Spring Clean

I live in a pig-sty. The last I checked, I wasn’t a pig, but I live in a pig-sty. And I live in a pig-sty because my cleaning lady has very selfishly decided that she needs to go on a holiday.
A week ago, I came home to find Ah Chuan standing in the lounge room screaming at Saffy.
A complete stranger walking into this scene would have immediately dialed 999. But Ah Chuan is from Canton and having met Ah Chuan’s relatives, I can say with authority that the Cantonese never speak at a volume less than a parade of F16s. Especially if they’re excited and happy. It’s only when they speak in what the rest of the world considers a normal conversational tone that you need to be worried and slowly back away.
Which explains why Saffy’s reaction that morning was not one of fear but plain politeness. That, and a conviction that repeating something very slowly would make the incomprehensible completely understandable.
“I. Don’t. Understand. A. Word. You. Are. Saying,” she told Ah Chuan patiently. “Do. You. Understand?”
Which only served to make Ah Chuan even more excited as she increased the volume. Saffy later said that if I hadn’t show up at that moment, Ah Chuan would have gone silent on account of the fact that she was approaching a volume audible only to God and dogs.
As it turned out, Ah Chuan was taking her 80 year old mother back to Canton to visit her relatives for the last time. “How long will you be away?” I asked her in my fractured Cantonese.
“FOUR WEEKS!” Ah Chuan screamed. “I’M SO SORRY TO LEAVE YOU ALL ALONE LIKE THIS, BUT IT’S THE LAST TIME MY MOTHER WILL SEE HER SISTER IN CHINA.”
“Four weeks?” Saffy said when I translated. She let the news sink in for a moment. “She’ll be gone for four weeks? But, but who’s going to do our cleaning? Oh my God! Is she allowed to do that?”
Ah Chuan was distraught at Saffy’s reaction. “OH, PLEASE TELL YOUNG MISS NOT TO FEEL UPSET! IT’S OK!” she shouted at the top of her voice. “MY MOTHER IS VERY OLD AND SHE’S HAD A VERY LONG LIFE.”
By now, Saffy was in a right old panic mode. Her legendary bosom heaved like overworked pistons. “I haven’t picked up a mop in the entire time she’s been working for us! I don’t even know where the mop is! No really, she can’t go! Tell her she can’t go!”
I blinked and it occurred to me that maybe I’d translated the wrong thing. So I tried again. “Her mother is going to see her sister for the last time, and…”
“OH, IT BREAKS MY HEART THAT SHE’S SO UPSET!” Ah Chuan screamed.
As I later told Amanda, it was like telling a joke to an approaching tsunami. “Someone needs to tell her that it’s not always about her!” I complained.
“I don’t see why we can’t just hire another temp cleaner. There are so many unemployed people out there now,” said Amanda, who’s always believed that there’s no problem in the world you can’t solve if you throw enough money at it.
“Saffy doesn’t want anyone else to clean the apartment,” I reported. “She doesn’t trust them not to go through her underwear drawer.” Amanda looked grim.
Which was why on Saturday morning, the three of us found ourselves standing before a bucket of water, a mop and a vacuum cleaner which I was sure we’d attached the wrong way.
It was an odd moment. Like Saffy, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d picked up a mop. It had taken twenty minutes to find the broom closet and another ten to recognize the mop.
Saffy broke the silence. “I don’t know what to do now,” she said in a small apologetic voice. Somehow, she managed to look – while wearing a tee-shirt that declared ‘Make it work!’ – both defiant and embarrassed.
“We’re so pathetic,” I said.
“Clearly, this is not happening,” Amanda decided, as she adjusted her expensive and wildly mopping-inappropriate D&G blouse. “I’m calling a temp.”
That was two weeks ago. Saffy vetoed the first five candidates as potential underwear perverts, while my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch vetoed the last two by growling very fiercely at them. “He’s a very good judge of character,” Saffy told the candidates as she shut the door firmly in their faces.
Our flat is now a pig-sty. I’m sleeping over at Karl’s, Amanda has moved to a hotel, while Saffy – in true Alamo spirit – is staying put to guard her underwear. Two weeks to go.

Age Defying

One of the most disturbing things about the passing years is that you suddenly realize that you’re not the youngest person on the bus. There I was on the 105 to Toa Payoh the other day when it occurred to me that I was a good deal older than half the bus population.
“Oh, I can’t stand her!” cooed the 14 year-old SCGS girl to her owlish bespectacled friend. (I know she was 14 because before I really tuned in to eavesdrop, she was regaling one and all about her recent birthday bash at Carls Junior.) “She’s so old, like my grandmother and she’s still jumping around like that. And I think it’s so weird that she can wrap her right leg around her neck!”
“I think she’s amazing!” said her friend.
“But act your age lah, aiyoh! You’re a mother now, you know!”
It took me a few more bus stops and enormous concentration to realize that they were talking about Madonna. I couldn’t wait to get home to tell everyone.
Amanda was outraged. “Madonna is not a grandmother!”
“Seriously, you get the best public transport conversations!” Saffy said, shaking her head. “I just get dirty old men who accidentally brush against me on their way off!”
“And not in a good way, either,” I said. Saffy squealed with delight at my feeble double entendre.
“She’s a role model for all of us!” Amanda said, steering the conversation back to Madonna, and still clearly incensed at the insensitivity of 14 year olds.
I thought of this for days afterwards. I remembered my first tutor at law school was 22 years old. And at the time, I thought, with the insufferable smugness of an 18 year old, how old even that was. And now, here I was well past 22 and still feeling 18.
When did this shift happen? When did our role models start shifting from the teenage, cruxifix and torn lace rebellion represented by the likes of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, to young Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse? More importantly, when did Madonna become old?
I still remember when her “Papa Don’t Preach” came out and there was all that fuss about what a terrible song it was, how it promoted promiscuity and glamorized teenage pregnancy. I would sit at the back of the bus trying to concentrate on my homework while that crazy Goth chick from my Chemistry class Janet Wella belted out the chorus at the top of her voice. “Papa don’t preach, I’ve been losing sleep! Papa don’t preach, I’m in trouble deep!” she screeched. (Janet, if you’re reading this, are you on Facebook?!)
All this seemed like only yesterday and we were all clearly the youngest ones on the bus. Now, a continent away, I’m listening to my childhood being cruelly dissected and thrown away by pimply young girls who weren’t even born when Madonna first struck her Vogue pose.
“The little bitches,” Amanda said.
A few days ago, Trevor, a friend from law school, emailed me. “Oh God, I just bumped into Pete the other day. Remember him? He was in our crim law classes. Always walking around in summer with his shirt off to show off his body. Well, he is now HUGE and I mean fat!! FAT face...fat fat...He was with Anna. I went to their wedding a few years ago. She’s so haggard with bad bad skin. I can’t believe they were the glamour couple in school!”
Of course, I immediately Googled Pete and Anna on their law firm’s website. For half an hour, I sat there, mouth open.
“It was like a train wreck!” I skyped Amanda. “I started with their firm profiles and then I just kept clicking on our other classmates. I couldn’t stop. They all look terrible! The guys have started losing their hair and have huge eye bags and the girls look like they have three-dimensional make up on.”
She immediately went online to have a look. “Goodness!” she said after a while. “What happened to these people?”
“It’s stress!” said Saffy later that night. “Your face is the first place it shows. You sit in the office all day and see if the fat doesn’t all congeal around your butt!”
Amanda looked worried. “But, that’s what we do too. Surely, we don’t look like that?”
“Choy, choy, choy!” Saffy spat. “They’re all unhappily married. We’re unhappily single, so the stress doesn’t show. Just in our spirit. Outside, we’re still young and gorgeous.”
Amanda says she’s not taking a chance. The last I heard, she was investigating Botox. “You’re never too young to start,” she reasoned.
“Hail, Madonna!” Saffy intoned.

Clothes Call

The other day, in a rare burst of perceptive insight, my flatmate Saffy observed that you could tell there was a credit crunch going on because our other flatmate Amanda was now picking up her underwear and other delicates from M&S.
“If I hadn’t seen the packaging in her rubbish bin myself, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Saffy said, nodding to herself with satisfaction as she scanned the TV guide.
From the comfortable depths of the couch, I looked up from my book (Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, an Oprah Book Club selection if you must know). “I suppose there’s a perfectly good reason for this, but what were you doing going through Amanda’s rubbish bin?” I asked.
Saffy waved her hand around. “Oh you know,” she said vaguely as she continued to read the TV guide. “Someone needs to explain to me what the hell the big deal about Little Nonya is. I don’t know any Peranakans who speak Chinese so well.”
“You don’t know any Peranakans,” I pointed out.
Just then, Amanda emerged from her bedroom. “Has someone been going through my rubbish bin?” she asked, lifting a perfectly drawn eyebrow and staring straight at Saffy who immediately bristled.
“What, what? Why are you looking at me? Just because –, ” and because it always took a while for anything to register on her consciousness, she paused and blinked. “What are you wearing?”
Amanda beamed. “You like it? I got it today at This Fashion. It cost less than a Starbucks cappuccino!” she said, though I couldn’t help but think that these days, most things cost less than a Starbucks cappuccino.
As Saffy later said, “It was like she wearing a zipper!”
I said technically, Amanda was wearing a dress but Saffy replied that that would be really stretching the idea of a dress, like saying that Cheezels is a food group.
But for the moment, she was shaking her head wildly. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You were at This Fashion? How do you even know about This Fashion?”
“Excuse me, I wish you would stop making me out like I’m a fashion snob or something!”
“But you are!” Saffy said.
“Well, I was just passing by after my meeting and I happened to notice the dress on the mannequin in the window. Why have I never ever noticed that shop?”
“Because your ensuite bathroom leads directly into Gucci’s dressing room?” Saffy suggested.
Amanda trilled with laughter and disappeared back into her bedroom.
“If that dress was one millimetre shorter, the world would have been her gynaecologist,” Saffy said later to Karl over afternoon tea. She pursed her lips with disapproval while his eyes turned moist.
“You guys lead the best lives!” he said earnestly. “I miss being single!”
“Seriously, you are one bedpan from turning into a dirty old man,” she told him severely. “But the more shocking thing is she’s now actually shopping at This Fashion! She can go on as much as she likes about how great that dress is, but I can sniff a money-saving strategy a shopping mall away. What is the world coming to?” Saffy said, shaking her head.
“It’s a credit crunch,” I said, reaching for another pressed sandwich. “We all have to make sacrifices.”
“Yes, but still. And she’s wearing M&S underwear!”
Karl choked on his scone. “How do you know?” he asked goggle-eyed.
On our way home, Saffy said that Karl must really not be getting any from his dreadful harpy of a wife, Marsha. “Did you see how hot and bothered he got just by the mention of Amanda’s underwear?” she sniffed as she stared down, with affection, at her fabulous bosom as if to point out that Karl had clearly been getting hot and bothered about the wrong woman.
Meanwhile, the kitchen cupboard where we store plastic bags is growing with bags from This Fashion which leads us to wonder if Amanda is single-handedly keeping the store in business.
“I just happen to like their stuff,” she said stoutly the other day. “I wish you’d stop making such a big deal about it.”
But what is annoying Saffy no end is just how good Amanda looks in a $15.95 dress. “The other day, I told her I really liked her skirt, thinking that it was a Miu Miu or something and that she’d let me borrow it and she said it was This Fashion! I bet you if I got into it, I’d look like that woman who sells me fried beehoon! Or, ” she paused and thought, “a cast member from Little Nonya.”

