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A reader wrote in with the name of the man who designed the dragon: Khor Ean Ghee, working in-house at HDB. Added it to the entry.
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4.2 km
Toa Payoh
The Dragon at Lorong 6
Walked out at six to see whether the dragon at Lorong 6 is still standing. It is, and there is still sand under it, which is the part that keeps surprising the people who come from the other end of the island to photograph it.
Went round the town park on the way back, which I had not done in years. Rain at the tower; waited it out with four strangers, none of whom said anything.
Lorong 6 to Braddell, the long way round the town park. -
No walk this week. The haze came back — PSI in the low hundreds by Wednesday, and it got into the flat even with the windows shut.
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Fixed the map on the Tiong Bahru entry. I had the shelter on the wrong side of Moh Guan Terrace, which someone who lives there pointed out, politely.
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5.6 km
Tiong Bahru · Robertson Quay
Tiong Bahru to the River
Five and a half kilometres from the pre-war blocks down to Robertson Quay. The thing I cannot walk past is the air-raid shelter built into the ground floor of Block 78 — a room made by people who expected to be bombed, with laundry drying on bamboo poles above it.
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Added a page with the distances, because I kept opening old entries just to check a number.
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6.1 km
Bishan · Ang Mo Kio
The River They Put Back
Six kilometres along the Kallang River through Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. Between 2009 and 2012 the concrete canal was taken out and a river built in its place; the park is the flood plain, on purpose.
No otters. One heron, standing in the meander doing nothing at all for the entire eleven minutes I watched it.
The canal that was taken out and the river put back. -
Otters at the pond in Bishan at seven this morning. Not a walk — I was on the way to work and stood there for ten minutes.
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2.1 km
Toa Payoh
What Happens at the Void Deck
Two kilometres, four void decks, one Sunday evening: a wake, a queue for the Meet-the-People Session, a Malay wedding being set up for the next morning, and a kindergarten pulling down its shutters. None of this route was planned.
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2.0 km
Chinatown · Keong Saik
Under the Five-Foot Way
Chinatown, on and off the five-foot ways for two kilometres. The site is named after them, so it was time I wrote the entry properly — including the part where people rioted over them.
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2.8 km
Somerset · Newton
The Week It Kept Raining
2.8 km done in four dashes between shelters. Sixty-three minutes for a walk that takes thirty-eight in February.
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New shoes. The old pair did somewhere around 1,100 km, almost all of it on pavement, and the tread on the outside of both heels is gone.
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7.3 km
Punggol
A New Town Is a Grammar
Punggol, 7.3 km, gone to read a new town rather than to like it. Town centre, neighbourhood centre, precinct — once you know the grammar, an unfamiliar town is legible on sight.
The cost is the ground floors. Precinct pavilions are lovely and small, and nobody is building the deep void decks that hold a wedding of three hundred any more.
Punggol reads like a sentence you can walk through. -
3.4 km
Balestier
Balestier, Slowly
Balestier Road end to end, both sides, nothing skipped. A failed sugar plantation gave the road its name; a villa halfway along it was where the Tongmenghui ran its Southeast Asian operations; the shops in between mostly sell ceiling lights.