Neverwhere

I re-read Neverwhere, after chatting to Luke, who was reading it for the first time. I love this book quite madly, probably due to the combination of loving Neil Gaiman and loving London madly as well.

I love the way the hugely different worlds of London Above and London Below overlap, yet don’t quite merge, at stations of the London Underground. The Gap is a ravenous predatorial pouncing fog if you’re from London Below, as opposed to the minor hazard we’re told to Mind by a disembodied voice that’s become background noise to most of us. If you get off at British Museum (long-closed to London Above), ads for moustache wax and two shilling seaside holidays are still plastered on the walls.

There’s something about London, and the London Neil Gaiman presents in Neverwhere, that makes it almost easy to believe that in London Below there are black friars at Blackfriars, an actual angel in Islington, shepherds in Shepherd’s Bush who you should hope you never have to meet, Coke and chocolates from platform vending machines are served if you are a guest at Earl’s Court, and you have to get to the floating market at Harrod’s (the previous one was in Big Ben – it floats from place to place) by crossing Night’s Bridge.

Eating Agenda

I am slowly working my way along the eating agenda. Yesterday I was able to tick off Alvin’s Claypot (oyster chicken, oldie but goodie on their menu) and Oreo McFlurry (they’ve got a Chocomint one now too! London McPowers That Be, I’m begging you…). Dad’s been spoiling me with expensive durians. Sister has bought two 6-packs of Pokka peppermint green tea. Mum has stocked up on Uncle Toby muesli bars. On the Day Of 14 CDs I had a green apple bubble tea (1997 restaurant in London Chinatown tries to do these too, but they’re a poor, poor substitute). On Sunday I had deep-fried Shanghai dumplings for dinner. All’s well on the food front. Which reminds me, I really must start my fitness regime.

Stop laughing.

Perhaps

Perhaps the best-adjusted people are the ones who aren’t afraid to talk about the sappy Hallmark sentiments.

Perhaps the best-adjusted people are the ones who aren’t afraid to let themselves feel the sappy Hallmark sentiments in the first place.

Perhaps I’m not as well-adjusted as I’ve always thought, after all. Food for thought.

One Day, Fourteen CDs

I held out as long as I could. I really did. But I had to leave the house at some point, and Music Warehouse was (kind of) on the way to the optician’s, and Gramophone was (kind of) on the way back. Okay, so maybe they involved little detours, but they were on the same bus route.

Well, er, these are all new:

  • Work 1989-2002 (Orbital, S$18.99)
  • The Private Press (DJ Shadow, S$17.99)
  • No More Shall We Part (Nick Cave, S$18.90)
  • Love And Theft (Bob Dylan, S$16.90)
  • Harvest (Neil Young, S$14.99)
  • Roseland NYC Live (Portishead, S$18.99)
  • Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (Lucinda Williams, S$15.99)
  • Murray Street (Sonic Youth, S$17.99)
  • Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Wilco, S$18.99)
  • Pet Sounds (in mono and stereo, Beach Boys, S$17.99)
  • Souljacker (eels, S$17.99)
  • Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection” (EMI Classics, Otto Klemperer conducting, S$17.99)
  • A 2 CD choral compilation (S$18.99)
  • The Mirror Conspiracy (Thievery Corporation, FREE because of Gramophone’s buy-10-get-another-free offer! So I’ve saved, really I have…)

Ohdearohdearohdearohdearohdear. Somehow my usual excuses of “It’s my only vice” and (recently) “I deserve a graduation present” aren’t really cutting it in the face of such gluttony.

Help? Please?

Being With Debaters

Off the Ayer Rajah Expressway, through Ghim Moh housing estate (slowing down for jaywalking students), round that voluptuous curve in the road and Raffles Junior College peers out at you from behind a rather strangely landscaped and mildly overgrown island thingy in the driveway.

Homecomings thrive on immediate connections, the sort that are still relevant and apparent enough that they don’t have to be explained. So this is never quite a homecoming. It’s an amateur movie of me walking around a place I spent two years of my life, with ghostly commentators drawing arrows and circles on the screen. Here’s where Michelle and her friends would stagger after classes were over for the day. They sat in the tuckshop and drank 30-cent mugs of cool lemon tea, but they called it their “beer garden” for some reason. Sad kids. Here’s where Michelle’s class used to go to pretend to productively use the free period before PE on Fridays, but where they’d inevitably end up giggling helplessly, overcome by what they came to call the Friday madness, until the one-trick-pony librarian would come round and threaten “You can do your talking OUT-SIDE.”

I was there to judge the preliminary rounds of the national debating championships. We counted six “generations” of Rafflesian debaters among the judges alone. There was that wonderfully refreshing feeling that however outspoken or blunt I let myself be, it wasn’t going to intimidate my companions, or discourage them from being equally outspoken and blunt right back. A rare feeling for me in Singapore. My other prime conversational flaw, of assuming I know what someone else is saying before they finish the sentence, and interrupting them because I’m so eager to respond, was equally replicated in most of my companions. And again, the feeling that only here can we do this.

