To Clifford, it didn’t fit: the employees of a government board strolling along some of the corridors with toilet rolls under their arms. In Singapore though, a lot didn’t seem to fit at the time; and that was precisely its charm, its fascination.

In his hotel’s lobby, a chance meeting and subsequent get-togethers, had steered Clifford from the status of tourist to that of video consultant, at Singapore’s National Productivity Board. What luck! He was on top of the world - well, at one end of it, anyway! For the next fifteen months, he had what he could only describe as, the time of his life.
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Some eighteen years after Singapore, (and by then having lived and worked in a few other countries), Clifford met and married Charmaine. At his enthusiastic suggestion, they were to honeymoon in Singapore. He was jubilantly anticipating the prospect of showing his wife one of his most memorable earlier destinations. It would be both a nostalgic and a romantic journey, beginning, one could say, with their arrival at the ever-outstanding Changi airport.

Later, as the bus entered the centre city area, he sensed some kind of ‘aura’ he didn’t feel comfortable with: but he wasn’t going to fall into the trap of giving Charmaine a “used-to-be” guided tour. How could he possibly talk about the delights of things which seemed to no longer be there, to someone so greatly enjoying all that surrounded her now?

For much of each day, she nudged him and pointed, poked him and chortled, gasped and giggled. She was experiencing at this instant what he had relished back then: but unfortunately, everything she was absorbing and appreciating, reinforced his sense of.....was it loss?

While Charmaine was ‘seeing’, he was, well, not seeing. It became apparent to him that he would no longer find a middle-aged man giving a helpful back-massage to a friend on the pavement, a wood carver devotedly forging his objets d’art in his ‘shed in the wall’, the incessantly flowing, higgledy-piggledy interaction of waterside cafés, almost seamlessly linked to boats crammed with anything and everything humanly consumable. Now, for Clifford, it had all been “tidied up”; no doubt for the benefit of the tourist and, to be sure, the nation. Now you could, with the help of a guide, be told ‘how it was’!

Yet as a tourist, his privilege had always been to go somewhere to peep into its community’s life as it actually was; to briefly be permitted to see how they normally lived - of their own volition. This however, felt like an invitation to observe how their existences had been organised for them. (Was he supposed to be convinced that his little wood-carver’s quality of life would be improved by being allocated, say, two cement boxes to replace his wooden one? The opposite could be just as easily argued!)

He would never tell anyone, even Charmaine. He would hoard this. What he had, was a jewel far too precious to share.
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[filched from, re-hashed from or simply plagiarized from Itchy Memories and Tales Told...]

p.s. from author: I have two identical photos of the area - one of, say, 20 years ago and one of today. (But I don't know how to drop 'em in.) kpl