It rarely occurs to one the trouble taken to build a flat. The workers who deal with the sun, mud, accidents and incomprehensible supervisors. Foundations, architecture, engineering, project management, utilities planning, material selection, timelines and ultimately the multiple compromises due to market demands. In Singapore, getting a home means, please sir, can we have more loan quantum?

Grand Designs (on Netflix) is an eye opener. Homes could float away, slide down, crumble into dust. How rare and special it is, to be able to go out and buy a home has telephone, light and water, that is near buses and trains, near ready to eat food, with renovators who at a snap give you a template in order to pretend to have taste and deliver this illusion in a few months. Someone has done all the calculations, taken the risks to made sure there are no expensive mistakes. Nobody has to pay half a million or close to a million to discover that the plot is a bog.

Zoom is an equaliser. Everyone works off a small, slightly, tilting ceiling.

Yet other people’s interiors always bother us: bowed shelves acquiescing to just-one-more-wouldn’t-hurt and joyfully unfashionable floors.

Great money and effort turns inward to stamp that wealth, tearing down and building up. On zoom, only the tilting blank ceiling is allowed. Books and letters piling on top of the dusty piano, and the children and their legs strewn over coffee tables are portraits too intimate.

Kid #1 has just started Primary school and I find the schedule change hard to manage. I couldn’t figure out how other parents did it. I kept trying to figure out how did they manage to fit revision after dinner. What about playing? Don’t their kids play? Why is it that those blogs and articles say kids are suppose to play? Am I allowed to let them play?

It’s a public holiday today and instead of doing exam exercises I downloaded Lego Movie 1 & 2. (Love the show! The songs!) I am wondering if I imagine kids can be managed like a manufacturing process, with strict adherence to schedules. I think it’s maybe like managing a new baby. Key jobs need to be done for a baby – diapering, drinking milk and sleeping. A schedule is necessary so that mummy and baby get what they need to do out of the way. It does depend on whether how fast or slow the baby and mummy gets all these things done.

So perhaps I should just set key tasks and we try to fit that into a schedule to get all the things done so that play can continue.