Trophy Parent

This week, I've been engaged in something of a power struggle with Small Child.  This is not unusual, as Machiavelli himself could have learnt a few things about manipulation and emotional blackmail from my firstborn. But normally these things are short-lived: either I give in, in order to put a stop to the incessant whining before my ears start bleeding, or he forgets about it and moves on to something equally annoying.

No such luck this time, though, and in the absence of any sign of either side capitulating or even conceding ground, Small Child and I have taken to the trenches over... a trophy.  The trophy in question is a trophy only in name and shape: it's a worthless piece of crap that caught his eye at the checkout in Giant, the World's Worst Supermarket (TM), where everything rejected by Poundland goes to die. Piece of crap this trophy may be, but the plinth on which the plastic cup rests is emblazoned with the worlds 'WORLD'S GREATEST' and as a consequence Small Child, who seems genuinely (and sometimes quite touchingly) to believe that he is in fact the world's greatest everything, could want absolutely nothing more in the entire universe. And so this fucking trophy has been the beginning, middle, and end of Every. Single. Conversation that I have had with Small Child in five long days. And I should probably mention here that Small Child talks a LOT. In fact, he never stops talking. So I have heard a lot about the trophy. Enough about the trophy. Far too bloody much, in fact, about the damn trophy.

Obviously he talked non-stop about it after he first spied it on Saturday, but I opened my eyes on Sunday morning to find his little face literally inches away from mine, willing me with every fibre of his being to wake up. "Mimi", he said. "Mi. MI. When are we getting the trophy?", while I speculated (not for the first time, nor, I am quite sure, the last) whether it is ever appropriate to tell your six-year-old to bugger off. On Monday I got home from work and he ran to greet me. "What a lovely moment", I thought. He looked up at me through narrowed eyes. "Go to Giant and get me the trophy", he said, "and THEN I'll give you a hug". *Oh*.  In a voicemail I received from him yesterday, he informed he that he would tell me about his day when, and only when, he was presented with the trophy. By this point it was evident that the trophy issue would not be going away any time soon.

It's not about the money (a whoppingly overpriced $4.90, which would however be a paltry amount to fork out for even a moment's peace). It's the principle of the thing. I will willingly admit (see above) that I do on occasion (ahem) give in to the war of attrition that he puts up when he wants something. Usually, though, it's ice cream, or biscuits, an in-app purchase, or something on the TV - something transient, that calms the waters and then is gone, out of sight down the shitty parenting drain where it will never be seen or spoken of again. But if I give in on this one, this trophy will sit there, screaming 'WORLD'S WORST MOTHER' to me and 'YOU CAN ALWAYS WIN IF YOU'RE IRRITATING ENOUGH FOR LONG ENOUGH' to him, like a toxic horcrux of bad parenting, for all eternity. And clearly I cannot have that.

So I have reached a deal with Small Child, who is, after all, the offspring of two lawyers and whose irrepressible impulse to negotiate is doubtless buried somewhere deep in his genetic coding. The trophy will be awarded on a daily basis, in return for him telling me each day five new things, none of which can be how many points has has managed to score on the latest level of Candy Crush. I had hoped that this way, perhaps I might get even a fleeting insight into how he spends his days, which (for once in all seriousness) as a full time working mother I really do feel like I miss out on - particularly since Small Child has a severe case of that almost universal form of infant amnesia which every day wipes their mental slates spotlessly clean on the bus home from school.

On the basis of this agreement, yesterday the trophy was finally purchased and I got home to a beaming Small Child. To say he was thrilled with his new four inch high made in China piece of plastic (FOUR DOLLARS NINETY!!! Jesus.) would be an understatement of epic proportions. He could barely stand still he was so excited. He looked like I did the first time I walked into the shoe department of Bergdorf Goodman. "Come on then," I said. "Tell me five new things." He cocked his head, looked at me in a considered way for a moment, then trotted off to the table before returning with a slim volume. "I got a book out of the library today, and it's full of new things I can tell you." He showed me the cover. It had a cow on the front. It was a book about... milk. Twenty pages filled with fascinating facts about milk.

I didn't really have much of a response to that (other than what six year old takes a book about MILK out of the library?!?!  In fact, why is there a book about milk in the infant library?! And, while we're at it, who the fuck WRITES a book about MILK for infant age children?!?! The mind boggles) so we read the milk book. We read the milk book twice, in fact. And then we played a game where everybody had to name as many things as they can that are made from milk... all of which actually wasn't as bad as it sounds (particularly since I won, ha! Take that Mr. H and your inferior knowledge of dairy products). And which may not have been exactly what I had in mind (quelle surprise - when does that ever come to pass?!) but which I guess, after all, was better than being slumped mindlessly in front of Paw Patrol for the five thousandth time with Smaller Child concernedly inquiring "Mummy sleep? Mummy dead? Mummy sleep?" over and over in my ear.

Still, it's hard to surpress the feeling that once, just once, it would be nice if Small Child didn't win.

