Long day

I got up at six this morning and ran for two hours, mainly to prove to myself that I'm capable of doing a half marathon in a month's time, then came home and forgot to spend the rest of the day in bed.

As yet, I'm not sure whether you should spend the rest of the day after prolonged exercise resting, or if you should try to remain active so you don't seize up. We compromised today; we went over to Sentosa Island and walked around, but we also spent an hour sat at a bar on the beach eating pizza.


Sentosa is one of the larger islands belonging to Singapore; it used to be a prison and is now a leisure complex. I suppose if you don't like theme parks and holiday resorts, you could argue it hasn't changed much, but they don't lock people up any more. It was also where Fort Siloso was, which is famous for having its guns pointed out to sea when the nefarious Japanese arrived from Malaysia on bicycles to defeat the British.

(According to the museum, that isn't a fair account of events - the guns on the fort were capable of being rotated to fire back the other way. Japanese air superiority and a larger, well equipped army had more to do with it than just guns pointing in the wrong direction.)

You can now play lasertag on the island, which seems a bit of poor taste for the site of a major battle, but then maybe I would say that, being British and all. You don't have to reenact famous battles from the 1940s (for a start, they didn't have lasers back then) - probably for the best.

We also went inside an enormous merlion statue, where you can climb up and peer out of the merlion's mouth, or buy plush merlions in the shop, or watch a film telling you all about the life of a merlion. There was no exhibit pointing out how utterly mental the concept of a merlion is; perhaps it's been moved to make space for more lasertag.

I had hired a lens for my camera for the weekend, to test it out before dropping some serious cash, and that meant I could get some nice photos in the butterfly park (although there's not many butterflies in there) and also be terrified by taking several grand of photographic equipment that I don't own down the luge. Didn't smash anything though, so I guess that's all good.

After six hours walking around with a heavy camera, I was exhausted. We went back to Chinatown, and I passed out. Even an agonising foot massage couldn't wake me.