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.

That's What Friends Are For

Here’s the thing about being single: it’s all fun, frivolity and sunshine when you’re with your friends bar-hopping, eating out, settling down at the movies, and gossiping into the night. But when the chips are down, you know who the people most important in your life are when you’re laid low with an illness.

It crept up on us quietly like, to use Saffy’s immortal phrase, a pervert in a change-room. One minute, we were happily dashing about Orchard Road in the morning, inhaling a rojak in the evening, and the next, we were having a close and very personal encounter with the insides of a toilet bowl.

“Saffy, please hurry!” Amanda moaned as she leaned against the bathroom door. From behind it, we could hear Saffy retching while crying.

“God, it’s awful!” she wailed. “How did this happen?”

Amanda’s chest heaved as she threw open the bathroom door and rushed in, pushed Saffy aside and threw up.

“Oww,” Saffy said feebly as she curled up into a ball on the bathroom floor.

A warning gurgle in my stomach made me leave my place in the queue and I waddled hurriedly to the toilet in the maid’s bathroom at the back of the flat where I crouched, my head feverish and pounding with pain, and praying to die soon.

No one came to rescue us. Sharyn said stoutly over the phone that she was looking after her 75 year old post-stroke mother and she wasn’t going to risk it. Saffy’s boyfriend Bradley was away on a business trip. Our maid Ah Chuan said she had three houses to clean, but said she would leave us some soup at the door. Even Pooch, my beloved adopted mongrel dog, had been banished to our neighbour Lydia Kumarasamy.

From her bed, Amanda called me on the handphone and said that the way we were being treated, we might as well have leprosy, to which Saffy said, via conference call, that she wished she had leprosy because at least then maybe her head would drop off and stop hurting so much.

This all took place at 10 pm on a Saturday evening, a full three hours after our fateful encounter with that rojak. At 10.05pm, our stomachs turned over. Which is how we found ourselves sitting on the loo amidst thunderous explosions and toxic fumes and feeling even more sorry for ourselves.

We would take turns in the two toilets, crawling out of bed, one after the other, and then crawling back in, utterly defeated. At one stage, Saffy could be heard to moan, “How is it possible that it’s still coming out of me? I only had a few bites of rojak!”

“You had two plates, Saffy!” Amanda croaked.

“Oh, shut up, Amanda!”

Much later, when it was all over, Amanda said it was a miracle of sheer good luck that she’d remembered to stock up on toilet paper the day before at Cold Storage. “What if we’d run out? Can you imagine?” she wondered to the world at large.

Saffy said she’d never felt more alone in her life. And when Pooch returned to the flat, I scooped him up and hugged him tightly.

Of course, the whole sorry episode had two important consequences. One was that as soon as she could walk again in a straight line, Amanda marched down to the rojak stall and told the poor bewildered auntie that if any of us got sick ever again, she would feel the full force of a Harvard law degree. We’ve been getting free rojak ever since.

The second is that Saffy has been ruthlessly editing some friends out of her life. “Not even a phone call or a text message!” she said, her bosom trembling, as she deleted numbers from her handphone. “I could be dead for all they knew or cared! And to think I actually gave them two hundred bucks for their wedding angpow! Do you think I could ask for the money back?” she wondered.

Amanda said to me it was a good thing we’d all been sick together, otherwise our phone numbers would probably have been deleted as well. “Can you imagine?” she asked for the second time.

Saffy says it just goes to show that, when you come right down to it, despite the stats on Facebook, you can really only have a handful of good friends. They’re the ones who leave you chicken soup at the door. Or the ones who will happily dog sit for you. And they’re especially the ones who will move aside so that you can share the toilet bowl.

Lost in Translation

A few mornings ago, I woke to the sound of our part time maid Ah Chuan screaming at Saffy. It says something about how immune I was to the whole thing that I flipped over and went back to sleep for another ten minutes.

When I finally dragged myself out of bed and into the living room, I found Ah Chuan standing over Saffy waving her arms and shouting at the top of her voice in Hokkien. Saffy nodded and smiled reassuringly at Ah Chuan.

“Really?” said Saffy, who doesn’t speak a word of Hokkien. “That’s so interesting! Oh there, you are, Jason. What’s she saying?”

“Why are you asking me?” I said. “My Hokkien is as good as your’s!”

“The way she’s yelling, you’d think I’d just peed in her soup, or something!” Saffy said cheerfully and shouted back at Ah Chuan, “Would you like some coffee?”

