Picked up by a white merc driven by an extra from a Gibson novel, technology integrated into the car in a way that made Bristol taxi drivers’ stuck-on docking stations and cradles look antiquated, all hung around with beads and charms (two doves in a wooden heart that swung at 45 degrees round every corner) and questions about rich Russians going to London, driven through peak hour traffic listening to the drive-time chat of a female DJ telling blonde jokes and labelling her callers stalkers, playing Radio GaGa and Billy Idol, passing signs to the BUDGET airport well outside the glass and height of the main strip, clouds taller than I’ve ever seen squatting malevolently in the orange and grey haze of the sunset, buildings whose purpose I couldn’t guess at (schools looked like tower blocks, tower blocks looked like hospitals, hospitals looked like big pharma headquarters), feeling the dirty heat buffet me in the brief intervals between air-conditioned spaces, watching the towers grow taller as the crowds got larger and the neon more visible, trying to work out where hotels stopped and shopping centres began, I almost forgot that I’d spent 12 hours without control of either armrest and was still sitting with my elbows glued to my sides.

Also worthy of note is free broadband and minibar, a potentially catastrophic combination. Go Singapore!

I’m off tomorrow: flying out to Singapore to go house-hunting, and to attend ICET, where I’m running a workshop on using computer games in formal education, and giving a presentation on games and learning more generally. Very exciting – first time I’ve been to Singapore, or even on a plane for more than a couple of hours, come to that. Afterwards, I’m going to see my family in Perth for two weeks. And then, after a brief administrative period in Bristol, I’m going to move out there for six months, working with the IDA and LSL.

So this is where I’m going to write down what happens.