No, you don’t have those days? Well, this was just my Saturday. A lot of people ask me what it is like living in one of Singapore’s (in)famous ‘Black and White’ colonial houses. The only real answer to that: it is a unique experience!
If you are into old rickety houses with oodles of charm and nooks and crannies to lose your children in during the too long summer holidays that international schools offer in exchange for extortionate school fees, these houses are for you. And if you like a bit of history thrown into the mix - even better. Especially if you don’t mind that history bloody, with a genuine WWII battle in your garden, a POW camp in your very bedroom and the accompanying ghosts roaming your lofty verandas. Go for it.
But if you like your real estate polished, smooth, your roof leakage-free and your bathrooms clear of mould – think again. And of course, you need to have a certain tolerance for the wilder aspects of tropical living. Up in the sky on the twenty-seventh floor of a concrete condo you can be fooled into believing the opposite, but us ground-floor and garden dwellers know better: Singapore has a wild side.
And that is what I love most about our Adam Park house: the immense garden. That place where our kids can build huts, where we host marshmallow roasting campfires, where I scoop the leaves out of our very own pool three times a day. Where the kids play football, badminton, tag, hide and seek and swing on our jungle swings. Where we breed tadpoles and butterflies, keep chicken, plant flowers, herbs and vegetables. Where guests comment that they don’t need to leave the house, that staying with us is resort experience enough. That is, those guests that don’t mind sharing their bathroom with our resident toad. At Adam Park, we are never allowed to forget whom we share this lovely green space with.
The second thing people ask when we talk about our house is usually: ‘But what about the snakes?’
For some reason I have the reputation of that tough gal, that head horror that fearlessly leads the way in jungle hashes through the wildest terrains, the one that scoops up snakes from her daughter’s bed (who was at school, thankfully) with a broom and dustpan, and throws them over the fence without flinching. Admittedly, I do those things, but what people don’t see is that even tough that was a perfectly harmless bronzeback tree snake, my heartbeat went through the roof. So it is time to admit here, once and for all: I am terrified of snakes!
I am afraid of the black spitting cobra I saw slithering though the front yard from the window, the extremely poisonous malay coral snake that bit my cycling husband in the rear tire. Even the harmless wolf house snake, kukri snake and the beautiful colours of the tree snakes make me nervous. I have become proficient in identifying local snakes, thanks to the internet and the SG snakes app but still, I remain restless. A child bitten by a cobra can die in hours.
(as I am typing this on our patio, a two-feet monitor lizard is sneaking up at me. It is still around five meters away, but bloody hell, that face with its forked tongue is just too much like a snake for its own good!)
Anyway, this Saturday night, I did not sleep so well. I kept imagining all four meters of that python coiled around our cat Mitzi. Or seeing its long, chequered body with several chicken-sized-bumps in the middle. When I woke up late, hung-over and restless, I was relieved to see all my children sitting on the sofa reading comics quietly, Mitzi snuggled up cosily between them. It took several minutes for me to work up the courage to go outside to let out the chicken from their supposedly snake-proof coop. Supposedly, as the hugest python can squeeze itself through the tiniest gap and that coop is as rickety as our house. Our chicken run is the most efficient python trap, as any python with a chicken inside his belly is too lazy and fat to get out again. We have ‘caught’ four already, and yes, I have ACRES on speed dial. Thankfully, all the chicken were safe. That is, for now.
Despite the snakes, the lizards, the monkeys, the omnipresent ants, the ear-numbing noise of cicadas and last but certainly not least the terrifying risk of falling trees, I would not want to live anywhere else.
Every day here is an adventure!