I’ve been in Singapore for three weeks now. Last night, just after sunset, I was out for a run, and thought about the thousands of other Europeans doing the same thing, running loops and circles around Singapore roads; for a moment I imagined us spinning the flywheel, building momentum, making things turn faster than some people born here might like them to, part of a long line of outsiders stirring things up and changing the psychic landscape. Being here makes it impossible to avoid thinking about who I am and who I’m not, and while I’m able to pretend to ignore difference when I’m the UK, here difference is the one thing everyone seems to have in common.

I may have just been dehydrated and imagining things, of course. The last few weeks have been busy, arranging visas and contracts, meeting teachers and game developers, learning my way around new transport routes and vowel sounds, remembering how tiring constant novelty can be. But I think I might be able to see everything settling down a bit more, and I’m looking forward to having more time to consider some of the things that have struck me since I arrived here: modernity, time and the spirit world, place and history, language, culture and power. These are all things I don’t understand and that seem especially present in everything right now.

says someone in Underworld, and, I forget who, maybe the Italian who runs, this is usually true but for this time, I don´t usually read novels but I read this one and also An Equal Music, which made me want to swim back to England and pick up my violin and try the first eight bars of the Kreutzer again, like I could properly play them this time, despite the time spent doing things other than playing, and both of them together along with the change of scenery and the sea and the way the landscape seems to be more in three dimensions here, what with the angles of the rock and the textures of the scrubland and the way the pine trees bend in the path of winds with names, both of them made me think much more than I have been recently about what´s really important in the world. Language and memory and the ways we build ourselves.

Back next week. See you then.

Most places I’ve lived have been in the process of remaking themselves, whether reconfiguring local shops to better reflect a newly gentrified demographic, or tearing down post-war terraces to make room for plate glass and swipe-card gates, and as a result part of my landscape has always been cranes: sturdy red English towers with a tiny St George fluttering bravely on the jib strut, or bold European yellow with contoured cabs and tidy concrete counterweights, all standing sentinel over the crawling anthills below. Sometimes I’ve imagined these cranes as part of the city’s immune system, removing debris from the wounds beneath them, or helping to grow the new concrete bones that the city needs to live. At sunset in high places you can see herds of them striding slowly among the arterial roads, looking for cholesterol and unlicensed tipping.

I always imagined that being a crane operator would be different to any other job on a building site: entering the site with the rest, checking your safety hat, perhaps eating a thin bacon sandwich from the van, but always leaving them early to grip the first rung and start the long climb away, to the glass box where the ground looks unreal and mistakes are so consequential. Up there the radio link to your colleagues below would be slow and clumsy compared to the signals and nods that pass between you and the other crane operators across the rooftops. On sunny days the shadows cast by the latticed jib on the cab would turn your brothers into strange amputated shadows – a booted foot, a firm hand and the rest uncertain behind the cab glass, turned to sky and clouds on the vertical edge of the city. In pubs you would recognise each other by the tanned wrinkles beside your eyes, and the way your colleagues treated you with respect but no affection, not trusting your love of the high places.

Last night I met a man who called himself a stevedore. He wasn’t sure whether we knew the term: I described him as an expert on lifting anything and he said “close enough”. He preferred the word to “docker”, which he thought made people think of tattoos and bad behaviour, and I agree that it’s a fine thing to have an excuse to use a word like “stevedore” and mean it. Most of his work is in ports around the Severn, although he modestly suggested that his expertise sometimes calls him to London, and he spends his time in gantry and tower cranes, lifting crates of things that come from far over the horizon. I was thrilled, though I hope I kept my cool. Finally, to meet someone who could share with me something of the brotherhood. I tried to remember that he would be surprised by my insight. Could he see other crane operators? He could? And did they nod to one another, closer to their brothers than the earthbound below? He said, no, not really, they tended to use the radio to talk to their crew.

On the way home I heard fireworks nearby. Looking for the light, I saw they were coming from the bridge I had to walk across in a couple of minutes. Should I walk on and cross further down? But that would be cowardice and as good as saying I don’t live here: I carried on to the bridge. Halfway across I saw them: a middle-aged man, hands in pockets, looking embarassed, and a woman near him, leatherette blouson and gold hoop earrings, with a carrier bag of fireworks and a grin on her face a mile wide, firing them one by one across the New Cut.

I have a thought, unformed, recorded here to await the fingers of an overenthusiastic evening class, manipulations I am sure that will be distinguished more for their earnestness than their deft nature or sureness of direction, yet still the thought stays here, and if I haven’t handcuffed it to the side of the burning page and left a hacksaw it should count itself lucky. Here it is.

Internet language, by which I mean hip internet language, the sort used by twenty-four-year-olds who have been twenty-four for long enough now to understand tax returns and how to make money from selling t-shirts that carefully mean nothing, the sort of approach to communication that thinks “i have an extra controller do you want to play as luigi i know that’s not much but this is my house” is a good sort of a thing to say on a masthead, the kind of speech that reckons that, if ordinary metaphor is two kinds of meaning and intertextual metaphor is three and that’s better, then metaphor which is likely shorn of any referent for your audience is NONE times THRIFTEEN better which is win, this kind of language is, I intend to propose once I’ve thought this through a bit better and the flashing lights have gone from my peripheral vision, this kind of language is a perfectly good response to the problem of having a thousand and two billion people at risk of reading your words.

By which I mean, analysing memey language (the language of lol and of fail and having all of things belong us, not specifically memetic language that copies and replicates extant modes of communication) according to computing history, or the affordances of the technology present when a certain kind of speech was established, or the prevalent youth codes active in the populations that propagate these ways of talking online might not be as elegant a way of approaching this indefinable (really) but instantly recognisable (honestly) internet trait as coming to see it as a way of preserving self through obscurity, a tacitly recognised capitulation to the need to remain unknown to most people (this is normal and healthy) while still being available to all. If I use a metaphor that makes no sense (“scratch and sniff” for “have a look at the archives”) then maybe what I’m really doing is looking for the least (not most) relevant yet meaningful connection I can make, in a signal that, if you understand, even inarticulately, my reasons for doing that, then you will understand.

My god it’s hideous, this thought, so different from the pure and snowy notion that drifted in just two paragraphs earlier. The class have been cruel in their passion, stubby and unco-ordinated fingers blurring essential features, warping what were harmonious qualities into the kind of ghastly shape I hope never has a pulse. Obviously, understanding the need for obscurity through language has been a hallmark of youth talk since things were copacetic, and the imperative to say things to be got rather than have them contain things to get is what makes cool things cool (if you have to ask, then…). But it seems to me that in this lies a possible defence against the relentless flaying of our social skins by the sharp demand for transparency issued by the web, that in defying Wittgenstein and making languages private we might find a way to wriggle out of the riddle posed by socially-targeted ads and Amazon recommendations, by googling new employees and only posting our good shots on flickr, and that maybe the development of the notion of ‘cool’ in the twentieth century is what will help us hang on to the concept of ‘self’ in the twenty-first.

That, and rooting bare-fingered through the slime and detritus of flooded cities for anything we can burn for fuel, or course. This might be a worry only for a very short time. But still: it’s an idea I’d like to record, to leave in its various stunted forms on the shelves of my inner art store, to wander about and reconstruct in its Platonic glory from the absences present in these muddled sentences. It says “notebook” up there for a reason, after all.

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.