As inspired by Caleb. 100 things, with the ones you've actually accomplished in bold. I thought I'd add a small commentary after each one.

1. Started your own blog
Pretty obvious, this. Unfortunately I no longer write in it on a regular basis because the matters that occupy my mind in real life cannot be blogged about, due in no small part to a book project and an upcoming April event. I do feel like I am neglecting this and will probably start up again soon.
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
I have played in a string quartet, if that counts at all.
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
My brother and I caught it in the garden of our old house on Shelford Road. We gazed at it for a bit and then we let it go.
10. Sang a solo
Many times, the most infamous of which was in Secondary school. I still wonder what I was thinking, but at least I made a stab at burlesque before it was "revived".
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm
This scares me shitless. It really does, ever since Cuifen and Esther told me about the bolt of lightning that nearly struck them in RJC.
14. Taught yourself an art form from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
In my childhood, yes. I hope to God it doesn't happen again.
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
Again, a childhood thing. This involved tomatoes and chillis. The chillis were more successful and I ate them regularly. They were very spicy.
19. Seen the Mona Lisa
20. Slept on an overnight train
Was going from Amsterdam to Rome. I watched the Rhine until it got too dark to see. Kept getting roused by border policemen in search of drugs.
21. Had a pillow fight
Younger brothers are good for this. Not to mention younger cousins and Primary School sleepovers.
22. Hitchhiked
Together with four male friends, in Austria. I'm not sure if this counts as hitchhiking, but we got a lift from some random Schengen when we missed the last bus. That is why learning foreign languages is a very good thing.
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
Seriously, which 9-to-7-er hasn't? Seriously?
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
This happened once, with D. It was very cold. It was also not repeated.
27. Run a marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
At the beach, a long time ago. It seemed like so much work for so little.
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
It had nice food and can-can dancers. I was very bored. This resulted in my eating a lot of food and then walking around Malacca - the destination of the cruise - rather listlessly.
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
I'm not sure I want to visit the places where my Hokkien ancestors come from. They sound like fairly brutal towns. Need to brush up on my staring and bottle-smashing first.
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
I've never taught myself. Too stupid.
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
At a K-Box back in the BT days. The music videos were surreal.
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
Strangers have bought me meals, though.
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
Again, this happened with D in Bali. We'd had a massive, delicious meal and were looking for the club with a bungee jump. It was too early, so we went for a walk.
46. Been transported in an ambulance
Nearly. I was hit by a car in Germany and an ambulance was sent for. I was still all right enough to walk.
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
Yes, in Rome. Rome is a very moving place.
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
D and I were walking on the moors. Of course it had to start raining.
53. Played in the mud
Ah, my misspent youth.
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
I keep telling D that we should start a World of Warcraft speculation business or an ethical gold farming firm, but he says it's illegal. I tell him it shouldn't stop any good Cantonese, but he's sceptical.
58. Taken a martial arts class
A self-defence class in Oxford and a beginner's fencing course in Singapore. I was utter shite at both. D is constantly telling me to try martial arts, but my utter shiteness might result in terrible injuries.
59. Visited Russia
I will have to do this someday.
60. Served at a soup kitchen
The Oxford Gatehouse. It's a lovely place with lovely people and the guests were wonderful to talk to. Washing dishes and making sandwiches was never so entertaining.
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
Define "no reason". I have got flowers from friends just because they felt like it.
64. Donated blood, platelets, or plasma
65. Gone skydiving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
I still have my My Little Ponies somewhere.
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
I first ate proper caviar at the Tower Club, during some press conference luncheon thing. One of the few perks of being a journalist, I suppose.
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
In Thailand. To this day, I'm still surprised that my parents didn't mind.
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
The Vatican on Holy Week, no less. Many attractive priests were in attendance.
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
I keep getting bogged down in the nether reaches of the Old Testament.
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
I used a small wooden bird to pick at the itchy bits.
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
Oh yes. Indeed. Very famous.
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
My grandfather died when I was in Oxford. It still pains me that I didn't get to say goodbye.
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a mobile phone
It's too smart for its own good.
99. Been stung by a bee
Twice. Once I got stung on my neck and had to wear a scarf for a few days to hide the mark.
100. Read an entire book in one day
This has happened many times. I almost feel guilty.

31/100.

The exotic Orient: temples, rickshaws, queer local customs and balmy equatorial breezes. Watch and be colonial Art Deco-ed out of your wits.

