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Episode 9: Case number 154 is released

By Johnny Sandelson


In no time, my short indoor walking track has changed location. Plastic linoleum is now replaced by a soft springy lawn under foot that is boarded by low level manicured hedges, and tropical flowers. Oddly, I have to check my mind and body against its impulse to swivel after every seven yards. It’s amazing how quickly my body adapted to the forced environment. Charles’s fiancé thinks my incessant walking might have helped extinguish the disease from my system, and that may have contributed to my early release. Charles has had to remain in the room we shared, still learning to dance, spare a thought for him.

Ultimately, my release was timely. It was indeed a 15 day stretch, a couple more days than average. I am now a mere case number: 154, just a statistic in a future medical study.

As I write, insects are nibbling away at my ankles, and in truth Singapore’s humidity is fairly unpleasant. Obviously, I don’t long for a return to the hospital, but I have to recognise that a sealed room by necessity creates a stable and calm environment. I’m reminded of Howard Hughes’s final years of self-imposed incarceration in a Las Vegas hotel room. This was his remedy for a mind craving sanctity from the dangers he perceived out in the world.

I ate so much last night, inhaling food without restraint. I ate with as much gusto as a thirsty drinker might consume a bottle of wine after a month of abstinence. I’m picturing in my mindall those movies of released prisoners walking into a hareem of debauchery. I receive a fresh ginger beer, and solitude.

I must remind you of Bernd, my Raffles point man, a strictly trained, Frankfurt-born and educated hotelier of the highest standing. It was

Bernd who organised the limousine to collect me from the hospital, and then he called me whilst I was in transit to the hotel.

‘I’m afraid I have to inform you,’ he paused, ‘it hadn’t seemed appropriate to mention to you whilst you were inside, but since that morning when you were taken away by the authorities, there have been consequences. Word spread very quickly through the guests and the entire body of their staff of your detention.’

It turns out that the other guests had basically fled, and staff had been left working in fear. After the great Sandelson inspired an Exodus, only a very few guests remained, indeed only those very few stranded business men who couldn’t get a flight to their country of origin.

The economic impact of my earlier stay to the hotel has been calamitous. In truth they were probably heading that way in any event thanks to the effects of the virus on international travel .(My great friend is a hotelier, and is reporting to me historically low occupancy levels.) For the moment, in the eyes of their staff, I was the poster boy of Covid-19 Raffles pandemic.

The limo driver continued the journey through the busy Singapore downtown, as I receive messages of a UK wide shut down, whilst outside my window I witness full restaurants and bars.

Bernd continued to explain to me that there had been a long discussion with management and staff about whether I should be allowed to return. At this stage in the conversation I’m imagining that the driver is about to redirect me to an airport hotel.

Whilst Bernd spoke I could hear children playing in the background, incidentally in this new world I have honed my skills for picking up the tiniest clues to divulge peoples environments. It’s said that a deaf man can see with enhanced clarity. What for most of us appears as a blurry image, is as clear to a deaf friend as an insect might appear on a nature documentary on a high res flat screen in a department store. Too many metaphors here, perhaps!

Anyway I can hear kids in Bernd’s background, like so many, he is now working from home.

He informs me that the hotel management and staff have reached a decision, and that I am indeed to be welcomed back. I feel deep relief, and then he continues in his heavy German accent, ‘but there are to be imposed special rules and protocols for your stay.’

Basically I am to be isolated in my room. It’s a strange thing to admit, and it might sound deeply ungracious, but with this news, I felt a

sense of disappointment.

One couldn’t imagine a more beautiful equipped room, blackout blinds that move at fingertip instructions on the hotel iPad. An enormous bed, and private bathroom, with butlers on hand to deliver food of any whimsical desire at any time of my choosing– and best of all a world which respected ‘Do Not Disturb.’

Yet when I was told of my forthcoming isolation, I felt a tightening in my chest. I could hardly debate with this man, for he had fought for my right to return: the returning ‘guest from hell’ who had essentially emptied his establishment a fortnight earlier, was to be welcomed back.

From my perspective, all that I had fantasied about on my release, was now being curtailed. I had wanted to walk with abandon, to socialise in a bar, to eat amongst strangers. Remember how by day 10 of my quarantine, I had dreamed was to be able to walk in Holland Park? For just that, I would even

have sacrificed the fancy lunch I’d fantasised about.

Instead of which, the news was delivered that I was to be put into the best Social Isolation facility in the world, and I would have to be grateful, and pay the normal rate. Who could negotiate from this position?

The welcome on arrival was so exquisite, that it was difficult not to be moved. The staff all lined up to meet me in their pristine white uniforms with bellboy caps, and a large number escorted me courteously to my room. I knew that only 30 minutes earlier, in a group meeting in their staff room they had all voted unanimously for my return.

