Rising Damp

In the car, on the way to the supermarket this afternoon, Noi suddenly brought to my attention the fact that my shoes were unsightly - to say the least. I wasn't able to look down at that moment, driving as I was, but at the supermarket I realised what she meant. Faint patches of whitish mould embellished the surface of each of the pair so that they looked for all the world like something a tramp might have picked up from a bin, thinking they might last a couple more months. A quick rub with one of the Missus's wonderful all-purpose damp cloth thingees solved the problem, showing that, appearances notwithstanding, the sort-of-mould didn't go very deep. But it was a reminder of the penetrating nature of the climate here.

You see the shoes were my back-up pair, left outside our place in Singapore, and left there clean I assure you, one month ago. That's all it took for the damp humidity to get to them - this being the rainy season - and how! In fact, on entering the apartment yesterday you didn't need a particularly strong nose to gain an immediate awareness of the fact it had not been lived in for almost a month and there had been a lot of rain. It smelt wet, a sort of woody wet. This is a smell I first encountered in the August of 1988, on arriving in Singapore. It permeated my room at the Garden Hotel, where I stayed for a couple of weeks, and that wasn't a particularly run-down room - but it had some old wooden furniture that was suffused with the odour. The sweet decay of the tropics.

Funnily enough Noi has been talking quite a bit in the last month about how much she misses the English winter, specifically, I think the cold clear frostiness you get at sub-zero temperatures. A couple of nights of that would certainly do something to our warm tropical damp, though I'm not quite sure what that something is. But I don't miss the winter at all. I sort of enjoy our warm damp.