New Worlds

Today we celebrated Teachers' Day. I first encountered this strange phenomenon - involving teachers being given all sorts of gifts & cards & generally being saluted by the student population - on my first day in a school in Singapore. I'd arrived here to teach in August, which is rather an odd time in terms of the school year here as we're only midway through the second half of the year, the second semester, at that stage. However, it made sense coming from England where I'd just finished my year's teaching in the middle of July. As with many events in Singapore, National Day included, people here assume these things are part of the life of all nations, so they are quite puzzled when you tell them that Teachers' Day is something entirely foreign to you and you haven't got a clue what's going on. Anyway that day in that school struck me as a bit daft, extremely noisy but entirely charming and curiously touching, and I suppose I still think the same way today.

Amongst other items I gratefully received, most of which tasted very good, some of the Year 6 drama guys gave me a CD of Rachmaninov piano pieces (mainly Preludes) played by some ultra-talented Russian chap called Nikolai Lugansky. Rather too expensive a gift methinks, but very much appreciated (as were all the cards & stuff, I hasten to add.). I gave it a spin earlier, and am now experiencing seconds, even as I write, and I'm getting that delightful sense of discovering something rich & bountiful. I mean, I'm reasonably familiar with the Rachmaninov that everyone knows, but my knowledge is extremely superficial and I'd have probably never exposed myself to the pieces on this CD thinking that this kind of late-Romantic repertoire wasn't for me - too overtly expressive, too virtuosic, too much going on. And I'd have been wrong, as I usually am in such matters. Listening beyond the surface and dismissing my preconceptions I find myself getting a footing in this world and my world becoming larger as a result.

And that's the reason I listen to music, I think, and also why I read. (I've decided that my last entry about reading was pretty much wrong-headed.) Both are ways of escaping, but they are escapes from the claustrophobic confines of the self into something much closer to the real, at least the real as experienced in other people's worlds. I don't think I always make good that escape - too often I don't listen or read well enough and remain earthbound, though glimpsing something, but when I do climb out of prison then, my goodness, the air smells good.

And talking of good smells, Noi is cooking her famous sup tulang this afternoon, and later we'll be feasting along with good friends Mei & Boon & Yati & Nahar, and possibly Karen & Anthony, though they may be too busy to come. The dish, by the way, translates as bone soup and if there is a more delicious, noisier, messier, more generally splendid way to eat, I have yet to discover it. What larks! It just doesn't get any better than this.