I Do?

Our friend Muna recently got married to her long time boyfriend Nasruddin.

“Seriously, it’s about time,” Saffy said as she inspected the wedding invitation the day before. “They’ve been dating like since before Mariah’s breakdown. And I’m loving the paper stock of this invite. See, this is what wedding invitations should be like!” she said, her ample bosom heaving with approval.

Recently, another set of friends John and Sook Heng had sent out an email invitation which scandalised Amanda. “I hope this isn’t the actual invitation!” she said. In a rare meeting of minds, Saffy also refused to attend the wedding dinner and sent the happy couple a snapshot of her lying on a beach in Phuket and a note that said, “Just prop this picture of me on the seat!”

To all her friends, she complained, “Well, if I’m not even worth a hard copy invite on proper stationery, then they’re not worth the real me showing up.” Which led her best friend Sharyn to wonder to me, “Wah, like that can, meh?”

I sighed and said that weddings always made the girls weird. “Remember that time Saffy poured a whole bowl of sharks-fin soup down the chief bridesmaid’s dress because she made that joke about single women being desperate?” I said happily. “I’m just dying to see what happens at Muna’s. It’s their first void deck wedding!”

A few days later, the three of us piled into a cab to head to Bedok. “I’m not sure I understand the romance of a void deck marriage,” Amanda said, as she delicately adjusted the lace on her latest Prada outfit.

“I think we’re overdressed,” Saffy grumbled as she adjusted her bra strap. I spotted the cab driver flick his eyes back and forth his rear-view mirror. “Please watch where you’re going, Uncle,” I said.

Just then an SMS arrived from Barney Chen on all three phones: ‘I am trying very hard not to slap my cab driver who has CLEARLY taken the long way! Will be late!’

The thing I love about Malay weddings is the whole informality of it all. You usually hear the noise long before you see the actual gathering, but there’s a stream of people in colourful tudungs and sarongs milling around handsome kids clinging to their patient parents. People come and go. Struggle through the sea of aunties and grannies to say hello to the bride and groom sitting on the stage in their finest silks and extravagant make-up. Grab a plate, get served, find the nearest empty table. Sit, say hello to a complete stranger, eat, get up and go home just in time for a repeat of American Idol.

I’ve found that if I don’t dally at a Malay wedding, I can be done in an hour.

Which can be disconcerting to those used to the tedious drawn out drama of Chinese weddings with their ridiculous costume changes by the bride, business card exchanges and endless rounds of half-hearted yum-sings.

“Have we actually missed the ceremony?” Saffy asked as she stood at the foot of the stairs of block 13 and surveyed the organised chaos before her. “And is that Muna over there on that dais? Good lord, her make-up is three dimensional!”

“This humidity is ruining my outfit. We need to sit under a fan!” Amanda instructed as she stepped smartly towards an empty table. I headed to the buffet table. I’d spotted mee rebus.

The novelty of a Malay wedding kept everyone happily engaged, though at one stage, Amanda completely forgot where she was and asked one of the passing maciks if there was a chance she could get a gin and tonic.

“You know,” Barney Chen said as he idly stroked the plastic table covering and stared at the distant couple, “I’m happy for Muna and Nas and everything, but I just can’t imagine beginning my married life under a pink and white tulle tent in a Bedok HDB void deck!”

“I think it’s great. It’s so festive! And think of all the money you save,” I said.

“Meanwhile, it’s only just occurring to me that Malay men are seriously hot!” Saffy said suddenly, as she sat up to concentrate and look around the concrete hall. “Look at the beautiful eyes on that guy over there!”

“Back away slowly, bitch,” Barney warned. "I saw him first."

“How could I,” Saffy said, by now completely in a parallel universe, “with all my extensive dating history, have missed an entire demographic?”

Leave it to Sharyn to be practical when she heard about this. “She eat rendang every day, her constipation how?”

Back to Basics

When it comes to technology, I’m a right old dinosaur. I’m the sort of person who will show up at a SingTel shop and ask if they’ve a phone that dials out and receives phone calls. “That’s all,” I tell them firmly. “I don’t want anything with games, GPS, music, alarm, camera, diary, calculator functions, nothing. Nothing,” I repeat.

“Please don’t tell people that I live with you,” Saffy once begged me after a particularly painful visit to the SingTel shop during which I must have looked at every single model they had and said no to every single one. The one I wanted had been discontinued. Four years ago.

I don’t care what people say. A phone is just meant to make calls. That’s all. If it does anything more than that, it’s got no business being called a phone. “It’s the same with a vibrator,” I told Saffy recently over breakfast, trying to look for an example that would make sense to her. “Why, for instance, would you want one that also has an alarm clock function?” I asked.

Saffy sat up straighter, eyes wide open. “Shut. Up. They make them with alarm clocks? Oh my God, that’s perfect because sometimes I fall asleep while using mine!”

Amanda looked up from her Hello! magazine and stared at Saffy who shifted a little under the strength of the gaze. “Do not tell people that I live with you,” she said which led Saffy to later complain privately that it’s no wonder Amanda is still single. “She’s so bossy!”

My point is, technology is not my best friend. It took me the longest time to get an iPod and even longer to work out how to load songs onto it. Of course, once I got the hang of it, I sat up all night loading music and, at last count, I had over 4000 songs on it.

But leave it to some kill-joy to rain on my parade.

“Hey, how often do you back up your iPod?” my best friend Karl asked me the other day. We were walking from Borders to lunch at Paragon. I stopped in the middle of the road, causing a little human traffic jam to swirl around me. As often happens when the conversation turns technical, my heartbeat went up a little. “Back up? What do you mean?”

Karl walked back and pulled me along. “You know, like you back up your computer so all your documents are safe. How often do you back up your iPod?”
I was astonished. Though now that I think about it, I’m astonished that I was astonished in the first place.
“How do you back up an iPod?”
“Well, I normally back up my iTunes to an external hard-drive,” Karl said. “But I guess as long as you’ve got all your songs in the library, that should be fine. You’re looking at me funny. Why?”
“I know you’re speaking English because I recognise the words, but really, I have no idea what you just said.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“Well, for starters, I don’t have iTunes,” I said patiently. “I have an iPod.”

Barney Chen said that that night, Karl rang him to wonder how I ever managed to get out of the house. “He was going on and on about how easy it was to sync this and do that, it made me very dizzy to be honest with you. He’s so butch!” Barney said adding thoughtfully, “He’s almost more of a man than that dreadful harpy he’s married to.”

I’ve not stopped complaining since then that not only have I had to learn how to load my songs, I now also have to learn how to save them. “It’s ridiculous!” I said to Saffy.

“I don’t understand why you don’t have all your songs on your laptop anyway,” she said, patently pretending that she knew what she was saying, which aggravated me even more.

“Because I didn’t want to use up all that space. I thought 4000 songs would take up a lot of space. So I deleted them!”

“Not if you just use the laptop for word processing. It’s not as if you use a lot of applications or do a lot of programming,” Saffy said fluently. This, from the girl who, until recently, was seen trying into attach an alarm clock to her personal lifestyle device, as she’s decided to call her vibrator.

“If this works, I’ll be so rich I’ll never have to work another day in my life!” she said as she fiddled with bits of wire.

Amanda says that if Saffy electrocutes herself, we’re evicting her.

Angelic Behaviour

People are always asking me what my favourite past time is. Well, OK, that’s not strictly true. What they actually ask me is: “What do you do all day?” Which is a rather rude way of saying they think I’m incredibly lazy. But I’m the sort of guy who says my glass is half-full anyway, so really, it’s all water off a duck’s back.

So when people ask me what my favourite past time is, I always say that I wait for the arrival on YouTube of the latest Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. “I spend my year looking forward to it,” I say without the slightest sense of embarrassment.

What’s that you say? You don’t see what’s so great about the show? It’s just a bunch of women in their underwear?

That’s like saying tennis is just two people hitting a ball across the net. That a Maserati is just a car. Or that Gisele Bundchen is just a girl with two legs.

In the little flat that I share with Saffy and Amanda and my adopted mongrel dog Pooch, the excitement of a Victoria’s Secret Show is a bit like the announcement that Oprah is coming to dinner.

“I wish I looked like Alessandra,” Amanda once said wistfully. She’d just come back from a trip to America where she’d raided the Victoria’s Secret store and brought back a haul of little bikinis, bras and other delicates. I remember she sat on her bed in a sea of pinks, polka-dots, reds and blacks, a little afraid to try any of it on. For at the back of her mind was the certainty that even when she slipped into the sheer silky camisole and tossed her hair, she would never look like a junior Victoria’s Secret Angel, let alone Her Holy Bodyness, Alessandra.

Leave it to Saffy to be practical. “Well, of course we will never look like an Angel!” she huffed, her bosom heaving. “Those girls have an army of people to do their hair, do their make-up, apply body glitter and put on wings for them! God, if I had all that attention, I’d wipe Adriana Lima off the catwalk!”

It says something for Saffy’s immense sense of confidence that not even the facts that she is a good 3 inches shorter than Ms Lima and she currently had a bad case of dandruff (Saffy, not Adey) factored into her world view. Meanwhile, thank you God for YouTube, otherwise it would be months before the show made it to TV.

