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Earlier this year I read a book called “Sampans, Banyans and Rambutans;  A Childhood in Singapore and Malaya” ⁽¹⁾ by a man called Derek Tait. I enjoyed it very much. The author spent several years of his early childhood in the 1960s living in Johore in Malaya and frequently visited the city of Singapore close by. I visited Singapore in 2017, so it was interesting to compare the city today with the city of half a century ago.

The Republic of Singapore consists of a group of islands off the southern tip of Malaysia in South-east Asia. There is one main island and a large number of smaller islets. Singapore lies only one degree north of the Equator and has a tropical climate. Tait mentions the heavy monsoon rains and violent thunderstorms. There is a long history of settlement on the site, but the modern city has its origins in 1819, when it was acquired by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles for the British East India Trading Company.  

In 1867 Singapore came under direct rule from Britain. During World War II it was taken over by Japan between 1942 and 1945. It became self-governing in 1959, and from 1963 until 1965 was part of the Malaysian federation. Singapore became an independent city state in 1965, and Derek Tait’s family moved there that year. His father was in the British Navy. The Singapore River provides a natural harbour and it was an important naval base, with the British navy stationed there until 1971.

The first thing Derek Tait mentions about Singapore in the 1960s is the distinctive smell of rotting rubbish and raw sewage. A filthy canal ran down the centre of the city, and the Singapore River was full of rubbish, raw sewage and rats. When I visited, I was particularly struck by how clean the city was, far cleaner than London or Edinburgh. There were no bad smells at all and I noticed the large number of people employed as cleaners in public areas. I don’t remember seeing the canal, but the river mouth has been dammed and is being used as a freshwater reservoir for some of the city’s water supply. Tait mentions rats and dead dogs in the water; David Attenborough in his 2016 documentary about wildlife in big cities (part of Planet Earth II)  mentions the return of smooth-coated otters as a result of the cleaning of the waterways.

Tait’s photos show streets full of cars and rickshaws and rickety buses. In an effort to combat air pollution in the densely-populated city (7,797 people per square km), the authorities now discourage private car ownership and encourage people to travel using a very good modern bus and Metro (underground) service. I used the Metro all the time during my visit, it was clean, safe and easy to follow. None of my son’s friends drove cars, and neither of us can remember seeing a single rickshaw.

In the 1960s the mosquitos were so bad that people had to sleep under nets and burn coils of mosquito repellent at night. Mosquitos often carry dengue fever, a dangerous tropical disease, and the authorities are trying to control them. Posters on the walls of the Metro system urge people to get rid of stagnant water around their houses, where mosquitos breed. It seems to be a successful program. I only got bitten once in Singapore, on the Night Safari at the Zoo, and in the centre of town I never saw or heard a single mosquito.

Tait’s photographs show very few multi-storey buildings, but it is a city of skyscrapers today. To house the huge population, people not only have to live in small spaces, but homes and offices tend to be in tall tower blocks, except for the very wealthy indeed. One of the most expensive hotels is in two enormous slender towers linked by a roof platform containing a garden with palm trees and an infinity pool. My son lived in a shared flat in a gorgeous tower, one of a group of three towers set in a gated garden with a gym and a swimming pool. Out of the city centre there were tower blocks that looked more utilitarian, from the train at least. I did much of my shopping in excellent shopping malls, which weren’t there in the 1960s.

The authorities are committed to making it a green city.  The roads are lined with trees, grass and flowerbeds, and there are gardens everywhere, from the Singapore Botanical Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, to the rooftops of tower blocks. During Lockdown, I followed the Singapore National Parks Board on Twitter, and was fascinated by their program to encourage everybody to grow food, even if it was just a pot of salad greens beside their front door, to improve the city’s food security. It cheered me up all through Lockdown, and inspired my own micro-food-growing efforts.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the lively street life. Since accommodation even for the relatively well-off tends to be cramped and often has minimal cooking facilities, people eat out a lot at restaurants and food halls. Food halls are open areas with tables and chairs surrounded by stalls selling food and drinks. Sometimes vendors come round with carts offering drinks at your table. I personally found them great.

Given that the world is now drastically overpopulated and most of us are likely to end up living in places as densely populated as Singapore, it’s heartening to see a city making such a positive effort to make it a good place to live for humans and wildlife. How a tiny city-state with a no land or natural resources and a huge population has managed to evolve the sort of economy which can support all this is beyond me to understand. I am no economist. But from what I can pick up on an internet trawl they seem to have been rather clever.

