Bedtime

Bedtime used to be a breeze in our house. Both kids have always been solid sleepers (a fact about which I suspect I may on occasion have been somewhat smug - boy is that karma now coming to bite me in the ass), and for four blissful years after he graduated from cot to bed Small Child seemed to have a cast iron belief that once he was in that bed, there was no possibility of leaving it until the morning - almost as if convinced that the floor was electrified and would shock him if he made contact with it.

Times have changed.

Bedtime (or "%^&@#$ bedtime", as it has come to be known chez nous) has somehow, out of absolutely nowhere, become a Groundhog Day-esque horror show, an absurdist game of whack-a-mole in which you tuck one child in to find the other hanging from the banisters, or rifling through the fridge, or covered in toothpaste, or naked. And once that offending child has been rescued/cleaned/dressed and appropriately chastised, you turn round only to find the other one doing something equally transgressive. And that cycle is repeated, again and again, until a point where there really is no alternative but to lose your temper - spectacularly, volcanically lose it - and doors are slammed on crying children sitting alone in the darkness, and everybody feels like they have failed, and apologies are made, and the child, feeling wronged and forgiven, takes the opportunity to push his or her luck and begin it all again.

Take last night, for instance. Last night was a doozy.

7.30pm: I get home from work. I am tired - bonecrushingly, viscerally, physically and mentally exhausted - I've run home, totalling 20km for the day and passing 434km for the month. The kids are watching Teen Titans Go and demanding jelly beans. My refusal is met by tears (her) and bile (him). I feel loved.

7.45pm: Mr H gets home. I ask the kids to go upstairs and brush their teeth. They have to be asked (nicely, I might add) nine times before they actually do it.

8pm: Mr H gets on a conference call and exhorts the house to please moderate their volume. I wonder at the relentless optimism required for it even to have crossed his mind that any such moderation might be an option. I read Smaller Child the compulsory four stories (which have been the same four stories, every day, for the last four weeks - but that's another story of suicide ideation altogether), and ask her to get in bed, before I realise that she is inexplicably wet. A long and fraught negotiation ensues over what would be a suitable replacement for her sodden top (me: anything that fits will do; her: absolutely nothing will do). We finally, after inevitable tears, settle on an oversized Ibiza Rocks t-shirt. She's clearly not convinced.

8.10pm: The cup containing her milk is wrong. WTF? It's the Finding Dory cup with the pink lid - which is the right cup (or has been for the last five days at least). After tearful remonstration from Smaller Child, I ascertain that of the two Finding Dory cups we own, HERS is the one that has the pink lid AND the (tiny) picture of Nemo on it. THIS cup is not HER cup. It is her lid, but not her cup. She cannot drink milk from any other cup. My (I think reasonable) argument that since the light is going off anyway she won't be able to tell the difference, is met with more tears. We are on the verge of hysteria, in fact. I decide the fight isn't worth it, go downstairs, replace the cup.

8.15pm: Twenty-five minutes behind schedule ("'Schedule'!!! HA!!!!") I tuck Smaller Child in, plead with her to stay there. She looks sleepy. I am hopeful. I am stupid.

8.20pm: I am reading The BFG to Small Child. He's throwing Lego around the room, making this more of an exercise in task completion than interaction. A crash comes from upstairs. I put down the book. Smaller Child is walking down the stairs, already crying in anticipation of my displeasure. I feel somehow chastened by her expectation of anger. She's sent a bag of coat hangers skittling down a flight of steps - noisy but no harm done. What was she doing upstairs though?! Forget it, I don't want to know. I cling to the brittle straw of hope that maybe the guilt at having already broken the rules will keep her in bed this time. Yep, stupid.

8.40pm: I am still reading the BFG. How long is this sodding chapter??? "Twenty-three pages", Small Child informs me, turning from his Lego looking gleeful and victorious. "Oh," he says, looking through the half-open doorway, surprised, "She's out of her room. And she's naked". He's half right - the Ibiza Rocks t-shirt is gone but she does at least have trousers on. I call time on the BFG. I pick her up, deposit her in bed without ceremony, slam the door, go downstairs, sit on the sofa breathing heavily and thinking about wine.

8.41pm: Guiltily I am soothing Smaller Child's racking sobs. She puts the Ibiza Rocks t-shirt back on. "I won't do it again mummy". Surely, this time, she won't? (Stupid, again.) I go downstairs and open a bottle of wine. It's really the only way.

