6. Hello Yesterday Long Drives
4 Oct 2020
Old Upper Thomson Road - just like a drive back to childhood days...
a drive along memory lane - narrow, winding roads built through tropical rainforest. aidan insisted on the choice of music in the car during the video recording. we were driving home after his appointment at KKH bone specialist to review his fractured left ankle.
video recorded with a sony ericsson W810 phone!
4 Oct 2020 sunday book in 7.45pm. left the house at 7pm.
driving aidan back to pasir laba camp earlier tonight brings back the memories - around the years 1995-1999 - the number of hours and countless times i drove to and fro from work at 11 liu fang road to drop or pick andrew at the various camps - i even have to drive inside/outside pasir laba camp or SAFTI or kranji camp (21 SA singapore artillery) or khatib camp (23 SA / 24 SA). years 1999-2002, when i did freelance work, i was driving to & fro the changi ferry terminal when andrew was doing his temp tour at tekong foxtrot, camp1 i think. i've visited the tekong camp and thought it looked comfortable, after being renovated and completely cleaned and prepared for LKY's visit.
it was a good thing that i was kept super busy at work. my crazy work kept me sane when andrew was doing live exercises, guard duty or field training. things weren't too good when he went to tekong. it wasn't even supposed to be part of his tour. it was meant to be for a few weeks or months (that was the reason and logic told to him) but somebody in MINDEF had forgotten all about him and left him at tekong. that was that. and that was the end of the long drives from our home in woodlands to all over the island to & fro the various camps. can you imagine - i spent 50% of my entire day on the road. sometimes waiting for hours on camp grounds because there was some last minute thing that needed to be completed before booking out. good thing we could afford the car and the petrol then. but that's where our savings went. got really bad during the asian economic crisis in 1996 and 1998... singapore was hit really hard. people lost their jobs and couldn't work for months.
anyway, the photo below is the bit i remember about the one storey buildings at pasir laba camp - when i had to drive inside for about 5-10min to reach SIW (school of infantry weapons). i have an attachment to the look and feel of these kinds of buildings. i'm also attached to similar looking buildings at the old CDC hospital grounds and similar buildings in other army camps, like at seletar camp where i spent some hours in my childhood just hanging out near the former address of the seletar golf club as well as the beach area at the seletar yacht club and near the once public swimming pool.
looks like i'll be driving up and down to the various camps again - these few years when aidan and christen will be serving their ns. i think i'm gonna enjoy my long island-wide drives again.
finally took a bad photo of pasir laba camp LOL
Comments
Post a Comment