Mummy Dearest

A few days ago, my sister emailed me a black and white picture. Her message read: “I was just going through some old photo albums and found this. Isn’t it just extraordinary? Who would have thunk?”

            I stared at the picture on the screen and frowned. A pretty young woman in tight capri pants, floral blouse, sunglasses and a thick wave of hair leaned up against a white Vespa. She wore a sly, enigmatic smile that said she knew something and it was simply delicious and that she couldn’t wait to tell you about it as soon as she was done with this shot. It was a classic 1960s pose – slightly provocative and yet incredibly innocent.

Funnily enough, the woman in the picture looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

And then it dawned on me. It was my mother.

When my flatmates came home, I showed them the picture.

“That’s your mother?” Amanda said, eyes wide open. “My God, she looks like a movie star, she’s so sexy!”

“Gosh, those cheekbones! What happened to you?” Saffy asked. It bothered me to realise that she was actually asking a serious question.

“I guess now that you tell me, I can so totally see that it’s your mother,” Amanda went on. “I just can’t get over the fact that she was so beautiful. Not that she isn’t now, but you know what I mean.”

My sister Michelle later said that it’s so odd to think of one’s mother in that way. “Or any way,” she added after thinking about it a bit more.

And that’s the thing. It never occurs to you that long before you were born, your mother actually had a life that didn’t involve you. She had her own plans in life, her own dreams and her own things to do. She was young and the future lay ahead of her. She just needed to nudge her Vespa in whichever direction she chose.

And we can be certain that none of her plans involved nagging three reluctant children about the importance of straight A’s and why 9pm was a perfectly reasonable time to leave your friend’s party.

“You need to study!” she would say. “There’s plenty of time later in your life for parties!”

What does she know about a good time, we thought sourly. By then, the young woman that she once was in that picture, standing so happily next to her Vespa, was long gone. Who knew where she’d gone?

I emailed the picture to Mother who immediately called me.

“That dratted Michelle,” she said by way of maternal greeting. “Where on earth did she dig up that old dinosaur of a picture?”

I said it was a lovely photo.

“Well, I know it’s a lovely photo, I’m just saying it’s a bit of a shock to see yourself looking so, well, unlined!”

There was a silence and I could hear Mother’s soft breathing. Then a quick rush of air.

“My God, I was 19 in that photo. Such a long time ago.” Another pause. I could almost sense the years unrolling. “It was Christmas and the Vespa was a present from my father. I’d just seen ‘Roman Holiday’ and pestered your gong-gong for my own Vespa. Your por-por was horrified. She said well brought up young ladies did not ride on motorbikes. I said it was for me to commute to college and she said, ‘But that’s what the driver is for! The next thing you’re going to tell me is that you want to be a doctor!’”

I was surprised. “Did you want to be a doctor?”

“Oh, yes, I did!” Her voice rang like a crystal chime down the phone line. “I wanted to be Dr Kildare. Do you know who he was? A TV doctor. Richard Chamberlain played him. So beautiful. Such a shame he turned out to be gay. Anyway, young ladies didn’t become doctors back in my day. You only ever had three career options – nurse, teacher or housewife. I didn’t like blood, and chalk dust made me itch. So, I married your father. And that was that. But I still got to ride my Vespa!”

“Mother wanted to be a doctor?” Michelle said. “Really? How odd that we never knew that.”

I said that there was probably a lot that we don’t know about our mother.

“Huh,” Michelle said. “I wonder if that’s why she always wanted me to study medicine. I wish she’d told me. Maybe I might have listened.”

Still, looking at the picture of Mother from all those years ago, it occured to me that it’s still not too late to start listening. It never is.

Sleep Mode

Maybe it’s a sign that I’m getting older but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to sleep.

            When I was 15, I could fall asleep sitting up in class while my brother Jack had a freakish ability to sleep with his eyes wide open.

            “Oh my God, I wish I could do that!” my sister once said with an equal mix of admiration and resentment when Jack slept right through one of our mother’s dull lectures about the importance of straight As, all while managing to look remarkably alert.

            “His eyes never moved from mum’s face!” Michelle told her best friend, Betty Chan who said that her brother once slept through an earthquake.

            “Seriously, what is it with boys?” Michelle asked crossly, completely unaware that many years later, she’d still be asking the same question.

