It's so easy to love a piece of land.

I've been meaning to take my Singapore Tours for so long, but I've finally realised I've got it all wrong. I don't want to study and photograph the streets of Singapore, I want to live on them, in them.

I fell in love with Still Road and its Changi and Joo Chiat appendages the other night. The eateries, noisy and loud and run in arrogant dialect, sprawled across pavement and road, durians tossed continuously out of trucks like some Broadway parody, people from all walks of life in T-shirts and slippers, holding hands - and I think to myself, what's there not to love? And the cars - little worlds of yellow light buzzing up and down - they tell me that hundreds of other families feel the same way I do. My attachment certainly isn't one of childhood familiarity (my landscaped, avant-garde, globalised childhood). The streets have a charm I cannot fight. I need to be able to put on my crummy made-in-Pattaya flipflops and smell the living world.

Time is a growing consideration, especially when I notice all the hawkers and durian sellers are old and nicotine-rotted. How many of them will die out in the years to come? I made a small speech that roused the MPs and several reporters at a youth forum a couple of weeks ago about heritage and building conservation, but I secretly fear that conservation is a losing battle. The future is inevitable in more ways than one.