Y2K Update (very late)

As many of you will have noticed, the massive spending to ensure that this newsletter did not suffer from Year 2000 problems, paid off handsomely, as there were no problems.

The Mango Farming team are now working hard to make sure that there are no Year 10,000 problems.

A whole new apartment

Some things have changed but many have stayed the same. The main change has been of residence. At the beginning of October a hectic six days saw us move apartments from one side of Orchard Road to the other. (Orchard Road is Singapore's equivalent of London's Oxford Street.)

Earlier in the year, the PricewaterhouseCoopers offices had also moved from Raffles Place, the heart of the business district, to Orchard Road and into Ngee Ann City and the sixteenth floor above the massive Takashimaya department store. So now, not only do I live five minutes walk from work (but see the section on travel later) but I work a minute's elevator ride from some of the best Cantonese, Indonesian, Thai and Chinese Dim Sum food in Singapore.

The Cantonese restaurant in particular will be familiar to those of you who made it to Kaija's birthday party. For, yes, it is the very same Crystal Jade Palace, purveyor of highest quality sharks fin, snake soup, crispy roasted chicken and miscellaneous pig bits, to the gentry.

I guess, though, one of this year’s themes has been the Dine on Singapore Airlines campaign run by PwC. I have been away from Singapore for most of this year, travelling every week to Jakarta or Hong Kong. Apart from hotel food, my most regular meal has come in seat 12C of assorted Singapore Airlines flights. Fortunately, since I travel business class and Singapore Airlines is one of the best in the world, I have not had to suffer too much.

In fact I can thoroughly recommend the rather amusing white burgundy, Montagny Premier Cru, which they serve with each meal. Redolent with rebarbative symbolism, each mouthful has hints of chocolate, tannin, rubber trees after the third tapping, and, oh yes, a touch of grape.

Still, only seeing my apartment for one and a half days each week can be a little frustrating, especially as we have only just moved into the new place.

We were actually quite happy with the old apartment but it was quite old by Singapore standards, 20 years or so, and it just had to be torn down. Cairnhill Court was a peaceful oasis in the heart of Singapore, connected to the Orchard Road by Emerald Hill, a delightful conservation area. Emerald Hill consists of traditional Singaporean houses, with colourful wooden shutters and doors.

The quiet streets were once the scene of much more notorious behaviour, as it was the site of a war-time brothel. If you pause outside Number 19, the most famous of the comfort houses, you may just be able girlish laughter in the distance. Of course that could just be from the rowdy bar at Number Five, home of Duval (Legless) Beer.

A whole old farm

Since I have been away from home (wherever that might be, so much this year, Pacita has had the chance to spend plenty of time on the farm. It continues to develop slowly, moving very much at the filipino pace of life but some of the mango trees are quite tall now,

 In fact, one of the tallest was recently toppled by typhoon Rumbia, which passed near the farm in November. The workers managed to get it back upright and it is supposedly OK but time will tell. And that's all from Mango Health Check brought to you this year by Cambaguio Fruit Products: "The best mango is a Cambaguio mango."

Ok, OK, I know it's not a very snappy slogan, but hey we don't even have any mangoes yet. For those of you who aren’t aware of it, our farm is in Cambaguio hamlet, part of Del Monte village on the island of Bohol in the Visayan region of Central Philippines. We actually wanted to call our farm Del Monte Fruit but even as we were just thinking the thought, e-mails started arriving from the other Del Monte threatening to sue our bananas off,

I did check to see if www.delmonte.com was taken so we could try cyber squatting and make millions of dollars for an outlay of US$35. Again, just doing the Internet registry search provoked another flurry of emails. So we ended up with Cambaguio Farm.

By the way, moving at somewhat less than Internet speed, our web site should be available by the time you read next year's letter.

I did not really get to spend too much time on the farm this year. One 10-day holiday was chopped in half when I had to go to Hong Kong for four days on business. Still, Xmas will be here soon and then I have the unashamed luxury of three whole weeks on the farm.

No e-mails, no voicemail, no mobile phone and a fixed line telephone that works infrequently enough for most people not to bother.

Just Pacita and me, on the verandah sipping rum and cokes, watching the mango trees grow. Ah bliss. That will set me up nicely for another year of 7-day working weeks, at least two flights a week, full-time hotel living and being not entirely sure which country I am in when I wake up.

The joy of food

Mind you, in Hong Kong I have been staying in a serviced apartment best described as bijou, even by HK standards. The bedroom is like a goldfish bowl with windows on three sides and a nine-inch gap between the bed and the wall on two of them. Still, it does look out over a stunning harbour view. At least you would be able see the harbour, if they hadn't built another dozen skyscrapers in the way.