And it’s fascinating to see how things have changed well within my lifetime. Thank you, Mr Tait.

⁽¹⁾ “Sampans, Banyans and Rambutans  A Childhood in Singapore and Malaya” Derek Tait 2006 Driftwood Coast Publishing PO Box 7, West Park, Plymouth, England, PL5 2YS ISBN 978-0-9554277-0-1

I saw this mosaic pavement every day of my working life for many years, every time I crossed the main gallery of the Verulamium museum. All of the mosaics in the museum are beautiful, but the Dahlia mosaic particularly appealed to me, I don’t know why. It comes from a townhouse in the Roman city of Verulamium, and probably dates from around 175 – 200CE. It would have been on the floor in Roman times, although it is now fixed to the wall of the museum.

It is made of black, red and white tesserae, and has a large central flower in a square with small motifs in each corner of that square. The flower is set within a circle and the whole mosaic is overlaid by a grid of nine squares surrounded by a pattern known as” three-strand guilloche”. There are flowers in the four corner squares of the grid. The excavator, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, referred to the large central flower as a dahlia and the four corner flowers as roses, but to me it looks more like a water lily or lotus, set in a stylised circular pond indicated by the wave pattern of the innermost circle surrounding it.

The mosaic was in one room of a small second-century CE house in Insula IV. The house was L-shaped and surrounded almost all the way round by a veranda. There were five rooms, an extra one projecting from one arm of the L, and two small buildings close by which might have been for cooking. At least two of its rooms had mosaic floors and the veranda had a red tessellated pavement (little brick cubes). The veranda also had painted wall plaster coloured green, white and black. Unfortunately this nice little residence was built over a swallow-hole, not uncommon in chalk areas like St Albans, and partly collapsed before the end of the third century CE. It happens even today. The site was levelled around 300CE when this area of the town was redeveloped.

Wheeler (1936, page 146 (2) considered it to be a “good example of careful pedestrian work.” I think it is very pretty. I would have chosen it for my floor any day.

(1) Image by Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

(2) Report of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London No.XI Wheeler, Verulamium: A Belgic & 2 Roman Cities  p146 Pl XLIVB  REM Wheeler, D.Lit., V.P.S.A. andT.V. Wheeler FSA  1936

My two favourite artefacts found in Orkney both Viking-age brooches, and both are thought to have originated in Ireland. One comes from a hoard, the other from a burial. Although they are slightly damaged, reconstruction shows that they were very beautiful when they were in use.

The Skaill brooch is a penannular silver thistle brooch. It comes from a hoard of silver objects discovered in 1858 near St Peters Kirk, at Skaill, Sandwick, on West Mainland, by a boy digging up a rabbit hole. Alas, there were no archaeologists at that time to call in, and the hoard was dug up by local people and later reassembled by local antiquarians. It consisted of 8kg of brooches, neck and arm rings, pins, ingots, hacksilver, ring money; and 21 Arab coins, which allowed its dating to the late 10^th century CE.  The size of the brooch is not reported in any of the sources to which I have had access, but thistle brooches, while varying a lot in size, are usually around 20cm in diameter by 52cm long.

The Westness brooch was found in the grave of a wealthy Viking woman at Westness on the island of Rousay. The grave was discovered by accident in 1963 by a farmer burying a dead cow, who fortunately notified the archaeologists. The stone-built grave was in a Viking cemetery and is that of a young woman who probably died in childbirth, as it also contained the bones of a newborn infant. It contained many rich grave goods. This brooch was probably intended for fastening a cloak or shawl, and was more elaborately decorated than the Skaill brooch. It was 175mm long, silver-gilt decorated with zoomorphic gold filigree, large amber studs and red glass inlay. The amber studs were already missing when it was placed in the grave. Although the grave is believed to be early 9^th century, the brooch is thought to have been made in the mid-8^th century, so that it was 100 years old when it was buried with the young woman.

Both of these brooches are in the National Museum of Scotland. They are on display and you can access the collections database to see images of them online.

I have just returned from a short trip to the London area. While I was down there I caught a cold. Having tested myself every second day for a week, I was reasonably sure it wasn’t covid, so I felt safe to fly home. However, I decided to wear a mask on the journey, to protect my fellow-humans from any lingering common cold germs, especially as I was still coughing and blowing my nose rather more frequently than usual, and I didn’t want anyone to feel threatened. Masks, as everyone ought to know by now, don’t give much protection to the wearer unless they are hospital-grade, but they protect other people from the wearer’s germs. In the Far East it has long been considered ordinary good manners to wear a face mask in public spaces if you have a cold.