            Anyway, my point is, back in the day, it was easy to sleep.

            These days, I’m like Sleeping Beauty with OCD. The room temperature has to be just right. If it’s too cold, I toss. Too warm, I turn. The bed sheets have to be folded back just so. It helps if I’ve had a nice hot cup of chamomile tea just before getting into bed. I can’t have any noise. Which means I usually can’t sleep until my flatmates have turned in, otherwise the sound of their gossiping in the kitchen will keep me awake.

            And when I finally fall asleep, I am plagued by dreams. A rotating cast of people from my past will show up. I’ll be in taxis that are lost. I make my way through Takashimaya but the layout has changed, so I spend a lot of time wandering the aisles. I suddenly realize that I have an exam in half an hour for which I’ve not studied. Sometimes, I’m sitting on the loo in a public place and there are a lot of people I know around me and I’m trying desperately to be discrete. In other dreams, I’m wandering around wearing just a tee-shirt and no pants or underwear.

            Of course, I wake up exhausted.

            “Maybe you’re sleeping too much?” Saffy said the other day on Skype during her lunch hour.

            “Eight hours isn’t too much, is it?” I asked.

            “Maybe you only need six? They say the older you get…” I disconnected Skype.

            “Try drinking some sherry before bed,” my mother suggested.

            “She must have mistaken me for her!” I told my sister.

            Amanda finally suggested that I might be having some psychic problems and dragged me to her regular psychic, a chubby good-natured Filipina called Mel.

            Mel shuffled her tarot cards, laid them all out in a row and solemnly announced that my grandmother was trying to get in touch with me. I said this was physically impossible as both my grandmothers are dead. Then I remembered where I was and who I was talking to and said, “Oh.”

            Then I added, “Oh, God, no!”

            “It’s your father’s mother. She’s trying to send you a message!” Mel said in the same tone that your office receptionist might use when you ask if anyone called while you were out at lunch.

            “What does she want?”

            “It’s not clear,” Mel said firmly. “But you have to be more receptive to her messages. You’re blocking her, that’s why you can’t sleep!”

            “God, what does she expect?” Saffy later said. “If my dead grandmother was trying to get in touch with me, I’d be blocking her too!”

            “Maybe she’s trying to tell you where the rest of her fortune is hidden?” said Amanda, Professional Gold Digger.

            “Did Mel say how you’re meant to be more receptive?” Saffy asked.

            “Well, apparently, now that I know the cause of my sleep issues, every night before I sleep, I’m meant to ask her what she needs to tell me.”

            My mother thinks the whole thing is just so typical of her dead mother-in-law, whom she never got on with. “She was such an attention seeker when she was alive. Why am I not surprised that even when she’s dead, she’s still trying to hog the limelight! If you ever get to speak to her, tell her I said so!”

            Leave it to Sharyn to put things in perspective. “Aiyoh, you, ah! Where got such thing, one! You think dead people have nothing better to do, is it? I see the way you eat dinner – big steak, big plate of rice, big cake, of course you can’t sleep, what! You got indigestion, lah!”

            Still, I’m not taking any chances. Tonight, I’m sleeping with a rosary. And just in case, I’ve also taken three antacid tablets. 

Christian So-later

As I write this, it’s early October, but it feels as if the year has already come to an end. I’m almost positive that the Christmas decorations are about to go up along Orchard Road where each night, their maddeningly cheerful lights and fake Santas will remind me that I am about to spend a whole lot of money on useless presents for a whole lot of people that either I don’t really like, or don’t see enough of during the year to actually bother making the effort of liking.

            It would be so nice to not bother with the whole nonsense, seeing as I’m not even Christian. But that said, my kindergarten teacher was a dyed in the wool Methodist from South Carolina. I went to a Catholic primary school and dutifully read the Bible, but frankly, I just never saw the point of the Holy Trinity.

It hardly helped that my mother’s best friend was a Cambodian princess who became a nun at the Church of the Holy Infant Jesus back in the day before the whole place became CHIJMES and she smoked like a chimney and could turn the air blue with her foul language delivered in flawless French, Cambodian and Hokkien.

            As my sister always pointed out, with a role model like that, it’s no wonder none of us paid any attention to Monsignor Duchamp whenever he came to dinner.

