Number 1 in an Occasional Series...

Click image to enlarge catchphrase...

(Ps - Number 1 James)

A conversation (A play from Singapore)

1.

PAN SHOT THROUGH WINDOW to INT. HOTEL ROOM IN THAILAND - NIGHT. Outside it is just starting to rain. A couple, Max and Beatrix are discussing their holiday plans. She is flicking through some travel magazines. He is getting ready to go out.

BEATRIX
What's that temple called? Anchor something?

MAX
Wat

BEATRIX
You know, the one in Cambodia. Anchor?

MAX
Wat

BEATRIX
FRUSTRATION STARTS TO RISE IN HER VOICE

The temple. In Cambodia. ANCHOR SOMETHING!

MAX
Wat

BEATRIX
NOW EXASPERATED, SPEAKING AS IF TO A CHILD

What is the name of the temple in Cambodia that is called Anchor
something?

MAX
SHOWING EXTREME PATIENCE

Angkor Wat

BEATRIX
The temple....

REALISATION DAWNS

Ohhhhhhhhh

***The End***

If you're bored of this try...

Viceland. I've been reading it for a while. You can choose which country you want to keep pace with. The UK might be a good start, but there is stuff from all over. Quality is variable but Viceland extends 'being mean is funny' to an art form. Check out 'Do's and Don'ts' for example.

It's good to talk

Got back from the gym where I witnessed an amazing sight. A guy was having a personal training session. Nothing unusual about that. He was on the seated chest press machine. For all you gym-o-phobes here is a picture of said machine. However for the duration of his exercise set he was speaking on his cellphone with one had and 'exercising' with the other. The Personal Trainer was evening out the exercise by pulling the other handle for him. Then she made him switch the hand he was using for the call, and do the other arm. After this she paced around in a frustrated manner in small circles looking daggers at the ground, gave up after a while and made him repeat the set, again one arm at a time. They then left that machine and went off round the corner with him still yakking on his cellphone. I don't know what happened after that, but I saw his body swinging from the cable cross over, hanging by a skipping rope.

Musings on Muse

We went to see Muse last week at Fort Canning Park. Now I wouldn't normally have bothered
with Muse in the UK but there seems to be a dearth or 'well known' rock n roll acts making their way out here so I thought it would be good to support it. Well the other 'big names' hitting these shores are El Divo and Cliff Richard (I assume before Wimbledon starts and he's required to entertain Centre Court).


The performance itself wasn't bad at all, although I suspect it would have been the same if there had been 10 or 100,000 people there (and those going to see them at Wembley will be able to test that theory out - at least we could see them in detail with only 6,000 people there). There was very little crowd connection apart from one or two 'hello Singapores' through the set. The gig was also lacking a support act, just a DJ which at $110 a ticket seemed pretty mean spirited, especially as Singapore has a thriving indie scene any one of whom would have bitten their mothers arms off to play for free. And of course, there weren't enough toilets. At this point I have to plug Bone Table (from Hong Kong) who Tom Kitten describes as sort of like the bastard son of Thurston Moore and Nico.

One plus of the gig was that even Beatrice was one of the taller people at the concert and as for me well, I had a virtually unrestricted view of the gig. I say 'virtually', because it was hard to see around the sea of cameraphones being held up constantly. Now I've seen this in the UK, but never on this scale. It became easier to watch the gig on one of the phones around me and select a view from the field of little TV monitors.

The other thing that was unique to Singapore was the heat effect that can be generated by 6,000 cramming themselves together when it's already in the mid 30's. You think the global weather meltdown you're experiencing in Europe is due to El Nino? Think again. As we know, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo it causes 10 acres of rainforest to spontaneously combust what the effect of 6,000 sweaty Muse fans waving cameraphones can do. Of course, the time honoured tradition to cool off the audience is for other audience members to hurl their drinks across the crowd, spilling them as they go. Which is great, except in Singapore, everything is served with ice cubes in it. I'd imagine that the effect is like 'ahhhh relief' followed by 'ouch, ouch, ouch' as the cubes land. Well they looked pretty from behind anyway.

Final reminder, we're hoping to make it back for Glastonbury, so if you want to see us this year UK side, get your wellies in now while the price is still low.