Ah Chuan came to us highly recommended by one of the secretaries in my office who’d heard that I was desperately in need of someone to clean my flat. Though I’d only just moved in with Saffy and Amanda, it became clear very quickly that none of us knew how to clean. The first day Ah Chuan showed up on our doorstep, she immediately started screaming at the top of her voice and scared us half to death.

Saffy ran to her room and rang the police, while I retreated to the kitchen and eyed the knife rack. We should have taken our cue from my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch who immediately flipped over onto his back and, with a shaggy wag of his tail, invited Ah Chuan to rub his belly.

Thank God, Amanda arrived just in time to translate. “She’s saying that we’re all too thin and that we should be eating more and did we, uhm, oh yeah, did we want her to make us soup when she comes to clean?”

“Why is she yelling at us?” Saffy shouted from behind her locked bedroom door.

“That’s just the way she talks.”

“Really?” Saffy asked, poking her head out. “My God, if this is her being pleasant, what’s she like when she’s mad?”

“She’ll be whispering, I imagine,” Amanda said. “That’s when we should all be very scared.”

And that was that. Since that day, every Thursday, Ah Chuan will show up at the flat at 7.30 am. She takes one look at the mess and then starts yelling. She seems to save the worst for Saffy which, according to a very put out Amanda, means that Saffy is her favourite.

“She says you’re too thin and wants to know why you are still single!” Amanda translated in the second week, after a particularly virulent stream from Ah Chuan.

Saffy’s impressive bosom inflated. “Oh my God, she thinks I’m thin? I love this woman! Thank you very much!” she shouted back at Ah Chuan under the assumption that if you say something loud enough, the other person will understand everything you say, and that’s been pretty much the volume of their conversations ever since.

The fact that Ah Chuan’s can’t speak a word of English and Saffy’s Hokkien is limited to swear words she picks up from the courier man at her office doesn’t seem to bother either of them. Every so often, Amanda will translate, but by and large, they seem to get on like a house on fire.

“I’m surprised the neighbours haven’t called the police on us yet,” Amanda said the other day while Saffy and Ah Chuan yelled pleasantries at one another. “It almost sounds like someone is being killed!”

Saffy was showing Ah Chuan some photos she’d taken during a weekend trip she’d taken in Bali with her new boyfriend Brad. “Isn’t he cute?” she sang in a note that technically only dogs should have been able to hear.

Ah Chuan bellowed back something. Saffy looked at Amanda who sighed.

“She says he’s puny and she wants to know why he looks like an angmoh.”

“His mother is German!” Saffy shrieked happily, but you could tell from Ah Chuan’s expression that Saffy was much too good for the likes of Bradley who couldn’t even claim full Chinese ancestry. And as if to prove her point, her only comment – “Ridiculous!” – was delivered several octaves lower. Saffy glowed at all the attention she was getting.

Saffy later said there are moments when she literally believes that she was switched at birth and that Ah Chuan is her real mother to which Amanda said that it’s exactly the sort of inflammatory statement that gets people disinherited.

Father Figure

Every night, before I go to bed, I turn off my handphone. For some reason, this drives people insane.

“Alamak, why you off your handphone?” Sharyn once scolded me. “What if I’m trying to call you?”

“Why would you call me at 2am? I’m sleeping!”

“If emergency, how?”

“Call Saffy, she’s your best friend!”

Amanda says she wouldn’t be able to sleep if her phone was off. “I’d always be wondering if someone was trying to reach me!”

I’m not keen at all on the whole ‘I-must-be-contactable-at-all-times’ schtick. It’s not as if I’m the President of the United States. What’s the emergency?

So, a few mornings ago, just as we were all sitting down to breakfast, the home phone rang. It was my mother calling from a hospital in London.

“Oh, darling,” she sniffed. “It’s your father. He coughed up blood last night!”

My legs suddenly gave way and I had to sit down on the sofa.

“They spent hours doing up a whole set of tests,” she went on, her clear voice sounding like it was coming from the next room. “Then at about 10pm, they told us that they’d lost the test results!”

My jaw dropped. I’d still not said a word.

“This is what a first world medical health system looks like,” my mother sighed. “It’s no wonder Mrs Lee flew straight back to Singapore after she had her stroke in London!”

I finally managed to find my voice. “Why didn’t you call, Ma?”

