More curious finds

All the time I was living in Britain, I never felt the need to see Stonehenge. Oh, I was curious about it -- and who isn't -- but it was too far away; could only be reached by a bus that ran once a week or something; and completely fenced off. I guess the most off-putting thing was that I couldn't wander about it like Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

And then this trip, R&K took me to Avesbury. It contains what is said to be Europe's biggest stone circle. There are two rings, a moat and an avenue leading up to it. More amazingly, the village -- including the local pub (very important) -- is slap in the middle of the circle.

You can wander up to the stones and the only things that will stop you from doing so are the sheep. And the mud. So again, no Tess of the D'Urbervilles for me, just pictures from a distance.



Crop circles have been spotted in surrounding fields but we only saw a crop doodle, and only a very vague one at that as the wheat had already been harvested.

Not a stoodent any more

The nice thing about going back to the town you lived in when you were a student is that you can now afford the things you never could before. Like finally having dinner at its only Italian restaurant. I used to treat myself to their gelato -- which wasn't often but unsuitable weather had more to do with it than prices -- but never ventured into the cave-like posh-looking restaurant (Etna, opposite the HMV, next to the post office -- information for YH, whom I'm sure has question marks above his head already).

This time, we could sit down to a three-course meal plus wine. And because one of our party had a birthday, the staff accommodated with candles in the tiramisu and a happy birthday song -- in which the other diners also joined. That really took me by surprise. This isn't Hard Rock Cafe where people are expected to break into song and dance. So much for the reticent British.

Not being a student also means there's no ISIC card to wave about for massive discounts.

But not being a (homeless) student also means that I can finally buy the beautiful handcrafted homeware I've always coveted (like these coasters). Which also partly accounted for the need to buy a new piece of luggage the day before we left for home.

Twenty years later...

* My Middle English prof is still looking like a Middle English prof, ie, he still has a beard down to his waist. Even if he has considerably less hair.

* There is beef rendang on the menu at what used to be the Airport Lounge (thusly named because of its airport-like carpet. Urban campus legend had it that it was picked because its 70s motif design would hide vomit spots). Heaven knows what it's called now (feel free to contribute, Yee Hung, it's the lounge on the first floor of Rootes Social Building). Outside the restaurant. Which used to be called the refractory. Now, every eating place on campus is a dang restaurant. Oh lord, how I used to pine for beef rendang. We used to have to trek to the Chinatowns in Birmingham or London for a chilli fix and now Warwick students get a bottle of sambal in a condiments tray that comes in the form of a dim sum steamer.

* There's a Costcutters supermarket on campus where you can get a sandwich for instant gratification and the ingredients for a meat and 3 veg if you're DIY, along with the pots and pans to cook it. We used to have to go to Coventry Market for tableware and cookware. Now, an Ikea has sprung up almost next to the market and I suppose ubiquitous Scandinavian designed plates have displaced willow pattern ones.

* My old room now has four power points in it. Plus high-speed Net access. WiFi. Back then, it had just the one power point -- and in an obscure round-pin at that -- and I had my first lesson in creative electrical wiring even before I went to class.



* The sapling outside my room window -- I had taken pictures of it through a year, during all the seasons -- is now a fully fledged tree. When I had mentally accounted for more buildings sprouting up on campus, I had forgotten to allow for how much trees can grow in 20 years.

I know, I'm going to sound like my own parents doing their "back in my time" act (and YH must be doubling over with laughter). If I had a beard, I'd be stroking it in a sage-like manner. Especially if it's waist long like a Middle English prof.

Interesting finds

L found silver spoons in Portobello, I found a bronze plaque to hang over the dog crate:


We also found a cafe called Makan. Very clever name, you know exactly who would head towards a sign that says Makan. It had laksa for five pounds. But we thought we could hold off till we came back to S$3 laksa. Still, that was a find we could pass onto R and other pining Singaporeans in London.

One of the best finds was an Italian cafe called Re:Hab where Max, the Italian waiter told us to forget about the menu. Instead, he would go into the kitchen to find out what "Christina feelsa like-a cooking-a". "Becausa it willa come out all gooda." We wanted breakfast so out came crusty bread drizzled with olive oil, italian sausage and eggs from Bologna with yolks so vividly orange like a sun rise that we had to take a photo.


The couple who owns the cafe was going to shut it down the next day and hightail it to their cottage in Italy for two weeks to "get some sun" because summer has been dismal. The husband is Australian and they fly to Melbourne every Christmas, with a three-day stopover at Singapore, staying in the Shangri-La, to break up the long flight.

That's pretty much like the lifestyle of the rich and famous for me. Makes you want to throw it all in and run your own caff in Notting Hill, doesn't it?