Turkey after all

Slightly delayed by lack of photo editing, but some click here to see some edited pictures from our trip to Thailand over Xmas and NY.

We started off by arriving in Patong in Phuket province. Patong is really the Costa del Thailand, it's brash and touristy and the primary business is prostitution and vacationing, often combined. The girls are centred on 'beer bars' often little more that a set of stools round a bar, often 30 or 40 crammed into a tiny side street, though some are monolithic themed affairs with many phallic statues adorning their facades and interior.

However much you try not to let it, you can't help but shudder at the, and let's be quite frank here, guys who even their mother might have trouble loving for their appearance pawing at the Thai girls who are quite content to put up with it in the name of revenue.

The main reason for going to Thailand was to catch some diving at the Similan Islands and avoid Xmas. We'd scoured the Internet to find a boat departing on the 24th December, with West Coast Divers. We transferred up to the boat the next day with tour leader Milton (about the most laid back person you might ever meet) and the majority of the rest of the group. The boat isn't the most luxurious that I'd ever been on, but as we were the last to book, we got the worst cabins, below deck, by the engine room, and so small that you actually had no floor space, just 2 single bunks, slightly staggered. Beatrice threw an epic strop, but there was no way of changing them and we had to deal with it. Liveaboards in the area are generally quite small, but the team on board were pretty clued up and the cooks managed to produce an amazing variety and quantity of food from the tiny kitchen, including a full roast turkey and works on Xmas day itself. For my part, I'd smuggled a small Xmas tree from Singapore in my rucksack, which we zip tied to one of the tables on the main deck. You can see Mod, our dive guide looking at it in awe and wonder on the pics.

The diving ranged from downright excellent (Richeliu Rock) to a bit average in places. Certainly overall I'd expected a lot more from the Similans based on their reputation. We also had to endure some supposedly qualified (50+ dives) divers highly overweighted and kicking the crap out of the reef. To be fair the dive guides did their best to keep them away from the reef after dive 1, and they always ended up finishing 15 minutes before the rest of our group due to air consumption. We saw a lot of boats at any one site, so you can imagine the impact this has to be having on the reef. Sigh.

Anyway, lots of marine life, we had one dive spending a lot of time with a huge Manta ray, sadly my camera had fogged and all the video looks like London on a foggy February day. Ditto the pics. We also got to see a few seahorses, which Bea was very excited about and my favourites, octopus and cuttlefish kept popping up from time to time. If you really like fish pics (and I guess there are a few divers reading), there is a second album on Fotki.

The pic of the turtle and the Angel fish represented an amazing standoff between the two, as the Angel fish pestered the turtle as it broke up the coral in order to get some food of its own.

The second half of our stay was at Kata Beach. Lonely Planet had sent us there as it was full of 'bohemian, young travellers'. Whoever researched the guide wants to do more checking, as it seemed to be exclusively full of Scandanavian families, who all went to bed at about 10pm. We casted around the resort trying to find somewhere with a bit of atmosphere but with limited luck. Initially we walked around, but soon decided to hire a scooter to get around. There is a nice picture of me on the scooter with my 'purple helmet'. Just gay enough Mr Brown...

If you ever go to Kata, I can thorougly recommend a trip to the Dino Park Mini golf. It's both educational AND fun. It's like info-tainment. I also got to ride on a Ankylosaurus and you can't say that about every holiday. Bea also won the round by 2 strokes, but then she did used to play golf seriously. Or so I tell myself. Hole 17 was fiendishly hard.

Did a spot more diving, this time with Sea Bees. The guide they gave us was certafiably useless and pretty much wrecked the dives we did. He couldn't tell one end of a wreck from the other (literally) and basically disregared all agreed plans when in the water. Beatrice was super unhappy again, but she has always belived that the guide knows everything. We've made up a new sign for underwater that represents 'this guy is an idiot, let's do our own thing'.

