Marking time

1. The day before National Day, we wandered to Home, wandered off to Lau Pa Sat for satay, back again for the S.A.D. show, which was remarkable chiefly for a video of one or other of the Little Red Dot posse wandering around Singapore with a huge white-faced paper mask over their head and your energetic dancing.

2. Last Thursday, we went to the Arts House to watch Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which seemed to begin with the intention of showing the, well, unbearable lightness of being, but drifted despite its best intentions into sentimentality (if not kitsch) by the end.

3. There was a BBQ and housewarming at I and D's new place at Joo Chiat (a few sausages, lots of drink), which is exactly where you imagine it to be. Dinner and drinks and Little Britain at YS's place the day after. J's BBQ the next week - a BBQ! With chipolatas and hamburgers and satay and kebabs and potato salad (not grilled, though there were roast potatoes) and stingray and prawns (courtesy of SL's parents). And then QI, which only the British (and Stephen Fry) could do.

4. I have been falling into books lately, which is less pernicious a form of escapism than some I can think of, but no less escapist for that. One of them was John Gregory Dunne's Nothing Lost, the first John Gregory Dunne I've read; it's exactly right on the ways in which people use one another, and the real tenderness among people. Steve found a second-hand copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and gave it to me; like all Ishiguros (or the few I've read, at least) it is very well done and faintly horrifying. Also We Need To Talk About Kevin, which is entirely horrifying but at the last shies away from concluding the discussion of evil.

5. The problem with code-switching is, of course, that after a while it isn't code-switching any more.

[to hold the title line thing in place]

At the end of the tax form, right after it tells you how much you have to pay and by what date, it says, "Thank you for your contribution towards nation building!".

So.

I'm up reading an article by the European Central Bank on labour productivity in the Nordic countries, and feeling like I'm back in school (to be precise - like I'm reading for Econs S - and a little glad to be able to recognise some of the technical terms still, and a little amazed that we learnt enough in Econs S to recognise these terms, and a little regretful that I never went on to be be able to do more than just recognise these terms) - and remembering that I did like this part of school, did like reading things beyond my knowledge or comprehension, did appreciate scholarly work, did like learning things. It's a strange thing to remember now - and a stranger thing to have forgotten.