8.50pm: Noise from upstairs. I sit on the sofa with my ears pricked, wondering whether it's at a level where I need to deal with it (other than by drinking more wine, of course). Feet on the landing. Shit. One of them's out of their room. Climb the stairs. It's him. He's in her room. I tell him to get back in his room, close the door. She's wailing again. He's stolen her favourite toy. I retrieve it, repatriate it. The crying eventually subsides.

9.20pm: I've finally managed to eat dinner. Mr H has finished his call. More noise from upstairs - rustling, a dull thumping, the sound of feet again. Resigned, I climb the stairs for what feels like the thousandth time, as if going to the scaffold. Smaller Child is standing on the landing. She is wearing butterfly wings. From the waist down, she is stark naked. She looks at me, my mouth hanging open, my expression caught somewhere between rage, disbelief, and an almost irrepressible desire to burst out laughing. "I need a wee," she says. I have by this point made a clear choice to travel the path of least resistance this evening. I pick her up, plonk her on a toilet. She looks at me. We stay there together, silent, eyes locked, for maybe five minutes. She doesn't need a wee at all. Stupid, see? I take her back to her room, tuck her in for the fifth time. The entire contents of her wardrobe are on the floor. I pretend I haven't seen it.

9.40pm: Mr H has gone out. Small Child is downstairs. "I'm hungry". I tell him there's nothing I can do about that at this stage in the day, that he should have eaten his dinner, that he should go to bed. He ignores me, goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge, complains about the broccoli to chocolate ratio it contains. I shepherd him back upstairs, shut his door, rest my forehead against it, count to ten.

10.30pm: Small Child is downstairs. Again. "I want the cat in my room". Why is he still awake?! Despairing, I think about going to bed myself, the only surefire way to end the cycle of bedtime hell other than leaving the house, which may or may not end it but, from the perspective of the absent parent, is a merely philosophical question akin to that of the tree falling in the wood. Instead, I try to explain to him, as I have done so many times before, that it is late, that it is grown-up time, that I have had a long day and I'm tired and I just want some peace and quiet, and can he please just go back to bed and stay there. "But mummy," he says, "I'm basically a grown-up already. And anyway, don't you want to spend time with me?" There's nothing like an emotionally manipulative sleep-averse six-year-old to make you feel like utter crap.

11pm: I hear Small Child's door open upstairs. "Mummy..." he says. I give up and go to bed.

What feels like five minutes later, it is morning. Smaller Child is up first. She is wearing an entirely different outfit to the one I last saw her in. Not for the first time in the last 12 hours, I pretend I haven't seen it. Downstairs, she demands bacon. He, of course, is still asleep, having been awake until probably gone midnight, doing god knows what. I leave to run into the office, the cycle starting again.

Writing this now, I wonder whether this recurring bedtime nightmare is some kind of twisted rite of passage imposed on me by the cosmos, trapping me, like Bill Murray and Punxutawney Phil, inside an inescapable vortex of mundanity and ridiculousness on repeat, day in day out, until such time as I get it right.  Lord knows I have tried. I've tried starting the bedtime process earlier, tried starting it later. I've tried discipline, I've tried leniency. I have read Rainbow Fish thirty times in a row and not complained about it (much). I have substituted fun bubble baths for functional showers. I have weathered the seemingly endless nightwear-selection debate with a smile glued to my face, over and over again. I have found the Nemo cup, washed it, replenished it, handed it over cheerfully while cursing inside. I have climbed the stairs so many times I am seriously contemplating moving into an apartment. I have in the darkness trodden on Lego, got Shopkins wedged between my bare toes, so often I've lost count. I've cajoled, pleaded, negotiated, bribed, threatened, yelled, cried. Nothing works. Give her an inch and she'll take a mile, but say no and you are faced immediately with tears; and as for him, well, the problem with him is that, when all's said and done, he basically just doesn't give a shit.

So, bad mummy/good mummy, present mummy/absent mummy, happy mummy/sad mummy... I've worn all the hats, and none of them had a rabbit inside. And thinking about it now, thinking about where that leaves me, I realise that although I may have no choice in or control over my feral offspring's nocturnal hijinks, I do have a choice as to how I let it affect me. So, as of now, I choose to enjoy it. I choose to interpret their egregious bedtime behaviour as a demonstration of love - to believe not that they want to torture me (which is what it mostly feels like) but that they want to spend time with me (which, in fairness, is probably much closer to the truth, no matter how questionable their methods). After all, who knows how long that will be the case? For sure it won't last for ever, even though, at 10 o'clock at night when you're wiping baby lotion off the traumatised cat, fishing books out of the toilet bowl, or trying to find the right goddam Finding Dory cup for the hundredth time, it may feel like it will never end.

