Having a brilliant time out of the office, left in rather a hurry and left more undone than I’d like, but can feel my shoulders going down more each day and am beginning to realise that living your whole life for work is stupid. Have been paintballing in Norfolk, walking on the Gower and am stopping off in Leighton to see folks before going off to Singapore for a couple of weeks tomorrow. See you next week if you’re there, in April if you’re not, and I hope you all have as nice a time as I intend to.

Bangkok,
originally uploaded by kokeshi.

I’m in another hotel, one that looks a lot like the other ones I’ve been in recently, where I had a drink in the bar downstairs, and listened to someone sing My Funny Valentine while I thought about someone a long way away, and I will be very disappointed if tomorrow I don’t have to film a Suntory commercial.

The drive from the airport was incredible, everything very brand new indeed, apart from the taxi touts whose only concession to their new environment seems to be a suit. The airport follows the kind of grey-steel-and-curved-glass-with-blue-highlights template that makes me think of Canary Wharf, although the curves follow a Thai line rather than a Waterloo-style bulge, making it quite distinctive. That, and the fifteen-foot high multicolored statues of figures from Thai myth that gaze down unsmilingly upon you before Immigration.

Between the city centre and the airport they’re building a “skytrain” extension, I think: they’ve got what looks like part of a trainline on a series of concrete pillars that follow the motorway, on the other side of the latticework advertising hoardings, rising high above the bungalow shops and bars that make infrequent splashes of light in the shadowy palms. At first, I thought the tiny, one-floor buildings were vestiges of the recent past managing somehow to continue in the shadow of the future, but then I realised, passing the grey concrete pillars that still lacked a trainline, that they’d decided to skip the future and go straight to building the past: in the ghostly light of the giant advertising hoardings, the pillars looked like ruins from a post-oil age; Roman witnesses to the Saxons busy beneath them, relics of an age where ambitious new transport links were necessary and laudable, instead of hubristic and doomed.

This trip also made me realise how much I love 3G: I had a moment of worry when I realised I hadn’t even thought about a visa: google in the departure lounge told me not to worry. And despite doing no research at all on any aspect of being in Thailand, by the time I stepped out of the car at the hotel I knew what the exchange rate was and which banks I could use. The best thing is, it didn’t occur to me that anything was unusual about this until a minute ago, when I imagined telling myself 5 years ago that not only would I own a phone, using it to access the internet thousands of miles from home wouldn’t even give me pause for thought. I love living in the future, even if some of it looks like relics already.

Singapore doesn’t feel like a place whose inhabitants spend much time thinking about the impact of their activities on the environment: there’s an emphasis in the media and advertisements on straightforward, no-nonsense consumerism, with none of the morally ambiguous efforts to persuade people to spend lots of money on green products seen over here. In the UK, I’d expect an advert for a loan or mortgage to feature someone looking towards the horizon with a beatific air of fulfillment: in Singapore, the DBS ads feature a man in the back of a limo with champagne and two models, grinning manically at you, someone who doesn’t have either and is standing at a cashpoint. Straightforward.

And yet there seems to be a widespread awareness that Singapore is a place that can’t afford to be profligate. Space is short. Resources are limited. Ministers are photographed drinking recycled water to persuade people that it poses no risk (Singapore wants to become less dependent on Malaysia for its water supply). So is Singapore going to be somewhere I can behave with some kind of environmental responsibility, tapping into traditions of Confucian husbandry, or is it going to be some kind of karmic descent into branded selfishness?

So far, of course, I’ve got no idea. I’ve found two carbon offsetting sites, Climate Care and Carbon Neutral, who can help you support projects that will offset the emissions from your flight (and calculate the amount of CO2 your flight chucked out – my flight to Singapore and back from Christmas will emit 2.4 tonnes according to Carbon Neutral and 3.24 tonnes according to Climate Care, costing about £25 to offset), so at least my journey there is better than it was.

