If I was an Indonesian bricklayer I would spend all day mixing semen: December 2008

Hello everybody, much love and kisses to all the family, and a few hearty punches in the eye to all my friends. I appear to be having a few problems with my Blogger layout settings today, as my account has gone haywire. Firstly the entire webpage is insisting on being written in Indonesian, which is a bit annoying as my extent of Malay/Indonesian has never had to go into the realm of computer stuff. Then I just had a battle with the transliteration predictive text, as when ever I typed something it would miraculously turn itself into arabic script. I thought I fixed it, but then it started typing Tamil. Well now it's typing in English (evidently) and I don't want to have a fight with it about the layout of photos, for fear that it decides to transliterate everything into Urdu and not let me change it. So for the minute, you all got to live with a messy page.

So Christmas this time has indeed been a different one. Firstly we took the bus down to Singapore

On the way down to Singapore suddenly the riot nazis pulled up while we were in the rest area. I never seen a water cannon up close, it looks so cute and dinky, sort of like it belongs on Bob the Builder. How strange that a cute little fire engine can be the stink fist of facist bullyboys. Note my finger.

We spent Christmas eve and Christmas day in the Lion City. Quite frankly I have never considered Singapore as a Christmas destination (well lets face it, who would ever consider that? Despite the tourist offices best attempts to promote a Christmas in the Tropics, Singapore just doesn't have the same vibes as say Lapland or Denmark for that traditional Christmas appeal). Well it's actually not too bad, the only real downside is that it's just so bloody expensive it hurts. Especially since the pound took a nosedive, the cost of beer is excruciating. Never the less, we went and had a genuine Singapore Sling in Raffles hotel bar (a first for me, and a last cos it cost a Tenner - and my Jew gland started to spasm, we sipped slowly). I got to see old town Singapore, around the Padang and the city hall area, and as always it made me a bit sad. Yes, I think I was born a hundred years too late. Ho hum.
So we did Christmassy stuff like eating too much, getting drunk and stuff like that, interspersed with having to physically force our way down Orchard Road as it was obscenely crowded with pedestrians shopping.

Here you may note a few of Singapores more tasteful christmas decorations, my favourite being the rancidly ugly Bauble tree, and the traditional christmas donuts. Ah yes, the traditional christmas donut, how could I forget. Almost as good as Malaysian shopping centres with their christmas clowns and giant plastic elephants balancing on beach-balls. Ah the spirit of Christmas is evidently open to interpretation.

On Boxing Day we all woke up early and went towards Changi Naval Base. Then at the ferryport we got onto a catamaran bound for Bintan Island, which is part of Indonesia, however it used to be owned by the Sultan of Johor many hundreds of years ago, before the British came (Bintan and Batam are called the Riau archipellago, and the Johor sultanate used to be Riau-Johor, so there you go). Mum, do you remember a really bad and biased program you showed me a few years ago, about how evil Malaysians are because they employ Indonesian maids. Well, anyway it had Batam island on it, as a place of vice and human traffic. It's just across the water outside my window, and anyway that program was a bunch of lies. Where was I?
Oh yeah, we took a catamaran, and got to Bintan which is really very lovely.
As I stood in the cue to get my Visa on arrival the man in front of me got heartily vomitted on by his daughter, this cheered me up immensely, not only to watch a man get his shoulder and back drenched in chunder but it took 5 people out of the cue in front of me.

So this is the view of Club Med from the upstairs bar. Beer, wine, house liquor and cocktails are all inclusive. And yet, for some reason I haven't been drunk yet. I have been drinking, but some sick little goblin inside me has prevented me from being outragous. I'm most disappointed with myself, and I have to make greater efforts for the next 2 days. "What's going on at Club Med?" I hear you ask, well quite a lot. The youngsters seem to be obsessed with running around and being healthy, and somehow I got dragged into the yesterday. Thus I went to the gym and regretted it instantly. There is an archery range, which I am well happy with cos I haven't fired arrows since I was 10. I'm actually not a bad shot, it must be the welsh blood.

Then yesterday I went on the trapeze. No explanation, photos say all.