Business As Usual

We took a break from walking around parks today, instead traversing a little bit of the city just to remind ourselves it's there. We took a bus to Chinatown, where Noi bought something she needed for her sewing at People's Park, and sauntered up to Bras Basah, between the raindrops on a drizzly sort of day. This was the first time we've taken public transport since the pandemic began and it was good to see that everything appeared to be business as usual. It's only the ubiquitous masks, and having to clock-in with the Safe Entry on the phone going into specific shops and buildings, that remind you that things are not exactly normal. On the surface the city seems to be doing okay in terms of business being on-going, but I couldn't help but wonder about the stresses & strains that might lie beneath that seemingly unruffled surface. Hope I'm right in my assumption that most people here are getting by.

This uncertainty was a reminder of just how much I don't really know about this Far Place in terms of how it all works (though the same is true of any place I happen to find myself in.) Sometimes the basic economics of it all seem contradictory. I'm thinking particularly of the speed at which various shopping centres decide to transform themselves, which can't exactly be cheap, when there wasn't that much wrong with them in the first place. One obvious example is the Funan Centre, in which we spent a bit of time wandering around since we've never seen the latest version.

It's a pleasant enough place to be in aesthetically, managing to make me feel vaguely funky. But that's the way it was before the latest make-over. In fact, I can remember the earlier version I walked into in the late 1980s which was decidedly unfunky but did possess a laid-back charm and was home to a number of off-beat shops, including a Skoob second-hand bookshop. It must have cost a small fortune to have hollowed it out twice since then, but I suppose there's some logic to the apparent waste involved.

Happily the second-hand bookshops at Bras Basah seem to be surviving, at least the ones that were there last time I went. It would be possible to build up a nice cheap library based on the Penguin and Oxford Classics for sale. Not too sure that anyone's minded to do that these days.