In the meantime, I will cling to the hope that it's a phase, that we will emerge from this storm just as unexpectedly as we found that we had sailed into it... probably straight into another one, but one step at a time, hey?

And if, on occasion, that hope falters too... well, there's always wine.

Pre-July jitters

It's the eve of the 500km challenge and I am feeling more than slightly nervous, but at the same time very eager indeed to get going and start chipping away at that daunting target.

I've spent the last week weighing up the relative benefits of Strava and Nike+ and, being fundamentally technologically illiterate, I have not been able to reach any kind of decision so I'm gonna use both (yeah, dumb, but forgive me my option paralysis, it's been a stressful few weeks). I've signed up to the July distance and climb challenges on Strava so if you are going to join me (please do!!) then if you join the distance challenge too I can see how many kilometers everyone has done in aggregate, which I hope should be fun! So far I have friends here in Singapore, in Oxford, in Germany, and even my lovely mum in Somerset pitching in, so it is a global effort!

I'm also going to wear a pedometer, more than anything really just to see whether I can hit a million steps in a month - kind of a scary prospect when you think how damn hard it is to hit even the 10k recommended daily target, let alone more than three times that target (*panics*).

The idea is going to be to run about 16km a day, probably to and from work, on weekdays, and longer distances at the weekend. I'm going to split those longer distances up into an early morning (7am-ish) and a late afternoon (5pm-ish) run on each day of the weekend, both around the 10km distance. I will post on my Facebook page (D4D: 500/31 - please like it!) every Friday where and when I will be starting each of those weekend runs, so anyone who wants to join me can come along. Hopefully this will also have the side benefit of forcing me out of bed on weekend mornings, which I anticipate will be problematic even in the absence of standard overenthusiastic Friday night wine consumption. Those who know me will be (in some cases painfully) aware that I am not a morning person. In fact, as my alarm went off today and it dawned on me that it will be 6am starts every single day for the next 31 days, I could have cried. I think in fact the early mornings are going to be more of a challenge than the distance!

That said, a lot of people have asked me how I have trained for this. My answer to them has always been "well, I only decided to do it last week, so I've not really had a chance to train, but it will be fine, I run a lot". It only very recently (i.e. yesterday) occurred to me that this is not actually currently true. It is not true at all. In fact, according to my running app, I ran 27.5km in the whole of June, and - gulp - 8.52km in May. So, this should be... um... interesting.

Bearing in mind my fundamental lack of preparedness I guess the best I can do for myself is an early bed, rather than spending five hours making an explorer costume for a six year old who will in no way appreciate it. Sadly that ship has already sailed, but at least before I set off tomorrow morning I will get to see Small Child in a pith helmet covered in butterflies, which should hopefully keep me giggling to at least the halfway point.

0 down, 500 to go...

Dollars for Dave: a new challenge

Recently I posted an update on my Generosity page about Dave's long road to recovery from his osteosarcoma. I imagine everyone reading this will know that in January of this year I shaved my head to raise funds to help pay for state-of-the-art medical treatment for Dave, involving removing the cancerous bone in his leg and replacing it with an electromagnetic telescopic implant that will grow with him as he gets older, both enabling him to walk and removing the need for any further invasive surgeries.

But as with all surgeries, state-of-the-art or not, there is risk, and following a minor corrective procedure to realign the implant, Dave contracted an infection in his leg. That infection proved to be resistant to most antibiotics, and so Dave has spent the last week in hospital on IV antibiotics in order to save his leg from this infection. He will need to take these drugs for at least six weeks. Those antibiotics cost $200 a day. Two hundred dollars, every single day, for another five weeks, is a lot of money, even before you factor in the doctors' bills, the hospital stay...

We were hugely blessed to have been able to raise a very substantial amount of money through the enormous generosity shown by people during the original fundraiser. Those funds covered the cost of the implant, the surgery, Dave's second series of chemotherapy, and part of the cost of the corrective procedure. But that cash is long gone, and we are struggling to be able to meet the financial demands of Dave's treatment regime.

Which brings me to the new challenge.