We'd found the one decent bar in the area, called Nakonnai, an odd place with an art gallery as part of the bar and a house band who just loved playing music. We were tempted to go there for NYE but we'd been diving and someone had told us about a decent club in Patong that wasn't totally rammed with hookers and played decent music so we decided to give that a go. Owing to a miscommunication between myself and Beatrice we ended up with about 1000 BHT left to last us the whole night and get us back to Kata. We bought some cheap beers from the 7-11 and walked around the town which as it was NY had attracted a lot of people out and it diluted the bawdy atmosphere somewhat making it quite enjoyable. For me the highlight was going to the beach where people were selling fire ballons and setting them all adrift until there were hundreds of them. Firecrackers were being set off and rockets, and vendors were selling silly string so you could spray the surrounding area with CFCs and toxic chemicals. Of course we couldn't afford any of this, and we had to leave the beach before mid-night to get into the club which would have cost us 500 BHT each otherwise afterwards... Even so, we still had to share beers, though we did come out with enough to buy our own fire balloon and get a taxi home and the net result was not having a hangover the next day.

The rest of the trip we spent having massages and spa treatments, going to the beach outside all the nice hotels and sneaking in to use their pools and sunloungers until sadly it was time to take the scooter back and go to the airport. Luckliy we'd bought Borat on pirate DVD for £1.05 to watch on the plane, so it wasn't all so bad. Jagsamesh!

You can see a movie from the beach here. It's magical. Better than attack ships on fire off the shores of Orion.

If you're bored of this...

Why not take a look at Wikitravel and never buy another guidebook again? Well, as soon as the rest of the world gets WiFi coast to coast. Or SatFi. Or Skynet. Anyway, you can now while away the hours choosing where to go next.

All clear, no sharks.

No cancer. And the laser was actually in lieu of a scalpel. KIDS - next time you go for surgery, ask 'where is your frickin' laser, what is this, the stone age, are you gonna hack me to death with some sort of primitive metallic cutting device?' Apparently they've been using them over here for 1o years. Next time you see your doctor ask 'where is your laser?'. If he hasn't got one, chances are he's a quack and you should bolt and run. The same applies if his laser is attached to any sharks.

Another day, another scar

I'm currently recovering at home from a bit of minor surgery, having had a lipoma (fatty tumor) removed from my back yesterday. It's one of those things that because it's on my back I promptly used to forget about until I saw my friend Inecke, who would then scold me about not having had it checked out. This went on for a while, but it wasn't 'til I was in Thailand over Xmas and having daily massages that it kept being pushed to the front of my mind (or rather my chest cavity through over exuberant massage).

Amazingly in the papers, Singaporeans have been moaning about the state of their health service, having in some cases to wait for up to an hour at a walk in clinic to be seen. Now anyone who has been to A&E in the UK lately will know how laughable this is. It transpires that selfish doctors here actually spend time with their patients to find out what it wrong with them. In one case, peoples appointments were delayed by an hour due to a cardiac arrest and subsequent stabilisation. And people still complained.

Now I went through the private health service. Above several shopping malls are literally floors and floors of private clinics like a beehive of medical practise - everything from cardiology to plastic surgery. Imagine nipping into Paragon for some new Chanel, finding the last pencil skirt in the sale, and it being a little too small. No problem, just buy that skirt and nip upstairs for some lipo...

Joking aside, I had an appointment with a GP Monday morning, who referred me to a dermatologist in the same building and I got an appointment in the next 10 minutes, who then referred me to a surgeon. I could in theory have had the procedure the same day, except for a mistake on the name of my insurance group so I had to wait til 4pm the same day to be seen in another clinic. The most painful bit (well nearly) was dealing with the call centre who administer the scheme, who have thoughtfully limited being on hold to 10 minutes 'for your convinience' then cut you off. And it's actually 5 mins, cos I timed it. Into surgery on Wednesday (the clinic has a mini theatre attached). Seriously, even Bupa would struggle to compete. Oddly though, both my GP and surgery appointment were in clinics that were predominately plastic surgery, so I was lucky that I didn't come out with a 36DD cup as well. Who knows, maybe the lipoma gets turned into an all natural enhancement package?

It also transpires that I seem to have a bad reaction to local anaesthetic, which I'd experienced before when I had my last tattoo. At the time I'd put it down to having my lower spinal area perforated, but it seems that whatever is in the cream they use is also in the local they gave me. Anyway, it's like a rather nasty trip, not helped by waking up and seeing two totally unfamiliar Asian faces staring down at me in a room that I didn't recognise. And like last time, it happened twice before my body adjusted. Not nice. Understandably, they were reluctant to give me any more anaesthesia even when the procedure went into 'un-numbed' territory. They also used some 'frickin laser beams' on me and ouch they hurt (and people DON'T smell like pork when they're cooked which dispels a popular conception).