I cannot ope mine eyes,
But thou art ready there to catch
My morning-soul and sacrifice:
Then we must needs for that day make a match.

My God, what is a heart?
Silver, or gold, or precious stone,
Or star, or rainbow, or a part
Of all these things, or all of them in one?

My God, what is a heart,
That thou shouldst it so eye, and woo,
Pouring upon it all thy art,
As if that thou hadst nothing else to do?

Indeed man's whole estate
Amounts (and richly) to serve thee:
He did not heav'n and earth create,
Yet studies them, not him by whom they be.

Teach me thy love to know;
That this new light, which now I see,
May both the work and workman show:
Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee.
- George Herbert, Matins

I left off writing on this blog for a while because things had gone complicated and work's death grip of powerless tedium tightened several hundredfold. Since I last wrote the department I slave in has been reorganised, moving us up one notch from inefficiency to sheer chaos. The newspaper has been redesigned, thus adding to said chaos and transforming it into directionless mayhem, to say nothing of the rather depressing colour scheme and several dozen technical tweaks that have been as useful to my job as ear plugs to a blind man. I promptly fell ill with some sort of nerve-induced ailment, which was a stroke of luck because I got to stay at home for two days; you know you truly hate your job when you'd glady take on half a week of acid in your gullet just to avoid having to turn up in the office. Worse still, I was informed that I could be transferred to the departmental equivalent of Iraq by next year. It's all been taking place over my head, of course, but as a serf I have to be content with my lot and my monthly influx of groats.

Then there were the usual skirmishes on the personal front. My father has been testy of late for reasons better known to himself, destabilising the delicate parental entente and driving my mother to unusual bouts of verbal shelling. The Smilodon and I had a very rough patch, as the last post would have made obvious; this was exacerbated by my growing unhappiness in the office as the building vitriol had to go somewhere and, like all fallible human beings, I chose the one human being I shouldn't have spewed my bile on to do just that. Add to that the fact that I feel like I'm becoming stupider and more shallow after leaving university: whatever mental adeptness - far inferior to others' in the first place - I once made a pretense to is fading as I spend my days correcting copy and trying to make long captions fit in small spaces. Wit gives way to platitudes as the closest thing I get to self-expression is forcing headlines into increasingly tight columns. Theory transforms into dogma as I find my ideas and feelings unchallenged by academic rigour. The scariest part is: I have no more time or energy to think, to read, to reflect. All I do is flit from annoyance to anger to ennui.

There have been small pockets of respite, however. Rejoicing for the moment at the weakness of the US economy, I seized on favourable exchange-rate winds to loot a couple of online shops which, for some reason, had timed their sales to tempt me to part with my groats: I suppose I can blame capitalism. Cheaper alternatives to riding at the Saddle Club, which has been the Spain to my Napoleonic campaign to save money, have emerged and I look forward to plunging into Russia in the near future. In a way that's a uniquely Singaporean capitulation, of course: Unhappy with your life? Well, shop! Buy things! Paper over the cracks of your boring lack of self-realisation by induling in the thrill of acquisition and material one-upmanship! If you can't exercise your brain, spend good to look good! So yes, I do feel an element of shame for that. I've been sliding down the slippery slope of shallow appearance-conscious vanity.

The Smilodon and I have patched things up enough to play World of Warcraft together. My family is more or less back on its old tack, which means the unending Long Day's Journey Into Night plot of recrimination, guilt and frustration chugs along in Act One all over again. Some of my friends have come home from greener pastures abroad and I look forward to complaining further about this wasteland of a country with them when the opportunity arises. And a small window of escape has swung open in the form of Degree Day, when I shall return to England for a week or so and drink deep of the life I've been missing here. Small pockets of respite such as these have fluttered down from above like leaf litter concealing a graveyard and kept me marginally sane and still hopeful. Or perhaps not exactly hopeful, but numbed and distracted from the full putrefaction of my life. I may be stupid, but I have horses! Oh yes. Horses are good.

Is this what working life is like? Perhaps, but I'm beginning to wonder if that's only true for the stupid, naive and terminally unlucky: namely, myself. The truly intelligent would be able to make themselves wanted, to infuse themselves with a mental infallibility that would send debaters, pundits and, more importantly, employers flocking. The shrewd network, hustle and ooze their way to the top, or at least to some comfortable and lucrative cubby hole; they make friends, influence people and wind up sitting pretty, doing what they want. The lucky, well, are lucky. So what about the rest of us talentless, graceless and ill-favoured cannon fodder? Mental stagnation? Emotional anaesthesia? A retreat into material excess, competing on bragging rights for who has the nicest house, prettiest wife, most botoxed face, largest number of exotic travel destinations or cushiest job?

