Pages kept quietly — a personal shelf from Telok Blangah.

I write here in the evenings, mostly, after the corridor light has gone soft and the harbour side has settled into its quieter register. This is not a magazine, a shop, or a paid archive — just a handful of kept pages about reading, walking, and the city I live in.

→ open the shelf

Who keeps this shelf

My name is Ellis. I live at Telok Blangah Heights, high enough to catch the last colour over Mount Faber before the lamps come on along the park connector. I read more than I should admit in public, and I keep these notes the way some people keep ticket stubs — not for proof, but because the paper still holds the hour.

I am not a journalist, a therapist, or anyone who speaks for a neighbourhood. I write what I saw from my side of the railing, my side of the platform, my side of the desk. If a page here feels useful, treat it as a letter from someone you have not met rather than instruction.

A few honest lines about me →

Kept on the shelf

Everything below is written in first person and kept in the order I would pull a book from a real shelf — the most recent spine first, no starred favourites, no headline badges. Each card is the same shape: a photograph, a title, a date, and enough of the first paragraph to know whether you want the rest.

That Night, from the Long End of the Road

12 November 2025

I was not at home that evening. I had crossed toward Kim Seng for a family thing and was walking back along the long end of Chin Swee Road when the sirens started — not close, not mine to stop for. I saw distant lights on a facade and traffic waved on. I do not know what happened. I only know what it felt like to keep walking toward the harbour with that sound thinning behind me.

Lamp, Page, Second Kettle

28 July 2026

The desk lamp stays on later than it should because I am halfway through a paperback I do not want to finish yet. I boiled the kettle twice — the first for tea I forgot while reading, the second because the flat had gone quiet enough to hear the element click. This is the small ritual that holds my reading hours together when the day has been mostly other people's sentences.

Harbour Walk, Paperback in Hand

14 July 2026

I took the park connector down toward the harbour with a paperback folded into my jacket pocket and no particular destination beyond the railing where the light turns gold before the streetlamps sequence on. The city does this small handover every evening — day noise to lamp hum — and I wanted to write down the exact minute I noticed it happening.

The Umbrella on the Platform Seat

22 May 2026

Someone left a compact umbrella on the platform seat at HarbourFront and walked onto the train without it. I watched three strangers notice it, decide not to take it, and one station officer finally carry it to lost-and-found with the careful boredom of someone who has done this a thousand Tuesdays. I wrote the scene because the kindness was ordinary and therefore worth keeping.

The Bookshop Before Nine

18 June 2026

There is a small bookshop near the harbour side that opens late enough for me to arrive before the first customer and choose a corner table while the paper smell is still settling. I had forty minutes, one half-finished chapter, and the particular peace of a room that has not yet decided what kind of day it will be. I wrote from the margin because that is where I always sit.

Corridor light falling across a closed door

I do not write to be quoted. I write because some evenings leave a weight on the page that will not lift until it has a sentence to rest on — and because Telok Blangah deserves more than my silence.

— Ellis, from the reading room