“Oh, it was so late here in London and really, what could you have done? We wanted to be sure before we worried you children. Anyway, your father seems OK, now. They’ve run another set of tests and I told the doctor that if he lost the results again, I’m going to go all Wendi Murdoch on him. He looked so wonderfully scared as he scuttled off towards the lab!”

“I love your mother!” Saffy declared when I’d clicked off the phone and told them what had happened. “How do you lose a test result? A folder doesn’t just get up off the desk and wander off!”

“Are you OK?” Amanda asked.

I said I was, but, of course, I wasn’t.

You spend your whole life thinking your parents are always going to be always healthy, always opinionated, always strong. Always there. And then, one morning, just as you sit down to breakfast, you get a phone call and your whole world changes.

My sister rang from Hawaii where she was having a holiday and bawled for five expensive long distance minutes before she could speak. “If Daddy dies on me, I’m going to kill him!” she wailed. “He’s got to give me away at my wedding!”

I paused. “You’re getting married?”

“Well, not immediately, but one day! And I want him to walk me down the aisle and not my stepfather!”

“Mother’s having an affair?” I yelled.

From the depths of the sofa, Saffy sat up straight.

“Oh, you are silly. I’m just saying. But I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if she remarried. She’s very eligible!” Michelle hiccupped through her tears.

“The women in your family are so practical!” Amanda observed later. I shrugged and flipped another page in the family album that I’d just pulled down from the top shelf of my library.

There I was aged five being swung high in the air by my father. And there he was in our garden watching me wrestle with Prince, our stupid German Shepherd. Sitting with me at the dining table as he helped me with my maths homework, him staring intently at my notebook while I peered at the camera. A dinner to celebrate Michelle’s Judo black belt. At Jack’s stage debut as the pumpkin in his school production of ‘Cinderella’. Picking me up from school in his new maroon Jaguar. At my high school graduation looking so pleased as if I’d just discovered the cure for cancer. I was taller than him by then. At my university graduation – his hairline now noticeably receded and snowy. At the airport, waving as I got on the plane for Singapore.

All in the past.

Last night, just before we turned in, Amanda took my handphone from me and walked towards her bedroom.

“Hey, where you are going with that?” I said.

“I’ll keep hold of it during the night,” she said. “No point you changing the habit of a lifetime now. I’m sure everything is ok, but I’ll keep it on for you. Just in case,” she paused and just as she closed her door, she whispered, “Good night.”

What's Love Got To Do With It?

Here’s the thing about human nature: we’re never satisfied. Nothing’s changed since the beginning of time. First, when we were all happily living outdoors and breathing fresh air, we decided we wanted somewhere dry and warm, so we built little huts out of twigs and mud. But we got cold inside, so we built little campfires and basically smoked ourselves like salmon.

Then we thought, “Oooh, I’m not liking having to pee in the bush all the time. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an en-suite?” And when we got that, we decided that, maybe, it would be fun to have a garage to park our swords and chariots. And the next thing you know, we’d gone and built the Great Wall of China.

It’s all just a never-ending sequence of greed and restlessness.

Another example: Saffy. For the longest time, she moaned to everyone that she was sick and tired of being single. “Do you have anyone you can hook me up with?” she said to my mother on their very first meeting.

“Uhm,” said Mother, a little panicked.

“Or maybe I just need to get laid! You know, just between us, I’ve not been laid since ‘Friends’ ended,” Saffy added. She later said that she felt so comfortable with my mother. “She’s very easy going!” she told me.

As soon as she got home, Mother emailed to say she wasn’t sure I had picked quite the ‘right sort of girl’ to live with. She said the same thing to her sister who then told her daughter Mei who then told our cousin Mark who immediately rang me all the way from Seattle and said, “Your mother says you’re living with a prostitute. Dude! Is that true?”

And then, one day, Saffy met the man of her dreams, Bradley. Here, finally, was a man who adored the ground she walked on. Who said her habit of sitting with her legs wide open on the window sill (“I’m airing myself!”) made complete sense to him and that people just needed to lighten up. Who told her that there was nothing wrong with eating an additional slice of cheesecake if she wanted. Who bought her Estee Lauder and told her she looked wonderful in a dress she was convinced made her look fat. Who reassured her endlessly that he couldn’t imagine life without her. And, more importantly, who patiently sat through a DVD marathon of ‘Notting Hill’, ‘Love, Actually’, ‘Cinema Paradiso’, and ‘Beaches’.

