THE BOAT DIARIES

Day 1:

Well, I was pretty nervous about joining the vessel, thinking it would be a rough boy's own club, but so far all the men on board have been really nice and very, very friendly.

I was in the galley and all their eyes were on me, and I've got my tray of food and as the boat lurches in the swell I stumble slightly. At first I hoped no one saw, but they're all staring at me, and staring hard at my shorts. Lots of the other guys are wearing shorts but I guess mine are non-regulation or something to make them stare like that.

Anyway, I say brightly "I guess I haven't got my 'sea legs' yet!” then add “Ha ha!"

No one laughs, but one of the sailors says he doesn't know about my legs, but that he reckons I’ve got a “fine sea arse”. I'm not nautically trained, so I'm not sure what that means, but it's met with nods and murmurs of approval.

What a friendly bunch!

Day 2:

I'm working with our Ukrainian captain, Vitaly, moving boxes around the wheel house. There's a steep ladder next to where he stands, and all day he watches me climb and descend, climb and descend. At first I was paranoid thinking he was staring a little too much, but then I realised he was just looking out for me.

You may no know it, but when you're on a working vessel safety is paramount, so I'm grateful each time Vitaly grabs my hips and guides me to the floor, even though there's barely room for both of us to stand and we end up mashed together.

When I am done he gives me a manly slap on my rump to show his approval. His hand lingers a little, and he says something Russian under his breath, and I want to say something but after all I don't want to offend. This is the way of the Ukrainian peoples.

Day 3:

Disaster! Something has gone wrong and flooded some of the quarters. John, one of the swarthier sailors, informs me that in such situations it's custom for shipmates to "hot bunk".

Poor man. Of course I agree to share my bunk and he tells me he'd do the same in such a situation.

As we spoon out of necessity I just wish he'd removed the spanner from his coveralls as it's very uncomfortable.

Day 4:

Neither of us sleeps well, but Swarthy John looks worse for it. His mood worsens as the other sailors argue with him when we emerge from my quarters. He's done something the other sailors don't like, something about "the fresh fish", but I don't understand what that is.

He promises to tell me later what it refers to.

Also sometime in the night the flooded rooms have cleared. Odd.

Day 5:

I...

Re-press-ion

Inconceivably, Singapore drops even further in the Worldwide Press Freedom Index which is released annually from Reporters Without Borders.

As the report states, Singapore “slipped six places because of new legal action by the government against foreign media” which initially I thought was a reference to the recent Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) shenanigans, which has seen FEER banned from the land. If you're unfamiliar with the case then it's worth heading to the FEER website where they're hosting every lick of correspondence between MICA, various legal eagles and themselves – all of which constitutes a most entertaining read.

Oddly, it isn't. The Index focuses “solely on events between 1 September 2005 and 1 September 2006. It does not look at human rights violations in general, just press freedom violations.” So while the IMF/World Bank shenanigans most assuredly make the list, the FEER saga does not.

Of course this is just one instance, and it only helped Singapore drop six countries down the list. Coming 140^th is absolutely nothing to crow about, but 146^nd is worse. Especially when you consider there are 168 countries on the list, and that places like China, North Korea and Cuba fill the bottom. Turkmenistan ranks second last, for general press oppression, but propelled down the list mainly for the torture killing of a journalist there earlier this year.

Considering that, we are fairly blessed as journalists here, but for a supposedly booming and progressive country like ours to be ranked 146^th it's a little, well, embarrassing.

The ranking of 146 puts us just ahead of such freedom-loving societies as Russia (where incidentally a journalist was executed Mafia-style in previous weeks) and a mere eight countries ahead of Iraq.

So who has better press freedoms than us?

Kenya, Kenya for the love of god is ranked 118! In May this year government forces stormed the office of the Standard newspaper and their television station, burning thousands of copies of the paper, taking the station off the air, and arresting swathes of journalists. Even journos in Kazakhstan and Somalia are having a better time of it, apparently. Our neighbour to the north (and south), Malaysia, ranks 92^nd and the Philippines, where seven journalists were murdered last year, ranks a much zestier 142^nd.

Out of all of Southeast Asia, only Vietnam, Laos and Burma rank lower, but that's hardly surprising.

The meritocracy of mediocrity

Repression of media leads to a terrible problem, and that's that a non-critical partisan media is terribly, terrible stale in everything it produces.

It's an open secret that the media here is non-critical of the government, and while to me an outsider I find this a horrendous abuse, it's the way this censorship has permeated the entire culture of journalism beyond the political arena that mostly damns the Singaporean media industry. The government doesn't really need to crack their whip much – the rest just runs under its own momentum and the need to censor spreads into all nooks and crannies.

This self-censorship permeates the entire industry, regardless of what media you work for, regardless of who or what you write for, and it results in some of the blandest and most flavourless reading imaginable. Not too critical, overwhelming favourable, and unlike Goldilocks the result is far from being “just right”.

This “everything's rosy” gloss on everything tends to make for amazingly dull reading, and it makes you a terribly dull journalist. Yes, you! Always walking the middle road, never branching out. When there's juicy scandal reported it's never anything truly interesting, but it's manufactured bullshit with scant interest to the average reader. It's the same with things that are hyped (do we really need six stories in six consecutive days telling us how Singaporeans are losing their minds over the new SPH Buzz kiosks?)

Pick up an alternative to the local papers and see what's really happening in the world and in Singapore. Great starting points would be the Bangkok Post, International Herald Tribune, the Asian Wall Street Journal and the South China Morning Post. For magazines just pick up a foreign edition of a local magazine, or a foreign mag that deals with the same topic.