“Where do these people have so much time that they will tape a show and then upload it to the net!” Saffy said a few nights ago as we gathered around the lap-top at home as she tapped in the keywords.

My best friend Karl had brought popcorn. “I’m just grateful someone does! Really, this is the highlight of my year. I love Selita. I wanna have children with her.”
Barney Chen patted him on the back. “Way out of your league. Stick to your nasty wife.”

This year’s show took place in Miami on a giant crescent shaped stage and it was a doozy. There were great music, lots of gorgeous girls in underwear, wings of twigs and cobwebs and slinky costumes. There was Usher. There was a rainstorm of red rose petals. And Heidi Klum.

“Someone needs to lock her up and throw away the key,” Saffy said at one stage. “It’s unnatural that she’s had ten kids and still looks like that!”

“She’s a freak of nature!” said Amanda.

“I love her,” said Saffy.

“Me too,” Amanda conceded. “I want to be her!”

“But I’m not having Seal though,” Saffy added.

“I’ll take him,” Amanda said, effortlessly tearing apart Heidi’s happy family unit.

“I love Selita’s new hair!” Karl mumbled, slack-jawed as one long limbed goddess after the other strutted across the confetti-strewn runway.

“That is such a gay thing to say,” Barney growled. “I want Tyra back. That girl could really work a runway.”

“Are Marisa Miller’s boobs real?” Amanda asked as we all leaned in to get a better look.

“Karolina’s got too much make-up on,” Amanda said. “She looks like she’s in drag.”

“But in a good way,” Barney said loyally. He’d once shown up at a fancy dress party as Karolina Kurkova. At a Victoria’s Secret themed party of course. In certain circles, that outfit – complete with glittering wings – is still talked about in reverent hushed tones.

That night, we watched the show five times. And we’ve already made it a date for next year’s show. As Karl said when he left, “Seriously, who needs religion?”

Career Trajectory

When we were small, people were always asking me and my siblings what we wanted to be when we grew up. It was as if the question occupied their every waking moment. “So what do you want to be when you grow up?” my aunt Ai-Ling would ask as she handed me a red packet at Chinese New Year. In her tight red cheong sam, she bore an uncanny resemblance to a lap cheong.
“Not look like you!” my sister Michelle would mutter under her breath while Jack, just five years old, would snigger.
Our mother, of course, harboured the fantasy of every Chinese mother since the dawn of time that her brood would become a doctor, lawyer and engineer. Imagine her distress when Jack suggested, with a very straight face, that he might like to become a nurse. She never was able to get a handle on his sadistic sense of humour.
Still, the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” came up with increasing frequency and after a while, the pressure began to tell on us all, especially my sister. At university, Michelle dated in rapid succession, a medical, law and engineering student and then announced that she’d never been more bored in her life and that she would rather die than to end up like “those jerks”. And much to everyone’s confusion, she decided she wanted to be an accountant.
As Jack would ask me more than once, “That’s not boring?”
Years later, Mother has resigned herself to the fact that her wilfully stubborn children will never amount to much. I’ve quit being a lawyer to write magazine articles for 5 cents a word, Michelle is a reluctant (and often very angry) accountant while Jack spends his time trekking across the Himalayas and smoking bong to keep warm. And whenever anyone asks our Mother what we do, she changes the topic.
The other day, Michelle rang and complained that she hated her job. “Oh my God, it’s so boring!” she moaned.
“Try writing for 5 cents a word!” I said. We’re a competitive family.
“I’ve just spent the past three weeks auditing this company that’s gone belly-up and all I could think of was ‘Who cares?’ It’s a financial meltdown. The world as we know it is coming to an end and there I was, stuck in a dingy room in the basement surrounded by boxes and boxes of dusty accounting records. It was awful!”
My flatmate Saffy thinks Michelle needs a complete career change. “It stands to reason,” she said, her bosom inflating firmly. “Only someone who is emotionally lobotomised would ever become an accountant and your sister is slowly waking up from the nightmare!”
Amanda stared at Saffy for a bit.
“What?” Saffy asked.
“Do you just make these things up?” Amanda demanded.
“So I mix up my metaphoricals, but they make sense!” Saffy replied stubbornly.
“But what’s she going to do?” I asked. “She’s spent her whole life as an accountant, it’s not something you suddenly just give up.”
“Sure she can,” Saffy said easily. “People do it all the time. Especially married couples. Look at my father and Wicked Evil Stepmother. He spent 20 years putting up with her nastiness and then one day, he gets up from bed and files for divorce. What? Stop looking at me like that, Amanda! It makes sense!”
I immediately Skyped Michelle. “Oh, I’m too old for a career change!” she groaned.
“Saffy says her father is very happy now,” I reported.
In her little Skype window, Michelle blinked. “What?”
When Mother heard about her daughter’s mid-career crisis, she was ecstatic. She’d never gotten over the fact that her precious child had ended up being a “book-keeper” and now there was hope. “People have career changes all the time!” she said happily to me over the phone. “Your uncle Martin was just a pharmacist before he decided to become a dentist!”
“Mother,” I said patiently, “Uncle Martin is a dental assistant! He’s the one who moves that tube around in your mouth to suck up all the saliva and blood.”
“Well, he’s not going to be doing that for long. He’ll be a real dentist soon,” she said loyally, completely ignoring the fact that Uncle Martin is 62 and he works for his wife who’s the real dentist.
“Maybe, I’ll just take time off and join Jack on his treks,” Michelle said last night. “Or maybe I just need a break, clear my head and get my Mojo back.”
“Or maybe she just needs to get laid,” Saffy said, to which Amanda added wearily, “Join the queue!”

Jog Strap

Among the many great mysteries in life (why people insist on noisily dragging their feet when they walk being the least of them), the one that stumps me most is this whole business about jogging.

Really, it’s the most absurd activity. Never mind the fact that the guy who made jogging a world-wide phenomenon actually died of a heart attack while out jogging (which in itself should be a clear warning about how dangerous it is), but if God had ever intended us to jog anywhere, he’d never have invented the car.

The subject came out recently when my flatmate Saffy started dating Madison.

“Wait a minute,” Amanda had interrupted the first time Saffy brought up the subject. “His name is Madison? This is a guy?”

Saffy had the grace to look embarrassed. “I think he chose it himself. But I’ve got no choice! I can’t not date a guy just because he’s got a girl’s name!”

“Yes, you can!” Amanda yelled.

“I’ve not been on a date since Independence!”

I looked up from my cereal and piped up. “Isn’t Madison the name of that mermaid in ‘Splash’?”

Saffy turned around to look at me, her eyes narrowed into slits. I went back to concentrating on my cereal. “Are you sure he’s straight?” Amanda asked. “I don’t want to be the one to bring this up, but you’ve had quite a few dates with guys who really should have shopping at the MAC counter with Barney Chen.”

“Oh, who knows these days?” Saffy sighed. “The world has just turned upside down. Every guy I’ve dated this year has offered to carry my handbag for me in public. And the ones who don’t, love to play mah-jong with their aunties. At least with Madison, he does manly things like...like jogging. That’s gottta count for something right?” she asked, with a pathetic plea in her eyes.

“Totally!” Amanda and I chimed loyally, though I secretly thought that anyone who voluntarily jogs has his own special set of mental problems, and judging by the look in Amanda’s eyes, I could tell she was thinking the same thing.

Things went well for a couple of weeks. Saffy and Madison went on a few dates. They went dancing at Zouk though Saffy came home complaining that everyone on the dance floor was a foetus and she felt like she was 102-years old. “It was awful!” she pronounced, her formidable bosom heaving with embarrassment.

One weekend, they visited his parents (“They live in a pig-sty!” was Saffy’s horrified verdict) and went to midnight movies. They made out in the back seat of his car, ate supper at hawker centres and did all the usual things that dating couples do. And then, a week ago, he finally popped the big question.

“Oh dear God!” Saffy said the minute I walked in the front door.

“Yes, my child?” I blasphemed as I took in the wild look in her eyes.

“Madison asked me to go jogging with him!” Saffy said in a rush, as if saying it quickly might help erase the full horror of the moment. I blinked several times and then reached for the phone.

“I’ll be home in twenty minutes!” Amanda said crisply. She made it in eighteen. “What do you mean he asked you to go jogging with him? What happened?” she demanded immediately as she marched through the front door, barely pausing to toss off her Prada sling-backs.

“Well,” Saffy began miserably. “We were just hanging out in Paragon window-shopping and then suddenly he turned and asked me to go jogging with him this weekend.”

“That’s just sick!” I said firmly.

“Who does he think I am?” Saffy asked, a little spirit creeping back into her posture.

“Do you even know how to run?” I asked.

“Can’t remember the last time I walked faster than a crawl,” Saffy replied. “But I was thinking that it can’t really be that bad, can it? I mean, lots of people do it every day. Barney Chen jogs every day and he’s...oh...” she trailed off.

Amanda and I exchanged glances.

“Well, I guess if you look at the bigger picture,” I began, “it’s really not that bad. You guys get on really well. You even hate his friends and you’re thinking about letting him carry your handbag, so it’s all looking quite good.”

“But now he wants her to go jogging,” Amanda pointed out.

“And I don’t want to!” Saffy pouted.

And so, right now, they’re in the lounge room breaking up. I can hear them through the thin door. “I’m becoming a nun!” Saffy tells Madison.

I strain to hear his reply.