Buoyed by our experience with barges and locks, we hung around the one at Camden, waiting to watch people work them. We weren't going to laugh, honest. But no one sailed that way. I guess nobody wanted a bunch of tourists taking pictures of them being confused.

Only in Britain

* L and I are the only people speaking English in Camden.

* There's a hot water tap at one end of the sink and a cold water tap at the other. Which means that you either scald or freeze your hands when you wash them.

* You can get a pint and pay for it with loose change, without having to break into paper money. It's that cheap to drink.

* Doors would be "alarmed". Oh sorry, door, I didn't mean to startle you.

* Everywhere else, shoplifters would simply be prosecuted.


* Mr I Don't Feel the Cold, I Survived Canadian Winters So I Don't Need Woolies wears a cardigan (mine). However, he's still in the kitchen (of the barge) and still holding wine. So some things don't change. Especially the "eat and sleep" bits.

Half a century

We squeezed as many candles as we could on the cake but couldn't manage anywhere near the 50 required for the birthday boy.



As part of the slowing down process, the big five-oh was spent on a barge going at 4 mph down a Warwickshire canal.





Obligatory countryside pictures of sheep and cows follow.






Plus ducks, moorhens and swans. I also glimpsed a brown rabbit (or maybe it was a hare) by the water's edge. That was so cool, I've never ever seen a wild rabbit before. Swans can practically climb up a barge window for food.



Oh, and we managed a couple of locks without embarrassing ourselves. But that was only because we had tons of help and advice. The British are ever so polite.




Even during the very beginning of the trip when we had to make a sharp turn after sailing out of the marina. We made landfall very rapidly and must have startled two Brits sunning in deck chairs because we were going straight for them. They didn't say anything and personally, I think that they were sitting there to get a VIP view of inept boaters coming out of the marina. Another couple started video taping us. I'm sure we're going to show up on one of those Funniest Homevideos show on TV soon.

You know your holiday is off to a good start when you get upgraded to Business Class. It was very welcome after an eight-hour first leg in a seat designed for midgets (and whose big idea is it to stick the airplane equivalent of the interactive TV set-top box under seats? it means that you can't stretch your legs out in front of you) and a three-hour layover in an airport that's stuck in the 70s (ie, no Internet and no hot showers).



I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn't already fatigued by the previous 10 hours. I actually fell asleep between the courses of the meal. Yes, courses. You ordered from a menu and are served course by course, on fine china, glassware, set on crisp, thick table linen.

But the cutlery was still plastic. I suppose just in case terrorists get upgraded too.


High tea took on a different meaning at 15,000 feet altitude.

Dazed and confused

I got up on Friday morning, had breakfast (I had a yogurt that was mixed with Channel Island cream, I'd call that dessert, not breakfast) and went to the airport late in the morning. I sat on a plane -- and then on another (after running through a Middle Eastern airport with my name blazing through the public announcement system in a "last call" warning).

When I got off that plane, it was Saturday afternoon. I had lost Friday night somewhere over the Indian Ocean. Because I never went to bed between Friday and Saturday, my body now won't accept that today is Sunday. And worse, tomorrow is Monday and I'm to be back at work.

I woke up this morning with the dogs pressed against my legs and it feels like I've never left. Waking up in the Earls Court flat, on the barge, in R's house with her cats, in the Coventry B&B seemed like a series of dreams.

But my mind feels freer, looser, all the better for days of seeing green fields stretching into the horizon, for the horses, sheepses and cowses dotting the landscape.



Yes, I've had a wonderful holiday.

Guilt trip

We're baaaaack! With 40 quid worth of chewies -- from Harrods no less -- to appease the furkids.

The petsitter must have done her best -- an almost empty bottle of odour neutraliser which was full when we left and a severe indent in a new bottle of floor cleanser is proof -- but we still had to work the washing machine quite hard when we returned. That Dog had gone on the couch. And in his crate. And on the bathroom mat. Luckily, our bed was unsullied.

But then just now, in full view of us, he both peed and pooped on the pee pad, as if to show that he really knew what he was supposed to do. That Dang Dog.

I'm leaving on a jet plane

And the iBook is not. I don't want to spend my holiday figuring out WiFi in a London Starbucks. Actually, at London prices these days, I'm not even sure if I can afford a venti latte, double shot there.

You'll know when I get back.

See ya!

Oh doG

By this weekend, I'll be on a boating holiday in Warwickshire. To give myself a headstart on the trip, I've been rereading Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In a Boat -- To Say Nothing of the Dog. I'd forgotten that the dog in the subtitle is a fox terrier.



