Merlion city was awash with business types, drizzles of rain and a focused rushing towards year end and year beginning.
Singapore was just where I had left it several months beforehand - at the end of the Johor Bahru causeway and wagging Malaysia like some perverse dog’s tail wagging it’s slightly dowdy body. I had half expected, indeed wished for, an all lit-up Singapore in preparation for the Christian festival of Christmas. It was not to be. True, there were pockets of tinsel-mass – all glitter and huge baubles, but the overall feeling of Christmas had escaped, or had just been nudged out of the way by Deepavali. There, at the end of November, where Europe was all be-decked with Christmas cheer, holly and mistletoe, Singapore was still clasping its soft white office-worker hands and praying to Mammon. Christ was forgotten, and if he was remembered at all it was on Facebook or on those car stickers which preached to the cars, SUVs and mosquito-like motorcycles behind.
And then, rather surprisingly - there was ‘poo’.
It was unfortunate. I was loitering in an MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) station to the north of Singapore island. I had been awoken early to get my lift into Singapore. I was a tad hungry and still a great deal sleep deprived. It was my breakfast time and, on the way to breakfast, I espied a squat vending machine peering from out of a Singaporean news kiosk. Intrigued, I ventured closer. It was a vending machine such as I had not encountered before. Its sole function seemed to be to exude reconstituted instant mashed potato into a waxed paper cup, just that, nothing else. I was curious, perhaps not curious enough to try that machine’s wares as there was a red lit sign towards the right hand side, near where the mashed potato should dollop into the aforementioned receptacle.
Aside………I have to confess to nostalgia for instant mashed potato, or at least the kind of powdered potato, refreshed with hot water, which no doubt that vending machine would proffer. Back in the days of my impoverished youth – that is before my days of impoverished teens and all the subsequent impoverishments of the intervening decades, there was Cadbury’s Smash – instant mashed potato at its finest. The TV advert ran – For Mash Get Smash. I remember that advert involving metallic futuristic aliens but cannot, for the life of me, remember the connection between aliens and mashed potato.
Here in Asia, a certain Colonel’s Southern American fried chicken comes with a small plastic tub of reconstituted mashed potato and a drizzle, a mere drizzle that is, of brown cornflower thickened ‘gravy’. It too reminds me of Cadbury’s Smash and I further confess to a mild addiction to that soft, powdery pseudo-tuber, pseudo-victuals.
Back to that vending machine - the blood red sign, adjacent to the dispensing area of the mashed potato vending machine, read – POO. I did a double-take, and to this day I cannot fathom why that sign said POO. Perhaps it was some malfunction of the LED display, or perhaps it was a consumer warning – I shall never know, but I noted that warning and moved on mashless, hungry and pooless.
There comes a time in every man’s life when he yearns for the comfort of coffee and books. Ok, not every man’s life – maybe just a few cruddy, fuddy-duddy minority’s lives are afflicted by that particular yearning – but that day mine was. Still suffering the pangs of a breakfast not eaten, that yearning drove me to shoot to the fourth floor of the Ion building, off Orchard Road, in Singapore.
The day was characteristically hot. I was tired from a distinct lack of sleep on the drive down to Singapore and the passage through customs and immigration which, while not too lengthy, was nevertheless was wearying. Sleep was knocking my head with Gargantuan or was that Patagruel’s weighty mallet. I headed for the Books and Coffee corner of ‘Prologue’. Why Prologue I hear you mutter. It was simply because it was there, and the additional fact that the comfy chairs of Starbucks were all full, and the fact that Borders had long since closed its doors to the book browsing public in Singapore.
Coffee and/or cakes came with a free book. Free that is if you had spent S$16 or more on a single purchase – I had. There was a slight, perhaps meager selection of aging books available for ‘free’ - perhaps books that no one in their right mind would have wanted to purchase at the proper price. After a reasonable exorbitantly priced ‘Flat White Coffee’ sleep eluded me. Sleep just would not come, not even when I leaned my tired head against the double-glazed picture window displaying Orchard road and its tree lined fairway.
I was left in a bizarre limbo between wakefulness and the comfort of a leisurely sleep. Chattering Chinese customers, nattering netbooks and tattling toddlers forbade me the nap I so richly deserved. I just could not knock-off, nor could I claim any portion of 40, not even 39.99 winks.
Later, one meeting down and another were in the offing. Singapore was in danger of losing its luster. I was still a little titillated to be there - breathing in the essence of dollars and imagining what life must be like for the moneyed, and I momentarily regretted being simply the son of an apple-farm tractor driver - but suit-wearing, kow-towing and working under a boss was not for me. In the streets the sign sang – LIVE WELL, NO SMOKING BY LAW and SWING IT STRONGER. That last could have been an advertisement for Viagra, but turned out to be one for double-strength fish oil. Perhaps a better advert would have targeted hair loss - as there seems an inordinate amount of men with bald or balding pates in Singapore. I chuckled a momentary chuckle, and then swept my lengthy graying locks under my equally faded John Lewis pseudo-Stetson.
Meetings were eventually met, galleries were eventually visited, and the final metallic S$1 was collected from the MRT ticket dispensing machine. I headed back across the causeway, back up the North South Highway to my little Chinese enclave on the fringes of the city whose muddy waters merged beside Mogul inspired mosques. I was washed out with the high life. I needed to wallow once again in inefficiency, waste and a bureaucracy so bureaucratic that Franz Kafka would instantly have written an entire series of books about it.
