Monsoon, Shmonsoon
Let’s talk about the weather. There are supposed to be two monsoon seasons in Singapore: one now, November – January, and the other in May or thereabouts. All the other months are pre-monsoon, which means basically it’s supposed to be wet and raining nearly all the time, as far as I can make out. The pre-monsoon in August was quite effective, with heavy rain nearly every day around noon-4:00 p.m. And there was some rain in November. But right now, the supposed peak of wet miserable weather, is relatively cool (highs in the mere upper-80s) and dry. The pathetic excuse we’ve been getting for monsoon rain has been a five-minute downfall here, a ten-minute drizzle there, with heavy clouds teasing us by whizzing overhead and getting lost over Indonesia.
OK, so why do we want the extreme downpours every day anyhow? The violin repair man said that a few years ago it rained hard every day, all day, for the whole of January, and people kept traipsing into his shop with violins, violas and cellos whose fingerboards had popped off and whose glue had melted. (He refused to fix them until the rain stopped, on the grounds that the continued 100% humidity would just continue to make them come apart.) And we know from other experience that being drenched all the time is not fun. But the sheer drama of flash floods is strangely attractive: the sudden darkness in mid-afternoon as the divine buckets spill, the headlights on the taxis and the super-fast settings of everyone’s windshield wipers – when viewed from inside a dry apartment it’s really great!
Maybe we just miss the equatorial version of winter? We want an excuse to hang out indoors and drink hot chocolate, rather than feeling obliged to be healthy and energetic outside. They’re certainly not missing it in Malaysia, where flooding has delayed the resumption of school. And that’s just a few miles north of here.
But perhaps we should stop grousing and enjoy the strangely livable conditions – the shady afternoons, the actual tangible breezes that are unaccompanied by sideways deluges of water, the curious debility of the mosquito population, the possibility that the sweat we generate while walking around will actually evaporate and our toes will not have mold between them.