I was informed that the Chef was on standby, but that new house rules dictated that the food would be delivered to my terrace table, at which point they would call my room and alert me so I could come and eat. It offered the staff the two meters distancethey required, to be isolated from the most negatively tested man within their city. I wouldn’t even be able to thank the staff in person. It turns out that there was more human contact and emotional connection on the 7th floor, Ward F.

Once I’d finished eating, I walked into my suite, and I knew that I wasn’t really allowed out again. Although I was perhaps the cleanest post-Covidian In Singapore, indeed possibly one of the most tested humans on the planet, I was both a leper, and a VIP. [Steve, I bet they don’t have a training manual for serving that sub sect at hotel school.]

Unlike the hospital’s secure unit where the doors were locked, these doors weren’t locked, but I still had to stay inside my room.

To digress. I can’t avoid saying it, I’ve been raised as a Jew in a post-Holocaust world. My family were very liberal in outlook and sentiment. Indeed, my father was attacked by his own community when in the late 1960’s he swapped his Rolls, for a Mercedes: a car my father believed was technically superior. To put his actions into context, Jews didn’t buy German appliances until the 1980s.

So here’s the thing. And it is meant to be funny.


By way of a background Annette and her children are German. My grandfather, and his parents all spoke Yiddish, they all considered 1920s and earlier Germany and Austria civilisations as the cultural and ethical center of the world.


And so It’s awkward to write because to some degree, Bernd is one of our stories’ heroes . Remember he is the man who smuggled in the coffee machine, and pillow, he informed the British High Commission of my circumstances, and on a very human level he kept in regular touch over my two week stay, sending countless messages of good wishes.

Crucially, Bernd had advocated to his audience at the large Raffles staff ‘town hall meeting’ for my right to return. What is more, Bernd had moved the hotel staff so much by his words, that they were almost in joyous tears when my limousine finally swung into the imposing gravelled front entrance.

So how can it be, when he delivers the information to me about the rules for my stay, that my mind immediately substitutes the word hotel, for detention center. I immediately characterise him as an actor from a war movie.


Was it his manner? The clear order of his thoughts? Perhaps it was the way he delivered the guidelines with such a perfect casting voice, with stereotypical efficiency. My generation has cast all Germans as children, or grandchildren of ‘that Regime’. Am I alone in still casting all Germans as somehow culpable, in some shape or form for the crimes of their forefathers?

Am I alone to carry these prejudicial traits? I wonder how many people there are who voted Brexit for purely jingoistic reasons.

My petty prejudices need to be ‘called out’, and placed in the garbage bin of history. The Germans have made their amends for the Nazi regime. I want a clear and unambiguous mind to just thank Bernd for his hospitality and generosity of spirit, free of any World Cup chants.

During his earlier advocacy for my return, he had determined that to win over the townhall meeting, he had needed to offer this ludicrous compromise whereby I would be confined to my room.

As I write, I can see the few remaining guests in the hotel dining together in the restaurant across the courtyard. I sit alone, at my terrace table, in 200 degree humidity, eating the most wonderful chicken curry alongside a million side dishes, and a delicious spicy ginger beer.


I’m writing fairly freely today, it’s my last post, you may be relieved to hear that news. I imagine there’s a private corresponding blog of you readers who say, ‘be kind to Johnny, pretend his writing is good, it’s clearly helping his morale at a challenging time, and don’t let on to him that we are desperate for him to be released, and then we will be freed of his endless ramblings.’ Duncan will be living in anticipation for a return to my one line work emails.

So rest assured Dear Reader, I am a ‘one blog wonder’, this is almost the end of my 15 days of writing fame. Part 10 is almost certainly my conclusion. My flight home is tonight on Singapore airline, I then join the rest of you in complete lockdown.

Incidentally if any of you fancy it, try your hand at writing, or drawing or painting or sewing, or cooking. Now is a rare chance for us all to explore a creativity left behind in the art classes of secondary school.

We are way off track from our story, and I’m not quite finished yet.

I’ve been explicitly told that I am forbidden to walk in the grounds. So, after my morning tea tray is delivered to my terrace, I write for 90 minutes or so, then I order breakfast which I’m told will take 20 minutes to be delivered. I use this time to walk powerfully and purposefully through the elegant corridors, the maze of courtyards that are almost completely empty. The shops are closed, and the guest suite windows are dark.

Occasionally I see a hotel gardener or repair man, and they throw themselves backwards against the wall as they see my 6 ft Caucasian Covidian frame walking at an almost athletic pace, they don’t dive for cover out of deference, but out of fear. I don’t miss a beat, I love walking now, no pivots, no pauses.

My flight is set for departure at 11.30 this evening. I am therefore scheduled to leave my room at 8.30pm, I know the hotel car will be eagerly waiting to take me away. I imagine there will be a line of waving staff dressed impeccably in white , they will say : ‘Farewell Mr Sandelson, I look forward to welcoming you back in the future,’ and secretly they will all be praying that my flight is not cancelled.

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