"Fox terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs are, and it will take years and years of patient effort on the part of us Christians to bring about any appreciable reformation in the rowdiness of the fox terrier nature." Amen

I got me a dog

And it's comfy.
All hail the conquering Queeni.

No sub-titles

L took out the recycling to the big recycling bin at the next block. There's a kindergarten there and when he got to the bin, he found that there was a teacher there, telling her charges about recycling.

Nothing like starting your kids out early in protecting the environment but she was speaking in Mandarin and there were a couple of Malay and Indian kids in the group, looking up at her uncomprehendingly. I don't think they're multilingual at that age yet. And you wonder why minorities feel that they are left out.

You know that bit in the Pledge: "Regardless of race, language or religion"... we all recycle.

Making sport of it

I was quite surprised when I turned on the TV yesterday afternoon to find that BMX cycling is an Olympic sport. Sychronised diving caught me off guard at the last Olympics and now there's synchronised swimming. And all this time, I thought synchronised swimming was called water ballet -- which I think of less as a sport but more of a movie genre. You know, Esther Williams and all that.

Whatever happened to higher, faster, better? Prettier, sassier and all together now?

Killing time

I should be throwing clothes into a suitcase and flying tomorrow but I'm not. We've been forced to delay our trip to London by four days because the serviced flat that we were to stay in is not ready. Never rely on a procrastinator to book holidays.

I've done all I can to while away the hours, I've baked a batch of ginger snaps, had a long soak in the tub, took the dogs on a long walk -- well, the dog that would go on a long walk; best to let sleeping, grumpy queens lie. And still the hours are crawling till I can leave. To make things worse, there's nothing to watch on TV -- Olympic coverage has replaced the usual programming. And I don't really want to start into the book that I bought for the 16 hour flight.

All good training, I suppose, for the 12-hour transit that we'll face, although that will be on the return leg of the trip.

A citizen's solution

So we're watching the PM give his National Day Rally speech on TV and he's talking about the declining birth rate and discussing the reasons for that. In the background, his multimedia presentation (eh, not just PowerPoint but multimedia, OK) showed a "Stop At Two" poster from the '70s.

"The reason is because your father f**ked up," L heckled, referring to the campaign in the '70s, started by the then-prime minister, who is the current prime minister's father, to control population growth by lobbying Singaporeans not to have more than two children.

And L's solution to fix the low birth rate?

"Import winter." When it's cold outside, everyone makes whoopee indoors, he reasoned.

And how would one import winter?

"Can lah, if we can import Olympic silver medallists, we can import winter."

Silver!

I bet the sports subs have been playing with silver in a headline all day. So where were you when Singapore won its first Olympic medal in 48 years? This would be Singapore's equivalent of the JFK question. It's a big deal, considering that the last medal was won before the post-independent Singaporeans of my generation were even born.

And that's why the Prime Minister's Office postponed the live telecast of his English speech at the annual National Day Rally. They knew he wasn't going to be able to compete for TV eyeballs. The Malay and Chinese speeches were delivered and telecast but the English speech is embargoed till Monday evening and the papers cannot carry it till Tuesday. That's gonna throw out my colleagues who are working tonight because two pages have been set aside for reporting on the rally.

While the women's table tennis team was fighting for Olympic gold, the whole nation was glued to their TVs. We'd been to see my parents but timed to leave for home so that we'd get back in time for the table tennis final. The taxi driver said he was heading home too. On the way, crowds were already forming at the kopi tiams, with the TV in full blast. And it wasn't the Prime Minister these people were waiting to watch. Not when the general conversation was: "KNN! Still talking cock! Get him off!" -- duly reported by L, who stopped by for a takeout dinner and dashed home with it before the match started. Halfway into the match, Roop needed to pee so I took him down. I could hear all our neighbours' televisions blasting the same table tennis commentary from the same TV station.

And as Singapore came to a standstill, where were its elite -- the leaders, the politicians, the big-time business honchos and even our newspaper editors (heh). All stuck at the National Day Rally, forced to listen to speeches when they probably wanted to watch a table tennis match instead.

Just last week, a ruling party politician who lost the ward he was contesting to an opposition MP, went on a walkabout and said that party grassroot in the constituency are still strong. If our grassroot leaders were really so on the ball, there would have been block parties organised for the table tennis final. Instead of having every household watch its own TV in its own flat, we could have gathered round for a massive cheer session. It would have been a nice touch to National Day and would definitely produce more Singaporean camaraderie than the National Day Rally. I mean, these guys keep going on about the Singapore Spirit and all that. This would have been a good chance to harness it. But alas, all our leaders were all stuck listening to speeches.

