Two fun facts about living close to the equator, and some maths

(or: how finding out where you are in the tropics is quite something else)

from my Singadiaries

I have spent most of my life moving up and down between Belgium and North India. Apart from Sri Lanka and the Maldives and Zanzibar, I have never lived or worked or stayed anywhere near the equator. Until my family and I moved to Singapore.

Which happened just at the end of 2021.

So there is no way that I could have noticed the oddities that I am going to tell you about before. And nobody ever told me about them either.

Which is why I find them so disorienting.

Stuff got worse since I finally got struck by Covid. That was the end of March and the first days of April. All the time since, I have been living in some sort of brain fog. At first I couldn’t even remember how to switch on my computer, let alone log in — and today, more than a month later, I still have a hard time finding my way back out of the Jurong East shopping malls. It is as if they have been designed by a troupe of malevolent architects, with the specific purpose of trapping me inside — forever.

Which is a frightening prospect.