Meanwhile, my dad is Buddhist, and my mother, depending on the level of guilt she’s feeling on the day, fluctuates between the Roman Catholics and the Baptists. 

Personally, I’m still all at sea when it comes to matters of the soul. I’d like to think that there’s someone out there looking out for us all, but the practical part of me wonders how even a supreme being can pay attention to every single person on the planet. I can’t even text and drive at the same time.

And yet, despite all my misgivings and questions, there I will be on Christmas Eve, at some friend’s house, happily singing ‘Away in the Manger’ like there’s no tomorrow.

Then on Boxing Day, as I sit at home mentally doing my sums and getting a little frightened about my next Visa bill, I swear to myself that I won’t do it again. That Christmas is just a horrible commercial gimmick. That, next year, I’m not going to give any presents. That, if I really want to find the answers to the questions of life, they won’t be found in a Tiffany’s catalogue or a Ralph Lauren gift wrap.

            I say this every year, of course, but I always end up spending an awful amount of time slavishly shopping and ticking off people on my list. 

            This year though will be different, I think. My father’s recent health scare seems to have finally given me the perspective I’ve been looking for. For the first time, I realized that life isn’t really about the job. Or that pay-rise. Or the new car. Or the new model phone. Yes, it would be nice to have all of that, but when the chips are down, none of it really matters if you’re sick and alone.

            Saffy says that may be true, but it would really help if you were sick, alone and rich. “Can you imagine dying all alone in a hospital corridor because you can’t afford a room?” she asked the other day.

            “Of course, you need good friends and family, as well,” I added.

            “Listen, if you’re rich, you’ll always have friends and family around!” Saffy said. “Rich people never die alone.”

            Amanda says that’s so incredibly cynical, but Saffy is sticking to her guns on this point.

            “It’s bad enough that we don’t know what’s on the other side of death,” she said recently at the funeral of the brother of our friend, Chris. “Imagine how much more horrible it must be if the last thing you see is not a friendly face, but an empty room?”

            “So the point would be?” Amanda prompted.

            Saffy drew a big breath. “The point would be that we need to cultivate a loyal group of friends and family. And to do that, we have to buy their loyalty. Which is why, this Christmas, I’m giving you both presents from Gucci and Cartier! And if you want me to visit you in the hospital, you’d better be giving me something from Prada!”

            Amanda later said that Saffy is like the coming of the Anti-Christ. “But with a much stronger business acumen!” she added. I detected a grudging note of admiration in her voice.

Dead Certain

I read all the time in the newspapers about hyperactive gun-zheong parents who subject their kids to extra tuition. Maths, fencing, Chinese, English, piano, ballet, swimming. Before school. After school. On weekends. Anything to give little Madeleine that extra edge over her equally obnoxious class-mates.

            As someone who was made to sit through long painful hours of algebra with my patiently suffering tutor, Mrs Chiang, let me tell you, dear parents, that it’s all a complete waste of time. I literally spent months learning how to solve a quadratic equation and to this day, no one, not even my father who had to write out a sizeable monthly cheque to Mrs Chiang, can explain to me the point of solving (x+2)(y-6)=76.

            Really, who cares what x and y solve to? Nobody. You will never need this. Ever. You will never, unless you’re Russell Crowe who’s being paid millions for A Beautiful Mind, be put in a situation where your life depends on finding the solution to a quadratic equation. And even if you’re Russell Crowe, need I remind you how that all turned out for him?

Same goes for ballet. I’m always having lunch with someone who’s on a perpetual school run between home and ballet classes. Seriously, does anyone really think that little Annabelle is ever going to be a prima ballerina? All that fussing about with her tutu, hair and shoes - for what? She’ll have no need for a pas des deux at university, and by the time she’s married and with kids, she’ll have lost all flexibility in her joints and she’ll be lucky if she can even touch her toes. Meanwhile, her ankles will be so swollen from water retention and running after Ah Boy that the only reason she would ever do a pirouette would be to kick someone (most likely her husband who’s come home late, looked at the mess in the house and asks, “What have you been doing all day?”) down the staircase.