A medal at last

The whole office came to a standstill today as everyone gathered around the TV for the women's team table tennis semi-final. And now, Singapore is through to the final. Which means a silver medal, at least. No one seriously thinks that we can beat China for the gold. Still, that's like the first Olympic medal in 44 years.

And of course you're going to get the cynics who will point out that with a group of China-born naturalised Singaporeans, it's just another China vs China final. What thickens the plot, or the blood, is that the Singapore coach is the older brother of the China coach. All in the family.

The real rub is this. The final will be on Sunday night. That's the night of the National Day Rally. Television programmers are going to have it down to the wire, do you cover the match or the rally.

Of course you know already. Nobody's going to pay any attention to the Prime Minister.

What's for dinner?

The other day, I picked up a copy of Asian Geographic at the supermarket magazine rack and leafed through it. It was the 'Love' issue so I wasn't prepared for an article on dog meat. The article picked up on dogs as cosseted pets in Asia and then ran with it the wrong way towards the dinner table.

The pictures of dogs being slaughtered for meat just wrung my heart out. It wasn't so much the idea of eating dogs, but the picture of a skinned dog carcass that would be someone's dinner that got to me.

I suppose a picture of a skinned pig, lamb or cow carcass would have done the same. So it's not just the dog parent in me.

I know nowadays, all the ecological-minded chefs are pushing for rearing your own animals and growing your own produce. Or, if you couldn't do it, then get it from the farmer down the road. In other words, know what you're eating, or know who's producing it.

But how do you eat a filet mignon if you once knew it as Daisy?

Remember Arthur Dent at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe where a cow comes up to him, introduces itself, and points out the various choice cuts on its body?

I would still like to put on my blinkers and think of my meat as a chop on a cling-wrapped styrofoam tray, not when it had legs and walked and had a mother.

Scott Adams, a vegetarian, once mused that if the sight of a cow didn't make you salivate, then maybe you're not genetically programmed to eat meat.

Well, the sight of Daisy doesn't make me salivate but a perfectly grilled sirloin does. So maybe this makes me a shallow, unthinking consumer. But quite honestly, if I think anymore beyond the styrofoam tray, I will have a problem with what to eat for dinner.

Blogging in Melayu

Last month, Blogger made available blogging in Malay, noting that it has a large base of users in Malaysia.

Maybe in some Freakonomics cause and effect, what Umno decreed three months earlier that candidates for political party posts must have blogs has taken effect on Blogger's Malaysian base.

That and the circus around the former deputy prime minister, his accuser, the examining doctor, the notary and the private investigator. It is more riveting than The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, especially now that there's a by-election too.

There's so much to write about across the Causeway.

Goodbye to two friends

Two dogs in my little e-list of dog owners died on the same day last week. Fritz was in kidney failure and Nicho's little body just couldn't take his epileptic seizures any more.

It is hard to lose a dog, even when you know its time will soon be up. It is even harder to take when two go on on the same day.

And it is really, really hard to explain the loss and the grief I feel when these are dogs that I've only known through an e-list. One lives in Missouri, the other in Minnisota. How do you explain the tears for a dog that you've never petted, never scratched behind the ears, never rubbed its belly? And yet, I do know Fritzy and Nicho. I know how Frtizy like to be acknowledged as a pretty boy, and how he loves running in the park and riding in the car, and how when he was for a while an only dog after the older dog died, hid under the bed in misery for days. And how Nicho went from foster home to foster home and when he was finally really home, it was realised that he came with major medical problems, all of which he, and his people, fought valiantly.

Maybe this says so much about the reach of a dog.

I am reminded of an elegy that Theodore Roethke wrote in an elegy for a student:
"... I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover."

Another one

There's another Malay wedding downstairs again today. It's not as large scale as the last one and the music is all Malay. Not even a whimper of an REO Speedwagon ballad. Although there was Marc Anthony's I Need to Know but I think it was slotted in only because it fitted in with the joget rhythm. And later, when the karaoke singers took over, there was one Deep Purple song. So there were mat rokers in the wedding guests.

Now that it's Hungry Ghost Month and the Chinese aren't holding weddings, I suppose the Malays are picking up the slack.

Now there's racial harmony for you. Happy National Day.

Peachy, just peachy

I was eating a bowl of apricots and had placed a seed on a piece of tissue, the one with the moral fibre. It was a breezy day and I had the window flung wide open. Enjoying juicy stone fruit in a breeze just about cuts it as the best summertime experience, even this side of the tropics. I love it when cherries, nectarines and peaches come into season and become cheaper. Although white peaches are still out of reach -- gone are the days when I could afford to buy it by the crate.

