trifles

so after a few weeks of living out of a suitcase and then a week avoiding the apartment we've moved into due to an abscence of furniture, life seems to be getting back to an approximation of what it was just over two and a half years ago

i have a ridiculously large amount of time to idle away over the week, which i spend in solitary pursuits, and seem to cram in most of my working hours over friday, saturday and sunday, allowing me little time to socialise with anybody i know over the weekends while k. has days when he's very free and others when he seems to be working eighteen hours a day - and, as before we look forward to public holidays as the only days off we actually have together and the only nights when i can go out on the piss with people i know

it's quite bizarre - i went back to england to catch up on my classroom teaching skills and here i am back in singapore writing and running presentation skills workshops for staff of a famous burger outlet named after a certain old gentleman who had a farm with an e-i-e-i-o - not quite what i was expecting - but as wise mr heaton once wrote, go with the flow

i think one of the more surprising aspects of returning here after a break has been a diminishing of my personal annoyance-o-meter - all the little things about this place that used to niggle at me just seem to wash over me now

bad service in restaurants, cafes, shops and bars, rude and obnoxious customers who treat waiters, servers, bartenders and assistants badly, taxi drivers who have no idea where they are going (or pretend to), the use of emotive tabloid language and slang phrases in the straits times, female news readers on channel news asia with their over-the-top pronunciation, radio dj's and announcers with their fake american accents who sound like someone's permanently tickling them with some sort of feathered implement, queue-jumpers, loud children running around unsupervised because their parents can't control them or they've neglected their responsibilities by leaving their kids in charge of maids who let them do what they want (and who can blame them?), people who stare at you unabashedly because you're a foreigner, discourteous drivers (and those twots who think that the car horn is something that has to be sounded every thirty seconds), locally produced television programmes with acting so bad it wouldn't be allowed in a school play back in the uk (we were lucky enough to catch a bit of 'heartlanders' the other night and didn't we laugh - the tears were rolling down our legs) - and, of course, my fellow expats, whose mission in life seems to be to moan and generally complain about all aspects of life in singapore just as i'm doing now - although i do (uncharacteristically for me) have a point

all of the above-mentioned things and a lot more besides, trivial though they might seem to others, would in my younger years often send me off, if not on a rant, then certainly on a bout of whingeing and general moaning in a typical expat self-rightoeus tone of voice to anyone who would listen to me

i mentioned this to k. the other day who said that he feels the same way - we were trying to work out whether this more laid-back attitude is a result of our recent overseas sojourn and travels or whether we're mellowing with our advancing years (as he's seven years younger than me, that seems to confirm the suspicion i've always had that i'm a late developer)

or maybe it's just that as we grow older we get to the point where we can't be arsed expending valuable energy on trifling matters