No. What parents should really be gun-zheong about is finding classes that teach their kids what to do once they’ve left school. Classes like ‘How to deal with the boss from hell’, ‘How to sabo your work colleagues and get ahead without making enemies’, ‘How to be a man and not carry your girlfriend’s little pink handbag in public’, and, my favourite, ‘How to plan for your retirement, especially if it’s a near certainty that when your parents die, they will leave you nothing in their wills.’

I don’t know about you, but no one ever talked to me about retirement planning when I was growing up. Everyone was so busy trying to tell me about the events of 1066 or what happens when I mix two molecules of hydrogen with one of oxygen (seriously, who am I, God? Why do I care?), that they completely ignored the fact that none of this is going to be useful to me when I’m 85, in a nursing home and hooked up to a respirator.

What would be useful is having first class medical care. And to achieve that, I need to make lots of money. And to do that, I need to have a brilliant life-changing idea. Just one. I need my iPad moment.

And I think I got one the other day while sitting on the toilet.

It’s a brilliant idea that’s going to make me the millions that everyone thought I would by knowing how to solve a quadratic equation. I’m surprised no one has thought about it so far.

It’s designer coffins.

And before anyone says, “Choy!”, think about it. The whole world is already so obsessed with Louis Vuitton and Gucci. What would be the ultimate accessory? A Louis Vuitton coffin! And a Gucci shroud! While wearing realistic post-death make-up by MAC! See, I’m so excited by the idea that I’m putting exclamation marks at the end of every sentence!

My company tag line is ‘Who says you can’t take it with you when you die?’ Now, you really can. The permutions are endless. I know, for a fact, that I will clean up in Japan with a Hello Kitty coffin. I’m already seeing the queues clamouring to get into my showroom. My server for the online sales will probably crash too. And my Rolex watch whose hands are forever stuck on the moment you die has genius written all over it.

I’ve been so excited by the idea that I’ve not slept.

This morning, after I’d told her about my retirement plans, Amanda said, “How is this going to make you any money? Wouldn’t it be Louis Vuitton that makes the money from a Louis Vuitton coffin?”

Amanda is so lucky I never learnt ballet.

Singapore Girls

I probably should have written this article a few weeks ago when it was the National Day, but I figure there’s never a bad moment to extol the virtues of Singapore. Well, maybe there might have been during the recent General Elections when it seemed to me that all my Facebook friends had an axe to grind with the incumbent ruling party.


The litany of woes and complaints was long. Grievances were aired and shared endlessly. Horror stories about the state of education, housing and public transportation circulated. But amidst all the negativity and, in some cases, mindless rabble rousing, it occurred to me that we too seldom pause to give thanks for all the good things that Singapore has to offer.

Of course there are problems. Every single country has its problems. But the key is working out which country has the least and then holding on for dear life.

A friend of mine recently said she was sick of living in Singapore and wanted to migrate. Intrigued, I asked where.

“I’m thinking of California!” Marcy said.

I was astonished. “You’re moving from a country that’s never had a deficit in its entire history to a state that’s literally bankrupt? And you’ll be living right on top of a fault line. Did you not watch ‘2012’? How will you sleep?”

Marcy stared at me. Clearly, she had not thought of this. But she’s a trouper, our Marcy. Blessed, too, with a never say die attitude.

“Sweden?”

“Sixty percent tax rate? Ten months of darkness? One of the world’s highest rates of suicide? Seriously?”

“Uhm...France?”

“You don’t speak French.”

“Geneva?”

“You’re poor. And you don’t speak French or German. So that also rules out Germany.”

“Milan!”

“You shop at Giordano. You’ll never fit in.”

“Tokyo!”

“You’ll be sleeping on the floor in your dining room which will also be your lounge room and entry hall. And can we talk about the packed trains where they have special guards who push you into the compartments?”

By now, Marcy looked a bit panicked.

“New York!”

“You’ll be living in a shoe-box. The apartments in ‘Friends’ aren’t real. Plus the winters are brutal. And the airports are the absolute pits.”

“London! They have amazing museums and art galleries!”

“Which you will visit once a year. The rest of the time, you’ll be cold. The underground Tube has no air-conditioning and no mobile coverage. The tax rate will kill you and, if that doesn’t, the medieval health care system will. And did you not see the riots on TV? Meanwhile, Heathrow and Gatwick are the gateways to hell.”

By the end of our lunch, I could tell that Marcy was severely depressed.