Well I don’t spend much time there, anyway. I’m either working or eating, the two favourite pastimes in Hong Kong and I must say the food is as good as ever. Fiery Hunan cuisine, the menu marked with three chillies for the hottest dish and a waiter on standby with a fire extinguisher. Actually, he just laughs along with the locals. But, in fact, it is mainly the Chinese who suffer. Us Brits, brought up on diet of macho Indian curries, "I'll have a Vindaloo and some extra strong toilet paper," seem to cope quite well.

Fortunately, I also trained on Thai food, noted for its recipes starting, "Take several handfuls of chillies and throw everything else away."

My favourite dishes in the Hunan Garden are the minced pigeon soup with bamboo pith served in bamboo cup, Chilli chicken, Deep fried beancurd with chilli, and Steamed fish with fried minced bean... and chilli. All washed down with a glass or three of local Tsing Tao beer.

I'd also like to tell you about the Dim Sum, for which Hong Kong is justly famous but all the dishes are in Chinese so a litany of Char Siu Bau, Har Gau, Shiu Mai, Cheung Fun, and those little golden packets filled with minced pork that nobody can ever remember the name of, won't enlighten you very much.

The food in Hong Kong is certainly a treat after Indonesia, where dinner is very cheap, but it can be hard to get good quality.

For lunch in Jakarta, we used to go to the canteen where we could get Nasi Goreng or Kway Teow Goreng (Fried Rice or Fried Broad Noodles) for a huge 3000 Rupiah. That's about 60 cents in Singapore or 12p in British money. The same dish in Singapore would be about S$3, around three times the price. Of course, you probably wouldn't get food poisoning from it in Singapore. Come to think of it, I never suffered in Jakarta either, at least not from the canteen. One of my colleagues, though, re-christened the Kway Teow Goreng as Ring of Fire as that is what he would be feeling about 90 minutes after lunch.

The European holiday that nearly wasn't

Originally the plan was for a three-week grand tour of London, Helsinki and Athens. Once again work intervened and the trip was cut to 10 days. Athens was put off to another year. The good news was we did make my father’s 70th Birthday in Finland.

Haikko, a 19th Century Governor’s mansion converted to a hotel, was the location of the celebrations. For Pacita and I, it provoked fond memories of fifteen years ago and our first visit together to Finland. On that occasion my grandfather, Edvin, was the host.

This time round, we had a pleasant stroll around the grounds and admired the handprints of Finland's most recent famous hero, Mika Häkkinen the grand prix racing driver. Two years ago he got married here and left his mark along with his wife.

We wandered down the lawn to the lake. After all, it wouldn't be Finland without a lake. The peaceful sound of water lapping against the shore, the wind rustling the reeds along the bank, ducks paddling and diving for food. The overwhelming sense of cliché struck me and I just focused on the peace and quiet.

This trip, although short, was not quite such a shopping frenzy as last year, but we did raid HMV and Virgin for some uncensored BBC videos. I do live in a country where Titanic is banned on DVD as a pornographic movie.

Overall, it turned out to be a family holiday, short but sweet.

The move from hell

A soon as we returned from Europe, it was time to move apartments. And that was a complete nightmare. Seven days just to move and another seven for organising the new place.

A team of half a dozen packers worked for three days to put everything into boxes a day. They took one day to move the boxes and another three days to unpack everything. This was followed by a week of finding out where everything had been unpacked to, and moving it to the correct place.

And then of course there are the pictures. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures and photographs that need to be organised, placed and then hung.

The final conclusion is that we are never, ever going to  move again. Actually, I had the best of it. I was working in Jakarta and just appeared at the weekend for the actual move. Pacita bore the brunt of it. A week after it was all over, she retired to the farm to recover. I returned to Jakarta and suddenly the flat was peaceful.

One benefit of being in Jakarta was that I had time to devote to writing. Nothing very deep, just a little amusement about life on the project in various styles, Biggles featured heavily, as did Star Trek and Star Wars. A copy of the four chapters is included here but it probably helps to know a little bit about life on computer systems implementation project. Unfortunately, I won’t be enlightening you.

Well, at least it kept me amused and the one other person who understood it. Congratulations Andrew. In fact some one else did understood and I am still in correspondence with Legless Wise and his team of lawyers, He is insisting on a manual recount of the number of libels and slanders in my stories but I have appealed to the Jakarta Supreme Court and bought the Chief Justice a Nasi Goreng so I should be alright there.