“Aiyoh,” sighed Sharyn, Saffy’s best friend. “I tell you, ah, if I not orredi marry, I sure kidnap Bladley, one!”

Saffy practically glowed.

A few mornings ago at breakfast, Saffy suddenly piped up, “Why doesn’t he want to marry me?”

Amanda looked up from her Blackberry. And then she looked at me. After much practice, we’d learnt that conversations with Saffy tend to include a lot of mentally connecting the dots.

“Uhm,” Amanda began. “Have you discussed this with him?”

Saffy’s chest expanded. “No, we’ve never talked about it.”

“Then how do you know he doesn’t want to marry you?” Amanda asked.

“Well, if he wanted to marry me, he’d have said so, wouldn’t he? He hasn’t said so. Therefore, he doesn’t want to marry me!”

Amanda later said that just when you think you’ve got Saffy all sorted out, she turns right around and gives you a virtuoso performance in spatial thinking. “It’s like living with Dustin Hoffman in ‘Rainman’!”

Leave it to Sharyn to point out some home truths to Saffy. “Aiyah, why you so gun zheong? You think you very easy girlfriend, is it? He so far not run away is enough, what! What for get so upset! Marriage, hah, I tell you, is not for everyone. Some people can take it. Some people marry, straightaway get die-vorce! Like my sister. She fall in love in JC, marry, have one baby and one year later, the husband have affair. He say after the baby, she get fat. Aiyoh!” she sighed tragically.

Of course, discontent still rules our little flat. In the world according to Saffy, the real test of a man’s love is a Tiffany’s engagement ring. A year ago, that test would have been passed if the man called you the day after the date.

“I hope I don’t become like that,” Amanda said, no doubt thinking of the fact that she’s not been on a date in two months.

This morning, at breakfast, Saffy said that sometimes she misses being single. “Being in a relationship is so stressful! Men just never do what you want them to do! It’s a wonder more women don’t become prostitutes!”

Head First

The thing about growing older is that it can sometimes lure you into a false sense of security. For instance, when you’re six years old, you can’t wait to be fifteen as that’s when you’ll be able to cycle to school and not be ferried about by your annoying mother who insists on touching your hair for no reason and sweeping you up, on the slightest provocation, for a cuddle and a kiss.

And then, when you’re fifteen, you can’t wait to be in your twenties, because you’ll have gotten an office job, moved out of home and not be bothered by anyone. And, of course, when you’re in your twenties, you realize that it was much better to be in your teens because nobody told you about something ridiculous called rent, mortgage and income tax.

In the case of my flatmate, Saffy, some days, it’s just much better to stay in bed.

A few days ago, at the breakfast table, she lowered her handheld mirror and stared at us in horror.

“How did this happen? It’s not like I’m still in puberty!” she whispered, her eyes wide open.

Amanda pursed her lips and frowned, while I tried hard not to stare at the ugly huge red pimple that pulsed angrily on the tip of her nose. You couldn’t even pretend it was something else like a mole or something. This was clearly a pimple and by the looks of it, it was here to stay.

Saffy raised the mirror for another look. She moaned. “This is a nightmare! I went to bed with clear skin and this morning, I wake up looking like Bill Bloody Clinton!”

“Could you maybe put some concealer on it?” Amanda said, still frowning and looking at the pimple sideways just in case it decided to leap off Saffy’s nose and attach itself to her face.

“I’ve already put an entire stick on it, but the shade is too light!” Saffy sniffed. “And it really hurts!”

“Have you tried, uhm, you know, popping it?” I said, leaning back.

“Are you mad?” Amanda snapped. “That’s a blind pimple. It won’t have a head! If you squeeze it, it will just built up pressure inside and make it grow bigger and more painful!”

Saffy squealed and promptly burst into tears.

As I later posted on Facebook, since when did pimples have categories? And leave it to Amanda to know them on a first name basis.

Saffy called in sick at work and refused to leave the flat. She disabled the FaceTime function on her iPhone and ignored all her Skype calls. “I simply cannot be seen!” she told Sharyn piteously on the phone.

“Aiyah, only a pimple, what! Why you so gun-zheong?” Sharyn said.

“Sharyn, this is no ordinary pimple! It’s a blind pimple!” Saffy said with grim pride.

“Hah? Where got such thing, one?”

Every other minute, Saffy would inspect her nose at close range by the light of the window, hoping that by some miracle, it had gotten smaller in the last two minutes. But this one refused to budge even though Saffy threw everything in her considerable arsenal of topical acne creams at it. And when that didn’t work, she sent Amanda off to a dermatologist with a fake acne problem.

