Picked up by a white merc driven by an extra from a Gibson novel, technology integrated into the car in a way that made Bristol taxi drivers’ stuck-on docking stations and cradles look antiquated, all hung around with beads and charms (two doves in a wooden heart that swung at 45 degrees round every corner) and questions about rich Russians going to London, driven through peak hour traffic listening to the drive-time chat of a female DJ telling blonde jokes and labelling her callers stalkers, playing Radio GaGa and Billy Idol, passing signs to the BUDGET airport well outside the glass and height of the main strip, clouds taller than I’ve ever seen squatting malevolently in the orange and grey haze of the sunset, buildings whose purpose I couldn’t guess at (schools looked like tower blocks, tower blocks looked like hospitals, hospitals looked like big pharma headquarters), feeling the dirty heat buffet me in the brief intervals between air-conditioned spaces, watching the towers grow taller as the crowds got larger and the neon more visible, trying to work out where hotels stopped and shopping centres began, I almost forgot that I’d spent 12 hours without control of either armrest and was still sitting with my elbows glued to my sides.

Also worthy of note is free broadband and minibar, a potentially catastrophic combination. Go Singapore!