Keeping Time in Singapore

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ArtsScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands (where the chief casino is likewise sited) hosting a Cartier TimeArt exhibition at present. A week and more banners flying in the Arts precinct around Bugis and Dhoby Ghaut. No other place on the globe moves horological art from display case to wrist like Singapore. Full page colour ads in the Straits Times common, even after Roger Federer has slipped down the rankings (lord knows what his Rolex contract may have pulled). Cartier merely one of an extensive number of trading houses. Chap who founded "The Hour Glass" here — a Monash Uni alumnus incidentally — featuring in the paper recently after separating from his long-standing wife (also Monash - a downunder student love affair). "Horological Art" has been trademarked to this particular company. Jeweled time-pieces with visible inner mechanisms (a la Da Vinci) a large part of the sell in the trade in Singapore. Recent days our Academy star Nicole on page one caught in a lovely moment of abstraction with a thin gold band on her wrist. Her kind of English-rose bloom highly marketable in Singapore, you may be surprised to learn. And when Nic sells watches here the target is most certainly not the expat community. No, the refinement of the English overlords, their men of war, traders, clergy and law- and peace-makers, far, far from forgotten in Singapore. Indelible markings. Hong Kong must be similar, judging from some of the unfortunate name-calling of recent times across their water-way. (For further on this readers are referred to the posting entitled "Locusts and Dogs".) Whitening creams for example another big seller here, easily as large as blemish remover and anti-aging products. The blue and white striped shirt coming down Bras Basah Road this afternoon could not have been anything other than the original. One hundred metres prior the man had passed without blinking the Singapore Arts Museum (formerly St. Joseph's Institution—Jesuit) where on the lawn out front a slightly risqué plaster-cast melting Superman in oversized trunks lures tourists and courting couples with cameras. (Tropical sun more damaging than kryptonite.) Completely unflappable the chap striding by the contours of that manhood standing at about eye-level. On the opposite side of the road higher up the hill the Singapore National Museum currently hosting French Impressionists from the Musee d'Orsay (reported in a posting mid December). The Englishman had paced slowly down the incline from that quarter carrying a sunny look for his companion. In previous days he had patronized these and other museums and galleries — Singapore has a great number; the Englishman, however, a Londoner clearly from somewhere within the shadow of Big Ben, was highly unlikely to have seen on display within those walls anything to match the craftsmanship of the timeless ebony tie-clip he himself sported on this fine penultimate day of January. Early it had certainly been blowy.