“Make sure he gives you super strong antibiotics!” she said, shoving Amanda out the door.

“Saffy, he’s not going to believe I have acne!” Amanda protested as she scrabbled to get a firm grip on the edge of the door. “My skin is flawless and I’m not just saying that. It is! You’ve seen how much birds nest I drink!”

Finally, this morning, four days after it first appeared, Saffy announced that she detected the faintest hint of a white head. “The end is near!” she said with deep satisfaction as she turned her head in the mirror for a better angle.

She sat down at the dining table with a big bowl of hot water and draped a towel over her head. “I’m going to steam this bugger wide open!” she said, her voice somewhat muffled.

“But don’t do it too long!” Amanda said. “You don’t want to burst the fragile blood vessels in your face.”

Saffy later said that if Amanda ever got sacked as a lawyer, she’d have a great second career as a cosmetician. By then, Saffy had successfully burst the pimple in what she says was a spectacular dermatological explosion. “It was like a scene from ‘Alien’! God, it felt good!” she crowed. “I wonder if giving birth is like that! What! Don’t look at me like that! You know what I mean!”

Mind Games

For a long time now, I’ve been wondering if I’m becoming stupid. Or, at the very least, senile.

I can come home, wander around the flat doing household chores, have a shower, cook dinner, watch some TV and then suddenly realize that I’ve left the front door wide open the whole time. “I could have been mugged, raped and murdered!” I said glumly once to Sharyn.

“Please, lah,” she replied, “you think you in New York, is it? This is Sing-gah-pore! You mug someone already kena rattan cane. Where got someone so stupid go and mug, rape and murder you, one?”

Or I can leave the flat and halfway down to the bus-stop, I suddenly think, “Did I turn off the stove?”, and then I have to turn right around and go home to check. I once walked back into the flat to find my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch in the middle of raping our Ikea sofa cushion. He managed to look both guilty and extremely pleased I was home so soon.

And just the other day, I was talking to Saffy about a recent episode of ‘True Blood’ when I suddenly drew a complete blank. “Oh my God, what’s the name of that vampire…John? Richard? Thelma?”

“What is wrong with you?” Saffy demanded. “What self respecting vampire is going to call himself Thelma?”

“Elmo?” I hazarded.

Saffy stared at me.

“I think I’m losing my mind!” I told Karl.

“Wait till you get married,” he said comfortably.

“I can’t seem to be able to remember anything! The other day, I was at a wedding and spent the entire night chatting to this girl and the next afternoon at a lunch party, I stuck my hand out and introduced myself to someone and she said, ‘Yes, we’ve met. You sat next to me last night at Jeremy’s wedding!’”

I don’t think I redeemed myself at all by laughing nervously and replying, “Hahaha! I didn’t recognize you in daylight!”

“Oh my God, you made her sound like she was a prostitute!” Amanda exclaimed. “Seriously, what is wrong with you?”

You can imagine my relief at a recent report that said Google is making us all a little bit stupid. The gist of it is that because we can find out the answer to anything at any time with just a few quick keystrokes into our computer and handphone, nobody bothers to learn anything anymore, let alone commit anything to memory.

Why bother learning what the capital of North Sudan is if you can just Google it in a few seconds? Which reminds me of the time I was shopping at Tang’s and the cashier asked me to fill out a form and I got stuck when I had to provide my handphone number.

She looked at me owlishly in the same way you’d look at a two-headed cow in a museum. “You don’t know your handphone number?”

“Well, why would I? I never call myself.”

Of course, that didn’t stop me looking up the symptoms for Alzheimer’s Disease. Google was very helpful here, coming up with a nice selection of articles within 0.06 seconds according to the Google clock. I opened one, read it and panicked.

I immediately called Amanda (using my phone’s memory book).

“I’m very busy, what is it?” she asked by way of friendly greeting.

“One of the tests for Alzheimer’s is remembering what you had for breakfast, lunch and dinner yesterday!” I announced. “I can’t remember what I had! Can you?”

“A pear and coffee for breakfast, egg salad for lunch and tofu salad for dinner!” she said immediately.

“Oh, dear God.”

I called Saffy.

“Fried beehoon with extra chilli for breakfast, laksa for lunch, and fish an chips for dinner! It’s now wonder I feel so fat. Listen, are you really going senile?”

