of structualist interpretation of art that suggests Fritsch's motives are meaningless compared to the interpretation that the viewer of the art places upon it but I don't have the ability to describe that. And I think that people should be able to construct enormous effigies of tiny animals if they want to.

After the mouse, it was hard for me to remember anything else of the museum. There are some enormous yams there, and a few bits of Renaissance art that I don't think much of (after the National Gallery in London, I want to see enormous Carravaggios filling an entire room, not just a few paintings), but it was a pleasant way to spend the morning.

The shop in the basement is ok; quite a lot of it isn't anything to do with the museum in particular, but is just 'art' - which seems common to American museums (the Cloisters is similar) - and Fritsch won't permit the museum to sell postcards of the enormous mouse, which is her perogative and would otherwise lead to me mailing everyone I knew a picture of an enormous mouse, which wouldn't convey its majesty as much as seeing it in the (acrylic) flesh.

I had a light lunch in the museum restaurant, and on the advice of the server, walked up the hill to the Library, which is a lovely although rather brutal building, all sharp lines like a huge crystal. I'd been told there were good views from the top, but because the whole roof is a metal lattice, it's not quite the unobstructed view I was expecting. I went down to the sixth floor and read a few chapters of The Pleasure Bond by Masters and Johnson, which included (to me) the strange revelation that a bloke who worked in HR decided to have sex with his sister the night before he got married. I suppose it ups the ante, compared to having sex with the bride's sister the night before you get married. Masters and Johnson seem to suggest it might be more common than I expected (incest, that is, rather than as a pre-marriage ceremony) but then it was the Seventies.

Maybe I could have flung the book down and yelled out 'disgusting perverts!' because half of Seattle seemed to be visiting for a shouting competition in the hallway by the lift - a man with a face like a moonface calf was talking loudly and inanely about all the jewellery he had. Titanium is the next best metal to silver, apparently. Why can't people who are saying nothing do so more quietly? I can't get too angry because there's worse things in the world than somebody talking loudly in a library, but I was surprised that they were doing so - maybe I should have got up and said something.

Given my talent for diplomacy, I might have just got kicked out of the US.

The Guard

2012-01-14T13:38:00.001+08:00

I watched The Guard on the flight from Narita to Seattle today, and despite the tiny screen and being crammed into an uncomfortable seat, enjoyed it a lot.

There are obvious comparisons to be made with In Bruges. I can't decide if Mark Strong or Liam Cunningham is the one meant to be substituting for Fiennes' raging, phone-smashing character, but Brendan O'whatshisface has a larger presence as the boy Farrell isn't around for this.

It opens very strongly: the very first scene is a brilliant, sustained reversal of expectations, and the end does have a very tidy explosion. The middle wanders a bit and leaves more loose ends than strictly necessary, making me wonder if it's been excessively cut for the aeroplane. It seems strange to have one argument about whether Bertrand Russell was English or Welsh, a propos of nothing, and never return to it. Likewise, there's a scene set at an aquarium where the fish could symbolise something or foreshadow something else ... But they're just fish, is all.

Without wanting to be too negative, there is a touch of the Caffrey's advert about it: all Irish people are whimsical, and if they're not riding horses through council estates to advertise beer, then apparently they're zanily discovering Kalashnikovs in bogs / hitting people with blunderbusses / talking about amyl nitrate. It's not that I didn't like it, it's just it felt more like an accumulation of things the director thought would look cool, rather than something that's really tied together.

Still, they do a good job of creating an anti-hero with nothing to lose (and do so less unpleasantly than, say, Ryan Gosling in Drive) and it's a film that has a big fat Irish policeman flinging a cappucino across a lawn in the rain, which made me laugh. That's more than you could say for the 'rom'-'com' gloomfest One Day that I put myself through as well, and I don't want to talk about that.

Stressed

2012-01-13T06:47:00.001+08:00

Maybe it was the four and three quarter hours of sleep this morning. Or the way the lift stopped working - it happily came to my floor and let me get in, but after the doors shut and I pressed the G button, it simply sat there, docile yet immobile, and whatever I did, whichever buttons I pressed, it remained where it was.

At least the doors opened up again to let me out, so I could hump 16.5 kilograms of suitcase down 12 flights of stairs. Maybe that was the source of my stress. (It got worse when I got downstairs to find the lift down there as well - was it just teasing me?)

