There's a strange aura in the air

When i was a kid we had a dog, his name was Ricky. He was a Yorkshire Terrier and a bold little boy. Once my parents in their wisdom decided to enter him into a dog show. Well he decided there and then that he couldn't walk on a leash anymore and he peed on a Irish wolfhounds leg and decided to just more or less get in the way of everyone and everything. The poor little guy was tramatised for months. Well today in Singapore I felt how Ricky had felt that day at the dog show, and now publiclly i want to apologise to Ricky for making him go through that experience. Singapore is so regulated and so conformist that I didn't know where to stand, what to say or how to act anywhere, all the people dressed the same, walked the same and would put the Germans to shame with their complicance of traffic signals. I've come from Bangkok where you have to keep your eyes on the ground in case you accidently squash a dead rat!

Anyway if my life was a romantic novel, i would have sat in Raffells today and waited for my ex to come along. We would have had a couple of vodkas, realised that time does heal all wounds, silently internally commented on how fat/grey we had become and then with a hug and an air kiss gone our seperate ways. But today instead, I went and had my eyebrows shaped, had some lunch bought a handbag, and had a beer and people watched on Orchard Road. My life isn't a Jilly Cooper novel, or a Catherine Cookson novel, it's more like something written by Paul Auster or Ian McEwan, it doesn't really make sense, it's a little weird and there is rarely ever a happy ending, but at least now there is an ending. And it's more real.

Well the good news is that I wasn't killed by any Islamic extremists in Southern Thailand despite the dire warnings of the various goverment warnings. In fact the journey was pretty uneventful and a tad boring. Once i had settled myself in the wrong carriage on the train to Butterworth, just like I did on my first train from Paris to Berlin, and once I had re settled myself in the correct carriage, i was given a menu chose my dinner ordered from the bar sat back and just read my book. Once dinner was over and Marian Keyes had bored me into oblivion and i had had enough of being treated like a moron, I pulled my little curtain and slept my way thru the war zone. The only interesting part was the next morning when I was awoken with breakfast, plastic eggs and rubber bacon, and an english girl woke and yelled "have we crossed the border?". A dutch guy told her that we had about 30 minutes previously and she freaked out, it was hilarious. Note there were no Thais on the train. They can read the Thai dailys and had probably decided that it wasn't worth the risk. Butterworth is not worth talking about. I got a taxi driver to bring me to Penang, but only to Georgetown and he also came a picked me up at 5am the next morning to bring me back to Butterworth to catch the train to Singapore.

The trains in Malaysia are awful, by far the worst I have ever taken. But they reminded me of something. Irish trains, which then led me to a common demoninator. Built by the British. Hmmmm, my taxi driver told me I was, how do you say it in English, a fool, for catching the train through South Thailand. Agh but sure my parents brought us to Portstewart, and Portadown in the middle of the whole Northern Ireland thing, a little bit of civil war has never gotten in the way of a Blake holiday.

I had promised someone once that I would follow them to Singapore, well I'm here now and what's the point, I'm 8 years late?

Tomorrow I fly from here to Taiwan and from Taiwan to San Francisco, it's going to be a long journey and I can't see that China Airways are going to have English Language movies. But I've gotten a bit used to long monotonious journenys so I should be okay.

I'm not looking forward to leaving Asia, but i know that i can always come back. And you know I am looking forward to being somewhere where everytime i step outside the door i not long feel like I am being hit across the head with a warm wet towel. That'll be nice.