LAZY HAZY DAYS IN SINGAPORE

• Back home for a few weeks but almost wish I had stayed in Europe given the poor air quality.  This has been a stinker of a year for pollution and does not encourage people to come and spend time in Singapore unless they have no choice.  Most of the time people do have a choice.  Even the Indonesian government is finally getting concerned about the damage to health and the environment.  The problem is unless people are prosecuted and punished the benefits to individuals are sufficiently high to outweigh any damage they perceive to themselves and their immediate surroundings.  So slash and burn continues.  Remediation is always too late.  The only solution is prevention and prevention requires removal of the corrupt local officials who nod and wink.  We need arrests, preferably high profile.  

The problem here is that the police are also often on the take, while the army is probably in on this and benefiting financially in many of the places where you would like to send them to round up the usual suspects; and they will be the usual suspects.  It is the same people year after year after year.  There is no mystery.  People know who they are.  There is a way to put an end to this particularly noxious pollution, but there is as yet no real will.  

• One possible ray of sunshine, assuming you can see the sun, is that the situation is so bad that a proper home grown driven environmental movement might at last get going in Indonesia.  So much of the effort has been driven in the past by foreigners and NGOs from outside.  If villagers start dying (and some reports say that is now happening) protests could turn ugly.  Since the army and police do not seem very interested a bit of on the spot vigilantism may be the only near term antidote. 

• At least we have lovely music to listen to take our mind off the fact that the air smells of smoke.  The Singapore Symphony is in fine form as usual, though their annual programme of A Night at the Movies lacked a little something this year; and was not as enjoyable as last year.  The associate conductor managed the process with a more sensible mix between commentary and music.  I think he may have had feedback from the 2014 event that we are there to listen to the orchestra not the man with the baton.  In any event the mix was much more appropriate.  Yet the flow this time was missing, and some of the pieces were jerky.  Nothing came close to Alexander Souptel’s Schindler’s list solo.  That said the orchestra were at their best with the brief piece from Psycho, the famous stabbing scene; and the best moment was the segway into the finale of Mission Impossible. 

• It is Friday and the smog is awful again.  There are the usual warnings.  We are in seriously unhealthy territory on every scale.  I have a pretty simple test.  When I arrive in my office in the morning can I see the ships just beyond the Marina Bay Sand Resort sitting out there at sea waiting for something to do, and are the cranes at Jurong visible?  Alas the answer this morning is no and no.  I can barely make out the iconic boat at the top of the building let alone anything further away.  If there are any real boats out on the water, they are not visible from the OCBC building.  Today is a bad one.  We are not putting any picture on the blog this time because you would not see anything.  My visitor from Beijing said he could not wait to get back there because the air quality at home was so much better!

• Saturday arrives.  I feel like I am no longer a blogger but a smogger.  The PSI is supposed to be 227 today where we live; yesterday the high was 244.  This morning does seem a little clearer, but if yesterday’s high was 244, I am 21.

• Thank goodness for the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.  Nothing like a fantastic concert to lift the gloom; and we had one with Haydn’s Die Schopfung or The Creation to us other Anglo Saxons.  What a magnificent piece of music.  Somehow I had managed to get through life without stumbling across this masterpiece.  Cannot wait to find it again.  Lim Yau brought it together beautifully.  The SSO were a finely tuned machine.  The singers were breathtaking.  I am not sure who shone brightest.  Martin Nyvall, the tenor, was pure joy.  Yet for me the crown goes to the baritone Kresimir Strazanac whose duets with the soprano Larissa Krokhina were out of this world.  And then there was superlative support from the Singapore Symphony Chorus, and the NAFA Chamber Choir.  Massed voices over 100 strong singing in perfect harmony are something else.  Two hours went by so fast it seemed like only twenty minutes.  You leave with your spirits lifted. 

• Monday, and the visibility from my office is more or less the same as when the PSI was well over 200 on Friday.  The index reads 158 at 7 am.  Will be going higher.  We are still in the unhealthy zone, but it looks and smells very unhealthy.

• One solution if the haze is getting you down and there is no concert to attend is to go out for a good dinner.  Garibaldi is one of the top Italian restaurants in Singapore, and deservedly so.  The Antipasto misto make a winning way to start a meal.  The Aldo Conterno Barolo 2007 from one of Piedmont’s top growers is so enjoyable that the wine restores a sense of goodwill to the world (with the exception of Indonesian arsonists).