Back in Vogue

I don’t know about you, but in the little apartment that I share with Saffy, Amanda and my beloved adopted mongrel dog, Pooch, the biggest news right now is not the state of the world’s financial markets or even if the new American president should have surgery to pin his ears back.
No, the news that grips the fevered imaginations of my flatmates is Madonna’s divorce from Guy Ritchie.
This is how Saffy broke the news as Amanda walked in through our front door. “Oh God, Madonna!”
Amanda later said that for a confused minute, she thought that Saffy was having a mystical vision. As she said, “You never know with her.”
In this increasingly cynical world we live in, it says something that all of us so thoroughly bought into Madonna’s apparently fairy tale married life. Here was this rough New York girl with the unshaved armpits and the freakish ability to wrap her legs around her head (“Imagine sex with her!” as Saffy once observed with penetrating insight) who got married in some Scottish castle and basically packed up home for cold, drizzly, grey London where she then proceeded to have a multitude of children with the buff, no nonsense Guy Ritchie.
“He’s hot!” Amanda has said, with approval, on more than one occasion.
For her part, Saffy couldn’t get over how good Madonna was at multi-tasking her life. “How does that woman do it? A career, bazillions of dollars, abs of steel, Shambala and a great husband!”
“Kabbalah!” I said.
“Bless you!” Saffy replied from her parallel universe.
Not even the gossip that the Material Girl had been having an affair with that baseball player could tarnish her reputation.
“It’s all tawdry lies!” Saffy exclaimed at the time.
“Where got?” her good friend Sharyn said over a teh-o at Lau Pa Sat. “I read on Yahoo, you know. Must be true, lah!”
“You can’t believe everything you read, you numbnut!” Saffy said uncharitably, while hoping that Sharyn wouldn’t notice the latest copy of US Weekly peeking out over the edge of her handbag.
“You know for sure, is it!” Sharyn said whose coke-bottle glasses rarely allowed her to see anything beyond a feet anyway. On a clear day.
“It’s all lies. Madonna would never cheat on Guy!” Saffy replied with the kind of authority that hinted that she’d just that morning had coffee with her best friend Maddie.
The calm that followed the little storm with the baseball guy was, to the girls, proof that it was all the media trying to cause problems in a stainless marriage. “I swear, some people have nothing better to do!” Amanda said, as she stretched out on our lounge one Sunday afternoon and scrutinised the Enquirer’s report that Guy’s mother was denying that there was trouble in paradise. “They’re just jealous that some people can have a happy marriage. Such bad karma!” she pronounced.
Of course, shortly after came the official announcement that the Ritchies were splitting up.
For a few days, Saffy was convinced it was a late April Fools day joke and refused to believe a word she read in US Weekly. Even Amanda, normally so unflappable, had the same wide-eyed wild look that Miss Venezuela normally has a split second after she’s been announced Miss Universe.
“How did that happen?” Saffy asked.
Sharyn was triumphant. “You see, lah! Yahoo was right!” Saffy told her that if she kept this up, she was going to be pushed down the nearest flight of stairs and then struck off the Christmas card list.
Barney Chen, who’s always had a major crush on Guy, announced that he was buying plane tickets to London. “I know it’s probably blasphemous to steal the Goddess's husband, but I think I just might have a chance with him!” he growled happily. “I’ve always had my doubts about that marriage!”
“How could you? Poor Lourdes!” Amanda cried.
Our best friend Karl, who’s been unhappily married to the unlovely Marsha for years, says he wishes he had to the guts to get divorced. “I don’t think Marsha will let me,” he said the other night after listening to Saffy and Amanda mourn about the end of an era.
“I could push her down the stairs,” offered Saffy, who’s never liked Marsha. “It’s a little crowded at the bottom right now, but I’m sure I could make room.”
“Seriously,” Amanda said. “If Madonna, with all her fame and money, can’t make a marriage work, what hope do the rest of us have?”
That night, she programmed her iPod to play ‘Vogue’ on reloop and popped a sleeping tablet.

Death Becomes Him

A few Sunday mornings ago, my neighbour Chen knocked on my door – an act that led my flatmate, Amanda, to complain afterwards that it’s just such bad manners to show up unannounced at someone’s home. “Especially on a Sunday! I hadn’t even put on my face yet!” she said, giving her vibrant tresses an indignant shake.
My only complaint was that Chen looked annoyingly chirpy for that time of the morning. “Ay, sorry hor, but have you notice how dirty our floor is? The condo cleaner is not mopping!” she said while looking accusingly around the corridor.
I peered out and confessed that I’d not paid much attention to the state of our flooring, but now that she mentioned it, it did look a bit grubby.
“Yar loh,” Chen chirruped. “Every week, hor, I go down to management office and complain. Now they see me, they get scare! So, this week, you go down complain, can?”
I promised I would and was about to shut the door when she suddenly said, “Oh, also, hor, my father-in-law pass away yesterday!”
Which came as both a surprise and a complete shock. I’d rather liked the old man and enjoyed his company. He was always wandering around the grounds in slow shuffling steps, dressed in a scrappy t-shirt and pajama pants. That’s all he ever wore. I often passed him on my way back from walking my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch and we’d stop to chat for a while – him in stuttering Mandarin, me in appalling Cantonese, yet somehow we managed.
What surprised me was his death. What completely shocked me was that he’d not died earlier. As Saffy pointed out, he must have been a hundred and ten. “At least,” she added.
But what was even more shocking was how cheerful Chen seemed about the whole thing. My first reaction to the news was dismay. “Oh!” I remember gasping. “I’m so sorry!”
“No, lah!” Chen beamed, waving her hand. “Is OK! Is OK! He very old or-redi!”
“It was like we were talking about the Great Singapore Sale or something!” I said later to Saffy and Amanda. “It was all so casually cheerful!”
“I so don’t want people to talk about me like that when I’m dead,” Amanda declared.
“What I don’t understand,” Saffy said, “is why she thought it was more important to knock on our door on a Sunday morning to talk about how dirty our corridor floor was, and then so casually add that the father of her husband had died just yesterday! Shouldn’t that be the first thing you tell people?”
“That’s why people don’t like daughters-in-law!” Amanda said firmly, a statement that caused even Saffy to turn around and stare.
Which is how, a few days later, we found ourselves sweltering in our condo carpark, under a big white tent with a coffin. We carefully selected a table under a fan, but it only seemed to be moving the hot air around. Saffy, never at ease at a funeral, managed to look everywhere but the coffin at the other end of the tent.
“Someone please tell me that the old man is in a refridgerated coffin!” Amanda said after she’d scrutinized the flower arrangements and what everyone was wearing. Saffy frowned as she mentally replayed Amanda’s words and it was clear she was not liking the ending of this episode.
Just then, Sushila, another neighbour a few floors down from us, arrived and sat down with us. “Aiyoh, that poor old man!” she said, as she peered down at her cleavage peeping out from beneath her low cut dress. “I really liked him. Never understood a word he said, but we seemed to have such wonderful conversations!”
I asked about her children. “Oh, they’re fine. They’re having exams now. But hey, can I ask you guys something?” Sushila said as she leaned forward. By instinct, Saffy and Amanda leaned in.
“Do you notice anything different about me?” she asked. The girls cocked their heads and stared.
“Your hair?” Saffy asked.
“New lip gloss?” Amanda said.
“No!” Sushila whispered dramatically. “I’ve just had a boob job!”
Needless to say, three pairs of eyes shifted south to examine her breasts. “I didn’t want to get them too big, but what do you think?” Sushila asked.
Saffy later said that it had taken all her self control not to reach out to poke Sushila’s breasts. “I’ve always wanted to see what they feel like,” she explained, to which a scandalized Amanda said that she was this close to moving countries.
“We were at a funeral, for Chrissakes!” she blasphemed.

Money Talks

My mother rang me the other evening, right in the middle of “Survivor”. As a rule, I never answer the phone after 8 pm on the principle that if it’s urgent, there’s nothing I can do about it since I’m already in PJs and sipping herbal tea while watching TV. And if it’s not urgent, then why the hell should I be bothered? But this caller was persistent. The phone would ring and ring and stop. Twenty seconds later, it would ring and ring again. It was like listening to a dripping tap. It drove me up the wall. I grabbed the phone and stabbed the answer button.
“Can’t you take a hint?” I snapped. “Who the hell is this?”
“Really, is this what your expensive education has come to?” my mother began, her utterly and maddeningly serene voice floating across the continents.
“I was just…”
“Listen dear, I just wanted to check that you have put a sewing kit in your bank safe deposit box!”
“What? Sewing kit? Who is this? Is that you, Jack?”
“Oh, speaking of which,” my mother went on, “do you know where your brother is? I’ve been trying to call him for hours! He’s not picking up. And neither is your sister! What is wrong with you children? What if this was an emergency?”
“But it’s not an emergency!” I moaned. “I have no idea what you are talking about! What sewing kit? Why do I need a sewing kit?”
Mother sighed. “Because the financial markets are collapsing! Do you not read the newspapers? Really, I don’t know why your father worked so hard for so many years to send you children to such expensive boarding schools and…”
Michelle later rang to complain that as the years went by, she was more convinced than ever that we are all adopted. “I refuse to believe that I am in any way related to that woman!” she ranted.
My flatmate Saffy, on the other hand, has always been fascinated by my mother. “I’m just so amazed that she is able to find her way out of bed each morning,” she said the first time they met.
“Let alone give birth to three relatively normal children,” I’d added.
And now, the issue of the sewing kit. “What’s that all about?” Saffy wanted to know.
“It’s for when World War 3 hits and we’re running for our lives. She’s imagining that I’ll be dashing down to the bank vaults and be busy sewing gold bars into the lining of my pants,” I said.
“There’s going to be a war? When? No one told me! What does your mother know?” Saffy asked, her eyes widening and her breasts beginning to pump pneumatically.
“She’s just saying that we need to be prepared for some economic catastrophe,” I sighed. “The saddest part is that for years, she’s been hounding us all to buy little gold bars as a monetary hedge and I just don’t have the heart to tell her that my safe deposit box just has my first edition Batman comics in it!”
“That’s going to be really useful when you’re trying to barter for rice!” Saffy observed, immediately getting into the spirit of things.
Leave it to Amanda to take the nightmares of an old woman in her stride. “Oh, I totally get where your mother is coming from,” she said later that night after dinner. “I’ve got $50,000 in cash in my safe deposit box!”
Saffy coughed into her cappuccino. “What? Wait, you have a safe deposit box too?” she managed to splutter.
“I think you’re completely missing the point here, Saf,” I said gently and turned sharply to Amanda. “You have $50,000? In cash? How is that humanly possible?”
Amanda shrugged. “It’s my emergency cash fund. A few years ago, I figured that seeing as there’s still no husband on the horizon and between the two you, there might be fifty cents to go around, I figured that the only person who was going to look after me was me!”
I was still trying to wrap my head around the idea of $50,000 cash. Briefly, I tried to imagine what that must be like and what I would do if I had that much money sitting around idly in a safe deposit box. I decided that I’d probably go visit it every other day, just to keep it company.
Saffy looked wounded. “I do have more than fifty cents to my name, thank you very much!”
A few nights later, Mother rang again, this time advising me to store some cash in a Milo tin and store it under my bed. “We must change our names,” Michelle urged.