It all comes back to the same thing, doesn't it? Wittering on about disillusionment and work and misplaced idealism. Struggling with an inability to acknowledge that I am indeed stupid and naive and unlucky and for God's sake, get over that already and just become one of those "I have a pretty life" zombies. Oh wait, but I have horses. Horses. Oooo. And aren't horses fun!

I would say something about how this comic seems to have hit the nail on the head once again about my emotional state, but I'm far too heartbroken to do so.

You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good enough.
You ask for a poem.

I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.

You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.

You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.

You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.
- Brian Patten, A Blade of Grass

Maybe one of the reasons why I am unhappy is my inability to find delight in blades of grass or trips to the pub or watching Blackadder on the Smilodon's computer while eating vanilla ice cream. Maybe I hope for too much and want the moon. My dissatisfaction makes me unhappy, makes the people around me unhappy. The cure could be something as simple as spinning that blade of grass a different way.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees -
Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
- W.B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

Trapped in a job that is the epitome of alienation, a pawn in some self-important office kingpin's game with no power and no creativity, I long for this kind of transcendance. My time not my own, my talents wasted, my hours an infinite bone-numbing drone of repetition and taking pains, I cry out for stimulation, for beauty, for simple feeling. I feel the seconds of my life tick away as I sit in this chair editing the latest dry-as-dust, self-congratulatory hogwash by some politician and wonder what I went to school for or which stage of rot my brain has attained. I have had just the right combination of learning and opportunity to become the perfect brain in a vat: a thinking machine to be harnessed for capital and profit but suspended, immobilised, impotent. I want to sing but all the words are repeats. I want another's arms but sensual happiness is beyond me: there isn't the time, there isn't the energy. I've been swallowed whole, consumed, my person reduced to a name in black type on a makeshift orange felt wall.

I want to be consumed by holy fire, to become hammered gold, to find eternity. But as it is I am dross on hire for a pittance, a faceless voice on the telephone asking inane question after inane question, a computerised sign-in name charting productivity statistics and error counts. In some sense I feel like a thruppence prostitute hawking my brain and my eyesight for whoever will take me, my mind disconnected from my will and lashed to the mast of the highest bidder. Fifteen years of school, fifteen years of learning to appreciate the curiosity of the intellect and the burning need to further knowledge, understanding, even empathy: it matters little in the real world, where it's earn or starve. This isn't Byzantium. My knowledge counts for nothing and my skills, even less. My love is trapped in a logjam of work schedules and off days.

It doesn't matter how human, or how humane, you are. Not in this wilderness. Just shut up, do your job and earn your monthly wage. Buy things that make you happy and earn some more. Keep your head down and blame someone else. Pencil your love life, your family and yourself into your daily planner. And if you die unfulfilled, if you started out with apple pie in the sky hopes and crashed to earth in the clutches of conventional domesticity, just be happy that your bank balance looks nice and your children are in good schools and your wife is still slim and your maid hasn't been abused. This is it. Face it. This isn't Byzantium. This is life.

After I returned to this small island for good, the Smilodon and I set ourselves a silly sort of goal: to try as many different reputable kinds of condom as possible. We started out with the brand that has the most formindable range in this country and, I'm glad to say, we've managed to sample all the different types of Durex there are readily available in shops. That, essentially, meant everything we could find in Guardian Pharmacy, Watsons, 7-11 and Cheers; it also meant that we skipped the Ribbed, because I couldn't find it anywhere for some reason, and the Avanti, which I know is available here but only in some sex shop somewhere and it wasn't that interesting to us because it's merely a condom for those sensitive to latex. There were many repeats and the more pleasant varieties were sampled more than once, but we managed it. Here is a run-down of the stuff we've tried:

Close Fit: This one is red, or what the box called "coral". I kind of liked the colour, but the Smilodon said that it formed such a tight shell around his member that he couldn't feel much.

Comfort: The Smilodon liked this one much better, saying that it was, well, comfortable. Apparently this meant more room for movement and a more relaxed experience.

Extra Safe: This is industrial strength, probably akin to wearing a latex sock on your member. The Smilodon likes Extra Safe quite a bit since he worries less about spreading his seed while wearing it. I also have a soft spot for it because it's the first one we ever used and the Smilodon's default condom until we started experimenting.