Here, in this smug little circle of articulate, confident, smart arses, we can cautiously lower the self-censorship screens we (or at least I) erect the rest of the time. I forget myself and interrupt you, because I know if I’ve got you wrong, you’ll correct me with the verve and wit that makes these conversations sparkle, not just keep quiet and think dark thoughts about loudmouth Michelle imposing her opinions on the world. We can all talk at each other simultaneously, but we’re all listening too. The faults that everyone else hates in us are the lifeblood of our times together, and it is nice, even if I acknowledge they’re faults to be corrected the rest of the time, to let my guard down every now and then.

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.

Welcomed Home

I walked in the front door and was greeted by our traditional cheesy family banners for returning graduate children – 1ST CLASS MICHELLE! in the hall and WELCOME HOME MICHY! on the door of my room. The first ever banner in the tradition was made 13 years ago by my mother and I, for my sister. While we were making it we rearranged the letters of WELCOME HOME BETHY! to HELCOME BOM WEETHY! (I was 9 and found these things amusing), and ever since then I call her Weethy from time to time.

We went to one of my favourite restaurants on East Coast Road and the salt and pepper squid had fundamentally and disappointingly changed. I would have felt a bit stupid saying “wo3 de jiao1 yan2 sotong mei2 you3 jiao1 yan2!” (literal translation: My “add salt squid” had no added salt!) to the waitress so I contented myself with the Hainanese chicken rice, which was as good as it’s ever been.

Plans for this time at home are mostly unformed. There’s mum’s birthday to celebrate, a cousin’s wedding to attend and play the violin at, a national debating tournament to judge, a multitude of friends to catch up with, a neighbourhood to fall back in love with, a plethora of favourite foods to eat too much of (see below), a Great Singapore Sale to bankrupt myself at, a Singlish accent to enjoy using again.

Slightly less positive features about the next month and a half are that it’s too bloody hot, my eyes have already gone red (I’m having flashbacks to the horrible summer of ’99 where 4 eye doctors couldn’t do anything to lessen my misery), I was reminded right from entering Singapore by the unsmiling passport control officers that random politeness isn’t appreciated here (they were more interested in continuing their conversation in Malay than responding to my hellos or thank yous or even registering my existence beyond the fact that I was a recurring troublesome feature of their job), and I have to find a way of not missing Alec.

—

Michelle’s summer food list:

  • Alvin’s claypot oyster chicken (Parkway Parade food court)
  • Ocean Fish Head Curry (Ceylon Road)
  • Hainanese chicken rice (Ghim Moh hawker centre)
  • Murtabak
  • Chilli kangkung
  • Sambal everything
  • Small crispy fried squid
  • Barbecued stingray
  • Baby octopus
  • Satay
  • Lots of Mum’s dishes that I can’t name but describe as “that chicken in the gravy that stains everything yellow”
  • Bubble tea
  • Luan Qi Ba Zao (explained last summer, scroll down to NoBlogLove post #2)
  • Bee-Bee (does anyone else from Singapore love this, or even remember it? It’s still 10 cents – childhood price – it comes in a small orange packet with a picture of a sparsely-haired plump man savouring something that looks like a gigantic piece of Bee-Bee, and it’s only available from small provision shops and some kacang puteh stands including Orchard Cineplex. I can’t be the only person keeping its sales alive by buying crates of it once a year!)
  • Uncle Toby’s muesli bars
  • McFlurry’s with Oreos (London, get with the program already!)

Home To Home

Getting on a plane tonight, for a month and a half at home in Singapore before I get to come back home to London.

Not a bad way to live. Slap me if I ever complain.

The Week In Words

Every now and then you need a day of doing nothing, and that day is today. It’s been a week of always feeling the need to be doing something or other, keep moving Michelle, don’t waste the time you have here before you leave, get the most out of that Travelcard, but today – today calls for nothingness. For the first time since I got back from Germany the weather is fairly blah and hasn’t lured me outdoors. I’m mildly headachey and sore-throated from dehydration and a lot of sun at Wimbledon yesterday, and want to get over all that before I go to Xen at Cargo tonight. There’s also laundry. What probably seals it is that a gunman has taken someone hostage in the Amex building and most of central London is sealed off, so there you have it.

The morning has been lazy, with tea and Xfm and Don Camillo Meets Hell’s Angels (Giovanni Guareschi), which I discovered in Spitalfields market on Sunday and bought with glee, having read and loved most of the other books in the same series, but with all that out of the way and the laundry hung up to dry, I’m finally in front of the computer. I want to write about last week, but much like my record of the last week in Singapore last summer, it’s likely to bore anyone but me.