Originally when I realised I was going to need to try and raise money somehow, I had contemplated the idea of seeking sponsorship to do a run - specifically, the Angkor Wat half marathon last December, which I had registered for a couple of months previously. But when I thought about it, this seemed rather like asking people to sponsor me to go on holiday - nobody was going to pony up to see me run a distance that I could do on a Sunday before brunch. I needed something more, something shocking, something challenging, so I wrote off the idea of running, and I shaved my head instead.

But I can't shave my head again (or at least it wouldn't have the same impact second time around!), and the more I thought about it the more I realised that I had approached the problem in the wrong way. The problem was not running per se - the problem was that me running a half marathon was not a challenge. So I needed to find a running target that was actually difficult.

Which is why I will be running 500km over the month of July. Yep, five hundred kilometers in 31 days. Does that sound like enough of a challenge? It's nearly 12 marathons, 23.5 half marathons, almost 17 kilometers a day for 31 days, and I will be doing it while also doing a full time job. I will have to give up red wine, seriously compromise the servicing of my West Wing addiction, and get up at 6am every day. It will be horrible. But if it enables me to help pay for Dave to get better, it will be worth it - as going bald was worth it, five months ago.

So, how can you help? Well, there is an obvious way: please sponsor me! Lump sum, an amount per kilometer completed, whatever - everything helps, however small the amount may be. You can do this through the Generosity site or if you'd like to send money by another method just drop me a message through Google+ and we can figure it out. One thing I would say though is that if you do want to donate, then the sooner the better - we are facing an urgent cash crunch as the medicine is needed right now and we can't allow a gap in treatment.

I am aware, though, that I am asking the same people who were so generous the first time round to sponsor me again. So if you can't give cash, there is another way you can help: lace up your own running shoes, think about what distance YOU can do in July, and ask your friends to sponsor you. Not a runner? Even better! Everyone has to start somewhere, so commit to 10k, or 20. If you can't run, jog, and if you can't jog, walk. Can you get a team together, from your work, from your gym, from your kid's school, from anywhere? Join up, get off the sofa, and run with me, wherever you are in the world: let's create a global community of people running together to help this kid beat the crappy hand he has been dealt. And if you're in Singapore, come keep me company and run with me - it's gonna be pretty boring spending fifty hours over next month pounding the streets on my own. Every Friday I will post on here and on the page I will be setting up on Facebook where and when I will be running over the weekend, so please come along and cheer me up!

If there's one thing I learned from January's experience, it's the amazing power of human beings acting collectively for a cause. One person contributing ten dollars may not seem like a lot; a hundred people doing that begins to become a big deal, a game-changing deal; for Dave (and, to be completely honest, for me), a life-changing deal. So, can you give me ten dollars? Can you give me ten kilometers? Can you get your friends to sponsor you a hundred, two hundred dollars, for those ten kilometers, for twenty? Whatever you can give, and whatever you can get people to give, will make a difference to our effort to help Dave recover and to rebuild his life. And the more people we can involve in this effort, the bigger the difference we will make.

With heartfelt thanks from all of us for your generosity to date, and hopefully to come.

Isabelle xx

The big night: less than a week to go!

As announced on my Generosity site, the termination date for my barnet has been set. Next Wednesday, January 13, at 10pm upstairs at Harry's Boat Quay, my hair and I will part company. Adam's and my combined fundraising efforts are now approaching the $25k mark but I am hoping to see that grow substantially before Wednesday. Come on people, what price vanity?! I've even allowed my brother-in-law to call me Kojak without physically assaulting him (though to be fair, he lives 7,000 miles away. If he was in the same postcode I doubt he would be so lucky. Keep running James!).

Harry's have very generously provided a fantastic venue free of charge and will be giving us a percentage of their total takings from the night as a direct cash donation to our fundraiser - so please do come down and eat and drink as much as possible!

The evening will kick off with a quiz starting at 7.30pm. The tables (teams of six) are filling up fast so please do contact me through Google+ or on iclaisse@yahoo.com if you would like to book one. If you haven't booked a table for the quiz, you can of course eat and drink downstairs at Harry's before the doors open upstairs - but please let them know that you are there for the fundraiser so that they can give you a wristband and your bar spend will count! Mr Hooker will be acting as MC; if his last performance as quiz host is anything to go by, it should be pretty entertaining and involve impromptu singing while standing on chairs followed by an apocalyptic hangover for poor Mr H the morning after.