Anyway, that apricot seed. I left my seat for a minute and the breeze must've wafted the tissue off from the side table because when I returned, I found That Dog on the other side of the room, valiantly trying to chew through the apricot seed.

He almost gratefully spat it out when sharply ordered to, because he wasnt getting anywhere with it. I was even more grateful that he did that without me having to extricate saliva-coated objects from his mouth.

There were no signs of the tissue despite a manhunt under furniture and even down the back of the sofa cushions. So I'm pretty sure he ate that. Well, at least it's full of "hygienic, soft and natural values" and must be good for him.

Such stuff as dreams are made on

This poster is popping up at bus-stops in the space meant for billboard ads. It's all very rah-rah and all, what with the Olympics starting this weekend, but am I the only one who wants to take a red pencil to it?

Back to work

I went back to work yesterday after a week's leave. There is one habit that I have followed from my parents, that of having coffee on a workday morning and tea on days off (in their case, tea on Sundays; in mine, on days off or as in last week's case, the entire week I was on leave).

Which meant that I couldn't even finish a cup of coffee yesterday. After a week of tea, it was way too strong. Even if the tea wasn't really that delicate but malty Marks & Spencer's Extra Strong. The coffee gave me quite a caffeine buzz after just half a cup -- which is weird since tea supposedly has more caffeine than coffee.

But I'm sure as the week wears on, I'd be gasping for coffee the minute I wake up.

Distractions from downstairs

The roomy pavilion at the corner of the communal space downstairs, and almost directly under our bedroom window, is being prepared for a Malay wedding feast. Nowadays, most kenduri caterers prepare the food in an industrial kitchen somewhere else and then deliver it in chafing dishes. Only the really traditional ones like this one would have an army of mak ciks sitting up all night cooking and stirring huge pots on site. Which means that there is a wonderful smell of rendang wafting up into my bedroom window. It's driving me crazy. And making me hungry all day. And that's just the effect on me. Imagine what the dogs are making of it.

The DJ is setting up his system and running through his playlist so we're getting a free concert as he does so. It's the usual love ballad suspects, Richard Marx, George Benson, Bee Gees, Chicago, Air Supply. And then, very suddenly, George Michael's Careless Whisper. I hope he doesn't play that when the wedding gets started, it's not the sort of song that augurs well for a wedding. And then, inexplicably, it was the theme from Star Wars. Maybe the groom was going to come in to that, along with the kompang hand drums? Or the couple would be using that for the triumphal march as they leave? Or should I look out for Darth Vader?

At least it's natural

I'm not quite sure what "natural values" are in a box of tissue but it's nice to know that the stuff I'm using to blow my nose has moral fibre.

For one blurry unfocused moment, I thought the new detergent pack was offering me a rock 'n' roll wash.

What's cooking?

It all started when I had to walk past Borders to get to the hairdresser's (I now have icy steely blue streaks in my hair). I can't walk past a bookstore without going in, and can't go inside a bookstore without buying anything.

I picked up Nigel Slater's Eating For England because it had pretty rock candy on the cover. I browsed through it and it's all thumbnail write-ups on British food icons. From food that I was happily introduced to when I lived in the UK (Branston pickle, Penguins, Flake, Jaffa cakes, treacle tart, PG Tips) to stuff that I can't understand why anyone would eat (faggots and gravy, tripe and onions, haggis and neeps) to treats of my childhood (Quality Street, Ribena, Jacobs cream crackers, chocolate Digestives, KitKat -- complete with instructions on the proper ritual of eating it -- Toblerone, Bassetts jelly babies). He only missed Mr Whippy, I think. I was quite struck that a lot of my childhood sweet treat memories were all British. I wonder why that is so.

I fairly devoured the book and had to get more. I went to the library yesterday in search of more Slater. I thought he only wrote cookbooks so I had never been interested before. I enjoy cooking but I'm not really a cookbook person. Well, the library only had one of his cookbooks and not the biography that he wrote, which was what I was looking for. The food shelf had only cookbooks but tucked in among them were a few food-related volumes. People who wrote about becoming chefs, food and society, food and culture, that sort of thing. I figured it would be like Kitchen Confidential, only minus the sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll. So I took out all of them.

The trouble with reading food-related books is that it makes you a bit nibblish. So I made a batch of peanut butter cookies. I'm not sure whether I'll finish the cookies first or the books. I'll try not to get crumbs on the pages.

If paper can grow on trees, then I think I should try cultivating money.

Some kid upstairs keeps tossing out paper planes and sheets of tissue, I've seen them waft past the window as they float down. A couple of days ago, it was whole sheets of paper. I took a look at the ones that landed on the ground. It's some multi-choice assessment test and he scored a C. I wonder if he was tossing them out before his mother found them.

