The Porch
Welcome to the porch. I chose the word deliberately: not a lobby, not a landing page, not a studio with glass walls. A porch is where you sit before deciding whether to enter. You can read one chapter and leave. You can stay for five tales and the kettle I mention but never boil on your behalf. This site is a flat file dressed as a book spread — linen background, ink type, a narrow column for notes that would not fit in the margin of a printed page.
I live in Queenstown, in a block off Strathmore Avenue where the corridor smells of detergent on Monday mornings and someone always practises piano two floors up. The writing here is not journalism. It is not therapy exported. It is observation from a life that happens mostly indoors, with regular walks to the market and the canal. If you want breaking updates, you will not find them. If you want someone to admit the limits of what she saw from a dinner table one estate away, you are in the right place.
The porch holds house rules in plain language. I do not run analytics on your visit. I do not ask you to create an account. There is no comment box and no contact form — only an email address and a postal slot I check when the week allows. Maps appear on every page because I like knowing where a voice comes from geographically, and because consent should be explicit when a third party loads content. You will see a banner once, unless you clear cookies.
Navigation is simple. Chapters lists the tales in date order. Keeper explains who I am without pretending to be a brand. Postbox holds address and hours. The first long entry on the home page records an evening in Kampong Bahru when news from Chin Swee Road reached us at dinner — written from distance, without speculation. That tone governs everything here.
I rebuild this site by hand when the seasons change. Today's build date is 8 August 2026. Fonts sit locally in a folder; images are photographs chosen for light rather than drama. British spelling, Singapore references, no performance of cosmopolitanism. If a sentence sounds like a press release, I delete it. If a paragraph could belong on any lifestyle blog, I rewrite until it mentions a bus number or a stall I actually patronise.
Stay if the pace suits you. The porch light is always on in the sense that the files are served. I may not reply to email immediately, but I read. Come inside when you are ready — the chapters are numbered, not ranked.
Before you go further, a note on names: Tale Haven is the shelf label; Linen and Ink is the subtitle whispered in the header. Neither is registered anywhere official. They simply describe how the pages feel under afternoon light — cloth-coloured background, dark type, gold rules where a printer might have gilt edges. I borrowed the book-spread layout from old poetry editions where notes lived beside stanzas. Here the marginalia column holds dates, cross-links, and reminders I would otherwise forget.
You may adjust text size with the buttons above the nav once preference cookies are allowed. The site respects reduced motion in your system settings. Images load lazily except on the home page, where one night window photograph sets the threshold mood. Every tale includes at least one photograph because I trust texture more than stock icons.