Surgical Strike

For years, I’ve had a cluster of tiny cysts growing on my left forearm. Just little nubs that could be anything, really: extra soft tissue that happened to decide that they wanted to live close together. That’s what Dr Chan, my long suffering dermatologist, told me when they first started growing and I was convinced that I was about to die some horrific agonizing death involving complications arising from a botched amputation. Actually, his official diagnosis was, “You do know that your hypochondria put my kids through private school, don’t you?”
The thing was, like the doddering old lady who rents the flat down the hall from us, they never really bothered me. And I live by the motto ‘Live and let live’, so I let it go and pretended they were mosquito bites. “They’re mosquito bites,” I would tell people when I caught them looking out of the corner of their eyes. They always looked unconvinced.
“They’re really disgusting!” cooed my flatmate Saffy with a delicious thrill of horror the first time her eyes lit on them. This, after we’d only just been introduced. She looked up and stared at me. “Have you had them looked at? I saw this show the other night about someone who had a whole nest of worms living inside one of his boils.”
“It’s not a boil,” I said, even as I inched away from this obviously crazy chick. “It’s a mosquito bite. Please step away from me.”
Recently though, I was looking at the cysts and finally decided I was going to get them taken out. I made the announcement at dinner with my flatmates, Karl and Barney Chen.
“It’s about time,” Amanda exclaimed. “They’ve got to be the yuckiest things I’ve ever seen in my life. And I’m a lawyer!”
“It’s so butch of you to go for elective surgery,” said Barney with deep admiration. “I faint when I even think about a scalpel!”
“I’m coming with you to Dr Chan’s!” Saffy announced.
“What? Why?” I said automatically.
“Because he’s my future husband, that’s why!”
I sighed. For years, Saffy has carefully nursed the fantasy that one day Dr Chan will look at her and realize that he’s been wasting the past 15 years of his life with his current wife – the very sweet gynaecologist, Dr Chee – and that he must have Saffy at any cost.
“I swear, I’m so hypnotized by those lush lips of his,” she would say. “They’re begging for me to kiss them!”
“You are wasting your time,” Barney once told Saffy kindly. “If he’s going to leave his wife for anyone, it’ll be for me! I’m so obviously his type!”
Even Amanda has tried on several occasions to break up that marriage, making up the flimsiest dermatological condition just so she could have an appointment and flirt madly in her sheerest Blumarine chiffon dress.
“I don’t know what the attraction is,” Karl once said after a visit to remove a rather unattractive mole from his right shoulder blade.
“Are you mad?” Saffy said, her fabulous bosom puffing up. “He’s like the love child of Takeshi Kaneshiro and Ken Watanabe!”
“And Teo Ser Luck!” Barney growled, his eyebrows knitting together at the sheer improbability of such a sensational genetic union.
“I just don’t understand why he’s not responded to my charms!” Saffy wondered, while peering down at the deep caverns straining beneath her tight tube top.
“Because he’s happily married to a wonderful woman and has four beautiful children!” I said.
“Because he’s never seen me in a swim suit,” said Amanda. I noticed Karl shift a little uncomfortably in his chair.
“Because he’s obviously thinking about me,” said Barney.
“Who are you people?” Karl exclaimed.
And so, I’ve made an appointment with Dr Chan. “It’ll take about an hour to get it all out and you shouldn’t have any scars by the time I’m done. I’m rather good with my stitches,” he said modestly, as he peered at my extended arm. “By the way, how’s your friend, Saffy?”
My eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why do you ask?”
“You told him you might have leprosy?” I yelled at Saffy later that night.
“Oh my God! He told you that?” she shouted back. “What ever happened to client-patient confidentiality?”
“It doesn’t apply to made up skin diseases!”
“Well, I might have had leprosy!” Saffy sniffed, still clearly appalled at the ethical breach. Later, Amanda said that Saffy was good. “I would never have thought of leprosy,” she said with approval.
Barney says the girls had better watch their backs. “And not in a good way, either,” he adds.

Part Three?

Thank you to everyone for their encouraging comments. I've been a little lax in the past year or so. Blame it on a lot of time spent in the airport. The easiest way to keep up to date though is just to follow my misadventures in 8DAYS. I'm there every week.

And to answer the persistent questions about a third book...Sorry, that's not going to happen for a while yet. Who knew that those thin books would take so much effort and time to produce? I really don't have the range at the moment.

Anyway, in the next post is a new one. Again, with my apologies for the late show.

Woof!

JH

Fog this!

Yesterday morning, I drew open the curtains and peered out the window. I cocked my head and blinked, turned around and shuffled out to the kitchen. My flatmate Saffy was already up, her head buried deep in the fridge as she snuffled around for something edible.

“Is it me,” she began without so much as a ‘good morning’, “is it me or are we living in the war? There is nothing in this fridge to eat! Just some mouldy cheese and half a carton of milk.”

“First of all, that cheese is meant to be mouldy!” I said. “And I can, from this angle see bread, kaya, eggs and some cereal.”

“Yuck, carbs, sugar, cholesterol and bleagh. In that order!” Saffy replied smoothly, straightening up and adjusting her nightgown.

“Is that the haze that’s hanging around outside the window?” I asked.

“I think so. It’s just foul! I’m surprised I’ve not dropped dead from a respiratory ailment!”

Just then, came a low roar from outside the window. It took a while to register what it was.

“Oh crap!” Saffy groaned as she schluffed out of the kitchen to shut the lounge room windows. “Is it Tuesday? They’re fogging again!”

As one, we hate Tuesday mornings and try to make it a point not to be in the flat. For an hour, the entire condominium is blanketed in a heavy, smelly, diesel-smelling fog. Sometimes, the stuff creeps in through cracks into the window and we need to take another shower to clean the stench off us.

Saffy peered out the window as she watched huge white clouds puff up through the bushes and trees. “I’m sorry, but someone needs to explain to me how it is that the stuff can kill mosquitos and yet apparently it’s completely safe for me to breathe in!”

“Write to the Prime Minister,” I suggested as I closed the kitchen windows. “They’re very encouraging about feedback these days.”

Saffy paused. “Who’s ‘they’?”

“They. The feedback people,” I said vaguely.

“I don’t want them to open a file on me,” Saffy said. “They might decide to fill it up with other things that I don’t necessarily want them to know about me.”

“Too late for that, Saf,” I said, as I imagined the contents of Saffy’s security file.

“I’m sure he doesn’t go around his home shutting his windows when they fog his home,” Saffy went on, by now thoroughly grouchy from the combined effects of hunger and fumigation.

“Anyway,” I said. “Just say that you hope that the Prime Minister isn’t being unduly inconvenienced by the Tuesday mosquito fogging. I’m sure they’ll like you for being such a concerned citizen. Maybe they might even reward you with free CPF for life!”

Saffy brightened. “You think?”

“You never know!” I said cheerfully, while wondering how Saffy ever managed to graduate from primary school. Later that day, I received an SMS from Saffy: “God. I am very itchy n my throat is hoarse. Do u tink I’m falling sick? N can we talk about how stinky dis taxi is?”

“I should go get a medical check-up,” she told Amanda that night. Our flatmate had just come back from an overseas trip and was looking impossibly glamorous for someone who’d just spent 20 hours on a plane.

“You two are just so ridiculous!” Amanda exclaimed. “Why don’t you just not be in the flat when they fog if you’re so worried? Do you honestly think the Feedback Unit is interested in this kind of rubbish?”

“Well, if you’re going to be so selective, what’s the point of asking for feedback then?” Saffy said stiffly.

“There are so many other things to talk about,” Amanda said, giving her glorious shampoo-ad hair a vigorous toss. “I’m going to write in and say how much I adore Changi! The plane touched down at 8pm, and here I am back home at 8.40pm. Which other airport in the world can do that? It’s fabulous! And I love all that greenery along the highway!” she gushed. “We passed through dodgy neighbourhoods and ugly concrete flyovers in New York to get to the airport. I had to lock all the taxi doors!”

Saffy complained that Amanda was being such a kill-joy. “What’s freaking New York’s concrete flyovers got to do with us being gassed?” she demanded. “I wish you would just concentrate on the topic at hand. Now, tell me, do you think the Prime Minister has been working out? He’s been looking quite buff lately on TV.”

The next day, Amanda said she sometimes wondered how Saffy had ever been allowed to graduate from kindergarten.

Disaster

There was an episode of Oprah once where someone asked the question, “If your house caught fire, what would you grab as you rushed out?” Oprah said, I believe, she’d rescue her dogs. It struck me at the time that she never said she’d rescue Steadman, her long time boyfriend, but I guess she figured he had two legs so he could jolly well take care of himself. One of her guests said that he would take a picture of a tree, which made me laugh for days.

Recently, it occurred to me that if the little flat that I share with my two flatmates Saffy and Amanda ever caught fire, I’d first grab my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch, and the second thing I’d do would be to unplug my SmartTV.

This might strike many as odd, to take a piece of machinery when there are plenty of things that are far more precious. Like a passport, for instance, or one’s family album, or in the case of my mother, her small collection of gold bars. But I can’t even begin to explain how much I value my SmartTV.

My life has never been the same since it came into my life. Seeing the promotional commercial – pause and rewind live TV, view individual recorded programmes in the sequence you want – is one thing. To actually see how it works is entirely another. I can bookmark a recorded show and skip to another one. I can watch, fast forward and rewind a programme while it’s recording. While I’m watching Project Runway on one channel, it tells me that Lost is about to start on another channel.

My point is, for a TV addict, the SmartTv is life-changing (and no, they’re not paying me to say this, though come to think of it, they should). No more stacks of clunky video-tapes, or worrying about how you’re going to tape all your favourite shows if you go away for two weeks, like I did recently.

There I was on the plane back from London smiling happily at the thought of all the lovely shows I had waiting for me at home. Nigella Feasts, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Oprah, American Idol… In the taxi zooming away from Changi, I was already planning which show to watch while I had dinner. Even as I opened the door to the flat, still caught in a TV-fueled daze, it took me a while to appreciate that Saffy was staring at me in a mildly panicked way.

“It’s not my fault!” she immediately said while taking a little step back.

Smiling indulgently, I said, “You are such a drama queen! What’s not your fault?”