PlayStation kills

A couple of days ago on the train, two kids sitting opposite me were absorbed in playing on their PSP. I was tempted to take a picture and caption it along the lines of: And this is why we developed opposable thumbs. But I was too shy to take a pix of strangers wiith or without their permission.

In an interesting by the way, PlayStation does shed real blood in its own version of African blood diamonds.

Dog day

It all begins when you wake up to a moat of pee around the bed. RuPEE is on a course of antibiotics and three days (just three, thank goD) of preds for his itchy rash. I've had dogs on preds before and I know they pee rivers when they're on it.

So I was careful with Roop, taking him out every so often. What I didn't account for was the 10-hour stretch shut in the bedroom overnight. He very carefully avoided peeing on the dog bed and the floor cushion and the bed. He just went on the floor on all three sides of the bed so I woke up surrounded by pee. I didn't have my glasses on so not only did I step in pee, I couldn't see a path out of the yellow lakes and rivers to get out of the room to get the mop.

That Dog. But it wasn't really his fault. He just desperately needed to go, only there was nowhere to go in the bedroom and I was too fast asleep to know.

The bad dog story of the day goes to Pancho, M's toy daschund who decided to eat one of a pair of expensive pair of leather dress shoes that he bought in Japan and that he only wears for special occasions. The ratty old pair of slippers next to it were unsampled. So Pancho has good taste.

That's not all. After M discovered the damage to his shoes, he realised that his pair of socks, which he had stuffed into the shoes, were missing. He searched all through the house, trying to keep calm and suppress the panic that the damn dog may have eaten the socks. And Pancho's a tiny dog. And M has big feet. You get the idea. Bloat. Obstruction. Emergency vet. Paying for vet's kids' college education.

Luckily, the socks were found. Laid out on the lower shelf of his printer stand -- where Pancho likes to nap. Pancho probably felt that the metal shelf needed more comfortable bedding.

M, awash with relief, didn't know whether to scold Pancho for eating the shoe or thank him for not having socks for dessert.

20 years ago

There was a party at Bar None last night to mark The New Paper's 20th anniversary. I'd known about it for weeks and although I never got an official invitation from the bosses, I knew I was going to crash it right from the start, along with my gang of TNP contemporaries. We figured that we 1G TNPers don't need official invites.

And that was the spirit of things all night long. The old gang hasn't changed. They're still irreverent, funny, and downright wicked to the point of being complete a**holes if you were on the receiving end. And they are still capable of putting away vast amounts of alcohol. Except for the one who doesn't drink because it sends him off into a manic-depressive dive. I would like to finally thank him now, 20 years later, for introducing me to Jim Croce during his dives.

There're plenty of photos but I can only update them into this entry next week because they'll all be sent to my e-mail at work and I'm on leave for a week. I don't think the current TNP photographer taking them had any idea who we were, much less that we were the pioneer batch of reporters but she was damn good in snapping away when there were photo opportunities -- mostly involving shrieks and hugs when someone familiar turned up. Apart from my gang, there were people I haven't seen in 15 years.

It was a great evening playing catch up. Old jokes were revisited and there was much recalling of old times. It's nice to know that some things -- and people -- don't change. It didn't seem like 20 years have passed. The only thing that forcibly reminded us that it's a new generation at TNP now is that a new reporter who just joined them recently is a student of my old TNP buddy who went on to teach mass communication at a local university. At least the youngster didn't call his former teacher "sir". That would have been too much to bear. For him. Not us. We would have doubled over with laughter. What, him, responsible and moulding young lives etc. And shake our heads. And toss back more booze. Which we did anyway. The first batch of TNPers has produced two PhDs and an MP. But looking at my own gang in particular, it's quite heartening to see that we're the most unambitious lot.

Here's home

This is where Radovan Karadzic can expect to live.

After 11 years on the run, it's not too bad a deal. Particularly as the pix of the cell doesn't look very different from on-campus student accommodation at the university I went to. On top of that, he gets an ensuite bathroom and home-cooked Balkan cuisine. That's already two up on what we got.

Those crazy golfers and the things they get up to

It could only happen here. Company X organises and sponsors a series of regional golf tournaments, the winners of which meet in a world championship final. And in between teeing off, they get little treats such as taking company X's cars on a test drive.

The only "problem" is, what the Singapore winner does for a living when he's not playing golf is to sell cars for Company Y, which is the biggest rival to Company X. Which then refuses to send him to the tournament final. It says that it doesn't want him privy to its new cars and marketing plans. It offers him monetary compensation but he refuses it. All he wants is to play golf with the very best.

The whole sorry PR affair has now become a High Court case as the man is suing to stop Company X for preventing him from playing in the final.

