Bird's eye view

From where I stand, next to the window, some 54m from ground level, the six-lane dual carriage-way snakes its way south towards the National University Hospital. The sun is out, and again I find myself wondering what I'm doing in this cold place and not out there when the weather is this beautiful.

The sun casts the long shadows of the neatly lined trees (these have become a sort of icon for the Singapore landscape)on the road. The shadows fall on the roads with irregular, two-dimensional angularity,the black leaves and black branches and black trunks, resembling the doodles of a madman with a black-ink pen. Or those chinese paper cut-out shapes they sometimes frame up on the walls of newly weds, spelling the word "Double-Happiness", except that instead of cutting it out with red paper, they cut it out with black.

Just breath-taking. the cars whiz by looking remarkably small from this altitude, Lexus and SUVs of all manner and form get suitably reduced to size. Like little motorised toy-cars they get pushed along by a irreverent toddler.

Break. Reverie. Back to work. Now. Now. Now.

(I head away from the window, where I do not sit. Where I sit is a dingy little cubicle where the sun don't shine. Well, it's not quite the toilet, don't get me wrong. It's not a room with a view. Sigh.)