Wet

I didn't run this morning; I slept, and slept, and slept some more, and although that meant I wasn't physically tired today, I was mentally in a low gear that I never shifted out of. When the office is half empty, it can be a struggle to break from somnambulism; I tidied, I trained team members, I ticked off invoices, but it wasn't as if I was revolutionising the world today.

I hesitate to say that it's rainy season, on the basis of a thunderclap yesterday and a huge dump of precipitation all afternoon today, but it feels that way. The sky is grey instead of blue, I'm not constantly sweating, and so it doesn't feel like quite the Singapore I moved to. Although when I was here in September last year, the sky would turn black and the buildings would vanish behind sheets of rain, so perhaps this is normal.

I read some second-hand rants today, some of which were complaints about bad writing that seemed to have been produced by somebody reading things they hated, on purpose, to get angry about them. There was rage about Joseph Conrad writing Heart Of Darkness, rage about the correct way to characterise colonialism, and rage about somebody being offended by somebody else saying they were offended ... Although I can't criticise this, because I suspect I was only reading it to make myself angry, in the hope that by being really cross at something I would shrug off the lassitude that had overtaken me.

It didn't work. I felt vaguely grumpy, but as I haven't read Heart Of Darkness, only watched Apocalypse Now, it wasn't as if I could take offence at somebody else disliking it and then presenting their experience as objective fact. And on and on and on, worlds without end.

Because we're off to Canada, I have reacclimatised myself by going to Triple O's for a burger. After a lump of fried food, we went home, only to find that the loudest concert on earth was happening below our flat in Chinatown. Say what you like about the regimented lives of Singaporeans vs hard-partying Hong Kongers, there was never a Monday-night Cantopop festival in Hong Kong loud enough to rattle the windows 21 floors up. (Actually, there was - once, and then people complained that Andy Lau was too noisy and there's never been a concert at Hong Kong Stadium ever again. And I only just realised the irony of somebody in Hong Kong complaining about noise.)

So that was odd. My wife and I had to shout at one another across our apartment, even with the windows shut. I wonder if we're going to get extreme culture shock when we hit Canada.