We will then have a charity auction starting at around 9.30pm. We have been given a variety of awesome auction items including a fantastic Specialized racing bike, hotel packages from Unlisted Collection and Lantern Sri Lanka, dinners in restaurants including Bistecca, Donna Carmela, Stellar, and The Line, yoga memberships at Sweatbox, bootcamp packages from ooberfit, vouchers from Simone Irani and Hannah Lee, massage packages at Footworks, booze provided by Urban Remedy, Drinks & Co, and of course Harry's, some beautiful interiors items from Singapore Trading Post, and hopefully a variety of other lots that I will put together over the course of the next week by shamelessly whoring myself and my extreme new haircut across the island. Please bring your chequebook and get as drunk as possible while still remaining able to (a) raise your hand; and (b) sign your name.

And finally... *drum roll*... the main event. Adam, Mariza and I will be losing our locks immediately after the auction, at around 10pm. I'm still trying to find someone to wield the clippers so if anyone knows a hairdresser with a sadistic streak and a portable barber's chair please let me know.

And after that I plan to drown my sorrows sufficiently comprehensively to make my reflection in the mirror the next day blurry - although I guess the tears will probably do that too (*plays sad tune on world's tiniest violin shamelessly to extract sympathy and cash from potential donors*).

So I hope it will be a fun evening and that we will raise a lot of money. And that brings me back to the serious side of this, which is why we are doing it all. Dave has now had his third and final round of chemotherapy before the surgery, which is currently scheduled for the end of January. The impact of the chemo drugs on his little body is just heartbreaking, as you can see. But the end of his treatment is in sight and I am so grateful to every one of you who has reached out, for helping us to make that treatment a possibility - and I look forward to the day when I can write a post on here attaching a photo of Dave looking like he looked twelve months ago when he was here in Singapore: healthy, happy, and living the active life that in an ideal world every child, wherever they are, should be able to expect as a birthright.

So thanks for your support, whether through the Generosity site or in person next Wednesday. I have been immensely touched by the kindness and humanity of people's responses to our campaign. In what has been a very dark and difficult time, a light has been shone on our lives by the generosity - both the financial generosity and the generosity of spirit - of friends and strangers alike.

Postscript: I am having some issues with my Generosity site. If you can't make the payment system work, please try Adam's site instead! And if you want to donate but would prefer to use a lower-tech method (or trying to make Generosity work is making you want to defenestrate your IT hardware), you can send a cheque made payable to Robert Driver marked for my attention at 9 Kreta Ayer Road, Singapore 088985. 

Thank you!

Dave, or Why I am Shaving my Head for Charity

This is Dave.

Dave is ten years old, and the son of my helper Mariza. Mariza has lived with us since Small Child was four months old, so almost six years now. Her three kids live with family in the Philippines while she works, hundreds of miles away, to support them.

This is Dave posing with my kids when he and his brother and sister came to Singapore and stayed with us for three weeks over Christmas last year.

This is an x-ray that Mariza showed me one fateful Friday evening three months ago, unsure of what it meant.

This is Dave six weeks ago, under anaesthesia after going in for a bone biopsy to confirm whether the malformation in the bone shown by the x-ray was, as suspected, cancer.

This is Dave last week, having had two rounds of chemotherapy. He has lost all of his hair. He has a catheter in his chest. He is in and out of hospital for blood transfusions and vitamin injections as the chemo medication has lowered his white and red blood cell counts and made him even more ill.

The bone biopsy on his leg showed that Dave has an aggressive osteosarcoma in his left tibia. Not only does he have cancer, but Dave has also lost the global healthcare postcode lottery by being in the Philippines. He has no insurance, and the state does not pay for his treatment. The cost of that treatment has so far run to tens of thousands of dollars, and he hasn't even had surgery yet. That surgery - a surgery which, if it goes to plan, would leave him cancer free, with total mobility in his leg, and without the need for further operations - is expected to cost over fifty thousand dollars, including the purchase of a smart implant which will replace part of the bone in his leg and grow with him as he gets taller. Factoring in the scans, the appointments, the chemo, the other drugs, the transfusions, the hospital stays, the operation itself, and all the many many other costs I am privileged enough never even to have had to think about because my totally-taken-for-granted health insurance policy covers all of it without question, in all likelihood it is going to cost around a hundred thousand dollars to make Dave whole again.

I need hardly say that this is a significant sum of money. Indeed, for many people, Dave included, it is a life-changing sum of money. It would take Mariza years to earn that amount, which is why so far we have been paying for Dave's treatment ourselves. But with the surgery in the calendar for the end of January, the time has come to accept that we also need help.

