Thursday, December 29, 2011

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.

4 comments:

Trebuchet said...

Somewhere in MOE HQ is a room that looks as if it ought to smell that way. In the rather convivial atmosphere, however, I was amused to hear YOUR name raised, with a request for me to comment on your comments from a recent conference...

Brian Connor said...

I'd have enjoyed being a fly on that wall. It's nice to know someone was actually listening to me.

Hope your presentation set folk thinking. (On past form I'm pretty sure it did!)

Trebuchet said...

We had a diverting little conversation about the problems of IB assessment and evaluation. Thankfully, feedback was positive and some indeed claimed I had provoked them into thinking about the subject 'with a broader perspective'. Heh.

Brian Connor said...

Yes, your broader perspectives have a diverting quality. Sorely, sadly missed by myself, in terms of being delivered in person.

Happy New Year to you & yours!