The pocket dictator

There is a dictator in my handbag.  Seriously!  As with most dictators, I voted her in thinking she would change my life for the better, and now she's taken up residence I can't get rid of her.

She is Nike Running Bitch, affectionately (or not) abbreviated to NRB, and she has been living in my iPhone and making my life miserable for eight long weeks now.

It all started when I signed up for the Angkor Wat half marathon, taking place in December.  I've done a few organised races, from 10k to 50k, since the birth of Smaller Child, and my training has always veered wildly from the dilatory to the obsessive, dropping off a cliff when I got busy, bored, or hungover. This time I was determined it would be different. This time I would follow rules set by someone who (ostensibly) actually knew what they were doing. This time I would Meet My Potential. So I signed up to a program on my Nike running app.  Little did I know at the time that what I was doing was essentially abdicating my free will for the next twelve weeks. My free will, my mornings, my evenings, my weekends, my sense of humour, my toenails...

At first, it was almost fun. "Get out there," NRB would chirp on a Monday morning.  "Get out there and make it count!"  "OK, lovely encouraging Nike app lady" I would think.  "OK, I can do this! Yay!  Running before work is FUN!!! And such a good use of time! Sleeping is for losers!!!"  And I would dutifully pull on my trainers and, as instructed, get out there and make it count.  "Boom!" she would cheer at the end of the week. "Well done for clocking more miles this week than last!". She even has a selection of guest stars to feed her hapless victim 'encouraging' soundbites. (And on that note, Ellie Goulding, what the ACTUAL fuck are you doing congratulating me on my weekly mileage?  Don't you have better things to do/enough money already/any self-respect?)

As you can probably guess from the above, the beautiful symbiotic love-in between me and NRB did not last. It was all very well when I had a newbie's enthusiasm, a pair of shiny boxfresh trainers, and had to clock up "only" 30-ish kilometers a week.  But two months later I am sitting in the middle of Peak Week (otherwise known as $%&*^@#%^&*!! Peak Week), which obliges me to run no fewer than 68 kilometers over the course of five days, and I am M I S E R A B L E.  And, to be brutally honest, I hate NRB's guts right now.  I hate her bouncy chummy enthusiasm.  I hate her mid-afternoon alerts which remind me of the distance I have to run the following day, just at the time when I'm guiltily tucking into my (ahem) "emergency" Twix bar.  I hate the little graph she produces to tell me when I've hit my targets... and of course when I haven't.  And really, there are only so many times that someone can say "Boom!" before it triggers an overwhelming desire to punch them in the (virtual) face.  I hate her. I hate her! IhateherIhateherIHATEHERIHATEHER!!!!

And, breathe.

Mr. H doesn't understand.  He says, "If you loathe it, if you don't want to do it, then just stop!"  But Mr. H is self-motivated, loves running, is miserable when he can't do it.  Mr H is, quite frankly, a freak of nature, and he knows exactly where he can stuff his sparky get-up-and-go attitude to exercise. Also, in fairness, Mr. H has to live with me, which is probably a bit of a nightmare right now, and if I were in his shoes I imagine I would also be praying for NRB to meet a sticky end. But I just can't do it. I'm sooooooooooo nearly there. And, unfortunately, I am fundamentally - and actually to a fault - not a quitter. In fact, I am mule-stubborn, and the harder I get pushed, the more I dig my heels in. So the Bitch is here to stay, at least for a few more weeks.

Also, in complete honesty, I should admit that there have been some highs as well as lows on this journey of athletic totalitarianism.  For sure, running five or six times a week has massively improved my fitness, as you would expect.  I am also skinny in a way I wasn't even in my 20s, let alone post-babies, and a serendipitous side-effect of that is that I can eat whatever the hell I like (see above re the unfortunate Twix addiction, which I will have to kick once NRB has been despatched to the big running track in the sky). But, training or no training, ending up in third place in Singapore's biggest trail run last month was still a bit of a shock, and if you'd told me before I started that that would be the result of the fundamentalist approach to race preparation, I would have gladly done it a hundred times over.

I even got a trophy, and that's sat on my dresser as a daily reminder of diligence paying off.  Who ever knew that working hard yielded results?! It is nothing short of a revolutionary concept. *Ahem*.

I've also (of course) managed to leverage the daily exercise to excuse some reasonably egregious credit-card bashing in various sportswear stores.  After all, why buy only one pair of running shoes at once when you could buy three? Yes, I really did need that new pair of Lulu Lemon leggings. (And yes, for your information, I do understand perfectly the difference between "need" and "want".)

And, when all's said and done, I will get a weekend - a weekend without kids - in Cambodia. Yes, I will have to run 21 kilometers. Yes, I probably could have done that without subjecting myself to three months of NRB and Death By Training Schedule. But at least I will know, when I cross the finish line, that I will have done my best.

And perhaps, just perhaps, that means I won't ever feel the need to do it again  .

