The title is bigger than this thought: just want to get it down before it flies away. We can, with our location-aware devices and our addressable objects and our ambient interactions and our wireless connections and radio flying around everywhere, rid ourselves of screens and touchpads and styli and become the pointer ourselves. We can play the city with our bodies the way we can play a theremin with our hands: by being in this place and not that one.

When I was in Singapore working with the Zoo using mediascapes, I had a dream of marking out a giant touchscreen interface, with a start button and menus and buttons, on a football field, and using the software to let people become the mouse pointer, opening files by running across real space and clicking buttons by jumping on them (accelerometers in pockets).

Countries that are in my µtorrent peers list

• USA
• Singapore
• Italy
• Finland
• Canada
• USA again (there’s lots of them)
• Germany
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Belgium
• Ireland

I feel like a CB radio ham in the early days of radio, looking for faint signs of people from far away and wanting to contact them just to say “hey you’re there! I’m here!”. I can’t talk to them — the only way I can signal them is to disconnect, and that goes to all of them at once, which is a bit blunt. But I feel like we’re connected. Well, we are. I mean obviously we are. I was thinking of the kind of connection I was taken taken to the Commonwealth Centre as a schoolchild to experience, the kind of connection that sounds cheesy and Hallmarkish, too utopian even for early Rheingold.

I guess we’ve all got at least two things in common, which is that we like Heroes, and we’d like there to be more of us. I wanted to be able to right-click on the Singapore IP and send them a message about having a singtel address and how slow their broadband is. Social objects again.

In the lift lobby on the way to the office, and in fact anywhere people have eyes in Singapore, there are lots of screens playing an endless loop of adverts, in between adverts for the screens themselves, promising to reach “business executives in a captive audience”. The ads normally don’t leave any sort of impression individually, beyond a sort of sadness that jungle music is used to sell tights now.

This morning, though, there was a great one for Yahoo answers. European executive walks into hawker centre, sees lots of empty seats, smiles, prepares to sit – but wait! Every seat has a small packet of tissues placed on it – all the seats in the hawker centre have been reserved. The next day, he’s back, with an armful of toilet roll in Yahoo corporate purple: two seconds later, every seat is wrapped. Success.

Using packets of tissues to reserve (“chope“) a place is something that my Singaporean friends here joke about, the way I might mock my countrymen for queueing without a fuss: still, every lunchtime it confuses me, thinking that a seat is free before realising the tiny coloured plastic square means it’s been taken. An expat friend of mine told me over the weekend that she’d tried to save a place using something else once, and been told off by an uncle – “must be tissues!”. No point something being a norm if it isn’t normative.

These tissues look like they’d be best at saving a place.

I’m back from Perth, the wonderful city with the enormous skies and incredible stars and friendly people. Staying round the corner from William Street helped me feel not too far from home, either, with Yong Tau Foo and fresh bau available just minutes away. A combination of Paper Mario and Cottesloe beach meant I was reluctant to leave, and perhaps I wasn’t really concentrating when I finally had to, but for some reason I failed to notice my Singapore employment pass leave my possession somewhere between the surly security people and the nice Quantas people.

I think of myself as someone who never loses things, and, even though that’s not exactly accurate, I’m still not accustomed enough to losing things to have a plan for when I do. This time, though, instead of imagining the worst and hiding in the duty-free, I went directly to the immigration desk, where I was surprised to hear myself say, “I’ve lost my pass, can I still come in?”. In five months here I’ve learnt not to take the formality at face value: most people here are pretty friendly, as long as you aren’t in a rush. Ten minutes later, after a brief chat in English, Tamil and something else with the people at the empty “goods to declare” scanner, I was at the window of the police office in the secret basement of Changi Airport.

It isn’t really secret, of course: if you’re a cleaner, or official, or policeman or bus driver, or if you work in the supermarket that caters for all these people, you probably spend more time here than anywhere else. I went to the office where everyone employed to keep Changi spotless and operating gets their clearance passes from. I don’t think they have many guests: it didn’t seem dedicated to establishing a relationship between you and them in the way of most public offices. It was more like the Lego sandwich shop I had when I was small: tiny, compact, everything you needed was there, but you wouldn’t really expect it to be arranged that way in real life. The bench for two people was next to the lockers, which were next to the desk serving as a kind of reception area: all of these were behind an area maybe a metre and a half wide, which was mainly taken up with slots for every pass used in the airport. Seventeen-year-olds with acne and guns hung around making jokes about missing the coffee run. The officer at the front desk had a hole in his sock; his colleague left the office as I sat on the chair they brought for me, stuffing his rigid nylon jacket with Panini football stickers.

I was there to file a lost item report, so I could take it to the Ministry of Manpower and try and get hold of a replacement pass. I was dealt with by an officer (in the UK I would say boy, and try and make you think of his clear skin and open smile, but here that word means something else) who asked me to write my addresses on a clipboard, so he could be sure of what he was writing into the “Frontline Officer CompUterised System”. While I was waiting I looked around the office: hospital numbers on the wall, the username and password (“police123″) for the computer he was using, a list of common offences and the relevant penal codes. There’s a myth the t-shirt sellers here are keen to propagate, that Singaporean law will have you for the most trivial offences, but these looked reasonable, or at least like their British equivalent, although worded strangely to my ears. My personal favourite was “Mischief”, which, unlike carrying a gun-shaped lighter, is a non-seizable offence in Singapore.

The report was ready, each copy stamped appropriately and signed twice, and each time he’d entered something he’d turned the screen so I could approve it: procedure, I’m sure, but it was novel to have someone seem to care that they’d got it right. The printer was old and grimy, and seeing the chipped pastel paint behind it I had a tiny revelation. On the plane I’d been reading W. Somerset-Maugham and Paul Theroux, and although I lack the quiet despair of one, or the gallant seediness of the other, for a moment I thought I’d been somewhere they might have written about.

There seem to be quite a few things about living in a different country that I find cognitively taxing in a small way – not enough to stop me doing anything, but enough that I keep finding simple tasks a bit more difficult.

I’m emailing a list of people who attended an event I ran last week, and I have no idea who’s who. Everyone I met that day introduced themselves to me with an English name: every email I have on my list uses a Chinese name. I’ve got the hang of patronymic followed by personal names, but relating that to English names chosen arbitrarily is a little trickier.

I guess that might be one more reason why using handphone numbers as personal identifiers might be appealing.