Anyway, hopefully alright now, lab tests pending etc.

Flying Wizards of Satan

Nothing to do with Singapore, indeed much closer to 'home'. The Surrey Comet wrote a serious story about a pigeon cull, but being Xmas, people have had a little too much to drink at lunchtime, just check out the comments. I especially liked Mr Dallingers suggestion made at 9:57pm Wed 29 Nov 06...

Click to read the story

Nothing stops the Shopping

Decorations on Orchard Road

If you've ever been to or read anything about Singapore, then one subject that comes up pretty often is the huge array of shopping opportunities available in Singapore. Orchard Road is justifiably famous for the plethora of shopping malls down its not inconsiderable length. A couple of nights ago, forgetting that we're in the run up to Christmas I suggested walking from Raffles to Tangs department store as it should only take 20 mins or so. The road was so packed with shoppers that it took about 45. It makes Oxford Street in December look tame and sane. And the Singaporeans don't seem to have got the hang of avoiding people (or is it just me?) leading to several ramming incidents. Shops don't open here til about 11am, but at the moment they all stay open til about 11pm. This is actually pretty good (unless you are a shop assistant) as it allows you to go to work and then do any shopping afterwards. Although getting a taxi can be an exercise in queuing patience.

Anyway, as if any further proof was required that Singaporeans are shopping addicts, yesterday Tangs department store roof caught fire. But no-one felt the need to actually leave the store and stop shopping. People were saying things like 'we felt perfectly safe, there was an official announcement to keep us all informed'. What like 'Will the gentleman on fire in the underwear section kindly proceed to level 2 where he can wait in line to be extinguished'. It's an interesting insight into the local psyche.

This from the Today newspaper "There was no panic," said the civil servant, who was part of a crowd who gathered to watch the smoky scene outside Orchard MRT station. "When the fire was doused, in quick fashion, everyone clapped."

Slumming it..

I've not been feeling so well today, some sort of stomach bug. It seems that I ate something dodgy at one of the food places and now whatever it is won't go away. This has caused a disturbance in the maids cleaning schedule, as we have by now reached some sort of agreement where I get out of the room and go to the gym or for a walk to do some errands etc and she cleans the apartment. She seems very put out that I won't let her in to give me new towels or do the washing up, frankly I thought that she'd welcome the change. Much as I welcomed the new toilet rolls.

Our time in the serviced apartments is coming to an end, so I thought I'd add a few pictures of where we've been living for the last few weeks.


This is the best thing about the apartment, King size beds in Singapore are 6'3" wide, which means a really good nights sleep.

Small living area.

Nice little gym. I usually have this all to myself.

Roof top swimming pool and jacuzzi.

The jacuzzi isn't heated though, so you have to do a few laps of the pool to get used to the water before you can actually sit in it. It's a hard life.

Note also that we won't have Internet access for a while once we leave the apartment until we get it sorted out, not sure how long this will take, so will be incommunicado for a few days unless we can get Wifi'd up, though with the early launch of Wireless Island wide it may be easier than we think. Wifi everywhere for free. London - are you listening?

Sea to Singapore

So we've finally arrived in Singapore. Looking at the calendar, it's only been a couple of weeks, but it seems like an age already. As some of the initial headspin spin settles, Beatrice has started working and I've been looking for a flat, which is pretty much a full time job. As well as looking for a full time job. So we haven't had that much time to really explore etc.



Once the flat was all packed up, it looked very odd, like something was missing, but you couldn't quite put your finger on it. The other galling thing was that prior to letting it, I finally got round to all the DIY and upgrading chores I hadn't done in 5 years, and it looked quite amazing!



We had the packers in a week ahead of our departure, which was fine for Beatrice who was off to France for the week, but I ended up surviving on sandwiches and things that you could cut up with plastic cutlery as everything had gone into the container. It all fitted easily into the container, which is odd because the flat always felt quite full. I guess the answer is to just rent a container to live in.