In a more pluralistic society, Company X would have rolled out the red carpet for the Company Y employee and won him over with their largesse. Who knows, he may end up selling even more cars for them.

Instead, they blackmark him as That Man from the Rival and mutter about industrial espionage when all he wanted to do was to play golf. But then, this is how insular minds on a small island work.

Marketing campaigns reflect how a society operates. And ours isn't as gracious and as inclusive as our leaders would like us to think.

God is feeling a little gay

I'm telling ya, Jesus wept. With laughter.

Lions! Tigers and bears! Oh my!!

Well, OK, not the tigers and bears but three lions. Enough to intrigue Rupert so much that he forgot to bark. He also backed away from the window as the lions advanced down the path, until he was all backed up against the sofa and couldn't retreat any more.

The lion dance was part of some festival for Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, organised by our downstairs neighbour who's some sort of medium or devotee, along with a puppet show. The furkids were mesmerised by everything. I missed everything, I was at work. The pix were taken by L to show me what I missed. Not shown is a vegetarian meal, to which he was constantly shouted invitations to whenever the neighbours saw him standing at the window watching the goings-on.

Apparently I also missed the neighbour putting his hand to Rupert and Queeni's forehead (she didn't protest, and she normally would if she didn't know you and you tried to touch her) in a blessing. I've always been disappointed that no church in this country does a blessing of the animals service for St Francis of Assissi's saint day. But hey, now they've got Kwan Yin's blessing.

Lying in state

Here's how Queeni watches TV. Note that the royal head needs a pillow. All that's missing is Rupert peeling her grapes. I don't have to do the bit where I stand in attendance and fan her gently because she's lying on the part of the couch that gets the draft from the airconditioning.

3D puzzle

When we first moved in about two years ago, this lamp was a housewarming gift from C, who bought it in Thailand on one of his frequent trips there. It's actually comprised of flat little plastic rectangles with hook-like corners and you hook all the rectangles together and they somehow magically form a sphere. It's a really clever piece of design.

Knowing what a klutz I am and how anti-DIY L is, C had warned us that it required a little assembly. But by the time he gave it to us, he quite kindly took pity on us and put it together for us, complete with a light bulb. We were still renovating then and we simply handed the assembled lamp to the electrician who installed it for us. When we needed to change the bulb, we just had to unhook a panel, reach in, screw the bulb off and put a new one in, C instructed.

That was last week. It seemed simple enough. Only when I hooked the panels back up, the beautifully perfect sphere wasn't perfect and I know I messed it up somehow and a couple of panels aren't where they're supposed to be.

L, with his statistics background, says there's a mathematical formula to it. I'll be damned if I, the maths failure in school, needed to apply maths to changing a light bulb. I just slotted slats back where they could fit and let it be, beautiful perfect sphere of a lamp be damned. The statistician, being a non-DIY guy, didn't help beyond postulating mathematical theories. He'll fix it later. One very fine day. Or until the next bulb change.

So how many statisticians does it take to change a light bulb?

Fun at the supermarket

First, I couldn't find the Marmite. It wasn't with the bottled sauces and it wasn't with the soups. That's what I use the yeast extract for so I didn't knew where else to look for it. I finally found it by accident -- next to the bread. So that means that Marmite on toast isn't a solely British thing nor as cultivated a taste as I thought.

Then I came across breakfast flavoured milk. I didn't know breakfast was a flavour and now I'm curious as to what lunch and dinner flavours taste like.


But nothing can be as interesting as absurd seafood...

Wheels go on the road

I'd recently written about a pet peeve being cyclists on footpaths. They are an accident waiting to happen and L had a near miss yesterday. Someone cycled down the footpath behind him and he didn't even know she was bearing down on him till the mud-guard of her front wheel came into contact with the back of his leg.

He spun round, letting fly a torrent of blue words. The elderly cyclist responded just as vociferously as she pedalled off. She spoke in Chinese dialect, which L doesn't understand very well but enough to distinguish that far from apologising for hitting him, she was giving him what-for for giving her what-for. She's jolly lucky he didn't fall over or was hurt any more badly than a bruise on his calf. Or there'd be hell to pay. And that's just from him.

I think some cyclists don't want to go on the roads because they feel that they'll be at the mercy of *real* traffic. The result is that they ride on the footpaths and then pedestrians will be at their mercy. I'm sure we can compromise somehow. Don't ride up behind people who don't have eyes at the back of their heads. Or build more cycle paths. They're not unknown. We have them in parks. But the point is that a lot of people don't just cycle in parks for fun. In housing estates like ours, they cycle to the shops too. And more and more people I know are cycling to work. Our ministers who tell us to take more public transport don't seem to acknowledge that cycling is also an alternative fuel-free form of transport. And that as such, you need to provide for cyclists too.

