For those of you who didn’t know, I actually spent a chunk of the eighties in Singapore, and those really were the best years of my childhood. This was back in the day – when the place was still half jungle, half building site – and Singapore still looked like this:

It was a happy, innocent time of yellow school buses, days out to Singapore Zoo, Sentosa and the Science Centre, Saturday McDonalds on Orchard Road, and constantly playing non-ironic propagandistic earworms – which somehow I still seem to know by heart today.

Fast forward a few decades, and the place has been literally transformed beyond all recognition. By way of example, this is the same Singapore skyline at Clarke Quay now – I’m not even sure it’s the same Merlion (but if it is, then they definitely moved it…). Still, seriously impressive though.

Not surprisingly in this context, my attempts to take a trip down memory lane during my visit didn’t exactly go to plan.

First stop: my old apartment block, Jervois Mansions (not really a mansion, obvs). This was my personal childhood paradise – where I first learned to swim, played with all the apartment kids (a veritable United Nations of Singaporeans and various expat brats), and once knocked myself out falling off a swing on to the wooden playground floor (in classic eighties parenting style, my Mum told me to stop making a fuss, and that I’d probably stop seeing double again eventually…).

Imagine my dismay then, when I discovered Jervois had been recently demolished to make way for the architectural abomination in the bottom-right photo. My childhood Garden of Eden paved over without so much as a courtesy consult. I am most seriously put out.

Nor did I fare much better in looking up my old school, Tanglin. I remember Tanglin as a cosy quadrangle of two-storey colonial buildings with a much-loved lawned playground in the middle (bonus points if you can spot the little Sarahs).

These days infants, juniors and secondary have all apparently been merged into a single mega-school colossus. I didn’t go out of my way to check it out – there just didn’t seem to be much point. They’ve even binned off the old school houses – Singa, Beruang, Harimau and Elang (Lion, Bear, Tiger and Eagle, respectively) – FFS. Whatever Tanglin Trust – I’m still Singa till I die, motherf**ker!!

Cold Storage at Orchard Road (where we used to do our weekly big shop) is similarly no more, having been replaced with a swanky Fair Price Finest. It didn’t even stink out the whole mall with that unmistakable durian fruit funk or anything (practically de rigueur back in my day…). Come to think of it, I’ve not smelled durian even once since I’ve got here – has it been quietly relegated to Singapore’s official banned list, alongside chewing gum, jaywalking and vapes*, I wonder…?

Even the Mandarin Hotel, where we spent our first few weeks in Singapore, unfailingly having breakfast in the Chatterbox restaurant each morning (layout permanently imprinted on my brain), has fallen by the wayside too…

Needless to say, at this point my nostalgia tour was basically a demolition trail (quite literally in some cases).

Still, there were a few flutterings of recognition here or there. The colonial district is reassuringly still the same – and that’s Raffles Hotel bottom left. I valiantly resisted the urge to go in for a token Singapore Sling: I refuse on principle to pay forty-odd quid for one drink, plus it was only 8am at the time.

Chinatown too definitely rang a bell – not least because of the unmistakable Sri Mariamman temple (which I distinctly remember once visiting on a school trip) situated there, as well as those seriously delicious strips of red barbequed meat (known as bakkwa) that you can get on literally every street corner.

Ditto Little India – I definitely remember the colourful facades and shuttered colonial houses here – though without all the street art back in the eighties (no doubt Lee Kuan Yew would have taken a dim view). A welcome addition now, if you ask me.

Speaking of street art (as opposed to mere graffiti, which remains strictly verboten), Singapore has absolutely bags of it now. A few more examples from my city wanderings:

At least the Sentosa cable cars are still running – albeit in upgraded format these days. I was sorely tempted to visit Sentosa, but this would be whole day out in itself, and I only had two to spare (hence why I also didn’t make it to Singapore Zoo, Jurong Bird Park, Bukit Timah nature reserve or Wet ’n’ Wild, among other such childhood haunts).

Plus Sentosa appears to have completely changed too. In my day, a visit to Sentosa meant a stop at the insect house, a wander round the butterfly park, and an ill-advised dip in the dirty brown sea surrounding the island, invariably to re-emerge covered with jelly fish stings and a nasty case of conjunctivitis. These days they have a Universal Studios. And a waterpark. Even a Madame Tussauds – not to mention beaches that look positively appealing now. I choose to remember Singapore as it was: low-key, unflashy and with beaches where you still very much swam at your own risk!

Instead, in the spirit of embracing the new, I spent a morning at the impressive Gardens by the Bay (now featuring an unconvincing Jurassic World experience), which were opened in 2012 at part of a major programme of quayside development. Let no-one say I am not adaptive to change! I was semi-delirious with jetlag, however, so either that floating baby is an avant-garde art installation, or I was more sleep-deprived at this point than I thought.

Still, buildings and landmarks may come and go, but it’s good to see some things never change! The Singaporean powers-that-be clearly still love an overzealous public information campaign or two, as well as the odd vaguely North Korean style nationalist mural, enthusiastically inciting the population to patriotic fervour:

Back in my day, it was the National Courtesy and Sit Not Squat^ campaigns. Were Singaporeans in the eighties particularly discourteous or suffering from a collective mental block when it came to usage of the increasingly dominant Western toilets? I don’t recall in particular either way, but if so, that’s long-gone now – everyone I spoke to was unfailingly polite, and I didn’t see those tell-tale dirty set of footprints on a toilet seat even once.

And who am I to mock anyway…? We could probably do with a good old-fashioned awareness campaign ourselves, given the current abysmal standards of public behaviour back in the UK (grumpy old woman alert). That said, I think even the most regressive among us still know how to use a toilet – in theory if not always practical application.

One thing of course remains gloriously unchanged: the food. Singapore still does absolutely banging dishes from every fourth corner of the globe – but Asia in particular:

On the beverage front, as well as drinking buckets of teh tarik (delicious Malaysian pulled tea) on my visit, I also frequented a place called Heavenly Wang – but, in a blatant case of false advertising, sadly left only with a coffee. Bah.

Nostalgia, it turns out, is a risky business in Singapore. They say the past is a foreign country, and that certainly holds true for my personal experiences of Singapore over thirty years apart. Rather memory lane has, in my case, been unceremoniously bulldozed by a six-way modernity motorway.

But none of this detracts from the fact that Singapore is a phenomenal country in its own right. All I can say is that Singapore, for a dinky 15-mile-wide island, certainly packs a punch – and I barely even scratched the surface here. Singapore deserves at least two weeks, not two days, to truly do the place justice – and next time it’ll be a trip in its own right, not a stopover on the way to somewhere else.

Anyhoo, that’s it for now for this leg of the journey. I’m posting from Changi Airport, where I’m awaiting a flight to Koh Samui for the hopefully more relaxing stage of the trip – which I’m hoping will involve more chilling and fewer 30,000-step city marches. Until next time – preferably with fewer blisters and more cocktails in the mix too!

* Don’t come Tara and Stuart! S$700 fine for possessing vapes or vape juice even just for personal use – and even that’s for a first-time offence. Proper cigarette smoking though…? Knock yourself out.

^ In retrospect, Singapore should have ceded to Team Squat. From a colorectal point of view, squatting apparently straightens and relaxes the anorectal angle, making it easier to poop with less straining. Hence the increasing popularity of the Squatty Potty in the West. No, I don’t have one. Yet.