Singapore is known as quite a safe city and on the whole crime is something that you rarely see or hear about.
In fact, the local rag which is the Straights Times http://www.straitstimes.com/Home.html is probably the single most boring read for exciting news that I’ve ever seen. If you used it to lay the bottom of the canary cage the bird would take one quick cursory glance at the dull and dreary headlines and promptly launch itself into the nearest cats jaws rather than the alternative of being subjected to having the world’s most boring locally penned headlines staring right back at you between ones supercilium.
Now, the online version might be a little more juicy in the gossip stakes than the printed version, but if my favourite sub story which I once read, on what I must only guess was some horribly mediocre news free day was the absolute ripping catch of “Boy arrested for dangerous wheelie”.
Now call me fuddy but it really must have been some wheelie.
After reading this and digesting the full 2 inch piece I ended up picturing young kids up and down the halls of the HDBs reading this and muttering lines such as “respect dude...” or whatever young wheelie respecting kids mutter these days.
How is it that such pointlessly banal news stories reach the front pages here? That’s not to diss (see, I know the street language) the great skill and obvious newsworthiness of performing two wheeled stunt trickery but it’s simply the truth that not that much actually happens here of noteworthy substance which would be splattered all over the papers back home.
Having been brought up in England and having spent most of that living in London I spent many an evening home on the tube reading the local horrors of the day and assessing the probable likeliness of me being blown up/stabbed/becoming a scientologist before the imminent arrival of the Tooting Bec stop.
Not only did I grow up with said stories of death, destruction and deplorable deeds of dastardliness but I even had the ultimate torture of having to read the Daily Mail. It’s a wonder I didn’t turn out some deranged middle class conservative f*ckwit having to read that drivel through my most impressionable years. Talk about telling your kids not to do drugs. I’d personally have focussed more on the lines of don’t read this sad sack of shit excuse of a newspaper and becoming a complete twat.
Most UK headlines are made up of either the shock and awe type or focus primarily on a large pair of tits of either the silicon enhanced type or a pair of the political type. This is where things take a turn here. Large prominent breasts are generally not that much on show here and given that there is only one tit in the political hierarchy here, it does cut the number of likely stories down a tad.
The other major contributor is crime stories. Back in Blighty there are folks up and down the land too scared to come out of their front doors because of the delinquent mobs of alchopop fuelled hoards roaming the streets and bashing people over the head with their rolled up extra thick free CD, garden supplement included versions of the Daily Mail.
It’s a dangerous place I can tell you.
Not in Singapore though. As crime is relatively low, at least serious crime anyway, there is a bit of a gap in the market of things to pen. I’m not saying that violent or serious crime does not happen here at all, but you do feel like it’s something that has been removed from your daily consciousness. Having grown up in what some people refer to as up and coming areas of London I can safely say that the street wise edge that you develop as you go about your day is slightly subdued here.
A great example of this and probably the main reason to this story is something that we’ve all done many times before and was something I’d done for the first time since I got here.
Whilst on an evening out pre intoxication and wearing what were politely described as “Rupert Bear Shorts” I egressed a local taxi on my way to the next watering hole. All good so far but my fan dangled short pockets were a little bigger than customary and I deposited my mobile phone apparatus on to the back seat of the taxi.
I noticed this about the exact same nanosecond after I closed the door and the taxi sped off at what I can only imagine was the requisite 88 miles an hour as the taxi seemed to break the space time continuum and simply vanished. It was only missing that special effect in Star Wars where all the stars go blurry when Han Solo presses the button to go into hyperspace and they all disappear in a whoosh.
I’d have shouted some expletives and jumped up and down in the comical fashion that is associated with such conundrums of stupity but a six foot odd guy swearing out loud and jumping up and down in “Rupert Bear Shorts” outside Satay Heaven might just have edged the wheelie story to page two if the passing paparazzi had seen me.
Lucky enough I was with someone who had a spare phone so I dialled my number, but to no avail. Thinking bugger, there rides of to 1955 my perfectly good iphone, I wonder what they'll make of that. I tried calling it a few more times over the course of the evening with some of the finest courses of Satay that I’ve ever had. More on the joys of Singapore Satay another time...
By about the 10th time, a guy answered the phone to which I babbled without pause that I was the owner and that I was a dick for losing it and that if he could return it to the drop off point I’d be most grateful. At this point you see I was a little tipsy
At this point, he explained that he was not the taxi driver.
He did however explain that he’d found it in the back of the taxi and was giving it to the driver to return. After about another 10 calls trying in my best Singlish to describe myself and where I would meet the driver it did in fact finally turn up about an hour later. Where in the world would you get a random guy give a random taxi driver a $500 phone and expect it to arrive safely? As I walked back to my Satay I could not help but smile at this and think that although the day to day news in the papers might be a little on the dull side it would be something I could easily cope with.
Low crime is not no crime they say, but it does make you think that the world is not such a bad place. There are some good folk about. We just need to spread them around a bit more finely.
If that means that I live in a place where bad things don’t happen very much and that the worst outburst I’ve seen yet was somebody realising that they had 11 items rather than 10 in the 10 items or less queue then I can probably stop worrying about half the things that I’ve spent half a lifetime learning to worry about.
I guess that some deeper thought is deserved on to why the social make-up is actually this way. Why is crime is so low? Why is it that people respect the laws more than I’ve seen in many Asian countries? What makes this small place so unique whilst neighbours and foreigners alike seem to make such a cock of it in their own back yards? The deeper questions are the one that I’m looking forward to figuring out.
This week though, I shall mostly be trying to perfect my wheelie technique.
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