Ch-ch-changes

Sometimes it's the way things don't change which is the strangest.

I've got over Hong Kong failing to disintegrate without me. It's only really the first time you come back that you suffer the wierd disappointment of discovering that while you were away, not everybody's life was placed on pause, the way people manage without you being a final proof of your insignificance. Second time around, third time around you can start to rejoice that people are still there, that they can exist without you.

Overflown

The Museum of Fine Art is on the flightpath for Taipei's domestic airport, which means every couple of minutes another plane flies over. They must be rather proud of this, because in the entrance hall of the museum is an installation consisting of some very loud speakers that blare the sound of a plane flying overhead, while a shadow of a plane is projected across the ceiling. This is fun the first few times, but I imagine the museum staff could be quite aggravated.

Juming Museum, Taiwan

The Juming Museum is an enormous outdoor garden, filled with sculpture. There are dozens of monumental bronze statues of tai chi practicioners, soldiers and people in flight.

Apparently.

Village Of The Cats

After eight blissful hours of sleep, we arose this morning and took a train from Taipei Central out to Pingxi. Or Pingsi. There is some ambiguity here, partly because of the difficulty of transcribing Chinese in a Latin script, and partly because somebody has been round the town applying little 'S' stickers over the X in Pingxi. Or little 'X' stickers over the S in Pingsi.

Asleep off the job

I rather feel we wasted our first day in Taiwan. We arrived so early at Hong Kong airport that Cathay moved us onto an earlier flight, and were in our hotel in the middle of Taipei at 1 o'clock. The day was ours to make the most of. So we went to sleep.

Pardon My French

One of my favourite places to get coffee in Hong Kong is Fuel. It's a New Zealand coffee bar with a couple of branches; one in the upper reaches of the IFC mall, and the other submerged in the basement of the Landmark mall. At both, the coffee is good. The staff are generally both friendly and attentive (although there was one time it took them 5 goes to make me an espresso, which suggests a strange combination of diligence and incompetence). Finally, they serve an artery-hardening selection of baked goods, including a chocolate coated, sugar-slathered slice of caramel that, like a Proustian madeline, makes me think of happiness in Hong Kong and rage with a database simultaneously.

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.

How do you like those onions?

I woke aggressively hungover this morning. Last night, after being informed of my obsolecence by a Samsung employee, I'd clearly been affected, and ended up drinking heavily at a bar called The Bank, at 1 Shenton, on Shenton Way, which is a street full of banks, and thus a terrible place to give directions to. I suppose if they'd called it The Toilet it would be worse, but only slightly.

Obsolete

Last weekend, our tablet crashed. I was in the middle of browsing a webpage of little importance, when the screen froze and the tablet refused to comply with any further swiping-based instructions.

Wrong number

My phone rang at 2 yesterday afternoon. I'm too cheap to pay $60 a year for caller ID so I answered, in case it was my wife or someone was ringing to tell me I'd won the football pools.

It was neither, it was somebody who wanted Simon Hopkins. I'm not, and never have been, Simon Hopkins, so I told him it was a wrong number.

Usually at this point the caller hangs up (sometimes they apologise first, but really it's no great matter). But not this one. Oh no. He ploughed straight into his script to sell me a credit card loan.

Stuck at the office

Today my brain is rather ruined; something broke that needed an awful lot of manual fixing, and that took up five and a half hours of my life that I won't ever get back. At the end of that, I was already pretty broken - it wasn't the sort of time consuming fix where you have to wait five hours for it to complete, it was the sort where every five minutes for five hours you have to press a button and wait for five minutes, which does terrible things to your powers of concentration. What I've learned from that is how important it is to get somebody else to do the grunt work, if humanly possible.  Grunting won't make you better at anything (including grunting) and it appears to have made me worse.  I've now been in the office for twelve hours, and that's not good for my mood or my productivity.

Wrestling with Kindles again

Out running the other day, I had the thought that I should compile all those posts I wrote about Bond films, and stick them up on Amazon as a book. Not because I want to make lots of money from a blog post, but because there's probably a lot of people who'll never read my blog, but who might be looking for something to read on Amazon. It's good to be in several different channels at once, and perhaps some of them would then decide to read Diet Croydon as well.

Rescue?

There's a man in a house, surrounded by fast-rising floods, and another man comes by in a rowboat.

