72-hours-to-myself, an island, a book & a song

Another name for '72 hours-to-myself’ is ‘extended weekend’ and this post is a review of 3 things - an island, a book & a song which I visited, read & played respectively during the past 72 hours that comprised my extended weekend.

Starting with the island. This weekend, I had a little resolve to spend one day out of mainland Singapore (if you can excuse my conspicuous plagiarism from 'mainland china') So on Sunday, I went to a nearby island called Pulau Ubin. It was far from what I expected (or rather not so much expected but what I had been longing to see). We took a walk to the other side of the island. Walk because my friend didn’t know cycling, so couldn’t rent cycles. The journey to & back was marked by a lift from a truck driver, & then finally a taxi back to the ferry point… although we enjoyed the bumboat ride to & from Pulau Ubin, but nonetheless this island is completely avoidable… For the general knowledge freaks, it is a ‘ghost island’ of Singapore i.e. untouched by commercialization and human inhabitation, somewhat country in its looks, full of mosquitoes and cycle rent shops, nothing spectacular but yes I think visiting it was the only way to strike it off my to-visit-places list.

The book in the question is ‘The Accidental Woman’ which I thought was by J.M. Coetzee, but to my surprise when I started reading it, I noticed it was from Jonathan Coe. What surprised me was that I made a mistake in noticing the author’s name! I usually don’t do that.. but anyway absurd is the word… I don’t even know why the author wrote it and what he wanted to convey from the book. Although I liked the fact that he kept a conscious distance from the usual erotic stuff found in most fictional books, the dreariness attached to the story was quite awful. Also, the story did not make any sense whatsoever. I can’t understand why a girl who was the only one in her batch to make it to Oxford, who could be quite successful had she tried enough, chose not to take control of her life so was destined to such a sad existence. And the funniest thing was because she was a loser heroine of the story; all other characters in the story were even more spectacularly dumb and inane. Amazing how the author created a net of morons around his heroine to make her shine… Anyway a complete waste of a book and I certainly don’t recommend this book to anyone, not even lukewarmly (as one online review did)

Now comes the song, the only thing that certainly did go well during the weekend. It is Zombie by The Cranberries. It is a protest song by the band from the 1994 album ‘No Need to Argue’. And in all the videos I saw on youtube of this song, the band never forgets to mention the message they are trying to convey by it. I successfully played it on my guitar. It goes down as the first song I played on my guitar… it’s quite an easy song & that’s why I could even sing it while playing but the energy in the song has to be felt to be believed. A super melodious and an absolutely guitarable song ….