Random Access Memory #5

You know how in my last post I mentioned that many years ago I was working with rufty tufty seadogs and middle-aged mariners, who’d travelled the ocean waves on massive cargo carrying vessels?   I have them to thank for introducing me to many different things.

Different things like...  being shown around the hot, noisy depths of a ship’s engine room by a very polite (and not rufty tufty at all) boiler-suited Panamanian engineer.  Like how to make Cheese Beano*.  Like speaking to Eamonn Holmes doing role play for an emergency exercise (whoop-de-do!)  (and that's the first and only time you'll hear me say 'Eamonn Holmes' and 'role play' in the same sentence.)  And being teased about something called the Golden Rivet.  I was told that male sailors like to show female visitors on board their ships the famed Golden Rivet – in naval folklore the story goes that every vessel built contains one single commemorative one - but, oh, you have to find it! (It wasn't in the hot, noisy depths of that aforementioned ship's engine room, as far as I could tell.)  It was through this job that I took my first ever flight, and it was to New York!  Plus I heard a lot of tales, about a  lot of people and a lot of places.  One of the places was Singapore, a major port on the shipping trade route.

I’d never really thought about going to Singapore until then, but in the mid-‘90s I’d  hit a bit of a strange time in my life, a kind of personal, emotional crossroads, and something I decided I needed to do was to go away for a while.  Nothing extreme, you know - just an eleven and a half thousand mile trip on my own to the other side of the world.   On the way to Australia and NZ  I planned a short stay in Singapore  and, thanks to contacts I’d made through my job, there were people there who’d  be happy to show me around this city I’d heard so much about.

I’d never done any teenage travelling, hadn’t gone to uni, couldn't afford a 'gap' year, never had the urge to backpack, and had married someone with no desire to venture further than Cornwall.  I was in my early 30s and now I had that itch.  So I worked really hard, saved up like mad, and asked my boss if I could carry some leave over into next year and then take it all in one go – five weeks' holiday.  Being a globetrotting ex sea Captain (and now a great lifelong friend) he understood my urge to see more of the world and agreed.

Anyway, this is the background to why every time I hear a certain song, I think of Singapore.   I just can’t separate the memory.  More specifically, I think of a huge shopping mall (‘Ngee Ann City’), at that time only a couple of years old, and of standing in this vast modern complex with a ‘Japanese fair’ pitched up at one end (selling exotic-sounding dried fruits and meat dishes) and a branch of ‘Boy’ of all things at another, being shown round by a man called Ong and his wife Theresa, who later took me to a Pizza Hut where we had something called ‘golden corn soup’ for starters.

 In that quite overwhelming shrine to the Western art of shopping in a humid city state in South East Asia, 6800 miles away from home, there was an enormous video screen and beaming out of it, with the volume up full, was the eyecatching film for The Cranberries' single Zombie.

I would include that official video here, but Blogger won't let me, so instead here are a couple of images as a reminder,

plus a link in case you can access this way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts

and also a really fantastic performance of the song from Saturday Night Live 1995:

I love it.

Well, it just seemed really bizarre to hear this rousing, alternately fragile and powerful, angry, sad, beautifully brooding, spine-tingling song at that moment, in that alien place. I was on the other side of the world, in an unfamiliar city with a different culture, and there was a 20ft - 30ft? -  high Dolores O’Riordan sprayed in gold** – plus  the cross, Belfast, the soldiers - a song written about the Troubles, in memory of two young boys killed by the IRA.  It seemed entirely at odds, and that’s perhaps why that weird juxtaposition has stayed with me ever since.  ‘Zombie’ will forever conjure up that unlikely place and time, an early evening in a brightly lit Singaporean shopping centre -  and it will always sound great and moving to me, too.  It's one of those songs.

*one of the shipping world’s favourite dishes: beans on toast with cheese on the top then grilled (sometimes also with ham or corned beef)


** I've just realised that, quite by coincidence, this post contains golden rivets, golden corn soup and a golden Dolores O'Riordan.