Once I’m there, I can recycle (helping the government acheive their Green Plan), read about living well in Singapore and look at a green map of Singapore , with recycling points and ecological tourism destinations marked. Probably the most useful site I’ve found so far, though, is the Singapore Environment Council site, with a whole lot of information on green groups and activities.

On a more corporate scale, there’s a Singapore Green Business Alliance, promoting “environmental protection, best practice and cooperation amongst companies based in Singapore”. The National Environment Agency site is pretty clear, as well, and if I want to actually hire someone to do something about making my business more environmentally aware, the Green Pages have a long list. Surprisingly, my new bank also seem pretty committed, offering advice on responsible business to SMEs.

So it looks like I can at least make an effort to reduce my impact on the environment. In fact, it looks like I can do so to the same degree I do in the UK, which isn’t really very much aside from recycling things and buying local food. Maybe in Singapore I’ll be less lazy and a bit more proactive. Or maybe Singapore’s consumer culture will encourage Fresh and Wild to move over here and I can carry on as I am.

I’m on holiday! In Australia! Which is kind of different to Singapore, having a lot more room to build along rather than up, and a lot less time for things like wifi (they’re advertising 3G Nokia 62 series here, which feels a bit backwards after Singapore). Sky is big and blue, weather is gorgeous, spring is here and all in all it’s a fantastic place. It’s like if the Med was vegetarian and understood juicing.

Internet access is a bit limited, though, so it might be a bit quieter round here for a week or so. After I’d been so good at writing things down, as well.

You know how it goes, you spend months sitting on your backside in the same office, staring vaguely at a point just in front of your monitor, talking to the same three people about the same three things, and then all of sudden you end up renting a flat on the other side of the world and taking more taxes than an impecunious baron bent on pursuing an unprofitable military operation overseas.

I’m sorry, that should have said “taxis”. Anyway, since I rode in from Changi I’ve managed to find a flat to live in and met everyone I’m going to be working with. It’s been quite a good introduction to Singapore, as it happens, having a reason to drive from east (where the venue that hosted ICET is) to west (where affordable condos and LSL are) every day, although it would have been nice maybe to do it without having to man our stand at the same time.

The expo/conference was good, though. I met a whole bunch of people there: some exhibitors who are doing really interesting technological things (lagless video over IP! serious!) and attendees, who were remarkable to someone from the UK for being almost entirely teaching professionals, with hard questions about the value of what we do and how our partnership with IDA would benefit them. It was refeshing, after BETT, to be spending time talking with people who actually stand in front of students, rather than people who just buy the kit, or pay for it.

And of course it was an honour to meet Permanent Secretary for Education LG(NS) Lim Chuan Poh, even if only briefly, and even if it was only to answer some questions about Racing Academy. There was a lot more media attention on the event than I think people expected, and gratifyingly we caught an item on Channel News Asia’s ticker describing the partnership between “IDA and Britain’s Futurelab”, followed later by an interview with the CEO of IDA talking about what we’ll be doing over the next two years (in which he mentioned by name one of my objectives for the next six months, so no pressure). I missed the interview, unfortunately, because I was at the

Changi Village hotel, the venue for the official conference dinner, where I met the rest of my team from the IDA, who taught me as much Singlish as they thought I could handle. For once in my dissolute life I left early, despite the easy availability of booze, recognising that the relationship between me and my new climate is something we both need to work on before it can truly be called postive.

Obviously my talk on Friday was sparsely attended and lacking in questions, it being Friday evening on the last day of the conference, but the workshop on Wednesday was really interesting, to me at least if not the participants. Two things stood out: the emphasis of teachers present on issues around addiction to games and the ethics represented by games, and the consensual, equal and I suppose just plain adult nature of the group discussions. I was expecting some kind of UK-style ego fight, where a dominant figure needs to give the rest some space, or a member who’s too cool to take part needs to be encouraged to take part, but there was nothing. Refreshing.

Obviously, the rest of the week was taken up by me staring open-mouthed at everything and thinking “but…how can everything be exactly like England and yet confuse me utterly?”