Or perhaps it was the taxi-dissolving drizzle, that weird early morning rain that makes every taxi in Hong Kong vanish just when you need it. It wasn't so bad today: I got a taxi outside the nearest frozen yoghurt shop, and though he didn't charge me extra for my luggage, he did deposit me outside the IFC offices, not the airport express, which meant another hundred yards of pulling my bags along.

Maybe it was the inexplicably slow check in at the counter. Delta shares a counter with Tiger, Air Canada, and at least three other carriers. The two guys three ahead of me in the queue took twenty minutes to check in, for no fathomable reason. The clock was ticking; 90 minutes before departure, the counter would close. It was 6:25 before I got to the desk, and the flight was at 8. And all this time, an announcement on the PA told us that the train in the station was not to be boarded, raising the worry that I wasn't going to the airport regardless, because none of the trains were either.
But there was something wrong with my reservation too, apparently, or with the plane, because after an ominous pause, a phone call and lots more tapping, my seat inexplicably changed for the flight to Narita. At least I had a seat.

I walked to the lifts down to the trains, and checked my emails. There was an email from Delta sent at 6:04 this morning. It was to say the flight was rescheduled for 7:45. That waas the first thing that stopped adding to my stress: I'm just glad I didn't see that before I joined the queue for check-in and started worrying that I wasn't going to get processed in time.

The train still goes: I still fly. In seventeen hours or so, I'll be in warm, sunny, January Seattle.

Warrior

2012-01-12T21:45:00.000+08:00

I have to stop watching films where two blokes beat the tar out of one another and I end up crying, like the bride at a wedding when her dad is losing in a punch-up with the groom’s brother.

I walked to work today, which was probably a mistake, because I arrived at the office drenched in sweat, and even after a Spanish shower in the toilets, I imagine I can’t have been wonderful to sit next to. Then, after a day that smeared past, stressed and lacking sleep after staying up half the night, I went down to get a taxi to the airport, which is apparently impossible at 4pm in Singapore. After five minutes of that I flounced off to the MRT and took the train instead, which removes all the stress of worrying about finding a taxi willing to drive you to Changi.

However, I’ve been to Changi far too often recently. I’ve reached the point where using my frequent flyer status and getting into the lounge is no longer a special treat, it’s just something that I do. Whereas in the past I would have marveled at the free pastries and the endless drinks, now I spent an hour filleting the different notes that I’d scribbled today and stuffed into my bag, and then almost joylessly picked up four sandwiches and scoffed them all down.

Then at precisely thirty minutes before departure, I walked over the unlovely Singaporean carpet to the gate, and became that thing I would have detested, the man who ignores the queue and walks straight to the front. But then, what’s frequent flyer status for?

I took my seat by the window, and spent the next twenty minutes feverishly praying that nobody would take the aisle seat, and my prayers were answered – a spare seat to overflow into, all the way back to Hong Kong. This lateral space made up for the guy in front of me reclining his seat as far back as he possibly could, so suffice it to say I was in a punchy mood, even before dinner.

Still, I put on Warrior and it’s much the same as Crying Fist, the Korean beat-em-up that reliably leaves me with ‘something in my eye’ and ‘allergies playing up again’ while I weep like a newborn. Warrior is MMA rather than boxing, which just means that two blokes get to knee each other in the face and grapple on the floor as well, but it proceeds in a well-worn groove to the redemptive ending that had been staring me and Nick Nolte both in the face for the previous 100 minutes. I didn’t sniffle too loudly as two big blokes found compassion and fraternity while oiled up and battering each other – not so much homoerotic as deeply masochistic, whilst all the time Ode to Joy swells around them.

… which makes me wonder if Warrior is actually just a practical joke, and they thought they’d go for a tender moment where one man is giving the other a cuddle as he separates his arm from the rest of him, because it clearly couldn’t get more ridiculous than that. Well, it couldn’t get more ridiculous than a physics teacher beating up the world Sambo champion.

Did I hear that right? There’s not really a Russian martial art that sounds exactly like a racist jibe, is there?