Another test for Alzheimer’s is being able to count backwards from 100 in sevens.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Saffy said. “One hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, uhm, seventy-nine, seventy-two…”

Panic filled my mouth. I called Karl. “That’s a stupid test. I’m lucky if I can remember how many children I have!” he said.

“But you don’t have any children!” I pointed out.

“Well, there you go then. We can grow gaga together!”

I’m not taking any chances. I’ve just set up an appointment with a neurologist. Amanda thinks my problem isn’t senility so much as it is stupidity. “And laziness!” she said the other night. “Stop using Google and exercise your brain!”

I don’t care what she says. I’ve read some very good things about this neurologist online. I just hope I remember what to ask him.

Wearing thin

The other morning at the breakfast table, Saffy looked up from her zhee cheong fun and said, “I have way too much underwear!”

I buried my face deeper behind the newspaper. A silence settled over the dining table and after a while, even it felt a little embarrassed.

Saffy drew in an audible breath. “I said, I have way…”

“Saf, we heard you the first time,” Amanda interrupted, not once looking up from her Blackberry.

“Well, thank you for making the effort to reply!”

Amanda sighed, clicked her Blackberry one last time, put it down and turned her luminous eyes on Saffy. “Yes, what about your underwear?”

“I have too much of it and I’m wondering if I should donate some of it to charity or something! What! I saw that look! I’ll have you know that there are plenty of people out there who would be grateful for a pair of my Marks and Spencer’s lacey thongs!”

“Name two!” Amanda shot back.

Saffy’s jaws clamped shut.

“I thought so,” Amanda said smugly.

All of which made me think about how much stuff I’ve got. For starters, I have an entire wall of books, nearly three-quarters of which I’ve not read. I’m the sort of person who will innocently walk past Borders and suck up three books in my wake. I’ll take these home, put them up on the shelves, stand back to admire how they look and then walk away. Ten years later, they’ll still be up there, gathering a thick layer of dust and turning mottled with age and humidity.

Meanwhile, Amanda has an entire wardrobe of clothes that still have their price tags dangling from the sleeves.

“And don’t get me started on my shoes,” she said the other day as she stood in front of her shoe cabinet and stared lovingly at her Jimmy Choos. “Why do I have so many pairs when I can only wear one at a time? Well, I know why. I love shoes. And that’s all there is to say about it!”

“It’s all rather obscene, don’t you think?” I said. “Not just about your shoes, I mean, but in general. We just accumulate so much stuff!”

“Which brings me back,” said Saffy, “to my point about giving the extra away! Really, could you both please keep up?”

“Saffy,” Amanda sighed, “there’s a big difference between giving away Jason’s unread copy of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ and a pair of your frequently worn panties!”

Saffy remained stubbornly unconvinced. “I bet I could sell these on Japanese eBay and make a fortune! Oooh, maybe I could rent one of those vending machines in Tokyo! How fab would that be?” she cooed, her impressive bosom straining with effort.

That evening, as I looked at my bookshelves, I couldn’t help but think that I’ve spent a lot of money on things that I either don’t need or don’t use. I can only read a book at a time, wear one pair of shoes at a time and use one pen at a time. So, why do I have ten pairs of black shoes and at least 20 pens that I’ve swiped from hotel rooms around the world?

More to the point, why have I allowed so much clutter to build up in my life? Because, in the end, it’s all clutter. If you’re not using it, it’s clutter. So, why am I still shopping?

Leave it to Sharyn to put this existential crisis into perspective. “Aiyoh, you, ah! If you only buy what you need, then you might as well curl up and die, right? Life so short, why you stress yourself? For what? If you want to buy, buy lah! I love to shop!” she added happily. “To the day I die, I can still shop, I tell you! I’m very Singaporean!”

Meanwhile, Saffy had culled her underwear drawer to ten pairs of panties and ten bras. “I can wear a new one every day for a week and a half. That’s all I need!”

To which Sharyn said, “Eeeee! How like that? You must change a new pair in the evening, right? Udder-wise, whole day wear same underwear very chao, you know!”

Which, of course, sent Saffy into a big panic. She rushed downstairs to the rubbish bin to forage for all the underwear that she’d thrown down the chute with such happiness just a few hours earlier.

Upstairs, the phone rang. Saffy’s tinny voice sang through. “Oh. My. God. Someone has taken the bag I threw away! I knew there was a market for my underwear! This world is full of sick people!”