Halloween in Sing'

Something about

       Don't Take

           LIFE

     too seriously....

at a try-hard hipster coffee-counter in Selegie Road opposite SOTA.

         Around the corner in Bras Basah Road past Rendezvous Hotel, food republic at the base of Manulife Centre offered young blank-faced Chinese in neat navy cap with artfully arranged

         PORTLAND

               USA

         The construction workers in Geylang that were this young lad’s racial brothers never showed such a death-mask. Most definitely never. Not like young Portland carrying his tray to his window seat like that.

         You needed some stamina on the circuit: — now soft slender lass with her boy in bone-white carrying a bucolic version of the    

                BE

            The Best

               You

             Can Be.... (Something).

         Aduh! Capek. Golly. Tired.

         Along by Din Tai Fung, Molly Roffey's bar (12pm - 2am) neighbouring Starbs on the end beside the MRT at Waterloo corner, keeping right side of the shadow line to be sure like everyone else. Dodging and weaving the texters. PSI had to be upper 200s without masks visible was unusual.

         Designated Arts quarter on the urban masterplan. (SOTA - School Of The Arts, sits squeezed on the corner, weathered timber inserts that soar skyward covering the concrete bones beneath.)

         Around at Dome HALLOWEEN was hung over the register, lurid orange fishing-net stretched adjacent.

         Capek plus. Gotta await second wind

         We take a glass of warm water before the cafe, Yes, thank you.

         For the regular most of the staff delivered without order, even newbies. (Ice-cold sometimes was an understandable error on the Equator even for regulars.)   

         Latte listed $5.60, 10% off for regulars. Add 10% Service Charge and 7% GST. Five-ninety.

         Still, the room was rather wonderful, once the office of the old school, St. Joe’s Institution, where the current President had attended. Where he and the other upper crust drank coffee now on Orchard could boast nothing to compare.

         As an especially favoured regular one also received extra biscotti and panda or monkey illustration, depending on the barista. (Heart and leaf from the year before had been retired. Hearts had had a big, island-wide run in the branding a couple of years ago, with no clear successor emerged as yet.)

         Lunch had been with Gabby at KV prior to the Jogja trip upcoming in the morning. Pesky retired Divine continued to refuse to wear the handsome gifted straw-boater; but then neither has the old Queensland floppy been sighted many a month now.

         A few days ago the Gurkhas were in the news again. The extensive encampment of the trusty old Nepalese warriors out at Bartley Ridge had been circumnavigated in company with the Divine eighteen months before. A most memorable excursion. Who would have thought? More than a dozen tall towers that housed over two thousand hardened men alone.

         Well, Gab had discovered an odd procedure for the recruitment. In the regular selection process in the North one thousand young men underwent the most searching, the most rigorous examination. The inspection of young manhood likely had nothing like it anywhere to compare. (Could even Special Forces hold a candle to the mountaineers?)

         From this large initial cohort usually a mere forty or fifty candidates would pass muster for the final in-take. So few able to jump the required hoops. Of this number too, further winnowing took place before the Brits accepted their final contingent.

         The local element then.

         For their own purposes, the Republic of Singapura accepted those young men of the last group who had fallen at the final British hurdle. Ten, twelve, fifteen progressed to serve on the other isle in the North Sea and the remainder were given a life-line on the equator.

         Our gracious Queen naturally needed the best of the best even after the Irish had been tamed. But then the others were plenty satisfactory for the local Tropical nobility without all the goings-on left and right.

         Reputably reported by the former Divine. Fascinating.

         As a young lad in the Isa Gabby had in fact shaken the hand of the young Queen when she had visited her Southernmost dominion. Indeed, on the occasion the man had caught a glimpse of the lady’s panties too at an opportune moment in the mine-shaft when her royal Highness went down for an inspection.

         The royals in the old dart were a special case of course. Not to be wondered. The local billionaires and heads of government here could make-do with the slightly lesser calibre and only a bee’s dick in it ultimately you would guess.

         Perhaps further relevant: at the time of Will and Kate's visit here not long ago the Gurkha lads had been given patrolling duties with their mine-detectors around the streets of Raffles Hotel. For the portico of the hotel itself, however, only exceedingly tall, turbaned Sikhs qualified, chaps capable of eating babies from the spit and drinking hot blood, one could easily tell from a pass on the footpath.