Saffy says it serves her right. “Seriously, I wish people would just take a chill pill and stop complaining all the time about Singapore. Remember the last time we were all in London during winter? It was dark by 3.30pm, the airports all shut down because of one inch of snow, and the trains were always breaking down. We never left the hotel! And she wants to move there?”

“Maybe we should encourage Marcy to go,” Amanda suggested. “Then there’ll be a bit more space for us on the trains.”

Saffy later said it kills her when Amanda says things like that. “She’s not been on a train in her entire life!”

Marcy rang me this morning and said she’d been thinking about our chat. “I guess I don’t have it that bad here.”

“Ya don’t say!”

“But how am I going to meet someone?” she asked. “All the nice guys in this town are either married or already dating a skank. Or they’re gay! Have you noticed that everyone seems to be coming out? Apparently, Kumar is gay!”

I paused and stared hard into space. “Are you telling me that Kumar is your target market?”

“Well, the way my dating life is going, he might as well be. That’s one of the reasons why I want to migrate. My love life is the pits!”

Saffy says it’s a good thing she’s not friends with Marcy.

“It’s just one thing after another with her,” she said, conveniently forgetting that till just a few months ago, before she’d met her current beau Bradley, she was complaining about the same lack of dating opportunities and contemplating moving to Sydney for its manly surfer hunks. She even took a week off from work to fly down for a reconnaissance only to discover to her horror that the bronzed gods she was lusting after had no idea who Dolce & Gabbana were.

“How would that ever work?” she posted on Facebook. She received 23 Likes.

Mind the Gap

Getting older does funny things to you. For one thing, you start to make noises when you get out of a car that you’ve been sitting in for a long time. Like “ouch”, if you’re an ang moh, and “aiyah”, if you’re not.


You suddenly realize too that you’re no longer the youngest person on the bus and you notice, with sudden fear, that a ten year old kid is looking at you and trying to decide if you’re old enough to stand and give up his seat for. The only reason he doesn’t is because you give him the look of the death that says, “Stand up and you’ll never see the other side of puberty!”

And you also start eyeing younger people with a jaundiced, almost cynical attitude.

Just the other day, I was window shopping along Orchard Road, minding my own business and wondering if it was time for lunch yet, when I was passed by a gaggle of teenagers dressed in an expensive combination of Reeboks, Ralph Lauren polo knits and, on one shoulder, a Goyard bag. Just the cost of the bag alone would have fed a medium sized African village for a year.

One said to the other with the kind of District 10 accent that you get only from going to ACS, “How can you like him? He’s so old!”

Ms Goyard squealed. “How can you say that? He’s only 29!”

“And you think that’s young?” came the ripping reply. He couldn’t have been more than 19. I hated him on sight.

Saffy says that if there’d been a staircase nearby, she would have pushed the kid down it. I did the next best thing. I made a beeline for Food Republic and drowned my sorrows in carbs and saturated fats with a big bowl of laksa.

“Were we ever that obnoxious?” I later asked.

“What you mean, ah?” Sharyn asked.

“Were we ever that ya-ya papaya?” Amanda translated.

“Oh. No, lah. Where got? I was lucky if my mudder bought me and my brudder a Crocodile shirt. Dat time, hah, where got Louis Vuitton, one? Fake one also don’t have! And I carry my lipstick in a Cold Storage plastic bag, some more!”

I said it wasn’t so much the cost of their accessories that bothered me the most. It was the fact that the kids – and they were kids – seemed to really believe that 29 was old.

“Wait till they hit 25 and get sacked,” Saffy said darkly, clearly recalling a pivotal moment in her life.

“Who were they talking about, anyway?” Amanda asked.

“Probably some foetus movie star like…like…oh God, I don’t think I even know anyone who’s 29!” Saffy griped.

What I want to know is how all this has come to pass and all without my even noticing it. One minute I’m the youngest person on the bus, and the next, I’m squinting at a menu in the restaurant, complaining that it’s too dark. The other day, I caught myself pushing the menu away from me as I struggled to focus on the small lettering of the appetizer section.

A few days after the Orchard Road Incident, I was having lunch with my best friend Karl. He arrived ten minutes late, sat down and immediately ordered a Martini.

“You’re starting lunch with a Martini?” I asked.

“I need it!” he growled. “I just had a colonoscopy!”

