Packrat Blues

I decided to make a start on tidying things in readiness for the move to a new family house. It’s only scheduled to take place after I’ve returned to England, but I thought I’d do what I could now to reduce the amount of my junk my family will have to pack up.

I started with the lowest compartment of the cupboard – relics from childhood – and had to conclude after going through it all that I am a packrat of the highest order; the combined effect of the dual considerations of sentimental value and but-it-might-come-in-handy-some-day is that the eraser collection (I’m not kidding) can’t be thrown away despite the fact that I would have to write out the Encyclopedia Britannica in pencil and then rub it all out again in order to actually use all of it, the Sea Monkey pamphlet can’t be thrown away even though those little ripoffs are long dead, and Strawberry Shortcake (unfortunately naked) also has to stay, because you don’t throw away Strawberry Shortcake.

But some things had to go, and so I made painful choices.

Thrown: Generic toy cars
Kept: A MicroMachines tune-up station cleverly disguised as a can of motor-oil. A small, rather pathetic Transformer-wannabe truck that in its robot form strangely resembled Duke Nukem. Five metal replicas of commercial airlines. My neighbour Roy and I used to combine our collections of planes and have plane beauty contests. We’d trundle the planes down the length of the “runway”, they’d do a turn at the end and get trundled back, and we’d score them out of ten. My Korean Air plane won many times because it was this lovely sky-blue.

Thrown: Balls of knitting yarn
Kept: Squares of knitting which I knitted every time I learnt a new stitch; a practice scarf rendered unusable by an inexplicable foray into stocking stitch three-quarters of the way through it. An unfinished square was still mounted on the knitting needles. I tried to continue it. I could remember how to knit, but not how to purl.

Thrown: Whoopie cushion, with deep regret – its rubber had melted and stuck to the box and it was a pale shadow of the fart maelstrom it once was. I loved that whoopie cushion. Sigh.
Kept: Fake bloodied bandage with nail, calculator that squirts water when you press the keys, sweet tin with leaping snakes when opened, rubber centipede, two snakes (one rubber, one plastic), replica revolver which shoots a flag saying “BANG!!!” when you press the trigger.

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.