Fetherlite: While this does indeed result in greater sensation, the Smilodon isn't convinced that it's that much of an improvement over normal condoms. As such, he's rather unimpressed. It didn't feel any closer to bareback fucking for me either.

Fetherlite Ultima: This is supposedly even thinner than Fetherlite. Again, the Smilodon isn't convinced. Neither am I.

Love: This feels exactly like a normal condom. Apparently it has some sort of lubricant on it, but we really couldn't tell. Perhaps it has something to do with my innate ability to self-lubricate in highly respectable quanities. It has a rather odd box design, though.

Performa: I suspect this is one of the Smilodon's personal favourites, because it allows him to blaze away for long periods of time. Since he never comes before he's due - something I am exceedingly thankful for - "long periods of time" means something rather protracted and he likes using Performa so he doesn't need to concentrate on holding it in for, I don't know, half an hour. And as someone who appreciates "long periods of time" myself, I have to give Performa the vote too.

Pleasuremax: This is my personal favourite for all the reasons set forward by the manufacturer. It has a most intriguing texture that is detectable even in places where the sun doesn't shine. All this makes for a rather pleasant effect.

Pleasuremax warming: It's exactly like Pleasuremax. The warming bit seems pretty pointless: by the time you've put it on or used it in someone, those bits of your body are already in such a tumult that they're pretty much already heated up.

Select: These come in orange, strawberry and banana flavours, supposedly. They all taste sickly sweet and rather similar. You can pretty much only tell which fruit is which by the colour and smell. I certainly would not want to put one in my mouth for protracted periods.

Sensation: I like this once, because it has many dots. The dots feel nice. Second only to Pleasuremax, really.

Tingle: This one, I suspect, was designed for those people who enjoy putting toothpaste on their genitals. Fortunately or unfortunately we're not those people and the whole experience was a bit too much like brushing our teeth, down to the overwhelming minty smell. We liked this one the least.

Together: The standard condom. Competent but rather ho-hum. The cheapest of the entire range, though.

I am still on the lookout for the Ribbed kind, which is proving most elusive. But next up is the Espire range, which looks amusing if only because the boxes have pictures of white coiled springs and ice cream on them. All in the name of science, I say. All in the name of science.

"The first duty of a scholar is to learn languages!"
- Paraphrased from William of Baskerville, The Name of the Rose

Sometimes, I wonder if my current job is making me stupider. If the skills I have picked up in school and university are slowly atrophying from lack of use, if the knowledge I'd gained from 15 years of education are slowly leaking away as the mental card index gathers dust. There are moments when I test myself, running facts and concepts through my head just to rehearse them and reassure myself. Then there are moments when I find myself banging against the brick wall of mouldering talent like a musician charting the dread progress of their deafness. For each new skill I pick up here I seem to be losing ten more. I'm forgetting things: the arguments of the Communitarians, a particularly prescient joke by Gerald Cohen that he made during a lecture on socialism, the shining lights of post-Conquest monasticism, the intricacies of Byzantine government. I'm losing one of the things I prize most: knowledge and understanding.

Take language, for example. For much of my life I've been effectively bilingual: a rather Confucian and regrettable education in Chinese schools enforced that. Compared to my halting efforts now, Mandarin in Nanyang Primary seemed such a breeze. Why, it was my language of choice in Nanhua Primary, when English was a foreign landscape and even the use of the word "neutral" was greeted with incomprehension and just the lightest dusting of suspicion (it didn't help that I was making a declaration of splendid isolation in the midst of a clique war). Sadly, the "use it or lose it" maxim has done its worst: by the time I ended Chinese lessons in JC I was all set for a downhill descent that culminated in a humiliating interview for - laughably enough - a bilingual prize. Had my parents not forced me to attend the interview I would never have gone. I could see the looks of derision on the faces of the interviewers as I proved incapable of stammering out even the most basic sentences. I could feel my shame pummeling into my chest as eleven years of training went up in the smoke of my ineptitude. Suffice to say that I was truly utter shite at speaking Mandarin and I still am, to a large extent.