We proceeded to spend the next half hour discussing Karl’s family medical history and the implications of a positive and a negative result of the test.

And right there was another clear sign of the end of the world. Young people don’t need to think about a colonoscopy, let alone have one done. And I’m willing to bet that if you said the word to Ms Goyard, she would have looked at you sideways and taken a step backwards.

Which, of course, got me started thinking that maybe I also needed to get a colonoscopy.

Karl raised an eyebrow. “You’ve not had one done yet?”

Which started a whole other strand in the conversation about the last blood test and physical I’d taken.

Meanwhile, Saffy says she needs to go see our lovely dermatologist, Dr Tan, for her yearly check up. “It’s such a shame he’s married,” she said this morning. “I saw his wife at the clinic once, and can I just say that she’s been stretched so tight if you touched her, she’d vibrate like an A-minor chord? Anyway, I’ve waxed all over and I’m wearing brand new underwear. Just in case.”

“Oh my God, Saffy!” Amanda cried. “Isn’t he, like, 50?”

Frenemies Unite

Shortly after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded high up in the American sky, my mother announced that some days, it’s just not safe to leave your house. She said this while watching the devastation on the evening news and, to this day, we’ve never been quite sure what she was referring to.

Because if it was a reference to the space shuttle, that made absolutely no sense at all. As far as we knew, none of us was on course for a career in aeronautics. I was, at the time, failing spectacularly in maths and physics, while my sister spent her entire primary school years in love with her form teacher, filling out her notebooks with hearts and arrows instead of quadratic equations and chemical valences.

Our little brother was, it turned out, colour blind, ruled out a career dealing with any kind of electronic equipment. As Michelle pointed out, a person who doesn’t realize that lights are flashing red is not someone you want driving a plane.

“Or defusing a bomb,” Jack added sadly as he thought of all the professions he could never have.

I bring all this up because recently, my flatmate Saffy said exactly the same thing my mother did all those years ago.

It was a perfectly calm Saturday morning and Saffy was lazily window-shopping outside Gucci at Paragon. “It’s so depressing,” she said later when she’d calmed down. “I’m so poor that I cheer myself up by looking at expensive clothes that I could never afford and fantasizing about wearing them to parties that I’m never invited to. I should just curl up and die right now.”

Saffy was so engrossed looking through the window at Gucci’s fall/winter collection with a mixture of greed and self-pity that she didn’t notice the person waving at her from across the mall until it was too late to hide or walk away quickly.

Finny Salim is one of those girls that women just love to hate. In a nutshell, she’s tall, thin, rich, smart and pretty. Her father is an Indonesian tycoon who made his fortune in pharmaceuticals and sent his precious daughter to boarding school in England and then got her into an Ivy League school on account of the fact that he donated a whole wing to the library. We first met her at a party at which she introduced herself as Diaphanous Salim.

“Seriously?” Saffy blurted.

“But please, call me Finny!” she said, flashing expensively capped white teeth and looking like a million bucks in her Jil Sander outfit. Saffy hated her on sight while Amanda was torn between coveting Finny’s wardrobe and loyalty to her flat-mate.

For some reason no one could understand, despite Saffy’s best efforts to be cold, unfriendly and aloof, Finny decided to become BFF with her and would invite her to lunches and parties. Firm rejections only had the opposite effect on Ibu Finny, a nickname that Saffy said made Finny sound like a pain relieving tablet.

And that morning outside Gucci, Finny squealed out as she tottered towards Saffy in her Jimmy Choos, “I’m getting married and I want you to be my maid of honour!”

“That’s exactly what she said,” Saffy vented at home. “‘I’m getting married and I want you to be my maid of honour!’ No ‘hello’, no ‘fancy meeting you here, let’s have coffee’! She just sprung it on me! You don’t make that kind of announcement to someone who’s unprepared and poor! It’s just plain rude! She must really hate me!”

No amount of reasoning could persuade her otherwise of Finny’s good intent.

“But you got boyfriend, why you jealous?” Sharyn asked.

“Jealous? I’m not jealous! I’m perfectly happy with the way things are going with Bradley! Shut up, Sharyn!” Saffy snapped.

