Living for Disco

We are in Singapore. I love Singapore - it’s hot, it’s steamy, it’s full of delicious food (of which we have eaten much) and there are many cool things to do. On our last day, we decided to schedule in a visit to Jurong Bird Park, as it is, as I recall, excellent.

I like birds anyway - I became known for my ability to identify birds while in Namibia. ‘What’s that?’, people would cry as we passed some bizarre avian specimen. ‘It’s an ostrich!’ I would reply confidently, astonishing everyone with my ornithological knowledge.

The main thing I wanted to do was visit the Lory Loft, as I had heard that you could feed the birds and get close to them. ‘How lovely!’ I thought, picturing myself covered with delightful little feathered creatures that would eat demurely from my hand, whilst batting their eyelashes for the camera.

I am now older and wiser. Lorikeets are noisy as fuck, have very sharp claws, defend their food viciously and have thick grey tongues that are, quite frankly, unsettlingly reptilian. But enough of the wordy descriptions. Here, let me show you…

I left the Lory Loft with somewhat depleted hearing, and a number of deep puncture wounds in my arm.

Also I think they had fleas.

My sister announced mid-last year that she was hitching herself to a tall Australian who likes to take her fishing at silly o’clock in the morning, and does stuff like buy her flowers, and tell her she is wonderful. This is excellent, as my sister is lovely and historically has had a tendency to go out with guys that are a bit shit.

So, now that I have a job I can afford (for ‘afford’, read ‘get further into debt by being able to say I can pay off a loan’) to go to Australia to be present, wear a dress, get drunk, fall off things and embarass the family - although by the sounds of things, I may yet be outdone by some of the groom’s more interesting relatives.

Anyway, on the way, Gordon and I are stopping off in Singapore. This is mainly so that he can do the second leg of the journey in the Airbus A380. The larger that passenger planes are, the more they alarm me, so I naturally think this is a marvellous idea, and can’t wait for the experience. ‘A flying metal coffin with three times as many people in it as normal! Woo!’, I will say, as I down my diazepam and bloody mary combo, and try not to imagine the headlines.

We are extremely excited about this three day jaunt, and have made extensive plans, which we have annotated and marked on corresponding maps. Not an hour is unaccounted for. And it was this process that made me appreciate once again that I’ve found someone who is perfect for me; the process for selecting our activities went thus:

1. Work out exactly how many meals we had to eat between landing and taking off again.
2. Go through the ‘food’ section of the guidebook, marking off restaurants that we like the sound of.
3. Repeat, eliminating surplus eateries with the equation “priority = cost x distance from sites of interest - hawker centre interest rating”.
4. Work out list of bars in which to drink after dinner drinks with views of the harbour.
5. Mark on map.
6. Write list, with favoured dishes annotated (e.g. curried soft-shell crab; hainan chicken rice; banana leaf curry)
7. Salivate until forced to over indulge on cheese.

And I wonder why I’m not losing any weight.

I have been a bit quiet these last few days because my head has been like one of those bingo ball machines. I have been all a-flutter, and haven’t known what’s going to be spewing out next. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which I won’t go into in case crazy ladies start spitting up bile all over the comments box again, and you know how I hate having to go and get the bucket of sand from my special blog cleaning cupboard.

However, one reason is that yesterday I had a job interview. It’s for a job that sounds absolutely brilliant, and which I would very much like to get. The interview was over the phone, and so I found it difficult to gauge how I’d done, but it seems that they want me to go in and meet them, so I’m flying home for a week, in two weeks time.

Over the last few hours my head has been filling with all kinds of things, both good and bad, that I can look forward to in the UK that I don’t get here. These include:

my boyfriend
real ale
more kinds of cheese than you can shake a stick at
jaffa cakes
crumpets
rain
news features about pointless morons trapped in a house
sausages
clouds
ben and jerrys ice cream
book shops
television (not sure yet whether this is good or bad - I suspect mostly the latter)
grass (the kind that lawns are made from)
traffic

It’s alarming me how many of these involve food.

Yes, I’m off on holiday again. This holiday is one of the reasons I haven’t been posting much. I’m very excited about it, and haven’t really been able to think about much else, really. Not that there is anything of interest going on.

My mail has yet again failed to arrive, I’ve been battering my liver with fine wines and trying to keep out of the cold. And in Namibia itself, there’s been the usual spate of shootings, lootings and rapes - the papers are full of them. In Keetmanshoop last week, believe it or not, a 36 year old man was run over on the road, and not only did the car fail to stop, but so did the two cars that also ran over the body while it lay in the road. You see why I’ve been uninspired.

Anyway, my holiday. Much more important, I think. I’m leaving on Sunday, and will return to the blog on Monday 25th. In the meantime, if there is anything else you’d like to know about me, or Namibia or the world, once again, bung the qs in the comments box.

Ta luvvies. Back in a week.

One of my very good friends is coming to Namibia tomorrow with her Mum, to spend a few days with me, looking at leopards and cheetahs and other wild things. Yes - it’s that time of year again: my annual leopard-wrestling outing.

Actually, we’re going to this marvellous place. Last time I went we did some leopard tracking, and lo, we found a wild leopard, which we all viewed nervously from the comfort of the open landrover. They’re completely terrifying. You can see in its eyes that if you stuck so much as a toe out of the car, it’d have you.

Then we’re going to Etosha, to look at some springbok, and more zebras than you can shake a stick at.

I will be back on Friday, hopefully with all limbs attached.