By Toh Hsien Min

Sometimes when I catch up with old friends there's nothing to catch up on.  "Same old same old," one of us might say.  Our world-shaking changes are behind us.  Yet there might still be lots going on to write about.  My most recent quarter has been something of an overwhelm.  What to put in and what to leave out?  Why spend all my words on one thing when another could be equally deserving?  So, inspired by Trevor Noah's Ain't Nobody Got Time For That, I'm going to do a whistle-stop tour through recent mindspace occupiers, all within a hundred words.		I started supporting Manchester City Football Club in 1982, because they were the first football team I came across who played in blue and they had just bought Trevor Francis, the most exciting British player then.  City remained terrible for too long.  In the UK, I was visiting Wycombe and Walsall to watch City struggle to escape the lower leagues.  After the 1999 play-off final at Wembley, I predicted City would win the European Cup in twenty years' time.  I was off by four years, and wasn't in Istanbul only because of work.  But Trevor Francis has just passed on.
When not watching crappy football in tatty stadiums, I was often in the JCR flicking the rods on the foosball table.  I used to be enormously serious about foosball, playing for the college team throughout my Finals.  Once I returned to Singapore however, foosball fell away through lack of access to free tables and opponents.  Imagine the delight when our new office had a foosball table left behind by a previous tenant.  I realise I don't play to win at all costs, just to keep getting better at my skills.  But guess who's still a favourite for the office tournament?		On Sunday, I caught a Channel NewsAsia feature on the rise of the full-time child in China.  These young adults quit the workforce and instead receive a salary from their parents to spend time with and take care of them.  One commentator opined that these young graduates had little appetite for hard work and unrealistic expectations for their salaries, having been spoiled by their parents.  My main surprise was that this was China, where I have seen fintech staffers in Shenzhen properly doing the 996.  If the young Chinese won't work hard, what chance do the rest of us have?
A schoolmate passed suddenly twelve days ago.  Another friend based overseas said up until the day he arrived back in Singapore, he had been arranging to meet up with this chap and a few others from his JC class.  Then the chap went silent.  And then the news.  I went to the wake.  It was so packed some of us had to follow the service from the corridor outside.  Those of us from the same schools started listing our fallen.  In years to come, I might look back on this as the point I started feeling old (not same old).		Perhaps it was psychological, but the day after the wake I contracted a fever that has since proven difficult to shake off.  The whole of the next week, I got up in generally good shape but over the course of the day I would find my temperature (and headache) invariably creeping up.  It wasn't Covid, I was sure to test for it.  When I finally saw a doctor, he couldn't pin it down either, making some noises about it possibly being a throat infection.  Or maybe just a fever.  Or maybe these are just the wages of working too hard.
Politics in Singapore has been too exciting recently.  Black-and-white bungalows?  Why not an actual corruption case?  I'll see your corruption case and raise you a sex scandal.  Why have one when you can have two?  The timing of the reveal of the latter, involving the opposition Workers' Party, must surely raise questions, but just like a fever whose longevity shows itself following a different pattern from its predecessors, this spate of excitement feels different somehow.  Perhaps it isn't simply that in the era of smartphones, it's harder than ever to keep secrets.  I shudder to think what it might be.		In the midst of all that, I've had another book out.  Lilla Torg was written in 2007 as an exquisite corpse collaboration with fellow QLRS editors Yeow Kai Chai and Yong Shu Hoong and (ex-editor) Heng Siok Tian, during a road trip through Denmark and Sweden that tested our friendship and our navigational skills.  While it has taken rather longer than expected to get this out, I'm really pleased with the end-product, not least for being effectively my first photo book.  It's been selling really well too.  Seems it cannot remotely be true that there's nothing to catch up on.

One thing I didn't mention was that this issue of QLRS was slightly more challenging to put together not just because of robust work commitments but also because we discovered midstream that our QLRS outgoing email arrangements may have bitten the dust.  I suppose it wasn't really that impactful as my fellow editors all already use their own gmail accounts to correspond with contributors, but it's another thing for me to think about.  Still, the issue we did put together is a strong one.  The poetry has been as excellent as I can remember it, and from a diverse spectrum of poets too.  The short stories are respectable (including a multi-part contribution from Daren Shiau that in a way was an inspiration for this multi-part editorial), we have another Wyatt Hong essay to share, and then the Criticism section has just broken a record for the number of reviews we have published in one issue.  In other words, it's an issue to make time for.  Happy reading!

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