By Toh Hsien Min

Recently, it seems, I've been seeing more of my friends' kids in various settings and circumstances, some not always happy, that lead me to see them as no longer just kids.   It's hard not to acknowledge that they are properly grown up when they are pursuing internships in financial institutions (and asking my advice), pursuing a course in clinical psychology, and photographing events to build track record and some pocket money.  Two of them are, incredibly enough, training to be veterinarians in Australia.  I don't think there are many yet already in full time work, but that's just a matter of time, just as how over yakitori dinner on Saturday the parents of my beloved god-daughter debated with me whether it would be two or four more years before she doesn't want to hang out with the older adults anymore.  It seems like just yesterday when she was a couple of kilograms of swaddled 40-hour-old baby in my arms. 

Well, my own daughter will be 25 next month.  She is mercurial, sometimes flighty and often surprising.  She should be already standing on her own two feet earning her own keep but is still mooching around in the flat, asking for attention from a dad who admits he doesn't always have the time to give it.  Well alright, she's not a real human daughter of course but QLRS.

QLRS is the longest-running journal in Singapore already, exceeding Singa, which lasted for 20 years.  Even so, we can't beat the British for longevity.  For example, Eddie Linden ran Aquarius from 1969 to 2002, to the extent that few people remembered his last name and instead knew him as Eddie of Aquarius.  William Cookson ran Agenda from 1959 to 2003, while Howard Sergeant matched his 43-year record with Outposts Poetry Quarterly, which he ran from 1943 to 1987.  Both passed away with their hands still on the tiller.  Jon Silkin founded Stand in 1952 with his GBP 5 redundancy money and edited it for 45 years until his death in 1997, scant months after we met in Oxford.  As for the Americans, there should be honorary mentions for Peter Davison at The Atlantic and Howard Moss at the New Yorker, who clocked in 50 and 37 years respectively, but both were poetry editors in much broader magazines.  The American champion might just be George Plimpton at The Paris Review (yeah, go figure), who hit 50 years as editor-in-chief.  Even so, the longest chief editor of a literary magazine I know of is Michael Schmidt, who has been running PN Review since he founded it in 1973 which means his daughter is now nearing retirement age.

In that light, QLRS doesn't seem that old after all; it's practically a baby in comparison, particularly when I think of the sleepless nights I've had bringing it up.  Here's where life has a knack of springing a surprise.  I had jotted an outline for this editorial on my way home from work (having, as usual, left it to the last minute to agonise over what to say), and it had initially gone along the path of:- look at what's happened to all those other journals, Aquarius is defunct, Outposts is defunct, Stand... Until, back at home in front of my laptop and able to do proper fact finding, I discover the opposite is true - most of these journals, excepting Aquarius, have survived in some form.  

Maybe there's some hope for us.

I have to say over the course of this issue's production month, I've had lots of sleepless nights, lots of trying to squeeze in pockets of sleep in order to be up at 3am or 4am or whenever infantile desires demand to be satisfied.  I'm referring of course to the World Cup.  This year's edition has managed to be dull by dint of lacking surprise.  I watched the first two rounds of group matches and then managed to correctly call the four semi-finalists without even having to build a model (I didn't this year).  And then before the semi-finals, a friend said the final was going to be France vs England, and I wrote in our WhatsApp chat no it was going to be the opposite; and then went on record with my friends that Spain were nailed on to win, which they did in the most one-sided final in my lifetime.  At least I didn't have that trouble with this issue.  It was incredibly hard to narrow the poetry selection down to the eight quarter-finalists, and reading the short stories I had a sense that Kai Chai had some tough contests too.  The main surprise of the Criticism section is to see that, after having gotten used to five or six reviews an issue, there are only two, if high quality, reviews this time around, while there is a greater than usual degree of quirkiness to the Essays and Proust.  Wonder when the grandchildren will come.  

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