Today is the day I was going to fly to Singapore to join Joe and start a new life in the Far East. However, a few weeks ago, having returned from my second visit to the city state, I decided I couldn’t live there. So I cancelled my flight (and rescinded my job resignation and stopped my flat from being let out) and found myself working out what I was going to do now I was staying in the UK.

Singapore is a great place to visit (and I’m looking forward to going back for a holiday), but it not somewhere I can live. Joe and I would have had to pretend we are ‘just friends.’ This happened on my recent trip and I hated it. This denial of our relationship has the effect of killing it – in real time. I would have had to effectively go back into the closet when looking for work, in dealings with any authorities and probably socially to a certain extent. I thought I could go back to how the UK was in the 1970s, but I can’t.

Also, I felt Singapore would be a boring place to live. It’s pretty much mile after mile of similar high-rise flats in the north east of the island, where I would living, and the place generally lacks the variety of the British urbanscape. There are also problems getting some British foods in a reasonably easy way, and it (and everything else) is so expensive. I love chicken rice and many other Singaporean dishes, but I would not want to eat rice or noddles day after day and would want steak and kidney pie sometimes.

Then there’s the homogeneous political and media culture. Singapore is virtually a one-party state, with one serious newspaper (The Straits Times) and one media company (Mediacorp). There’s not much debate. I fully appreciate and respect why Singapore is this way, but it is not for me. I virtually wanted to hug the officer at the UK Border when I got back to Heathrow Airport. I appreciate this country more than before.