(Almost) a month of eating dangerously, digested

A few people have asked me over the last week or so what happened to The Month of Eating Dangerously. Did I finish it? Did I find black chicken, geoduck, frogs? Did I manage to swallow a single morsel of chicken foot/sheep stomach/pig intestine/stinking tofu? And did the mysterious dessert shop ever re-open??!!

Well. Having had my ass soundly kicked by sheep's stomach soup, I spent much of the last weekend of September girding my psychological loins to get myself back into the Chinatown Complex and really man up for the final three days of the month.  My will was set, steely. Eye of the Tiger was playing in my head. I was going to eat some really, really disgusting stuff. Or at least try to eat it, gag a bit, cry a bit, try again. It was only three days. I could eat again in October.

So at noon on the last Monday of September I marched purposefully to my fate... only to find that the food court was shut.  Not just the dessert stall: the whole bloody place.  Utterly, shutly, shut - to the extent that there was what looked like police tape stretched across the foot of the escalators.  I thought for a moment that maybe someone in power had tried the sheep's intestine, but then noticed a huge sign proclaiming "CLOSED FOR CLEANING".  The thought that I probably should have waited for the (annual?! *gulp*) spring clean before I started this project briefly crossed my mind, before being swept aside by the realisation that I could now quite legitimately eat a burger. Which I then did. And that burger took away in one fell swoop all the resolve I had spent the weekend - in fact the whole of the previous month - building up. And (*hides head in shame*) I never went back.

So there remain a few items on the list that I never managed to find, let alone eat, and I am - honestly! - still intending to hunt them down at some point. I have an accomplice lined up for a frog porridge dinner, there's a place near my office that does geoduck (and thankfully doesn't limit itself to cleaning only once a year), and I can get black chicken in the supermarket. But in the meantime, there are a few valuable life lessons that I have learned from my experiences at the Chinatown Complex, which I will share with you:

(1) Do not base your decision where to eat on the length of the queue waiting to be served. If anything, the size of a queue in a hawker centre is in inverse proportion to the edibility of the product on offer at the end of it. See day 11, Mystery Queue Roulette (AKA tofu-gate).

(2) Just because something looks revolting, doesn't mean that it is. Century eggs are conceptually and visually about as repulsive as it's possible to get but actually strangely delicious. An open mind can mean a full stomach.

(3) Notwithstanding (2) above, chicken feet are not meant to be eaten.

(4) Ditto sheep stomach.

(5) There isn't any carrot in carrot cake. Nor is it a cake. It's one of life's great unsolved mysteries why they insist on calling it that. And (see (2) above), the disgusting-looking black version (think regurgitated cat food) is delicious, while the other one (well it doesn't look delicious, it kind of looks like waterlogged carpet tiles) tastes... well, like I imagine waterlogged carpet tiles would taste, actually.

(6) If you are going off piste, always, always accept the offer of rice. You will not regret it: it may be the only thing on your lunch tray capable of being eaten.

(7) There are 27 different types of durian.  Twenty-seven!!! Most of these aren't even a 'gift' from nature, but are genetically engineered hybrids with romantic names like D24, D13, and the most appropriately named D101, which just goes to show that there really is no limit to the cruelty of human invention.

(8) Desserts in Asia contravene fundamental trading standards laws. And also human rights laws. Maybe the dessert shop man was on the run from Amnesty International? It's not beyond the realms of possibility.

(9) Sugar cane juice is manna from heaven for the chronically hungover. Pig knuckle tea is not.

(10) If you are asked in a hawker centre whether you want chilli, just say no. They will put it in anyway, but maybe, just maybe, if you are very lucky, it won't be enough to administer third degree burns to your oesophagus.

So, that's it, folks. In due course, when I've got over the trauma of this experience (I still can't walk past a food court without fear gnawing in the pit of my stomach), I will wrap up the last items on the Top 10 of Doom, but for the time being, I'm back on the salads and steering clear of mystery meat, pongy fruit, eyeballs, tofu of all shapes, sizes, and consistencies, and anything else that looks even tangentially like it belongs in a bushtucker trial on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!

Meanwhile, though, another question I've been asked is "what's next?". It seems that some of you fear a void in your online lives, now that the challenge is over and you no longer have my tales of gastronomic punishment to titillate you over your toast and marmite on a Monday morning. To you I say first and foremost, thanks for reading and all, it's really lovely to know someone out there is listening... but you are all, with the best will in the world, sadistic bastards. Secondly, in all honesty the challenge has been a fun, educational, enlightening, and eye-opening experience, and a big part of that has been your participation.  I won't say that knowing you have been with me, from Singapore to London to Portugal to Hong Kong to Manila to Switzerland to the USA, has made it easier to swallow the nasties (for some of them, literally nothing would make that possible), but it has definitely made it more fun. And with that in mind, I guess I will have to don my thinking cap to try and come up with a new challenge - ideally one that doesn't involve eating feet.

So, watch this space... and of course, if you have any ideas for a follow-up challenge - at all times subject, of course, to the aforementioned foot disclaimer - do let me know.  In the meantime, I'm off for another burger.  Bon appetit!