Owww

I wrenched a muscle in my back. Again. This time, I did myself in when I dropped a slippery piece of soap and it skittered into a pail of water that was standing next to the sink. Almost without thinking, I bent over quickly to retrieve it. And that did it.

I'm very cross with myself because I know I should have squatted down instead of bending over -- all that stuff that the physiotherapist taught me.

And I thought I had been so good with the physio and yoga threapy exercises the past 10 months or so. Since the last time I stupidly wrenched my back simply by getting off the sofa. I do them at least three to five times a week and had felt my back getting stronger. Apparently not. Or maybe stronger but not strong, because at least this time round, the muscle pull isn't as bad as last time.

I think my body is telling my mind that I'm middle aged. Ouch. That hurts.

Sun dog

It's not just a bulge in the curtains. It's Roop sitting at the window in the sun that's streaming in when we get out of bed. This has become a daily habit for him now, he'll take a little sunbath while I have a quick cup of coffee before we go downstairs for the first walk of the day.

To me, it's a sign that he's become a little calmer at two-and-a-half years. Previously, he used to follow me about, watching my every move in case he'd miss something. It wasn't so much attachment as his acute need to be part of a pack.

Now, he's coming into his own and developing his own habits, and that's nice to see. What's also nice is that he's got enough control over his bladder now and doesn't need to be rushed downstairs the very first thing and I can enjoy a wake-up cup of caffeine first.

Sheer laziness

Getting three legs out of four up on the couch with you aint bad.

Desperately Seeking Mas Selamat

I took this pix a while ago and forgot about it. It is a bookmark that serves as an invitation to the launch of a new local search engine. At the bottom of the the bookmark, in the mock-up of the search web portal, some one had inked in the "Find" square, the name of the escaped alleged terrorist who is still at large.

Somebody is wicked. Very wicked. Delightfully wicked.

Digging up bones

This was what was found under the sofa. Twice as many bones as dogs -- and that's just what was kicked under the sofa, there's more scattered about -- in different varieties of textures, shapes and flavours, all for their chewing pleasure.

Dang, not only have they taken over the sofa, they've taken over the space under the sofa.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Two radio DJs have started this project where you're encouraged to video the good, the bad and the ugly side of Singaporeans and podcast it. It all started when one of them tried to leave a lift but someone else was adamant on entering it and blocked his way. It's a familiar situation for many of us, I think, and it also applies to train doors.

So that's why he thinks there are going to be more bad and ugly videos than good. Though to be fair, he emphasised that if you're going to shoot something bad, you should also shoot something good. The results would be interesting.

My only question is, how do I shoot cyclists who are coming up the footpath behind me, ringing their bell, scaring me out of my skin and then expect me to jump out of their way? (By shoot, I'm not restricting myself to video. An M-16 would do just as well.) That is one of my top peeves. It happens very frequently, and it did yesterday. I yelled at the cyclist that he has ****ing wheels and should be on the ****ing road and not the footpath. So if he'd whipped out his cellphone then, I would be the ugly one.

A couple of weeks ago, the same thing happened. On the same footpath to the train station. The cyclist came up from behind, whizzed past me, narrowly missing me. Further up the path, he wobbled where the path was uneven, veered onto the grass, tipped over and fell. He wasn't really hurt and by the time he was picking up his bike, I had caught up with him. And I laughed. In his face. Oh lord, I was ugly. But it felt good.

Been at the music store

I enjoyed the movie Shine a Light so much that I had to go get the soundtrack. And since I was at the CD shop, I also got the new Bryan Adams and the not-so-new Bon Jovi.

I had meant to get the Bon Jovi when it came out last year but dithered because nothing in it really grabbed me although it was all very listenable and in the end, I guess I sort of forgot about it. I liked Bon Jovi very much back in the 80s but then I was much younger. Now, it's one of those embarrassing 80s moments that you don't want to linger over.

L used to sneer at Bon Jovi, all backbeat and big hair, he said. At least, they've all got decent haircuts now. The backbeat is still there but they're sounding more subdued. I think the one thing that has made me stick with them still is that they're still straightahead rock 'n' roll. A bit sugary now and then but they have never condescended to slide into pop. They've still maintained that bit o f edginess.

Much to my surprise then, L took to the "new" Bon Jovi album. It had mostly to do with one of the tracks, We Got It Going On and everything to do with its lyrics: "We got it going on / We'll be bangin' and sangin' just like the Rolling Stones / we're gonna shake up your souls / We've come to rattle your bones"

The Stones are everywhere!