The Difficulties Of Summer
One thing I wonder about every summer is how my relocation affects my blog content (and yes, I won’t deny it, how it affects your interest in my blog content, O reader).
First and most simply, there’s the change of country – what I don’t realize while I’m in London and writing about London and the people I know there, is how much more difficult it can be sometimes to be writing about a place where I have a history. Every entry in Singapore comes with scores of invisible footnotes. No name is just a name, or a place just a place, but I feel torn between explaining everything (which, knowing me, would be overly lengthy and ultimately woefully inadequate) and just coasting through it all (which means the entries could end up feeling empty).
The other simple difference is language – we speak a colourful and fairly charming mutation of English over here which I fall comfortably back into once I’m home (unlike other Singaporeans who suddenly acquire other people’s accents after a few years somewhere else, and speak like foreigners at home forevermore), but which can be pretty damn incomprehensible to the rest of the world. And then there’s all our names for food. I don’t presume to be an Inuit trying to explain snow to a Bedouin but it can get a bit tough trying to figure out what a ang moh/gwai-lo/gringo, call them what you will, reader makes of all this.
Lest this become too Joy Luck Club, let me just say that I’ll try and find a happy compromise to everything above, but will probably fail quite regularly. So be it. I don’t write this exclusively for me or you, but wander fitfully along the spectrum, which is how I quite like it.