an eventful period, or how we got to where we are now...

i feel the need to record this for posteriority lest i go senile and forget everything at some point in the near or distant fuchsia (my grasp of vocabulary is already fading as you can see) - these last four years have been quite hectic

we packed today in anticipation of our imminent departure on thursday - now we can enjoy our last two days without our usual frantic shoving things in cases at the last minute

i had the same feeling packing to leave singapore two years ago and packing to leave london in august - i can't fully describe it - it's a kind of low feeling i always get when another chapter of my life draws to a close - it's not sadness or regret - it's the same sort of feeling i get when i look back at old photos or videos taken at different stages of my life that make me realise that the way i was as a person, the every day routines i followed, the people, places and everyday objects that played such a big part in my daily life and seemed so solid and unchanging at the time, all these things are transitory - it's a feeling that with every change you lose something of yourself

it's strange i should feel this way as my life has been so transitory over the last three years - from the beginning of 2004 to the end of this year i will have lived in six different places and the year preceding this period was fairly unsettled too as 2003 started with the death of our friend rob in singapore at the age of 33, followed a few days later by the sars scare when singapore almost came to a complete halt and our work routine was disrupted for months afterwards - it was also the year we had a house guest for five months, our friend rick from melbourne, and the year we started exploring the newly opening gay bars that seemed to be springing up all over the chinatown area - not to mention the cruising clubs and saunas that suddenly started appearing as singapore seemed to spend the first half of the decade loosening up a bit - as k. was working for singhealth at the time and was heavily involved in the administration and the tracking of people during the sars period, pulling long working days, he often felt in need of unwinding in the evening and i think we had an unbroken run of three to four weeks where we were down at the fledgling backstage bar in chinatown every night, sipping our double house pour bourbon and cokes and eyeing up the clientele as they minced or bounded in

during that year we were also preparing to leave our goldhill apartment, the one with the gorgeous uninterrupted view over the only area of primary rainforest left on the island, and move into the robertson quay apartment, which was being built all the way through that year - i recall that time as a blur of furniture shops and the tap tap sound of simulated footsteps that accompanied k.'s virtual interior design computer program as you moved the viewer around the inside of the simulated apartment you had created

we always refer to that period of time as k.'s premature mid-life crisis - in the last five months of 2003 he gave up smoking, had a rather unwise nipple piercing, got lasic eye surgery and started working out at least five times a week at the california gym on orchard road - he had already taken out a mortgage on his flat and applied to a number of business schools both in singapore and abroad - i was in the throes of shedding 70 pounds on the atkins diet and getting a great deal of pleasure at the california gym perving at all the young guys in their skimpy gym kits as i jogged along on the treadmill or lifted weights on machines which i swear were modelled on spanish inquisition torture contraptions (well nobody expects the spanish inquisition!)

k. told me the other day that this sudden burst of life changing fervour probably stemmed from the fact that at that time he felt he was treading water and needed to take affirmative action - i had already passed through this point with my job after i realised that we would at some point leave singapore as part of k.'s career - so by that time i was just enjoying the easiest job i'd ever had and making the most of life in singapore while it lasted

we'd been in the new apartment at robertson quay for a month, after an 18 month wait for the building to go up, when k. accepted an offer to go to london business school to do his long-awaited mba - so five months after moving out of our old apartment, we were moving out of our new one - five months later again, after i had moved in temporarily with our friend a., and said my drawn-out au revoirs to singapore, i finished my final contract and joined k. in what we now affectionately call our pokey little baker street flat - thus began our 20 month sojourn in central london and my teaching experiences in those wild and whacky inner-city schools

which brings us round to august 12th and my first posting on this blog entitled 'leaving' - you can go back to the beginning and read on from there....