Defeated by the heat

We admitted defeat last night and gave in, turning the air conditioning back on. A week away from the warmth of Singapore has clearly made us weak.

Struggling again

It was silly to spend all week in Taiwan sleeping and resting, only to get the last flight out of Hong Kong on Sunday, depositing us in Singapore at 1:30 in the morning, and only getting back in to the flat after 2am. (There's a separate priority queue at the airport for pregnant ladies, but my wife refused to take it. I was aghast and dumbfounded, as she's not going to have this opportunity to skip the line for a long time now. Maybe that means I could waddle down there with a cushion stuck down my shirt - the family is owed a free ride, surely?)

Sleep, interrupted

I was taking a siesta this lunchtime. Or a nap. Or a snooze. I was feeling exhausted: I'd been drinking hard last night and the hangover was hitting me hard. I tried to read The Finkler Question to cheer myself up. That was a sign of how bad I must have been: nobody reads Booker prizewinners to lift their spirits.

Sleepy in Seattle

Jet lag is a murderous thing, or perhaps it's just the sleep debt I incurred through being an idiot on Friday night. Either way, I can hardly keep my eyes open and it's only 8pm local time.

Back on the plane again

The day after the wedding the weather was bright and clear. We got up to see the Forth Bridge shining in the sun, and instead of spending the mid-morning vomitting into a gutter, I avoided eating any suspicious vegetarian sausages for breakfast and went for a walk instead. We walked down the coast from Queensferry to a pier and a large stone seal, which I got to sit on. I like sitting on statues of animals. When I was young I got to sit atop an enormous squirrel in Beckenham Place Park. I've sat astride a plastic panda in Taipei Zoo, and now I've barged a small child out the way in order to ride on a huge (freezing cold) seal a few miles from Edinburgh.

Alarmed

At 4:30am local time, the fire alarms went off, a never ending klaxon that chased us out of our beds and down the street below, where the pretty flashing lights of the fire engine contrasted with the downpour of rain. We shuffled about in the shelter of the hotel car park for ten minutes, then walked down the street to the hotel's sister establishment, where we were offered coffee (at this time of night? No thank you), just before the alarm ceased and we all trooped back again.

Wide awake and starry eyed

I couldn't sleep last night and was wide awake at 1am. This made me tetchy; I had an intimidating run ahead of me in the morning: lots of fast intervals, that I needed to be fresh for, coming off the back of a good night's rest. Not recovering from trolling the internet all night.

Warming up

Either I'm warming up, or I'm getting cabin fever from spending two days in my friend's flat, guarding the cat and failing to interact with human beings. Today the cat did her duty and woke me at 6:30 to be fed, after which I collapsed back into the embrace of Morpheus. I had have a strange dream this morning about helping somebody, then sprang awake in a panic, thinking I'd missed an early morning conference call.

Tranquility

I went to the office at 8:30 this morning, and as everyone else was in Kuala Lumpur, had a day sat alone in a massive room, occasionally swearing at the haunted air conditioning units that revved themselves up whenever they felt like it. I got a lot done: not as much as I'd hoped for, and I still have 300+ emails festering in my inbox, but at least I've made inroads on the work that was waiting for me.

Chicken or beef?

Today was another wet day in Kuala Lumpur; I spent the morning in a freezing cold conference room, the afternoon in a hotel room, wrangling spreadsheets across a spotty wifi connection, and the evening in a club beneath the Petronas Towers, at a team-building evening that made me want to quit the company. I know if it’s too loud, you’re too old, but what does it say about your age when you’re bored with a screeching five foot drag queen yelling at you to have fun, from a stage filled with directors of the company, dressed up as ‘Malaysian super heroes’? Was that somebody’s idea of a fun night out for everyone? Or did I miss out on the memo about accepting cultural differences and terrible nightclubs?

Perhaps it’s just ennui from not enough sleep, accompanied by the petty annoyance of a diet of spring rolls and badly cooked noodles. Or perhaps it’s something else.

Drinking again

Another week comes to a close, and I scurried across the road from my office, to quaff gin and tonics and eat balls of fried cheese. It's fine, I'm taking pills to dissolve the fat, I can eat what I like. And it's not like four strong drinks and a glass of ale will do me any harm, is it?

