Saturday 14 November 2009

A Most Beautiful Home?



"Let’s make our world the most beautiful home
Where everyone can live and breathe and they can easily roam"
or so says the lyrics of this song which is currently being hammered on Singaporean television.

There is a sad irony about "live and breathe" with the haze continuing and the current state visit of the Indonesian President; whose country is responsible for polluting the lungs of everyone living in Singapore.

My past week has been punctuated by the frightening reality of an antivirus software turned bad. My McAfee antivirus software (which I downloaded from our work network at the behest of our IT department) decided to misbehave.

The result being that I could not access my PC for a day or two. At moments like this one realises just how reliant we have become on technology - checking the weather, the condo prices, the exchange rates...

Thankfully we have some excellent IT technicians at work and one of them was able to correct matters.

I am also without a passport at the moment and therefore confined to Singapore for the duration. There is nothing untoward about this, as I have sent it back for renewal through our local High Commission. The process as I understand it takes a month?

Renewing a passport is an exercise in stepping back in time. Looking at the passport photos in old travel documents graphically documents the deterioration of man. No passport image is ever flattering and it is cold comfort to realise that they get progressively worse over time.

Perhaps it's a case of beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

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