And this, as I imagine you may have guessed, is why I am here, talking to you about this, sharing these distressing images, this distressing story. There is a big tradition of fundraising through sponsorship in the UK - though much less so here in Asia - where people do crazy things and others contribute money to charity to do it. When it became apparent that the money we would need to get this surgery was beyond what we could afford ourselves, I thought long and hard about what on earth I could do to raise funds which was sufficiently insane to encourage people to donate, while not being actually either life-threatening or so time-consuming that I couldn't fit it in around work. Whatever I chose needed to be extreme enough to make people sit up and take notice, and to believe me when I say that this is something that I am passionate about, that I feel I really need to push the boundaries to achieve. Identifying options for this was not easy, largely because a lot of the stuff that people generally consider to be ridiculously hardcore and worth sponsoring, I would do on a weekend for fun.

Which is why, after lengthy consideration, and much dissent from those around me, I have decided that I will shave my head. I have about a foot and a half of hair that I reckon would take at least two years to grow back, and I am willing to whip the whole lot off and be a skinhead if it means this kid can not only live, but have the surgery he requires to live the life he would have had if cancer hadn't come and run him over.

So, it would mean the world to me (and obviously also to Mariza and to Dave) if you would please please please sponsor me. Even if you can only afford a token amount, every contribution will take us nearer the target of being able to pay for this surgery. I have set up a page on Indiegogo through which it is quick and easy to contribute, and recognising that this is a charitable fundraising drive, the platform does not take a commission on donations, so every cent you give will go straight towards the cost of Dave's treatment.

If you are in Singapore in January, you will be able to bear witness to the shaving - not only of my own head, but also those of Mariza herself and of my friend Adam, who are both taking the challenge too. We will be having an evening of drinks and a pub quiz in a central location at the end of which, hopefully emboldened/anaesthetised by a few glasses of wine, the three of us will all go under the clippers. We haven't set the date yet but I will post on here once we have made the arrangements.

I need to add some fine print here as I want to be completely transparent and upfront about the mechanics of this. This is not a donation to a registered charity. Apart from anything else, I don't have the time to set up a charity before the money will be needed to pay for the surgery. What I have set up through Indiegogo is a charitable crowdfunding site, which effectively acts as a temporary bank account for donations before the funds are transferred to me personally. I will then be transferring that money from my personal bank account to the hospital and to Dave's doctors to pay for his various treatments. Mr Hooker has offered (ahem, been enlisted) to be accountant for this, as it is way beyond my financial capabilities (which are unfortunately zero, maybe even slightly below zero). If you want to donate but you have questions about this process (or indeed about Dave's medical condition or the treatments he is having - we are in direct contact with his surgeon), please feel free to message me directly and I will be able to answer any questions you have. Finally, it is possible, though certainly not probable, that we may raise more cash than we need, and in that scenario I will donate all the surplus to a children's cancer charity here in Singapore.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for donating. As I am sure you can tell, this is a cause very close to my heart and I hope it has touched you too, that you can see that this could happen to any of us, at any time, and that you can find it within you to help - even a small donation will help us get closer to our goal.

Merry Christmas everyone xxx

Jingle Hell

Today is Friday 18 December, and I am beginning to panic.

I have a tree. That alone seems like a huge achievement this year. I also even managed to dig out last year's IKEA wreath, hang it up, find fresh batteries for it, and turn a blind eye to the appropriacy (or otherwise) of festooning my front door with red lights.

I say "I have a tree", but actually, I have two trees. One large one that I decorated ("because it's so big that you won't be able to reach the high branches darlings!" and "No, this decoration - this handblown glass ball filled with peacock feathers and lovingly transported all the way back from Cape Town - is for the big tree, but here's a lovely decoration you made in nursery when you were two, and look! It's got your face on it!") and another small one that the kids decorated/the ghosts of day-glo Christmases pasts barfed over, opinion regarding said tree being polarised between those who are under the age of seven ("IT'S JUST SO BEAUTIFOOOOOOL MUMMY") and those who are not ("MY EYES, MY EYES!!!" *withdraws self to lie down in the dark for a while*).

This not particularly heartwarming tale of two trees and the crappy selfish parenting involved in their decoration represents pretty much the extent of my Christmas preparedness, which at this stage in proceedings is alarming. So I figured, in the time-honoured spirit of festive procrastination, that I would make a list of all that I had achieved thus far, and try to spur myself into action that way - by scaring myself shitless.