(Saying goodbye to the flat and the park)

The container is currently somewhere on a ship between the UK and Singapore, and then it gets impounded whilst customs search it for alcohol and porn. We had an allowance to send some possessions via airfreight, so we just got our clothes. We packed these so that they would arrive a couple of days after we did, but due to 'local inefficiencies' they only just turned up. As we'd only packed enough for just over a week this meant that we've been washing and drying nearly every night. When the clothes did arrive, it was like getting back from the worlds biggest shopping expedition and suddenly having millions of 'new' things to wear! Very exciting. Although the 4 season sleeping bag and fleeces are a tad superfluous to requirements.

For me one of the hardest things was having to give away my world famous alcohol collection, literally tens of bottles of premium spirits collected over time. Singapore duty on alcohol is very expensive and you can only bring 1 litre each. Note that all guests will be required to bring a bottle with them so we can replenish stocks. In a way, saying goodbye to the spirits was like saying goodbye to fond memories, as each one had a special experience associated with it. The two I chose to keep? The Ardbeg 19 year old and the Hendricks gin (website well worth browsing) survived the cull.

Many thanks to all of you who showed up and making it to our final leaving party (pics link). I totally lost my voice afterwards from all the talking. You are all invited to stay if we have a guest room. Everyone who promised to come and then piked, you can all come too, but you have to sleep on the floor...

We're hoping to make it back for Glastonbury 2007 (assuming we can get tickets) so if you want to see us next year, either start looking for flights or buy your wellies now while they're cheap.

Stop the world, I want to get off...

Let's consider the Earth's rotation. The Earth's radius at the equator is about 4000 miles (3963 miles actually). Then the circumference of the Earth's equator is 2 * Pi * 3963 = 24,900 miles. This is the distance around the equator. This is also how far the Earth's equator moves in 24 hours. Then the speed of rotation at the equator = 24,900 miles divided by 24 hours = 1040 miles an hour. Since I don't live at the equator but about latitude 1 degrees here in Singapore, there is a reduction of the distance that is given by the cosine of the latitude. (Cosine(0 degrees) = 1, while Cosine(1 degrees) = 0.999.) Taking the equatorial rotation speed and multiplying by the cosine of our latitude gives us a local rotation speed of nearly 1040 miles an hour.

Let's take London. A latitude of 51 degrees, Cosine of 0.629. Moving at a mere speed of 655 mph. And who said that life in London was life in the fast lane. No wonder I feel bloody giddy. Does this mean that I'm getting older quicker or slower than I was before? Welcome to Singapore...

If you want to see where I currently am click here. That's me, the tall white tower in the middle. You can see our pool. If the satellite is overhead, I might be waving at you.

Dear Nephew Gobo...

Greetings from Singapore. Things are a bit more settled now and it's about time I kept you up to date with what's going on. A lot of people said to me before I went 'are you going to start a blog' and I laughed at them and said no chance, but that was mostly becaue I didn't really get it (I'm too old to learn all this web 2.0 stuff). Having looked into it, it seems like the right way to go, and I'm reasonably confident I can get it all to work as I want it. Think of it like a regular postcard if it helps. Which leads me to unveil:

Great Uncle Travelling Matt.

Now pedants will say that it should be 'Uncle Travelling Matt' but that had already gone (and he's taken it all very seriously, see http://www.uncletravellingmatt.com/), so I skipped a generation. The rest of you won't of course get what I'm talking about. You can learn about it here.

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Uncle_Traveling_Matt

Of course it will be great to get emails from you telling me what you're all up to, it will be a strange world where we all trade blogs like photocopied circulars at Christmas (this year Jake learnt to play the bassoon and Miranda drowned Aunty Clarissas sainted budgerigar. How we all laughed...Anyway, Happy Holidays etc).

How it works:

Web: http://greatuncletravellingmatt.blogspot.com/

Email: You can subscribe at the website to receive updates via email. Email will come from Great Uncle Travelling Matt (rssfwd@rssfwd.com), please make this a known sender to avoid it landing in junk mail.

News: for those of you using Newsreaders:

* RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GreatUncleTravellingMatt

* Atom: http://greatuncletravellingmatt.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I'm not about to post my contact details, you should have got them from the mail, but if you've lost them, just drop me a line.

Hope to hear from you all soon!

Matt