Sharyn told us, out of Saffy’s earshot, that clearly Saffy was jealous of Finny. “She tall, gorgeous and rich. Wah, I also jealous, I tell you! And now, hor, Finny get married and Blad-ley still don’t ask her. Double stay!”

For days, Saffy vented. “There I was, just minding my own business, window shopping and she pops out of nowhere to tell me she’s getting married!” she told her friend Clare. “I was not prepared! The funny thing is that morning when I got up, I knew I should stay home. Some days, it’s just not safe to leave your house. Because you never know what’s waiting out there to attack you!” she added grimly.

When this comment was reported back to Sharyn, she sighed and shook her head. “Poor Blad-ley. Tonight, sure kena, one.”

Business Times

People are always rabbiting on about the meaning of life.

The other day, a friend on Facebook posted an image of the Earth and the moon taken by a satellite from a long ways away – two tiny bright dots in a vast sea of black – and he said something about how insignificant we all really are. This, of course, prompted lots of soul searching by various friends of my Facebook friend.

‘Makes you realize what’s important and what’s not,’ said one friend.

‘What makes you happy?’

‘What’s the meaning of life?’ asked another. This got five ‘Likes’.

I’m just waiting for someone to ask me that question. Because I’m ready with my answer. After years of soul searching, deep navel gazing and countless episodes of Oprah re-runs, I have the answer to the meaning of life. And it is: Business Class. With an addendum: First Class if you can get it, but if not, the meaning of life is Business Class.

This will strike many of you as incredibly shallow and meaningless, not to mention a poor reflection of the values my parents so clearly did not pass on to me. But I don’t care. If people want to suffer for the rest of their lives in Economy, it’s their karma. When I die, I want to come back as an unlimited expense account.

I want to be pampered and not suffer. That’s nothing wrong with wallowing in luxury. Nowhere in the Bible, Koran or Buddhist sutras does it say “Thou shalt avoid being pampered, for it is a sin.”

I have had enough of being squeezed into a seat designed for a four-year old kid. I want to have the option of elevating my legs to the horizontal position.

I have had enough of crappy, surly service. I want to be waited on hand and foot. I want attractive cabin crew to crouch down by my seat and enquire with false interest if I’m comfortable and if I would like another flute of champagne.

I have had enough of squinting at a tiny screen the size of a paperback novel trying to see which Transformer is clobbering Megatron. And I want to have big Princess Leia type earphones with noise-cancelling capability, and not those stupid little ear-plugs which force you to jack up the volume to maximum because you can’t hear a thing over the plane’s engines and that revolting wailing baby in 32A.

I have had enough of trying to sleep at an 85 degree angle. I want to sleep on a flat-bed with nice clean linen and a big fluffy pillow. I get to do this at home and I don’t see why I should be paying a lot of money to sleep in the upright position. If I wanted to be upright, I’d be having lunch.

And speaking of which…I have had enough of dried up chicken carcasses, stringy beef and fish that taste of cotton wool. I have also had enough of trying to cut up my meat with plastic cutlery. I want to drink from a proper glass, eat from a proper plate and not a tin foil tray. I especially want to have satay for my appetiser.

“Ay, where got satay as appetizer, one?” Sharyn asked recently after listening patiently to my rant.

“On SQ’s business class, they roll a trolley of satay down the aisle,” I said. “I know because I once went to China for work and they flew me business class and they had satay!” 

“Wah, really, ah? So shiok!”

“Tell me about it,” I said grumpily.

“But you are a poor writer, how can you afford to sit Business Class?” Sharyn asked owlishly, her eyes magnified behind her half-inch thick spectacles.

“Sometimes,” I told her, “sometimes, I’m sitting at the front of the Economy section and I can smell the satay coming through those blue curtains. I can even hear the tinkle of champagne glasses. And that’s when I get served my tiny packet of peanuts and tap water in a plastic cup.”

“Oh my God, I’m so sick of that bloody satay!” said Amanda who only ever flies First or Business Class. “Why can’t they serve something else like kueh pie-tee or something?”

Saffy later said that someone needs to give Amanda a big reality check. “If she ever walked into an Economy cabin, she’d probably wonder why she was suddenly back in the airport’s boarding gate!”

Amanda says you get what you pay for. To which I say that I’ve paid enough. If all those years of suffering through Economy isn’t payment enough, I’m going to be having words with God when we meet.