Collision Course

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing about the Singapore shopping experience for a while now. I finally became so irritated by it today that I had to get it out of my system.

I seem to spend a lot more time shopping here than I ever have in the past. This is mainly because I’m still trying to get my new home in order. So, just about every weekend, I head for Orchard Road, home to a hundred different towering malls. The trouble is, about a million other people do the same thing.

The thing that irritates me is that none of the other people walking the streets, negotiating the subways or browsing the merchandise seem to have any awareness whatsoever of the fact that there are other people who want to use the same streets, subways and shops. Awareness of own body space is nil. When someone’s walking just behind me or just to my side, I’m aware of it, and move accordingly. It seems like no one else on Orchard Road is blessed with this awareness. By the time I get home from one of these trips, I have to spend 10 minutes punching my pillow extremely hard to relieve the tension.

A number of scenarios recur. I’ll be walking in a straight line. Someone will be walking ahead of me. They’ll suddenly stop, in the middle of the packed street, to dig around in their bag for their phone. I slam the brakes on, just about avoiding a Charlie Chaplin collision in which I end up with their head in my mouth. They don’t even notice my hot breath down their neck, but carry on rummaging in their bag. I sidestep, tut loudly, and walk on shaking my head.

Next, I’ll be walking (in a straight line) just behind someone who’s going in the same direction. They’ll be a bit to the left of me. Suddenly, as I’m drawing level with them, they’ll veer wildly to the right, for seemingly absolutely no reason, forcing me to slam the brakes on to avoid bringing them down Danny Mills style. I stand there for a moment shaking my head before tutting loudly and moving on.

Today, in a mall, I was walking (in a straight line) towards a woman who was about 15 metres away. Despite the fact that there were hundreds of people around, she was looking in a shop window as she was walking, so didn’t know and clearly didn’t care what was ahead of her. I started to change my direction a little bit so that we wouldn’t collide. Unfortunately, she changed direction in the same way too, still looking in the shop window. By the time she was almost upon me I stopped. Only when she was treading on my toes did she jump, as if I’d poked her with a stick, seemingly dumbfounded by the fact that there was another human being in the shopping mall at the weekend. She had the nerve to tut, sidestep and move on whilst shaking her head.

I did the same thing myself.

Then there are the umbrellas. It was raining so hard today that the world looked misty and grey. But when it stopped, people kept their umbrellas up, seemingly with the sole intention of bashing me on the head with them. I found myself bobbing and weaving my head like a boxer avoiding punches. When I use an umbrella, I try to be aware of the fact that some people are a different height to me, so I raise it and lower it accordingly. But these shoppers seemed intent on trying to perform acupuncture on me. Without my consent.

And the elevators. I’ll be making my way (in a straight line) towards an elevator when, from out of nowhere, someone will nip in front of me, forcing me to slam the brakes on to avoid knocking them down the escalator head first… hang on, that’s actually quite tempting now I think of it… anyway, you know the rest, the tutting and the shaking of the head…

I must walk double the distance I need to on my visits to the shops. By the end of today’s shopping expedition, as well as feeling as if I’d been shadow boxing and had visited an acupuncturist, I also felt like I’d been to a barn dance, daintily “do-si-do”ing my way through the shoppers. Or like a court jester springing enthusiastically from one side of the street to the other, bells on stupid hat. Or like a lurching drunk, zigzagging uncontrollably and bouncing off shop windows.

By the end of today’s shopping experience, I gave up trying to avoid people and carried on walking in a straight line. I was like Richard Ashcroft in that Verve video – (was it Bitter Sweet Symphony?) where he walks down a street intentionally walking into people.

Oddly, I felt no need to punch my pillow on my triumphant return home today.