She hesitated. “Your SmartTV. It’s not my fault,” she repeated.

I stared at her for a while, in the same way you might if someone said, “You’ve just won a billion dollars!”

“I never touched it, I swear, I was just dusting the DVD rack and then suddenly there was a loud crack and then the lights all went out and it never came back on, though I’ve tried turning it on but really, I don’t know why people expect me to know how these things work, so it’s really not my fault, please don’t yell at me,” Saffy babbled.

I felt a little faint and it took a while for the world to stop swaying. “It’s broken?” I finally managed to whisper. “But...how? It was all working fine when I left.”

Just in case I’d missed the point the first time round, Saffy said, “It wasn’t my fault. I’m sorry.” She later told Amanda that I looked as if someone had just told me that Oprah had died.

“The fuse is gone,” the Starhub man said sympathetically. He’d come over almost immediately after I placed a 911 call. “We’ll have to replace it.”

“But what about all the shows I’ve already recorded?” I moaned. “Oh dear God, I had two seasons of Victoria’s Secret on it!”

“Hopefully, the hard drive is intact, lah!” he said. He had the bed-side manner of a schnauzer. It was a great comfort.

The days since have been impossible. There’s nothing to watch on TV, just the local channels and I have to endure all the painful commercials that I normally happily fast forward. And I have to stay up late to watch shows that I normally record. I just can’t help but wonder how other people do it. “They have lives,” Amanda said unkindly this morning.

The next time she’s not looking, I will cancel her Vogue subscription.

What a Croc!

As anyone who has ever gone on a date will know, it’s a mine-field out there.

With girls, it’s like preparing for World War 3. There are endless discussions with girlfriends about what to wear, what not to wear, the decoding missions (“What do you think it means that we’re going to Blah-de-blah restaurant? Does he expect me to put out on the first date? Because I want to, but I also don’t want to send out the wrong message.”) and the four hours of prep time before the date (hair, makeup, outfit, shoes, accessories, perfume).

Guys have it relatively easy. They just have to make sure they wear a nice clean shirt, comb their hair, bring some flowers, compliment the girl on her outfit (but never the shoes) and remember not to pick their nose between courses. Well, at least that’s what I thought this was all we had to worry about.

A few days ago, my flat-mate Saffy introduced us to Mike, her current boyfriend. They’d met at an office function. Saffy said she was attracted to the fact that he was tall, could string a sentence together and wasn’t constantly checking his phone for messages. “And he’s got the cutest ass I’ve seen in a long time!” she reported breathlessly after the first date.

“Oh, that’s very important!” Amanda said with approval. In the world according to Amanda, a man with no ass is a man who is also very likely lacking in other departments. And now after a few dates, Saffy decided that it was time to introduce Mike to her friends, to get their stamp of approval. I begged off and said something urgent had happened at work.

“I hate that stage when you’re meeting the girl’s friends,” said Karl over dinner at Chomp Chomp. “It’s so stressful because if her best friend hates you on sight, it’s over.”

I looked up from my char kway teow and stared. “What do you care?” I asked. “You’re married.”

Karl shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

Right about then, across town, Saffy was introducing Mike to Amanda. By all accounts, it was very civilized, but Saffy said that she could tell that something was wrong. “Amanda had this pinched look, you know, like she’s about to pee out a kidney stone!” she told me later that evening when we had all regrouped in our apartment.

“You cannot possible date that man!” Amanda said without her usual sugar-coating.

Saffy’s famous breasts heaved in alarm. “What is your problem?” she demanded. “He’s single and straight! He’s perfect!”

“He wears Crocs!” Amanda said with devastating pity.

I swiveled my head around and frowned. Saffy’s mouth automatically opened to retort, but to everyone’s astonishment, no words came out. She tried again. And again. Eventually, she managed to squeak out, “What?”

“Mike wears Crocs!” Amanda repeated.

I hesitated. “Uhm, but what does that have to do with the price of eggs?” I asked, utterly bewildered.

“I also say!” Saffy said, her bosom trembling.

It was Amanda’s turn to look surprised. “Crocs!” she stressed again. “He wears Crocs!”

Saffy still looked lost. “So what?” The penny eventually dropped. I piped up, “Are you seriously telling me that you would rule someone out as husband material just because he wears Crocs?” On hearing this, Saffy sucked in her breath.

“Are you seriously telling me that you wouldn’t?” Amanda retorted.

“But Manda, they’re just shoes!” I protested. “Actually, they’re not even shoes, they’re more like slippers!”

“They’re Crocs!” Amanda said firmly. “Crocs are ugly. And if Mike thinks it’s acceptable to wear them, who knows what other kinds of bad taste he’s going to exhibit?”

As Saffy later complained to Barney Chen, “It’s totally unbelievable! I never even noticed what Mike was wearing! Would you hold it against a guy who wore Crocs?”

“Sweetie,” Barney said kindly, “I don’t care what the guy wears, as long as he holds something against me! I’m very low maintenance that way.” Saffy pursed her lips. She was clearly dissatisfied with this unexpected bump in her dating prospects. “The worst thing is that now whenever I see Mike, it’s all I can think about. And I still don’t even know what the problem is! They’re not even that ugly.”

“I hear they’re very comfortable,” Barney said vaguely. “Apparently, it’s like walking on air.”

Saffy wasn’t listening. “Amanda is crazy! Mike is perfect. He’s a banker, he’s smart and he’s got a car. Oh,” she suddenly remembered, “and he’s straight. Do you know how hard it is to find someone like that in this town?”

Barney sighed and patted Saffy’s hand. “You’re preaching to the choir, girl!”

Like I said…mine-field.

It's getting late

It really bugs me when people are always late for appointments.

“Maybe she’s stuck in traffic,” my flatmate Amanda said recently as we waited for Saffy like two tired old hookers outside Orchard Towers. She looked around her, nervously taking in the passing traffic of curious tourists and lecherous ah-peks who kept giving her casual glances. “And can you tell me why we agreed to meet here on a weekend?” she said eventually, and added, “I will just die if anyone asks me what my rate is!”

“Stuck in traffic, my foot,” I grumbled. “That Saffy was late for her own birth!”

And just like that, Saffy emerged from the crowd, a pint-sized dynamo in a mini-skirt, platform shoes and a tube-top (emblazoned with the words ‘No Money, No Honey’) that barely managed to qualify as a top by a mere two inches of material. “Goodness!” she trilled. “Where are all these people coming from? I was stuck in traffic!”

Eventually, she noticed my stare and shifted uncomfortably. Her bosom trembled with guilt. “What?”

“You took the MRT. What possible traffic could there be?”

“Oh, alright!” Saffy burst out. “Stop torturing me! I was trying on make up at MAC, ok? Give me a break, I’ve had a tough week!”

“But we’ve been standing here for half an hour!” Amanda said. “Why didn’t you call?”

“I got caught up!” Saffy cried. “And I’m only half an hour late!”

Amanda says that next time, we're meeting at Borders. Meanwhile, I've decided to get me one of Saffy's t-shirts in my size.

Miss Match

The first time I tried to match-make someone, it ended in a big fat fizzle. Barney Chen had been thoroughly miserable and going through a slump – which in his world was defined as not having had a date in three weeks. As it happened, one of my clients had just come off a long term relationship when his boyfriend had decided to go home to Rome – without Peter. Perfect, I thought. So I held a dinner party at my place and invited Barney and Peter without telling either it was a set up.

They barely registered each other’s presence. Barney immediately curled up on the sofa with my beloved adopted mongrel dog, Pooch while Peter spent the entire evening talking to Saffy’s breasts, a state of events which cause her tremendous excitement.

“I think I turned him!” she whispered to me in the kitchen, her eyes burning with the kind of light one normally associates with religious fanatics just before they press the trigger. She stared down at her bosom in awe. “They’re magical!” she breathed in awe.

The next day, Barney called and asked why I’d invited “the midget” to dinner, while Peter emailed to ask if Saffy was single because he was currently in lust with the brother of a friend and this brother swung both ways (“If you know what I’m saying and with women, he’s really into boobs!”) and he thought that if he could introduce this brother to Saffy, he (the brother) might consider getting into a threesome with Saffy and Peter. “He’s talked about it before. This is a great way to get in bed with the brother, don’t you think?” Peter asked. He added a smiley face at the end of the sentence.

When I reported this to Saffy, she had to pull out a piece of paper to work out the proposed arrangement. Eventually, she looked up from her scribbles and asked, “Is it just me, or is that a little sick? And is it even sicker that I’m also a little intrigued by what this brother looks like?”

Where's the ROM-ance?

The idea of marriage does funny things to different people. I personally can’t walk past a magazine rack brimming with bridal magazines without thinking, ‘Honestly, how many different ways can you do a party favour?’

My best friend Karl, who is unhappily married, says he considers it a good day if he doesn’t think about divorce more than three times each morning; while Barney Chen looks forward to the day when Vera Wang will make him a dress for his marriage to Wentworth Miller.

“Don’t you think this whole marriage thing is just a big con?” I asked my flatmate Amanda the other day at our local Starbucks.

She looked up from her cappuccino and blinked. “You’re asking someone who has kept every single issue of Martha Stewart Wedding since 1937?”

“It’s not even romantic anymore!” I said stirring my latte as I told her the story of Geraldine who’d been dating her boyfriend for two years now. And recently, in the middle of the commercial break for Ugly Betty, he’d turned to her and asked casually, “Do you think we should have a look at some HDB flats?”

Amanda rolled her eyes and groaned. “Ugh, I hate that! Can guys please learn to propose properly? Applying for public housing permits is not romantic!”

Which got me thinking. I grew up with some rather, admittedly, dated concepts of romance. Girl meets boy. They fall in love. They part and rendezvous in Paris. They kiss and The End. Not anymore. These days, it seems to me as if standards have fallen (and not in a good way either, as Barney Chen would say).

I blame it on shows like ‘The O.C.’ and MTV. Everything has become tacky and cheap (and not in a good way). Invitations to wedding dinners arrive by email (if you’re lucky) or SMS. Nobody dresses up properly to celebrate the happiest day (supposedly) of their friends’ lives: I once sat next to someone at a dinner at the Four Seasons who wore a black polo shirt from Warner Bros Movie World Gold Coast. He was also an hour late – “Aiyah, I had a nap. I overslept!” And I honestly can’t remember the last time I received a thank you note for all the very expensive wedding presents I brought.