There comes a point in life when your ability to handle the booze isn't the limiting factor; rather, it's your desire to have a bit more sleep. I was knackered this morning and I still got up at 6 to go for my run; I expect I'll be more knackered tomorrow, even though I had a Breakfast Beer today (no bacon included, alas) and a glass of red wine. And all the other drinks, too. But still, the training schedule is inviolate. I wonder if it was designed for drunks and office drones like myself.

The other problem with all this drinking is that you get home and then put on a 150 minute epic Chinese cowboy movie, and that deprives you of even more sleep. Dammit, I'm sure Mo Farrah doesn't have to put up with a pint of gin and Chow Yun Fat.

A short interval

After yesterday's euphoric run, today was much tougher. I kept waking up all morning. The first time I got up I got all my clothes out of the drawers and was about to get dressed when I checked the time: 3am. So back to bed I went, until I woke up again at 4am. And 5am. And at 6am I couldn't put it off any more, so I pulled on my gear and headed out the door.

Faster?

I don't know how I managed to get through the journey back without sleeping, but I seemed to manage. I think I dozed for a few hours on the Seattle-Narita leg, but I was resolute in staying awake all the way back to Singapore. That was made easier by the entertainment system working (it had burped, stuttered and hiccuped all the way from Seattle to Narita), but the downside was that I watched The Muppets (slightly overlong), Bridesmaids (a bunch of horrible, horrible women being horrible to one another) and The Hangover 2 (a bunch of horrible, horrible men being horrible to themselves and everyone in Thailand). The only thing that the last film taught me is that you can be a 'bro', popped collar and all, and also have sex with men, as long as they're Thai men with breasts and miniskirts. Ain't nothing wrong with ladyboys in foreign countries, apparently. Perhaps that's some subversive message the filmmakers were trying to sneak into the Hangover sequel. No, probably not.

On my way

I was surprised this morning to see a friend from Hong Kong asking what he should do in Singapore. I had to answer "take a plane to Hong Kong" for although I'm a resident of the Lion City, a fair amount of my heart remains in the Special Administrative Region.

Return

Last night I got back on stage in Hong Kong; I don't think I'd appreciated how much I missed it. Having performed there on an almost weekly basis for four years, everything was where I expected it to be. The microphone stand was the right height, the mike itself wasn't plagued with feedback and every time I got a laugh, it reverberated around the cramped, low-ceilinged room.

A weekend, a bit wasted

Although I went to bed early last night, I couldn't sleep. I tossed and turned for a few hours, then went into the spare room to read. After about ten minutes, a gust of wind made the door slam shut, and after that I had a sudden terror that there was an intruder in our flat. The wind would blow something across the floor and I would be convinced that our knife-wielding assailant was getting ready to slash us open. My wife slumbered contentedly through, while I was woken after a few dismal hours of sleep by my alarm, which I rejected, until a few hours after that the Chinese music recital began.

Still worn out

Travel broadens the mind, but it also deadens it. I hadn't recovered properly from going to Bangkok and then staying up late last night; today I struggled through a wasteland of conference calls and intransigent computers, and went home when my left deltoid started twitching uncontrollably.

Enraged of Asia

At about five a.m. the fire alarm went off, loud enough to disturb my sleep but quiet enough to leave me lying awake for the next two hours, worrying that I might sleep through a raging inferno. Well, that and the constant whooshing noise of the air conditioner. After discovering that there’s no way to turn the alarm off on the tablet we purchased, apart from turning the tablet off (and off again at every five minute snooze interval until your brain comes out your ears) I ate a croissant that was probably stale before it was even baked, and then hightailed it to work.

Out cold

Today I woke up at 1 o'clock again. I'm hoping this isn't going to be a regular occurrence. This time I didn't stay up and rearrange the contents of our flat, because the flat is now thousands of miles away. Instead, I took another melatonin pill and slept for five hours, and when I woke up again, read the rest of The Bloody Red Baron.

You can't hide the knives

We have two very nice Japanese knives, one big one for doing stuff with, and one paring knife for doing stuff with, when the stuff is small enough that the big knife becomes unwieldy.

Unfortunately, over time the edges of the knives dull. I purchased a whetstone when we bought the larger of the knives, and tried to teach myself to use it via Youtube videos. These may well be a good teaching resource, but it's hard to test, because if you start off with two blunt knives and sharpen one, you may get some comparative improvement without ever sharpening the knife properly. Or you could sharpen both knives (badly) and still not know.