"Hop in" he says, "I'll take you to safety."

"No need" says the guy in the house (for he is fairly devout) "God will save me."

"Whatever" says the man in the boay, and sculls off in a bit of a sulk.

The waters rise. Soon the ground floor is submerged and the chap relocates upstairs. Along comes another boay with a couple of firemen in it. (With all this water slopping around, fires are few and far between.)

"Hop in the boat and we'll save you."

"No need" he says, slightly nervously. "I'm sure that God will save me."

"Sure?"

"Yes..."

"Sure you're sure?"

"Yes..."

"Fine then, we'll be off." And the firemen sail away, and the waters rise.

Eventually, the plucky man has to climb out of his window, clamber up the drainpipe and cling to the chimney stack on the top of his roof. As the waters lap at his feet, a helicopter circles overhead.

"I say" says the pilot. "You look like you need saving."

"Who, me?" the chimney-cuddling chap. "I, er ..." and his faith wobbles for a moment, like the tiles on the roof. A gust blows. "No, no, I'm alright, my God will save me." If anyone else in this flooded waste observed this exchange, they might almost have detected a note of sarcasm in the homedweller's voice.

"Oh, uh, right" shouts the pilot. "It's just we're almost out of fuel, and ..."

"No, don't mind me."

And off goes the helicopter, and the waters rise.

A short drowning later, the man arrives in Heaven. St Peter gives this bedraggled wretch a look up and down, then asks: "What are you doing here?"

"I'd like to know. I was waiting for God to save me."

"Well, he sent you two boats and a helicopter, what else did you want?"

"Oh yeah? Would it have been too much trouble for them to say who'd sent them? That's the trouble with omniscient beings: they think they know it all."

An early start, confounding brunch

This morning my alarm went off at six. I rolled over, turned it off, and slept for another hour. Then I got up and went out for a run.

How to escape a desert

Today I learned something that might be useful, if I'm ever stuck in the desert with a broken down vehicle. If you want to signal to a rescue aircraft, one way is to shine a mirror at it. But it's hard to be sure that you're pointing the mirror at the right angle. So here's what you do: stretch one arm out, pointing towards the plane, with your index and middle fingers making a V. Then hold a mirror in your other hand and shine it so the reflected light shows on your fingers. Now you've got a pair of sights that you can use to aim the reflected light from the mirror at any spotter. Very handy, although I'm not planning on going wadi-bashing any time soon. (I do so hope that means driving a 4x4 over sand dunes, and not some sort of racist violence.)

Mad for Mexican

This evening we returned to Lucha Loco, a Mexican restaurant near our flat that combines wonderful food with terrible service. This is surprising, because they're one of the few places not to automatically add a service charge to your bill, which you think would be an incentive to the staff to be more attentive and helpful. Which they are, it turns out, as long as you sit at the back of the restaurant.

Out for a duck

This should not look like a sexy duck to you.

I've been trying to learn a new thing every day, and today I was worried that, stuck at my desk with nobody but a database to talk to, I'd learn nothing. Luckily, I had a 9pm haircut scheduled, and the garrulous barber cutting my hair told me that Salvador Dali had sex with ducks.

Fika

Today I went to Fika, which is a Swedish cafe. In Arab Street. In Singapore. Serving food which is halal. There's a fair few collisions of different cuisines, cultures and nations going on there. A pity, perhaps, that all I had was some cheesecake. I suppose the horsemeatballs would probably have been out of stock.

Undeprived

After a week where I seemed to be in continual mental freefall, my mood darkening with each day, things have been on the up again these past few days. Last night I managed, in an all-too-rare act of discipline, to go to bed at 10. That meant that rather than having to be unloaded from my bed and shoved out onto the cold, harsh streets of Singapore, I woke feeling fresh and mentally capable.

Cats

There are lots of cats that live around the HDB flats.

They can't live in the flats themselves, because cats are noisy and smelly, whereas dogs are reliably silent and fastidious. Many is the postman who will have bad memories of being savaged by a vicious housecat, many is the man who relives nightmares of being chased by a cat off its leash, or of seeing his flock of sheep worried to death by a cat turned loose in a field. They might appear friendly and fetch a ball when you throw it, but cats - oh, hang on, that's dogs I'm talking about. It's easy to get confused.