Whatever happened to the romance (and manners) in our lives? Whatever happened to the carefully planned marriage proposal? Since when was a commercial break considered the right moment to ask someone to spend the rest of her life with you? More to the point, if this is going to be the highwater mark of your romantic life, what do you have to look forward to after the wedding?

“Aiyah,” said my friend Sharyn. “After you marry, hor, no more lo-mance, lah! Anyway, what for you want lo-mance? I tell you ah, once you ROM, it’s the end, ah!”

At a clip

It's simply bewildering what some people consider acceptable behaviour these days.

This morning, Barney Chen sent me an SMS: "Someone on the train is using nail clippers on himself and his family. Honestly, some people are just animals!"

It's in the bag

I was at a dinner the other night with a bunch of friends. It was one of those gatherings where it was quite possible to slip in the background and let the flow of chatter wash over you. Happily munching my deep fried calamari, I slipped in and out of the different conversational tides. At the back of my mind, I was just wondering when it would be a good moment to leave and head back to American Idol when Vera piped up, “Can someone explain to me why men in this town carry their girlfriend’s handbags?”

My good friend Anne immediately yelped, “Aiyoh, I can not stand guys like that!”

“I know! Have some balls, I say!” exclaimed Vera with force. And on it went for a bit. Of course, the guys at the table stoutly denied that they’d ever carried their girlfriends’ handbags while the girls looked at us sideways, clearly wanting to give us the benefit of the doubt, but holding out on a final judgment till they’d spoken to our respective partners.

It eventually occurred to me then that Carly, sitting to my side, had been unaccountably silent the entire conversation. I swiveled my head around to her and lifted a questioning eyebrow. She looked at me nervously and, under the pressure of my furrowed brow, finally blurted out, “Well, I’ve actually asked my boyfriend to carry my handbag! But only sometimes, lah,” she added hurriedly.

In the ensuing deafening silence, you could have heard a mosquito fart. Much like a python moves in slowly as it surveys its helpless prey, Anne leaned forward and stared at Carly, turning her head slightly. “Uhm, why?” she finally asked.

“Well, sometimes, it’s heavy! What’s the big deal?” poor Carly said, by now clearly regretting ever opening her big mouth.

“Well, that’s your fault, what!” Anne exclaimed. “Who ask you to put gold bars inside? Right?” She looked around the table. Several heads nodded enthusiastically in response.

Under the verbal onslaught, Carly looked desperate. “But it’s a Fendi!”

“Oh my God, Fendi, Prada. Who cares!” Vera cried. It occurred to me in the dim lighting of the restaurant, she looked a little Uma Thurman did just before she went on her murderous rampage in Kill Bill.

“But what if he doesn’t mind carrying it for me?” Carly bleated.

“That’s not the point, lah!” Annette snapped. “A guy should never carry a handbag. Not even if he’s gay.”

From the other end of the table, someone said firmly, “A handbag is a handbag! If you’re going to make the guy carry your handbag, put it in a big plastic bag. Then I think that’s OK.”

“But even then,” Vera said, clearly dissatisfied with this flagrant attempt to create a loophole in the No Handbag If You’re a Man (Not Even if You’re Gay) Rule.

This is all such good material! I thought happily to myself as I busily committed the key points of the dialogue to memory. Later, back in the little apartment I share with Saffy and Amanda, the girls were unanimous in their disdain.

“Oh, I’m seriously going to have to reassess my friendship with Carly!” Saffy said, her voice heavy with disappointment and her famous breasts heaving with judgment. I frowned at her and pointed out that she didn’t even know Carly.

“That’s so not besides the point!” said Saffy, effortlessly dismissing logic with polluted grammar.

Amanda tossed her luxurious shampoo-ad hair and said that there was something very wrong with a world where it was acceptable for a man to carry a handbag. “A man-bag, I understand, but not if the immediate owner is female. It’s just wrong!” she said, her pretty eyes flashing. Then a thought occurred to her. “Unless, of course, he’s just bought her a handbag from say Gucci and is just bringing it to her. Then that’s perfectly acceptable,” she said with approval, while looking at me.

“Why are you looking at me?” I asked nervously.

“It’s my birthday next week.”

“I’m a writer,” I said. “I make less than 30 cents a word. I can’t afford a piece of thread from Gucci.”

“I couldn’t afford to pee in Gucci!” said Saffy, a miserable look settling on her face.

“There’s a toilet in Gucci?” Barney Chen asked me the next day. He was impressed.

“Would you carry a handbag for a girl?” I asked him. He gave the matter some thought. “Only if there was something in it for me,” he said eventually. “Like backstage passes to see Barbra. But otherwise, no.”

“See?” Amanda said. “Even the gays won’t do it! And they’re usually up for anything.”

“That’s so true,” Barney said proudly.

Amanda Unplugged

Amanda recently came back from a work trip to London. “It was the worse flight in history!” she immediately exclaimed the minute she opened the front door and rolled in her Prada luggage. She bent down to coo sweet-nothings to my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch who’d rushed to the door at her arrival, his fat tail wagging furiously with happiness at seeing her again.

"It was awful. I was so gassy!” Amanda exclaimed as she trudged to her bedroom, Pooch faithfully trailing behind, apparently convinced that there had to be a biscuit treat for his enthusiastic greeting. At the dining table, Saffy looked up from her cereal and pulled a face.

“It must have been something I ate in the business class lounge before the flight!” Amanda’s voice floated out. “I farted all the way from Heathrow to Changi. It was like an atomic bomb went off in the Raffles Class cabin!” I choked on my tea.

“Well thank God, the airplane is so noisy and I was keeping everything tightly under wraps with the blanket!” said Amanda as she came out of her room and sank gratefully into a seat at the table. Saffy and I leaned backwards gently.

“Oh, I’m fine now,” Amanda sighed, “but I think I need to go get some colonic irrigation. I may be all gassed out now, but I still feel really blocked up. I read about it in Woman’s Day on the plane. Apparently, it works miracles!”

As I later complained to Karl and Barney Chen, I just didn’t understand why some people found it perfectly acceptable table manners to discuss such obviously private cleansing procedures at breakfast. “I think she’s hot!” Karl said firmly. “And she can discuss anything at my table!”

At the Bus Stop

One of the great things about living in cramped Singapore is just how much rich material you can pick up just by standing still. I’m surprised no one has gone around recording people’s conversations. It’s a mother-lode out there. And let me tell you that it’s riveting stuff.

Just the other day, while waiting for the 105 bus, I had my nose buried in a book when I automatically tuned into the handphone conversation next to me where a school girl was updating her friend on her day’s agenda.

“And tomorrow, I have three hours of drama!” she moaned. I wanted to ask if she was being literal, but there was a pregnant pause on her end. “Yeah, he’s in my class also. Do you know, hah, in his boarding school, he played someone called Paul the Rapist?”

And just as my eyes started to refocus on my book, Drama Girl then asked – she didn’t even bother lowering the volume of her voice – her friend, “And what’s the term for when people, like, have it off with dead people? You know,” she went on in a patient tone, “when people boink dead people!” By this stage, I was riveted. I inched nearer while pretending to turn a page. “It’s neuro-pharmacy or something! Neuro-what, ah?”

And no, I'm not making any of this up.

MIA with MIW

Hola, happy people...In addition to the regular 8DAYS column (and books - buy more, buy more!), I now have a monthly column with www.miw.com.sg It's all under the "Hear Me Out" link. Check it out for more of my rants.
Schuss!
JH

Porn Free

I don’t know what other people discuss at the dinner table in their homes, but in the little apartment that I share with Saffy, Amanda and my beloved adopted mongrel dog, Pooch, the topic du jour is porn. To be more specific, it’s a topic near and dear to Saffy. Amanda, who went to a Swiss boarding school, usually leaves the table as soon as Saffy broaches the subject.

“You encourage her!” Amanda hissed at me recently as we were in the kitchen washing up after Saffy had spent the entire evening alternately discussing the merits of spaghetti carbonara and the relative strengths of Italian versus Israeli men. She then promptly disappeared into her room with her latest DVD acquisition (‘Angela’s Weekend’) leaving us with strict instructions not to disturb her.

“Excuse me!” I said stoutly as I loaded up the sink with hot water. “I am as mortified as you are! I just find it very hard to get a word in edgewise once Saffy starts talking. And I notice,” I continued, squirting more dishwashing liquid into the sink, “I notice that you’re always very quiet when she’s going on about, uhm, equipment sizes!”

“Well, what am I supposed to say? That I loved the cinematography in ‘Pearls of the Orient’?” Amanda muttered as she vigorously wiped a cup. She paused and frowned as a thought occurred to her. “It’s also a little disturbing to think about what’s going on in her room right now.”

I clattered the dishes loudly in the sink and tried to think about my grocery list.

The next morning, at breakfast, Saffy announced that ‘Angela’s Weekend” was a complete disappointment. At the other end of the table, Amanda sighed, which Saffy ignored.

“I mean,” she went on, “it was just sex, sex, sex! What’s that all about?”

Goggle-eyed, I peered at Saffy over the rim of my coffee-mug. “It’s porn, Saf!” I spluttered. “What do you expect to see – Wimbledon?”

Saffy sniffed. “Well, I know what it is. I just think that they could break up all that sex with something else!”

“Like what?” Amanda shouted, unable to contain her outrage. “A fundraising message from the Dalai Lama?”

Welcome to my new year...

Army Fatigued

A few days ago, I called my friend Alex at his office. His secretary, Sarah, answered the phone and said, “Sorry, but Mr Alex is on reservist!”

I was astonished. “Again? But he just went!” I could almost feel Sarah shrug over the phone.

The call raised a question that had been bothering me for a long time now.

“What exactly is it that people do when they’re on reservist?” I asked my flatmate Amanda over lunch at Lau Pa Sat. “And, more importantly, why do they need to go so many times?”

Amanda sniffed and said that they probably did whatever a bunch of men would do whenever they get together. “Like not wash their underwear for days on end!” she clarified quickly when Barney Chen looked up from his laksa with interest.

For her part, Saffy thought reservist was just an excuse for getting out of work.

