Blind Tip of the Week

I received some new subscribers last week and a couple of them have asked me to start the blind tips over again. I think I have found a better version of them so, here we go:

When you see us out somewhere, and you already know our name, please say something like, “Hi Robert. It’s Jim, or whatever, here.” If you just say “Hello,” we might not realise that you are speaking to us. It might mean that you think we are ignoring you when we have no such intention. Well, depending on who you are, anyway!

Parkrun

I had a go at my first Parkrun without much success last week. I found the dappled light in the woods and the echoes of overtaking feet quite disorienting. I am going back to support my wife this week and might just work up the courage to have another go myself. I am determined not to let the thing beat me. We’ll see! I think I am going to start offering up “white cane ratings” for Parkruns. This week it will be Sandringham Parkrun in Norfolk. I wonder if the King ever does it?

Singapore - Fort Siloso

All worked out fine in the end, except I am sure it gave me a crick in my neck, just by watching. It is not a matter that I can look straight at the bungee, like many of you sighted folk, I need to get my head in such a position that I can see the incoming image from the extreme bottom left corner of my left eye. So to enjoy the thrill of the jump I needed to look in a direction about 45° to the right and, in this instance, also look up nearly vertically. Not natural by anyone’s measure. That is exactly the same reason I return home from a long walk with a pain from the base of my head, through my neck and into my right shoulder. Arthritis in the future? Who knows.

On we continued until we came across Fort Siloso. We took the impressive Sky Walk which, I have to mention here is advertised as old people friendly! Not quite sure what that means but it was extremely accessible. Fortunately, it was also sheltered along most of its length as we were forever being bombarded by showers that afternoon. A tropical shower is unbelievable in its intensity. Quite often it buckets down for brief seconds, soaking you through, before a searing sun appears from nowhere and dries you to a bone, in shrouds of wafting steam.

Any discomfort we felt, was immediately put to one side, on arrival at the best preserved remaining coastal fort in Singapore. It played a significant role in the failed defence of Britain’s toehold in the Far East, I have been informed that we should now refer to the region as East Asia, Far East is too geo-politically sensitive. From here British troops fought a desperate action to stem the Japanese invasion. In the end they ran out of ammunition. When the order came through to surrender, they were left with no alternative but to do so. As a last act of defiance, very tired soldiers spiked what guns they could and toppled them over the cliffs.

Dodging waterbombs we took a good look around and could only admire the bravery shown by these troops. The garrison was a mix of professional soldiers along with recently joined up civilians fighting to hold onto a lifestyle that was slowly slipping away into history. Although they didn’t know it, the end of the British Empire was nigh.

In the tunnels and chambers that extended underground the exhibition went up a notch. In a way we were lucky with the rain as it created an atmosphere that would not have been alien to the defenders of Fort Siloso, a word, by the way, derived from the Malayan for rock. In certain parts we waded through inches deep water to get to the interactive displays. Jane read the information from the plentiful boards. I often wonder if some visitors to attractions we enjoy get fed up with her forever reading things out loud for me to learn. I can’t recall a single moment, in the time since I haven’t been able to read the words myself, a complaint being registered. In the main, people really are most understanding. The display that was most eye-catching, excuse the analogy, was the waxwork of the main protagonists from the British and Japanese armies sitting around the boardroom table at the Ford Factory agreeing the final and absolute surrender.