Blood and Wine

Old before I die.

In 1997, breakaway member of the British teen pop group Take That, Robbie Williams, released his debut album, Life Thru a Lens. His first single, Freedom, fell flat on its face, but more importantly his second, Old Before I Die, rose to become a hit. Eight years later, his first hit is now the first track on his first, but hopefully not last, Greatest Hits album.

And that is how I discovered this little gem of a song. It's cute: "I hope I'll live to see the day the Pope gets high," Robbie sings. But that's not what sold this song to me. It's the chorus:

I hope I'm old before I die
I hope I'll live to relive the days gone by
I hope I'm old before I die
Well tonight I'm gonna live for today
So come along for the ride
I hope I'm old before I die

Specifically, it's the second line that makes this song so special to me: ten words acknowledging the irreversible passage of life, of getting old and finally dying. It's about not denying the inevitable, but embracing the coming end and appreciating all the finite days in between.

I know it's just a lyric. But it's like when you're in love and suddenly all those sappy love ballads on the radio just make perfect sense, when two months ago you'd have snorted and changed the channel.

This simple song Robbie Williams had released when I was twelve makes perfect sense to me now. It's a comprehension I did not have when I bought the album months ago and first heard the song, one I finally grasped just last week.

It was the morning of our Friday Street Festival performance. My family was in Singapore visiting me. After breakfast, we decided to go out for a walk around Bras Basah Road. I was promptly relieved of my duty as guide; my mother knew the place better than I did. I'd walked through once or twice on my way to the Singapore Art Museum; she'd lived here in Bras Basah before I was even born, studying accountancy.

So there she was, walking down streets and roads she had not seen in more than twenty years, looking for a flat she'd lived in more than twenty years ago. She tried to superimpose the Bras Basah of her memories onto the Bras Basah she was seeing to help her navigate; we ended up walking in circles before we found the place.

And that was when that lyric suddenly made so much sense to me. The worth of growing old is to be able to one day return to the places you had seen when you were young and try to relive those days again even as you marvel at how much has changed. It's being able to point at a food court and say, "I ate breakfast everyday here twenty years ago."

I haven't travelled enough, seen enough, to be able to do that yet. But I am beginning to. The last time I was back home in Kota Kinabalu last December, I instinctively headed up to eat at one of my old haunts at Centre Point. I discovered to my surprise that Market Square had closed for good.

Well to be truthful, it hadn't been doing very well the previous times I was there; its closure wasn't really that big a surprise. The food was overpriced and the main reason it thrived was because it was new back when it was new. That, and the lack of other decent food around other than fast food. And the food court in the basement.

Believe me when I say you really don't want to go down there. The number of people tugging at you (not just your clothes) to get you to order from their stall should constitute sexual assault of some kind.

So I was pretty desperate to eat anywhere other than Molestation Central in the basement. Yet as I tried to figure out where else I could go eat without leaving the building, the memories of the place just kept distracting me. Girls I'd brought there (it really was all the rage back in its day). Hanging out with the gang. Lunches before hitting the gym at the nearby Promenade Hotel. Drinks after movies good and puerile.

I'd had lots of good times there. It was until then that I just never knew how much Market Square was a part of my life.

Some day long after I've left, I might come back to Singapore. I'll visit the Hwa Chong Institution Boarding School and see if the poor kids finally have air-conditioned rooms. I'll walk the corridors of my Junior College and peek into the lecture theatres I'd spent so many of my days sleeping in.

I want to see what's changed. I want to remember the days I spent here. I want to point and say, "That used to be my room. We reared a tapir here."

P.S. The "tapir" is my roommate. He is not a tapir.

I think.
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