Tuesday:
I spent half an hour in silent prayer before the Lord in St Anne’s Church (off Brick Lane). This wasn’t exactly voluntary – Alec got the mass time wrong, so we were half an hour early – but turned out to be welcome. I’ve had a lot to be thankful for lately. Dinner was in Eat And Drink, because I was craving Chinese food – they do rather good sweet and sour fish, for anyone who’s interested.

Wednesday:
There’s something really endearing about the graffiti in and around Brick Lane, but I’ll save that for another day when I can upload pictures. I had lunch in Cafe 1001, great for people-watching and toasted foccacia sandwiches, but my cherry smoothie tasted mostly and strangely of banana. The evil, evil Laden Showroom wheedled me into parting with £30 for a pink appliqued skirt after trying on and reluctantly rejecting what must have amounted to at least £150 of other clothes. As I paid I half-expected to see the cash registered displaying “Soul” along with Visa as an accepted method of payment.

We wandered into Shoreditch after dinner, mingling with the mulleted at The Bricklayers’ Arms before try-out night at the Comedy Cafe, where Ria turned up wholly unexpectedly, complete with ukelele, as part of the lineup. She was great, but I don’t know if I’d go to a lot more try-out nights. The embarrassment I felt for other people who were failing miserably was so acute it was uncomfortable. A surreal gag I rather liked came from a guy who said a woman came up to him at a bar one day and said she’d love to have his children because his head was so small.

Thursday:
I couldn’t find the new Reckless Records outlet or the Ben Christophers gig, which were the two reasons I went to Camden in the first place, but Music And Video Exchange helped to ease the frustration by providing me with Rock Action (Mogwai, £5) and Morcheeba’s contribution to the Back To Mine series of compilations (£8). Singapore Sling’s Hainanese chicken rice was passable (chilli more piquant than is authentic, but rice and chicken tasted comfortingly familiar). Also, Alec acquired new ammunition for his long-running “People who share Michelle’s music taste are losers (this obviously includes Michelle)” campaign with the cancelling of the gig, so a good day was had by all.

Friday:
I spent early Friday morning watching England meandering out of the World Cup, although it was quite hard to actually make out what was happening in the game while peering at a small, distant TV in a packed pub through the space between some guy’s armpit and the game machine he’d propped his arm against.

Actual game aside, I do always feel that the cosy atmosphere of total and cheerfully irrational bias makes watching football in a pub an experience and a half. When Ronaldinho got sent off, the TV commentator observed that he’d helped make Brazil’s first goal, scored their second, and commented on the irony of him now being sent off. The pub crowd generally confined their observations to “SEND THEM ALL OFF, THE FUCKERS!” When Rivaldo was hamming it up after a tackle by writhing excessively on the ground, the commentators remarked on this as a growing trend in international football, and brought up other instances of such conduct by the Brazilians earlier in the match. A guy in the crowd was more succinct with the simplicity and forcefulness of “CUNT!”

Lunch was indulgent (Carluccio’s with Tamara). Tea equally so (Valerie’s Patisserie with Victoria and Jolene).

The calorie overload was to prove useful later while dancing in the rain to Orbital at Somerset House, which, without going into long rambles about transcendental quintessential summer experiences (because I’ve done that too many times already), was one of those transcendental quintessential summer experiences. It was pouring down while they did The Box, driving, insistent, intense rain, just like the song. Strobe lights in the downpour, flashing off the sedate stateliness of Somerset House. That familiar feeling in the back of my head: remember. Remember.

Back To The Good Life

I hate it when I want to write on this site (by this I mean a fairly specific volition in terms of particular words, phrases, descriptions of events rather than a vague write-somethingness) but don’t have the time to. By the time I manage to get down to it, the entry feels crammed and stilted rather than evocative of anything I actually did want to record and remember.

We got back from Germany on Monday night (I really do mean to put my travel journals up here. Really. Summer project). Well-meaning Alec had cooked me a dinner of stew that prominently featured sausages (which I’d managed to avoid in Germany through careful effort), accompanied by some sparkling wine he introduced with “This is horrible, you’ll love it.” And that’s when I truly knew I was home. :)

The week from then to now has been a fairly satisfying mix of mostly practical mornings and mostly frivolous days. (Which will be written about in due course. I truly am resolute. Except that right now I need to go have a haircut…) However, in the midst of obscenely indulgent lunches and teas and inordinate amounts of time looking at flouncy girlie things, I was pleasantly reminded today that I was once an intellectual being well worth my black turtleneck sweater – the law faculty wants to publish my Bentham dissertation in the UCL Jurisprudence Review, which means that most of April was actually worth the pain.

When life has been this good to me lately, am I a pessimist for wondering where and when the fall is going to come?