The same thing has happened to my German; this time, the decline is even more saddening. I learnt the language for five years and, at the end of it, emerged with the valedictorian's prize and - more importantly - a personal sense of fluency and mastery in German. The words, phrases and grammar game trippingly off the tongue; I conducted myself perfectly when I travelled to Germany and Austria with nary a linguistic faux pas. I toyed with the idea of studying in Germany or taking the Deutsch als Fremdsprache test. The first sign of my downfall came in the second year of university, when I tried conversing with a German man in a bar and succeeded, but only just; the most crushing thing was his comment that my German was "good, but rusty". Now, I struggle to recall the simplest of vocabulary. Just several days ago I nearly forgot the word for "crazy" and it only came to mind after some hard thinking. I try to conduct imaginary conversations with myself in German and often they run aground for want of a word I once new, or a grammatical form once familiar. While my Mandarin has improved somewhat after speaking it more with my family and in public, my German has deteriorated to the extent that I can hardly string a meaningful sentence together.

I learnt two other languages in university with varying degrees of seriousness. The first was Welsh, mostly conversational; I regret to say that I can't remember a thing except for stuff like "dw'i ddim yn hoffi coffi" and "da iawn, diolch" and "nofio am saith o'r gloch bore yfory" (and I don't even know if I've got those right, frankly). That and the interesting mutations and how to pronounce the fascinating "ll" sound. I took lessons for only an Oxford University year and would have continued if the Russian classes hadn't jumped on me, making the prospect of struggling with two new languages at once rather daunting. Hence I don't really regret not remembering much Welsh: I couldn't have really absorbed much in 24 weeks and I reckon I could pick it up pretty readily if I tried - which I would like to do, since I love the sound of Welsh and I still have the Dosbarth Nos textbook sitting on my shelf complete with all the worksheets.

The more frustrating failure was with the second language, Russian. Words cannot express the sheer insanity of the intensive course I took in second year to sit the Russian Revolution Special Paper in the finals. I still recall shifting uncomfortably before the erudite gaze of the tutor as she read out the words in our Russian version of tingxie, or trying not to sound like an idiot when reading out the passages she'd set for us about life in Moscow or those bits of the set texts we were asked to translate in class. In some ways it was exhilarating and the most obvious testament to the newfound knowledge I gained in university: I went to Balliol knowing no Russian and, at the end of it all, with the help of Dr Natalia Keys and her uncompromising exercises, I left with enough of a grasp of the language to translate Soviet documents and do well in the paper. And, as a skill, it's very versatile: one moment I'm helping the Smilodon translate a Blok poem, the next I'm buying face products in Sasa with instructions that are only in Russian.

But therein lies the rub: I can only read Russian and write it (haltingly, as I pause to allow my brain to work through the grammar). I can't understand it when it's being spoken, or speak it myself. It seems like a singularly futile thing to learn a language and not be able to grasp it when it's shouted at you. The whole mental setup is very odd: when I watch Russian films, I can't understand the vast majority of it when the English subtitles are turned off; when they're turned on, the spoken words start making sense as my mind connects the English words to their Russian equivalents. Even better if the Russian subtitles are used, assuming of course that I can get all the vocab. It all makes me feel very powerless when I meet Russian people on the street and have no idea what they're saying apart from a few scattered phrases. I feel like a parvenu when I tell myself that I've learnt Russian but can't even order food in a Russian restaurant. Sure, I can tell you what Kerensky is saying if you gave me a transcript, but I wouldn't be able to tell head from tail if you sent me back in a time machine.

I've always valued languages, just as William of Baskerville did. I've always believed that understanding language is crucial to understanding the scholarship conducted in that language and bringing it to light. You need to know the language before you can begin full-scale historical work, before you can plunge eyeball-deep into the archives. Of course, there are the old chestnuts of language being essential to the understanding of culture and so on; but this is something that cuts to the quick of what I love and what I want to do. I want to do history and that discipline is peculiarly sensitive to the demands of language: how can I really undertake to study the Romans if I don't know Latin, or the Abbasids if I don't know Arabic? How can I hold meaningful discussions with the sources if I don't even know what they're saying? And how can I even think of doing research if I can't understand a language in full audio-visual colour, if a text is open to me but a film closed, if I can only read fan ti and not jian ti zi?

It's immensely frustrating to feel, on the one hand, the languages I'd once been able to master slipping from my mind, and have, on the other, the new ones I've learnt turn out all half-baked and incomplete. I know I'm capable of resuscitating what I've lost and solidifying what I've gained, but I don't have the time and resources any more. So even as I sit here correcting people's grammar, I find my own grasp of language fading and the delight I once felt in trying out a new German turn of phrase or unravelling a tough Russian sentence slowly crumble. An inevitable casualty of working life, I suppose.