“I swear to God, but every time I need something done in the office, someone will always say, ‘Oh, cannot. I got reservist all of next week!’ I mean really!” Saffy complained. “How big is this island? How much defending do we need anyway? And it’s so unfair that girls don’t get to do reservist! I wouldn’t mind some quality me-time of my own away from the office!”

Barney said it was also very unfair that he held a British passport. “I have so much to contribute to the Singapore army!” he rumbled. “For starters, I’d completely redesign those uniforms! Jazz them up a little. And everyone would wear Prada boots! How chic would that be?”

Amanda muttered that letting Barney into the Singapore army would give new meaning to the phrase, army camp. Barney turned pink with pleasure and sipped harder on his sugar cane juice.

Ab-solutely Fabulous

Just the other day, I was at the dentist, flipping through a men’s magazine and trying hard to ignore the piercing whine of the drill that flooded the waiting room in full stereophonic splendour, when I came across a full page ad of a man’s stomach muscles. Ordinarily, I would immediately flip the page on point of principle. I mean, what kind of a sick world do we live in that people actually have to torture themselves and do sit-ups just so that they can have funny looking bumps on their stomachs?

But this ad was different. Next to the picture of the bronzed stomach, glistening with sweat, was a small bottle of lotion. “Ab Rescue!” it said proudly on the ad. It promised firmer, tighter, smoother looking abs in just 8 weeks. Just by rubbing the stuff on your stomach, Ab Rescue promised a 20% immediate improvement in skin tightness. All thanks to the product’s special thermogenic formula. I had no idea what a thermogenic formula did – the ad didn’t say – but it sure sounded impressive.

I'm ordering a bottle as we speak. Hopefully in two months time, I too could be on the cover of Men's Health in all my airbrushed glory.

Laugh Tracks

Complete strangers are always accosting me at the bus-stop and demanding to know when the 8DAYS column will be turned into a sit-com. "Should be very funny, what!" exclaimed one stalker. "We want to see Saffy's breasts!" another one told me recently.

"From your lips to God's ears!" I always mutter to them as I shield my eyes from the bright flashing pops of the paparazzi lurking in the bushes.

Ahh, the price of fame.

Not.

The truth is, discussions about turning the Saffy and Amanda saga into sit-com have been going round and round since time began. Amanda wants to have nothing to do with the project, but Saffy is insistent that only she can play herself. Meanwhile, draft scripts have been written, rewritten, rejected, tinkered with. Potential actors have been mooted.

And on it goes. It's painfully dull. I just want to skip the whole process and fast forward to the Emmys red carpet.

For a sneak peak at the draft script, watch out for the upcoming issues of 8DAYS. Just stop bothering me on the bus!

Turning Japanese

I'm a big fan of Japanese supermarkets. If it’s one activity that I look forward to all week, it's shopping day on Sunday. I park my beloved adopted mongrel dog, Pooch, with our neighbour, the melodious Lydia Kumarasamy, for a few hours of mutual spitting and growling at her evil black cat, Achar. And then it’s anchors ahoy for Isetan’s basement supermarket.

For a few happy hours, I wander down the brightly lit aisles, fingers trailing along the boxes, bottles, packets and assorted tubes. Picking up. Examining. Sniffing. The fruits section alone has me pinned to my tracks with their dainty melons and beautifully boxed apples. The hand-baskets start to overflow.

I've been coming here for years now and I guess one of these days, I'll finally understand just what it is that I'm actually buying. Because everything in here is labelled in Japanese. Other than the fruit and vegetables, I have no idea what we’re buying. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, there’s a special promotion and they play a very helpful video. In this way, Saffy was once saved from potential mishap after she’d bought something in the mistaken belief that they were hi-tech facial cotton pads, but on close scrutiny of the accompanying video, it transpired that she’d actually bought a powerful brand of kitchen scourer. “Well, it’s all white and fluffy looking!” she exclaimed later, delicately wiping down our oven with said scourer. “This stuff is amazing! They really should do something similar for the face!”

And since everything is written in Japanese, it means that the girls are spared the dreaded caloric count and fat details of assorted food products. Firmly subscribing to the view that what you don’t know can’t possibly be fattening, they fill baskets with assorted packets of chips, chocolate and soft drinks. As Amanda once pointed out with penetrating insight, “I personally don’t know any fat Japanese! Do you?” To which Saffy agreed that she too didn’t know any, all of which meant that if the food product was Japanese, it followed that it must also be slimming.

Meanwhile, being the hypochondriac that I am, I can usually be found in the household section, marvelling at the amazing spread of cleaning agents and chemical solvents. Endless rows of bottles, slick, streamlined tools, boxes of powders – each beautifully packaged, the only clue to their contents being a cutesy picture of a smiling doll or a porcelained skinned Japanese lady, a mop in one hand and product in the other. The instructions are in Japanese, and so too, I happily imagine, are the warning labels.

I sometimes way-lay unsuspecting Prada-clad Japanese tai-tais (how long does it take them to get dressed each day?), presenting them with a bottle of chemical solvent and a questioning look. After a few minutes of confused sign-language and very fractured conversations that involve a lot of Hai’s and Domo’s, we will establish that we are actually talking about a bottle of sesame seed mayonnaise and that we are not, as I had previously believed, in the household section, but rather the salad aisle.

“Ah, so!” Mariko-san will declare, beaming with pleasure that we’d got that sorted out. There’d be a bit of low bowing and embarrassment on my part. Later, as she’s having lunch at Les Amis, I imagine Mariko-san regaling her girlfriends about her ridiculous encounter. “I know that guy!” exclaims her best friend, Sakura-san, laughing behind her manicured hands. “Were there two women with him? They’re always buying boxes of oven scouring pads!”

“Ah, so desu-ka!” Mariko-san tinkles. “They’re so strange! I think one of them is called Sarfie. I once saw her inhale an entire packet of taro chips at the check-out counter. Can you imagine the fat? More salad, Sakura-san?”

Fat Chance

In the continuing saga of dating in the third millennium, nothing gets both men and women more worked up than the question “Do these [insert item of clothing] make me look fat?”

It looks very innocent, this question. A simple sartorial inquiry that invites a flippant, off the cuff response. A simple Yes or No answer. But oh foolish is the person who believes this. Because, and you heard it here first, there is no right answer! And along with “Have you stopped beating your wife?”, it’s certainly not a question that can be answered with a simple Yes or No. A lot of footnotes and appendices are required.

And note that the question is only ever asked by a woman or a gay man. In the entire history of humanity, no straight guy has ever looked at his bum in the mirror and wondered, “Do these pants make me look fat?” It’s just not a question that figures large in the straight universe.

Saffy once asked me this very question. "Do these jeans make me look fat?”

In my defence, I was very distracted at the time, so I wasn’t really paying much attention. I looked up briefly, looked at Saffy and replied casually, “Uh. No. You look fine.”

“You hesitated,” Saffy said, her face a little strange.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yeeees,” Saffy drawled. “You did. You said, “Uh”.”

“Which is a word.”

"That conveys the impression of hesitation,” Saffy said, her bosom slowly inflating.

And much as one barely senses the moment that one has taken a wrong turn somewhere on a dark deserted road, it occurred to me I had, quite without intending to, ventured into very unfamiliar territory. I hesitated and tried a little back-pedalling.

“Well, you look fine,” I said encouragingly and gave Saffy my most winning smile before turning away, hoping she'd go away.

"I may look fine,” Saffy began from the back of my head, “but you still haven’t answered my question. Do I look fat in these jeans?”

“Absolutely not!” I said firmly.

Saffy huffed. “But you didn’t say no the first time I asked! I do look fat in these, don’t I? Oh dear God.” She turned on her heels and marched to her room. A few seconds later, I heard Amanda ask, “Why aren’t you dressed yet?”

Saffy’s reply rang through the apartment. “I was dressed, but then Jason said my bum looked fat in these jeans, so now I have to change!”

“I said that she looked fine!” I yelled. “I never said anything about fat or bums!”

“You hesitated!” came Saffy’s voice.

For days afterwards, it was all I could talk about. “Ooh, you should never attempt to answer that question!” cooed Barney Chen. “Don’t go anywhere near the bum unless you know what you’re doing. Like I do,” he added with a loaded look.

“You hesitated. Fatal mistake,” said Karl, my best friend. “It’s like a legal contract. Clause 16 – Hesitation shall be taken to imply fatness and unattractive bums and no further correspondence shall be entered into. The second worse question is ‘What are you thinking about?’”

“Well, all I know is that I’m never going to answer that question ever again. Saffy hasn’t spoken to me for days. It’s ridiculous!”

“Which isn’t necessarily such a bad thing,” said Karl, unhappily married man.

Wrong Number

I really don’t care how many people I offend out there, but…I loathe telemarketers.

There. I said it. The world didn’t come to a crashing halt. The phone lines haven’t rung off the hook with irate companies complaining. In fact, I with they would call to complain because I’m so ready to give them an earful.

This is how it always turns out. After a beastly day dealing with unreasonable editors and ungrateful flatmates, I crawl into bed, relieved that until dawn, I can finally have some peace and quiet. I plump up my pillows with a happy sigh. I reach for the TV’s remote control and flick through all the shows I’ve taped on Smart TV. I’m two minutes into “Smallville” when the phone rings.

And this is how the conversation normally goes…

Me: Hello, Jason speaking.
Caller: Ah, hello? Hello?
Me: Yes?
Caller: Can I speak to Mr Jason please?
Me: This is he.
Caller: Ah, hello? Mr Jason please!
Me: This is Jason speaking.
Caller (sound of paper shuffling): Ah, I want to speak to Mr Jason Hahn. Not Mr Jason Speaking.
Me: Are you trying to sell me something?
Caller: Ah, Mr Jason, ah. Did you fill in a competition form at Uzbekhistan Shopping Centre recently?
Me: Why?
Caller: Is your IC number S4939393Z?
Me: Maybe. Why?
Caller: Ahh, congratulations Mr Jason! You’ve just won a great prize, but to claim it, you must come down to Uzbekhistan in the next one hour, hor and then…
Me: Well, if I’ve won something, why don’t you just send me the voucher.
Caller: Uhm, sorry, hor Mr Jason. You must come down to claim this prize.
Me: It’s nine o’clock at night!
Caller: So you don’t want to claim the prize, is it?
Me: Well, it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that…
Caller: OK. [click].

Who can sleep after such an aggravating phone call? It's hateful. Just hateful!