As I progressed from bag-drop to security to the departure lounge, I don’t think I saw a single mask on a passenger, and precious few on the staff. A huge multinational airport, with people flying in from all over the world, is the likeliest place of all to encounter something nasty in the way of a virus from an exotic place. Haven’t people learned anything from the covid pandemic?

Over the past months I have seen a lot of little notices at the entrances to shops and public transport, asking people to help keep everyone safe by wearing a mask, sanitising hands and keeping their distance. The notices are usually small and inconspicuous and nobody is taking any notice of them at all. Why would shops, airports, public libraries etc. be asking people (timidly) to wear masks if we didn’t all secretly recognise that masks protected us from viruses? And why haven’t they got the courage to make the notices twice the size, and have someone standing beside them to encourage people to take some notice of them?

I am absolutely certain that it should still be a legal requirement, properly enforced, to wear them in public places – shops, cinemas, trains, buses and planes etc. The pandemic isn’t over. People may not be dying in such large numbers, hospitals may not have so many beds taken up with covid patients, but has no-one noticed how many shops, offices and schools have recently been closed for a day or so because there aren’t enough staff to run them? One person has come in with covid and infected enough of his fellow-workers to close them down. Isn’t that damaging the economy? And is there anyone in Britain who doesn’t know at least one person who is still off work with Long Covid weeks after contracting the disease?

And why are people in this country so bothered about being ordered to wear masks anyway? When I was young, there were no such things as seat-belts in cars. When it became a legal requirement, there was a storm of protest about civil liberties, the validity of the evidence that it did any good, people who would need to be exempted for medical reasons, etc. In the end people have accepted them. When smoking started being banned in most public spaces, there was an outcry. Now it is taken as normal.

Most people would now consider driving over the speed limit or driving when you have been drinking a disgrace, given that it is obvious you are endangering other people’s lives by doing so. Well, you are endangering them by not wearing a mask as well. Winter is now upon us. This is the season for colds, flu and noroviruses. And covid? We shall see…

The darkness was absolute. The air was cool and clammy. The small train rattled on, swaying as it went around curves, passengers clutching the rails of the open carriages. Suddenly it stopped. There was silence for a moment and then lights flashed on, dazzling us for a moment after the blackness, and our guide started speaking in heavily-accented English, asking us to leave the train.

We were far underground in the huge cave system of Rouffignac in SW France, sometimes called “La Grotte des Cent Mammouths” (the Cave of the Hundred Mammoths). We walked carefully through the roughly-levelled passages in dim light. From time to time the guide asked us to stop, and turned on lights to illuminate one side of the chamber we were passing through. The limestone walls were covered with drawings of animals, mostly mammoths, engravings or bold outlines in black made by prehistoric hunters of thirteen centuries ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.

There have been suggestions that some or even all of the Rouffignac drawings are not authentic, although it seems that most are now accepted as genuine. The cave has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979. It was used for clay extraction in the 15^th century, and a 16^th century writer mentioned that he saw paintings in several places there. It first drew the attention of archaeologists in the 19^th century.

There are frozen mammoths preserved in the permafrost of Siberia and North America so we know what they looked like, although they became extinct thousands of years ago. Most died out at the end of the last cold period of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, although a few small isolated populations survived until around 4,000 years ago.  The drawings at Rouffignac are accurate and give all the details of their adaptation to extreme cold: the humps of fat on the top of their heads and on their shoulders, the long sweeping hair of their outer coat, the two finger-like ends of their trunks, the massive tusks. They are so well drawn that they almost seem alive, especially if they had been seen by flickering torchlight by men who had crawled for ages through silent darkness to reach them.

To this day we do not know the reason for the drawings in Ice Age caves. How can we, since they were made millennia before the first writing? We cannot know what people believed unless they explain it in words. It seems likeliest that they were something to do with hunting magic.

I was lucky to see Rouffignac in the 1970s, before the flood of tourists had caused such damage to all of the prehistoric caves that the number of visits had to be restricted, or in some cases such as Lascaux, entirely discontinued. Increased light, heat and moisture encourage mould growth. If you want to see the mammoths today, you have to get up early and queue for tickets.