Saving a Sexier Island by Neil Humphreys

Author:Neil Humphreys
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814677523
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish Editions

For an hour, I had Pulau Hantu Kecil, an entire Singaporean island, to myself. I didn’t have a volleyball, but I did shout “Wilson” quite a lot.

At Pulau Hantu Besar, I went snorkelling for the first time in Singaporean waters. I saw lots of fish. I also fell off the boat.

Twelve

I ONCE CONSIDERED buying the worst tourist attraction in Britain. In 2012, the Louis Tussauds House of Wax closed down due to the failing health of its elderly owners and, more pertinently perhaps, for having the world’s worst waxwork collection, as determined by just about anyone foolish enough to pay a fiver to visit the museum. I loved the place so much I went twice. Louis Tussauds House of Wax was in the Suffolk seaside town of Great Yarmouth. On a map of the United Kingdom, Great Yarmouth is the bit that sticks out, the buttocks, and the windiest area, too. Family photos on a Great Yarmouth beach depict families looking like war refugees. We have photos of my teary-eyed, blue-faced daughter holding a candy floss stick with her blurred father chasing a disappearing pink cloud in the background.

That’s how Louis Tussauds House of Wax presumably got unsuspecting fools through the door, to escape the howling winds. With a degree of pride, I can say with some authority that no other country in the world would tolerate a tourist attraction so spectacularly crap as Great Yarmouth’s waxwork museum. For 57 years, visitors paid to admire a sun-tanned Adolf Hitler, an orange Sean Connery, a middle-aged Michael Owen, a Borat-influenced Daley Thompson and, most offensively of all, a youthful Prince Charles standing with Princess Diana. When I last visited, the royals were still placed together despite the fact that they bore no resemblance to the real people, Charles had remarried and poor Diana had died. Naturally, Louis Tussauds became a cult attraction, a waxwork museum where not one model bore so much as a passing resemblance to the person it allegedly represented. I had a soft spot for the faded, musty attraction because of its sheer British eccentricity and its spectacular defiance of modern tastes.

And in 2012, the owners couldn’t find a buyer for the museum. I read the story online (the House of Wax had developed a cult following across the world, such was its crapness) and ran to my wife in the living room.

“You remember that waxwork museum in Great Yarmouth, the really terrible one?” I shouted. “I’m gonna buy it.”

“Of course you are,” she replied, not looking up from her phone.

“I’m serious. They’ve got 150 waxwork figures, they’re worth £100 each, plus there’s the value of the business. It might only be £50,000 to £100, 000.”

“But you haven’t got that kind of money.”

“What if I got a loan? Singapore is supposed to be encouraging entrepreneurialism and new business start-ups.”

She put down her Candy Crush game. This was serious.

“Neil, a Singapore bank is not going to lend you the money to buy the world’s worst waxwork museum in another country.

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