The quality is there, where in Singapore it is sorely lacking. It's an entire industry that supposedly runs as a meritocracy, yet pumps out mediocrity. In journalism here, it seems that near enough is good enough. Unfortunately it's the Singaporean way to meekly accept this as just being the 'way is it is'. I do the same when friends ask me about it – although for me it's less apologetic and more incredulous, but the response is the same – that's just the way things are done here.

And the people accept it...because there's no alternative. I dream of the day when we no longer see the ridiculous proclamations that the Straits Times is “Number One!”, when they are the only one. Hell, it would be awesome if there was an alternative paper. I'm not suggesting that it be a 'free' paper, but maybe just one that cuts down on the fluff and makes the ST actually work for its ad-dollars and its circulation.

But you and I know that that is never, ever going to happen. Not while everything's rosy. Not while coups are most certainly not created in neighbouring countries by government interests. Not while billions of CPF dollars are not lost on share prices alone by the same interests. Not while the Singaporean machine keeps chugging along without a hitch.

And for all you journos out there, why risk your career by rocking the boat? Maintain your course, think nothing, act on nothing, you're doing a bang-up job already.

White Dork Down

I’m sitting in the helicopter, idly fingering the collar of my survival suit, making small talk with the other passengers and looking out the window at the water below, when the pilot screams the three words I did not want to hear:

“BRACE! BRACE! BRACE!”

Without thinking I’m down, one arm braced across my chest and grasping my shoulder, the other across my lap and grasping my knees, and I’m hunching as small and compactly as possible.

In seconds the ditching helicopter hits the water surface, and for a brief moment it bobs there, before the liquid begins to pour into the vehicle. I sit up, one hand grasps for the window, the other checks the buckle on my my lifejacket -- secure -- then confirms the location of my seatbelt buckle. In all, maybe two seconds has passed since impact, and the water is already surging over my calves.

While tearing out the rubber seal around the window with my right hand my left is pulling out the Emergency Breathing System (EBS) fitted to my chest. I fit the breathing tube into my mouth and the clip to seal my nose even as my right elbow is knocking out the window pane. As the water reaches my neck I take the deepest breath imaginable and engage the EBS as water closes over my head.

The chopper is now completely submerged, sinking, and I’m still strapped in tightly to my seat. Worse, the air in my lungs is all I have to survive on and I exhale the lot into the EBS.

That’s when the top-heavy helicopter rolls upside down, the engine dragging it down to the sea floor. This is also my cue to get out, now, or die.

I release the seatbelt as the life-saving nasal clip also releases its firm hold on my nose, and water shoots into my sinuses. I panic, and inhale stale air from the EBS in my mouth and water through my nose.

Suddenly all calm is gone and the lizard part of my brain takes control. It’s telling me that I am inhaling water. It’s telling me that what little air I am getting has far too much CO² and far too little O². It’s telling me that something is grabbing my waist. It’s telling me that I’m going to die.

Instinctively I gasp again and get another mix of water and air, but this time there’s even less oxygen in the mix and even more carbon dioxide.

It’s a second since capsizing, and out of the six or seven breaths the EBS affords you, I’ve only got five lef--- four more gasps left before I run out. Even though I’m upside down, feeling panicked and scared, I still manage to unbuckle and slide out through the window frame.

In moments I bob to the surface where I rip the EBS from my mouth and cough up fluid, and in my first panicked breath I swallow more air and water than I breath but this time the panic’s gone. Treading water, I take my first real breath and then belch loudly and involuntarily, which draws an appreciable applause from the assembled students waiting for their turn to ride in the helicopter crash simulator.

This is Day 1 of my three day Basic Offshore Safety Induction and Emergency Training session, and I am having a ball.

Hunger



Photoshoot with Faz

Soylent Green was people, now it's foreigners



A surprising flavour hidden among the chips. I have no idea what ethnicity the chips taste like, but I might give them a go soon.

I thought we were friends?!?

I had a full medical today, my first comprehensive ever, and the doctor at the end when poring over the charts, results, x-rays, graphs and doodles had the gall to tell me that I was overweight. I mean, what the hell?!?

Sure, to the layman I may appear overweight, what with my protruding tummy and love handles, but to a professional medic? No way. Surely the gamut of his tests I had to run through and even his machine that goes bing should have detected the sleeping coils of muscle just underneath my dermis.

And then I thought, wait a minute! This bloke's been to university to become a doctor and done lots of courses and tests and exams and I bet he's even done that one course where they learn to tell if people are fat or not by flipping through albums with hundreds of photos of people in them and they have to declare the person in the photo fat or not and every time they guess correctly a sweet grape rolls out of dispenser into a food tray in front of them.

So now I'm thinking that you cannot argue with a thorough education like that which means that I may in fact be fat, or in the thinking man's parlance, a little heavy, and that none of you, my supposed friends never had the decency to run across the room and slap the fork from my hand or just point and scream.

I thought we were friends? I thought we told each other everything? I mean, I confided in you about my deep remorse and horrible shame at the one time when I didn't pay a bill and the gas company cut off the gas. It still upsets me to this day. And you told me all about that time you accidentally killed that hooker in Vegas and when you were burying her next to the highway some kids on bikes stumbled across you and you had to kill them too and then you had bury them next to the hooker and dig more graves for the bikes.

What I mean is that we confide in each other in the little things that matter, so I kept asking myself why didn't you tell me I was 'fat'?

Then it occurred to me. By following my own awesome powers of reasoning I can also say that since none of you have been through the same arduous fat/not fat education as my doctor you had no idea, and that I was left with no option but to let you of the hook.

You lucky bastards.