Home is where the Gin&Tonic* is

(*There are no hearths in Singapore.  But there ARE gin&tonics, and balmy nights in which to enjoy them...)

The children went back to school today – happy, happy days – and so normality has returned.  Unfortunately, *my* normality is rather more stressy than your average lounge-about-at-home person’s, and my inability to properly set an alarm clock didn’t help get the new school year off to the best start.  GETUPGETUPGETUP, interspersed with magnificent amounts of headless-chicken behaviour, and then discovering that the Girl had gone back to bed AND gone back to sleep… I’m getting a bit stressy just thinking about it.  But all’s well that ends well  (except, or course, when it doesn’t end well, but with a phone call from the nurse’s office and a request to come collect your child and his headache from school…  Deep breaths, tomorrow is another (child-free, hurrah) day.) 

This must mean, of course, that we all survived the hideous, gruesome flight home, with its many transfers and few opportunities to sleep. I had bought these blow-up-cube things which you stick in the space in front of your kids’ seat – they’re called First Class Kids, which even my children scoffed  at (particularly the Boy – “That is meant to be a first class seat?”) – and you look like a total wally as you inflate it from the overhead air vents, but! They were pretty much fabulous and the children stretched and slept and only kicked and punched each other (and me) occasionally, which frankly, is akin to First Class  as far as I’m concerned. (No such stretching or sleeping for me, but I had the joy of telling the bitch air hostess that one of my children had pissed the seat, and the consequent look on her face had me chuckling all the way through immigration.) (No, I haven’t been paid by the blowy-uppy-cube people, alas, but if they want to send me some cash, I have spent about $500 on school-uniformy stuff today – school uniformy stuff which is in addition to the entire school uniforms I bought before we went away) so any donations very welcome.)

Speaking about being fleeced, I got nagged into bringing the ungrateful offspring to Kidzania the other day (we still had ELEVEN days of school holidays left when we got back).  If you’re ignorant of these things – and for your own sanity I hope you are -  Kidzania is a big indoor play area, where kids get to play at being grown ups.  They open bank accounts and go work in photo-copying outlets or fast food joints in the hope that some day they might save enough money to bring their own kids to over-priced play areas.   It costs $58 PER CHILD to get in, and the best thing of all is that children under 8 are not allowed to go in alone, so you, the horrified parent, have to spend an extra $35 to accompany them.  For this you get… not a thing.  (Actually, that's not quite true.  There is a "Parents Only" room, where you can buy yourself the most miserable cup of tea imaginable for $4, and then sit with other ashen-faced parents, all wondering what they're going to have to sacrifice from next week's grocery-cart to pay for this lunacy.)  Apart from that designated Zone of Bewilderment, “Parents not allowed!” signs hang all over the place, so instead you stand alongside the 80-minute queue with your unmanageable almost-4 year old, while her older offspring race around shrieking and complaining about the queues.  Why are there queues?  Because, silly, only a handful of kids can work in 7 Eleven or Pizza Hut or the Strip Joint* at any one time, but – for reasons I still cannot fathom – about 128 continue to patiently line up outside,  desperation etched on their teeny hopeful faces. Throw in the Singaporean penchant for rules and inflexibility (“Queue BEHIND the line!” “CANNOT leave the queue!”  “CANNOT pee in the queue!” etc) and really, you have the makings of a particularly unpleasant day.  Bizzarely, however, the kids loved it – nothing gets them going like learning how baby formula is made (Yes!  I swear!) – and so now *I* am queuing to work in 7-Eleven to pay for the next promised visit.  (To balance this out, I dragged them to the island’s best value venue the next day, after which they all slept for about 15 hours.  THAT is my sort of place.)  

Right.  I must go eat dinner.  I will leave you with this, my favourite photo of, well if not all time, then definitely the summer. Where was it taken?  Why, at a bare-knuckle boxing match of course!  (Why, how do you spend your summer Sundays?)  Who is that screaming in the background (to the right of the referee)?  Why, the Girl of course – who, as my Textpat spouse put it so beautifully, “Looks like she’s about to jump in and rip that motherfucker’s head off herself.”  I love this photo.  It sums the Girl up so brilliantly.  (Incidentally, if Kidzania ever open a crowd-control unit – which surely they must – she would totally nail that job.)

(*There isn't really a strip joint.)