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.

Michaela, my spouse, true to her ever-benevolent nature, reassures me.

The mall is just not your kinda habitat. I bet you can still find your way out of the jungle,

she says.

But I am not so sure.

And yet. Come to think of it, there must be other reasons why I have been so off-the-worldish, lately.

Here’s two of them that I can think of right now.

As said, we live in Singapore, which is more or less on the equator, and I always thought that there would be no seasons here, no difference between solstice number one and solstice number two, no changes, nothing, for all of the year, day in day out, absolutely zilch.