Working the job that I do, I often get the chance to read the news the day before it comes out in the papers. So it was with a mixture of despair and disbelief that I learned about an hour ago that the New 7th Storey Hotel will be torn down by the end of this year to make way for the new Bugis Downtown Line MRT station.

Now I've only stayed at the New 7th Storey once, but the experience was such a pleasant one that I can't help but be fond of the old place. Before that I'd always passed the building when my family drove down Rochor Road. I liked it even then, a charming pastel anachronism next to the glossy facade of Bugis Junction, a '50s stalwart pasted next to the kitsch commercialism of the DHL balloon. It stood alone on that patch of land, a rather random oddity which made me wonder where all the other buildings had gone. I remember this one particular time as a child, when we drove by and I remarked to myself that the hotel's signboard had a nice font, that it had "Ban Leong Co" written in one of those old-style painted company coats-of-arms so beloved by Chinese businesses and that its very name was ironic: I had counted the floors and found that there were nine. And when it came time for the Smilodon and myself to find a place for another of our trysts that wasn't Lloyd's or Keong Saik, I decided to give the place a shot. I'd heard about its manual lift, the last of its kind here, and the man who answered the phone when I called to make inquiries was reassuringly gruff.

Sure, part of its charm was meeting the Smilodon and planning the bonanza of festivities that swept him off his feet. But there was something about the New 7th Storey that raised the experience beyond our usual covert operations in Lloyd's or Keong Saik. Just walking in through the glass doors was like stepping into a time warp: the lobby painted in cheerful colours, the prim but worn sofas and tables cluttered in artistic disarray. A huge old clock hung on the wall, its face massive and its tick deep. The lift operators were all genial old ah peks in Hawaiian shirts. The lift was everything that it promised to be and more: it obligingly broke down for us as one point and the man at the counter had to walkie-talkie the man in the lift to get him to press buttons and crank levers or whatever it is you do with those cage lifts. I know it's a cheap thrill, but there's something about being in a cage lift that's more exciting than even the smoothest gliding bubble elevator. It was all dark wood and black steel, the sort of place we wanted to hold a photo shoot in.

The room was really nice, the cheap and cheerful sort that was, amazingly enough, of decent size and utterly spotless. The same rate would get you a boxroom in Keong Saik with minuscule windows and the sound of construction, but this place was light, airy, with a nice view of the field behind it and a bathroom that you didn't feel vaguely wary in. The whole setup was utterly homely, not the crisp sterility that you get in some of the upscale hotels, the kind that I feel uncomfortable sleeping in for fear of creasing the meticulously starched sheets. It had the same sort of easy hospitality that you got in a B&B writ large, the same sort of unpretentious comfort. Outside our room, backpackers lounged about on the sofas reading novels and families with squealing kids swept in and out from their digs. The hotel staff smiled and had this laid-back air about them that relaxed you. Even the random signs hung up on the walls, all written in shaky English, had an endearing quality to them.

We only spent a night there, but I'm fond to bits of the place: from the clock to the Hawaiian-shirted lift uncles to the weird signs telling you about the history of the place in dubious grammar. The lift in itself was definitely something. To think of the place being torn down, a shiny new MRT station where the hotel's brightly lit, almost tinselled lobby with its wood counter used to be - it's actually quite a disorienting thought, one that almost feels as if the reality I have known and loved is being chipped away bit by bit. It's tough to think that a place that you'd just come to know intimately, a place that you'd grown familiar with even as a kid, is just going to vanish like that. Having only memories to live on is not enough. Sometimes the tangible reminders of evenings spent with my family on drives, of a night of mayhem with a lover, need to be there, a landmark of life that one can see and touch and connect to.

I wonder where the lift operators will go, or the chief concierge, whom I found out has worked with the hotel since it opened in 1953. I wonder where the nice Indian receptionist will head to. Or the resturant next to the lobby: Will that relocate? The centripetal forces on all these lives boggles the mind. The thought of losing that tangible connection is equally stunning and saddening. And then I find myself thinking: what next? The New 7th Storey today; what's going to be demolished tomorrow?

The Smilodon and I are going to spend another night there, hopefully. We're planning on taking photos of everything, including the lift uncles and the huge clock. It'll be like bidding goodbye to a partner in crime, a snapshot of our love. I think I'm going to hug a pillar at the end of it and cry, just a little.