Last Sunday, the husband returned after a few days away in the Lion City – the city in the East that comes alive at night with the light of a thousand suns.

I have never been to Singapore, but Suman has, a few times. He goes there on work and comes back with a suitcase full of stories. Tales of fountain-spouting lions, of laser shows that conjure up faces on water like a sorcerer’s trick, a dinner of crabs on the 57th floor by the Marina and children flying kites in the night sky.

But these are no ordinary kites. These are kites lined with a string of lights, like kids ‘flying’ lightsabers against an inky night.

But Singapore was not always about children flying kites lined with a string of lights. Nor was it about conjuring fairytales on the 57th floor. On this trip Suman met a group of friends, friends nearing the end of their working lives, friends who told him tales of growing up, caught up between gang wars and regular knife crimes on the streets of the Lion City – rival Malay kids chasing each other down the road with open sabres – sabres not lined with a string of lights but something far more dark and sinister.

There were also probably no ‘lions’ in the Lion City. The guy who named it Singapore some 700 years ago, perhaps just saw a Malay tiger, mistook it for a lion (Singha) and named the land (pur) after it. Suman didn’t tell me that, Google did.

Anyway, so the husband returned last Sunday, this time bringing back more than just a suitcase full of stories. He came bearing gifts, as men from the East are wont to do this season. So this Sunday we had tea, lots and lots of it, by the fire under the chalk hills, far from the light of a thousand suns that was lighting up the inky night in the Lion City.

Wiltshire, December 2016