Return of the King

Well, not exactly instalment 15 of The Lord of the Rings / Hobbit brain drain but rather the Return of the Keenan's.  It was one of the appendices in The Silmarillion.  Peter Jackson bought the rights last year and you should see the 12 hour movie version of our trip, in 2017.

We are in fact returning exactly to the day that we left the UK thereby not completing our first year in Singapore. I thought this was rather cunning but actually it's fairly irrelevant.  Anyway, it is with great excitement and a strange sense of dread that we countdown the next two and a half weeks before we leave on a jet plane to good old Blighty.  How we have missed you, our island in the sun with a little drizzly cloud above it.

I say I have a sense of dread just because now that I am rather well settled in Singapore, all the opposite things that scared me about moving here are scaring me about coming home. Driving, negotiating motorways and buying bus tickets.  Do they still have conductors on a bus?  I don't know and this is what is keeping me awake at night. 

I am trying to reassure myself by remembering that I have only spent 364 days in Singapore as opposed to 14,235 in London and Surrey so I reckon using an oyster card and speaking English again will hopefully come back to me in a few days.

What I have been thinking about is all the things I am looking forward to about coming home and focusing my anxiety drained adrenals on that to avoid worrying about the flight home on my own with the kids and trying to understand what a collision damage waiver is at the Europcar office at Heathrow.

It is of course a given that seeing friends and family will be truly lovely.  But there are some smaller things that I am looking forward to immensely.  I have detailed these below:

1.  The Weather
You may scoff at this given I am returning from 35 degree heat.  However, it is not the tropical paradise you may think.  It is 35 degree heat, every day and every month.  There are no seasons.  There is no change.  Just humidity and sweating, sweating and humidity.  I am praying to the UKip God's that they will cast down upon us cold crisp mornings, bright sunny days and cool evenings so we can relive that experience of warming the cockles as opposed to literally roasting them when sitting on a bench in Singapore.

2.  Milk
Give me some of that good old British super fresh milk.  I want it straight out of the udder into the bottle and onto my doorstep.  We have sampled a few different milks over here.  Generally the expats tend to favour the Aussie brands but even they taste a bit like feet.  We did settle on a Japanese brand which we have been guzzling for the last year but recently found out from a reliable source who works in the food trade out here that this Japanese milk brand is actually made in Thailand.  Thailand has no regulations on how they process the milk and the word on the street is they are packed with hormones.  This does not surprise me given I have a face full of acne and my husband and son have developed breasts.

3. Roast Chicken
Eating out in Singapore is outstanding.  No question about that. It is wonderful, varied and cheap. However, if you want to cook your bird at home, the supermarket offering is a bit depressing.  I am looking forward to eating a big fat roast chicken.  A chicken that is actually a chicken and not a decapitated pigeon that has been run over by a car, shaved and washed.

4.  Chewing Gum
I am going to buy a packet of double mint and chew the whole damn thing in one go ... with the wrappers on.   I am going to chew those suckers until there is no mint left to give.  And then I might stick it on to the bottom of my trousers and sit on a tube seat for at least eight stops so it's nice and warm and sticky. I just want the freedom to commit a major crime without punishment.  Unfortunately, I can only do that back home.  I would be arrested here just for possession.

5. Clear Skin
This might have to do with our hormone replacement therapy milk but the sweat fest that is life over here has not done wonders for my complexion.  I am hoping the cooler climate back home will turn me back into the flawless beauty I once was.  Things have got so desperate that I succumbed to buying some makeup today, something I have never done before.  Other than a bit of tarts cheeks and mascara on special occasions I have generally gone slap free.  I am now officially too old and ugly to continue down this decaying path so on advice from my two closest friends who are both doctors and therefore entirely trustworthy I went to MAC.  One of these friends is also a makeup addict so her credentials for recommending makeup to me are sound.

The makeup shops are a little bit tricksy as the lighting in those places do make you look a bit like Katie Holmes.  The truth was I looked more like a wax work of myself even though the makeup lady really did a pretty good job matching my skin tone, evening out my 5 o'clock shadow and colouring in my zits.  Waxwork or not, it was an improvement so I purchased a bunch of stuff at a rather worrying amount of money and trooped home. 

Of course as I left the air conditioned wonder of Sephora and stepped out into the sauna of the street what happens to most waxworks happened to me, but I thought, yes I can feel the beads accumulating but she put a base thingy coat on and then the primer, undercoat and the foundation on top so I should be absolutely fine.  A few people looked at me as I walked to the bus stop home and I did think.... wow, I must actually look like Katie Holmes.  Of course when I got home and looked in the mirror all the stuff she had put on my face had started to combine with the sweat and I had long creamy drip marks running down my chin and cheek.  Less Katie Holmes and more the Nazi's getting melted at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I will be taking most of it back tomorrow.

6.  Automobile Contraption
We are renting a car for the duration of our stay.  As much as I am dreading the initial signing of papers, checking for dents and dings and working out how to get into 5th gear without stalling as everybody seems to do when they first take a hire car out of the car park I am really looking forward to having some wheels again.  

I have thoroughly enjoyed the public transport in Singapore because it is clean, cheap, convenient and to quote Dr Secretan of Green Wing fame, not the "mobile asylums" of home.  That said, the freedom of the road is very exciting and I intend to drive everywhere just to avoid embarrassing myself on the bus asking if I can buy a little serrated paper ticket from the conductors fanny pack machine.

There are probably twenty other things that I am itching for when we return but they are long boring and about as superficial as all the things I listed above.  

It is a hectic two weeks before school breaks up for the children and then it is going to be a hectic one month in the UK.  But even though we will be on the road a lot over those 30 days I know it will be great because there really is no place like home.