That aside, Warrior is a well organized film for guys to watch, and get a bit misty eyed about. Or it’s an advert for Moby Dick, and how if your son hates you, the thing to do is get really drunk and quote Moby Dick at him, and he’ll forgive your previous transgressions and give you a hug. Or put you in a wrestling hold, it’s not entirely clear which. Does it sound like the plot’s confusing? There’s not much of a plot…

But I watched all of it, even though I knew how it would turn out, because apparently I’m addicted to the male equivalent of Beaches, or Love Story, or some other tosh with Barbara Streisand in it. You have the sneaking feeling that it was only made because Tom Brady had to do something while bulking up to play Bane in the next Batman film, but it still gave him something to do. What would he have done otherwise? Torn the heads off kittens?

Still, my palate is cleansed. I’ve watched a physics teacher and a Marine beat each other up for money, and so I’ve been reminded that there are worse things than Changi Airport. A good lesson for the day

More househunting in Singapore

2012-01-11T22:29:00.001+08:00

Today I spent the morning in better spirits, looking at condominiums. Condominia? Whatever...

I saw four, and like Goldilocks, none were quite right. The first one was very big, but the builders had been a bit silly and built it on a flight path into Changi, which meant you'd be sitting in the swimming pool listening to the dulcet tones of 747s taking off and landing.

The second one was big and white and the owner was sitting in the corner. I don't think she was a fixture or fitting, but she was the only sign of humanity in the area: a desert lacking all shops, all pubs, all hope.

Number three was described as having a tennis court. It doesn't have a tennis court, unless it was concealed beneath the swimming pool, which was ostentatiously deep. 1.80 metres deep, which means I could stand on the bottom and drown. It's never been an ambition of mine to drown standing up, but it's always nice to know the opportunity is there.

The pool area looked very pleasant, in the deserted-beach-resort way that makes up so much of Singapore. The flat itself had high ceilings and an oven (good) and a big brown stain on the mattress (not so good) and an estate agent who vehemently insisted that this must remain, as if it were every landlord's god-given right to demand tenants slept on a filthy mattress.

Also, it was in the middle of nowhere.

The fourth place was on the edge of Little India, and because nobody had the keys, we spent half an hour wandering around the neighbourhood. It's good, very livable. The canal passes through, so there's a way to run out to Marina Bay and back. There's lots of shops a short walk away, the MRT is close, and there are rumours of a supermarket, although that was incredibly well hidden. Maybe it was concealed, along with the previous condo's phantom tennis court.

We tried to get in to the condo. The security guard spent half an hour refusing to let us go up and look at the flat, then relented when one of the two estate agents called the landlady and got her to tell the guard to let us go up. Or passed the guard a phone with a woman who claimed to be the landlady on the other end of the line; it didn't matter, either way we went up, although it made me doubt both the friendliness of the guard, and the organisational abilities of the agent.

The flat was in a good neighbourhood, but was a bit of a dump; filthy walls, dark, mess everywhere because the incumbent tenant hadn't moved out yet. It was the kind of place an animal would live.

Ok, it was the kind of place a lawyer would live. There's not much difference, except animals don't get drunk and have some capacity for shame. Still, maybe a lick of paint, a new kitchen and some furniture and it would be adequate.

I wondered if I'd been led into the usual estate agent trap of "show somebody n+1 choices, where the first n are manifestly unsuitable, and they'll blindly accept the n+1th simply because it's not horrid." Am I too cynical?

Of course, in this battle between agent and customer, I have a secret weapon, my wife. Being married doesn't mean never having to make decisions, it just means you don't have to let an agent sweat you for an immediate decision. You can airily contend that you have to let 'The Wife', that almost mystical being, to vet the choice, and thus if they're going to palm you off with the least worst choice, they're going to need to wash their hands properly first.

And use gloves.

Yuk. Never one to let a metaphor go too far, I'd cease here, but I also had my plan B, agent #2.

Agents are jealous creatures. They tell you that they are your only choice, that they have the best apartments chosen carefully for you, and that you mustn't go to any other agent because they'll only show you the same things.
I don't trust agents any more than I do anyone working sales on a commissionable basis, and especially not if they get lost, so agent #2 took me in the afternoon to see an absolutely beautiful flat that I fell in love with: big, airy, recently decorated, big kitchen with a brand new oven, in walking distance of the office ... Just right. We put an offer in this afternoon, and the resounding silence from the landlord suggests he's not taking it.

Damn. Looks like I don't have a place to stay when I move to Singapore. This could turn sour.