Roger, over and out …
Gerald Ingolby bids a fond farewell to Great Britain
I guess it was inevitable. After two full days in Singapore – the first of which we spent being driven around on personal guided tours and then having a slap-up meal at a famous private club … and the second of which we spent visiting the Bay South version of the epic Gardens by the Bay (a venture similar to the Eden Project but about four times the size) and then having a sensational dinner in a restaurant perched about 250 feet up on one of the giant artificial ‘trees’ therein, complete with an amazing panoramic view of the new financial quarter built upon land reclaimed from the sea – I have decided to emigrate here.
If New York and London are places that never sleep, then you can add the extraordinary Singapore to the list. I’m not the sort of cove who can normally be bothered to venture further from civilisation that Cobham, but somehow this place – with its endless activity, antiseptically-clean highways, dynamic ethic and empowering sense that enterprise, applied with suitable verve, will always be rewarded with Croesus-sized piles of cash and the lasting respect of everyone you come across – cannot fail to get to you.
This is plainly the kind of location where a man of refinement and good taste, beginning armed only with a coupe of hundred pounds of GB pounds sterling and the daily sporting tips of the National Rust‘s punting gurus could make his fortune … never be short of things to do and explore … and never feel the chill of a cold British winter.
I shall have plenty of time to contemplate the exact timing of my move on my flight later this morning to Melbourne – another great city that I have not been to in four decades – but one that I note is rumoured to be full of Australians.