Presents bought: probably about 30% of what I need
Presents bought which have actually arrived: 0
Presents I have bought for myself: 2 5 oh ok fine... about 7
Presents I have bought for myself which have arrived: all 7 8
Festive food purchased: nil

Cards sent: zero, which is neither an improvement or a decline over last year (or the year before, or the year before that)
Daydreams about mulled wine indulged in: 9,376,210 (having one right now in fact)
Desire to go shopping: literally a negative value, which is amazing bearing in mind that I've always thought that if I was an X-Man, shopping would be my superpower (not that useful, I know, when you have to save the world, but I can only work with what I've got)
Minutes spent on Pinterest drooling over home made wreaths, imaginatively sculpted mince pies, and caring handcrafted Christmas gifts: 576
Minutes spent making wreaths, caring handcrafted Christmas gifts, and/or mince pies of any description, imaginative or otherwise: 0
Minutes spent daydreaming about eating mince pies: 1 (right now)

I could go on, but I imagine you've already got my drift.

This happens pretty much every year. I start to get excited about the festive season in July (when, if Facebook is to be believed, other, frighteningly organised, people begin their preparations). This is followed almost immediately by forgetting altogether that Christmas even exists, and then waking up with a dry mouth and sweating palms on 1 December and becoming almost immediately so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of ubiquitous Christmas overplanning porn peddled by the likes of Pinterest that I end up stuck, hyperventilating, in a stalemate of decision-making failure. So no, I have not crocheted a sky full of sparkly snowflakes. I have not put on wellington boots and yomped the woods foraging for dead stuff to arrange artistically into an alternative, eco-friendly wreath. I have omitted to order personalised Christmas pyjamas/Santa sacks for the small people (actually I do feel a bit bad about this one, since they're cute and I do generally love an excuse to internet shop), nor have I made my own Christmas pudding, complete with hand-picked organic fruit which I put in a mason jar with a bottle of cask-aged calvados three months ago to infuse. I've done bugger all, in fact.

Oh Christmas. I love you, I hate you. You warm me with all the fuzzy family feeling of togetherness only for me to remember that many of those people are thousands of miles away. You fill my head with impossibly pristine images of a picture-perfect Christmas morning, all shining-eyed, rosy-cheeked children, novelty knitwear, and chinking crystal flutes of Bollinger, when in my heart of hearts I know it will be fights, protracted explanations of the meaning of fairness, and a frantic search for AAA batteries followed by a tsunami of discarded gift wrap and several hours spent picking fossilized play-doh out of the furniture, most likely all viewed squinty-eyed through the fug of a Christmas Eve-induced hangover. But I love you anyway. I am a big-time sucker for you, Christmas. I just wish you weren't so much bloody effort.

Fast-forward twenty-four hours, and it's now the evening of Saturday 19th December. Three hours (which felt more like three years) spent on Singapore's main shopping drag this afternoon, and the Hooker Christmas is in better shape (though in fairness it couldn't have been much worse than it was this time yesterday).

Presents purchased: approximately five hundred

Presents wrapped: all of those that have arrived (*high fives self and does small smug happy dance*)

I am physically and mentally spent. My feet ache, my head aches, I've got a weird little twitch going in my eye muscle, and a slight blurring of vision which a small part of me is concerned may indicate a brain haemmorhage brought on by the noise, darkness, and strobe lights of Abercrombie and Fitch but could of course just be because it's Saturday night and I've not had a glass of wine yet. But I'm done, and Christmas will happen after all. I even have mince pies. Yes, they came from Marks & Spencer, in a box, and there's nothing imaginative about them. But nobody likes mince pies anyway. I'll just throw them away in February, like I always do, with the mixed nuts and the mini Christmas pudding.

So, I'm finished, in every single conceivable sense of the word. Finished physically, mentally, emotionally, financially. But also, thank the Christmas gods, finished with planning, shopping, wrapping, fretting, failing. So, Merry Christmas everyone. May your puddings be full of silver, your glasses charged with your favourite festive tipple, and your children better behaved than mine (which will almost inevitably be the case, more's the pity). You'll find me slumped under the tree (the big one, naturally), clutching an empty bottle of Hendricks in one hand and a roll of sellotape in the other, lying on Lego bricks, play-doh in my hair, while the Minions movie plays on repeat in the background. 

And it will be perfect - not Pinterest's vision of perfect, for sure, but perfect nevertheless.

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!

Week Four: losing my appetite

Hi folks, and welcome to Week Four of the Chinatown Challenge.  Actually I am thinking of rebranding this whole exercise as a new and incredibly successful weight loss program, having dropped THREE KILOS in the three weeks that I have been doing it.  There's nothing like chicken feet to put you off eating, possibly permanently.  Even summoning to mind the thought that they exist, and revisiting the image of a tureen of them wallowing slackly in unidentifiable orange goo, is now more than sufficient to suppress my appetite for a good few hours.  I think I could be on to something here.

Anyway, week 4 begins with a skive as it's my birthday and I have taken a day of leave.  I get up late, I go for a run, then I take Smaller Child out to lunch and fill my face with insanely expensive sushi, every mouthful tasting all the better for being eaten in the knowledge of what I am missing out on.  But when I wake on Tuesday, I have some pangs of guilt about having abandoned my post the previous day, and at lunchtime I man up and order....

Day 12: sheep stomach soup, ice kacang

So, it turns out that I do in fact have a limit, and today is the day that The Challenge breaks me. Last week I had clocked a stall selling various unloved bits of the sheep, and today, without even giving common sense a look-in, I head straight there and order myself a bowl of their foulest-looking offering.  The vendor dips her ladle in a small vat filled with a murky brown liquid swimming with strips of something grey and spongy.  Oh.  Mygod.  I want to get a photo of it but I am paralysed, though with what I'm not sure: is it fear? disbelief? an uncontrollable urge to throw up/run as fast as possible in the opposite direction? all of the above?  It's like rubbernecking a road accident: I don't want to look, but I can't help myself.  I actually think I would rather eat chicken feet at this point.  On autopilot, I take the tray and sit down, staring blankly at the bowl and trying not to breathe through my nose.  The vendor follows me and I wonder whether she is waiting to see whether I eat it until I realise that I was in such a state of shock that I hadn't paid.  Oops!

I try the broth.  It's deeply, almost unbearably, meaty, even for a standard-bearer in the meat-eating army like me.  It has the over-ripe fleshy tang of offal, which to me often tastes like it shouldn't really be eaten.  It's just... too much of itself.  It's oddly reminiscent of durian, actually.  Taking a deep breath, I pluck a piece of the stomach from the soup.  The surface is honeycombed, glistening with a slick of broth, strangely beautiful (if you don't have to eat it, at least).  It doesn't look like food, and as it registers that thought my brain makes a one-way conceptual jump from seeing this as lunch to seeing it as what it used to be, an organ for digesting grass... and that's it.  I can't eat it.  I can't even try to eat it.  A life as a vegetarian flashes before my eyes.  I shudder and push the bowl away.

Sheep stomach soup is an epic fail.  Although it is no great surprise that it was inedible, I am nevertheless shocked at the visceral depth of my response to it: there was a moment when I thought that the whole structure of my ability to eat meat, which is (and I am really not exaggerating here) a fundamental pillar of my happiness, might be tumbling down around my ears.  That would be an interesting epitaph: sheep stomach ruined my life.  Fortunately though, it has only ruined Tuesday lunch.  I will survive to eat another sheep - just not its stomach, please.

I have somehow to make up for my pathetic lily-livered pseudo-veggie refusal at the sheep stomach fence; and those of you who have been reading this blog regularly will be thrilled to hear that after some exploring of the nether regions of the food court I have finally found a  dessert shop that is open, and so finally I get to share with you the delights of Asian afters.  I can't quite figure out whether the sheep stomach has left me more hungry (owing to near zero food intake) or less (loss of appetite caused by nausea at offal related dining disaster) but I guess that's not the point, as there's a very high likelihood that I will not make a significant dent in what I am about to order either: ice kacang.

Ice kacang is the most popular hawker centre dessert in Singapore.  I use the word "dessert" in the loosest sense here, as anything involving sweetcorn and beans is not, to me, a pudding, but rather some kind of fucked-up salad masquerading as one.  At first glance what I am looking at is a pile of ice shavings drizzled in a variety of unidentifiable technicolour syrups, and wearing a hat of seagull vomit.

But I have lived here long enough to know that there is More to ice kacang, so I delve deeper.  Oh my god.  There's grass jelly under here!  For those who missed the chicken/chilli confusion of Week One, grass jelly is firmly on the Never Try Again list, so this seems unduly cruel luck.  There's also the obligatory red beans, more sweetcorn, and attap seeds, which I haven't eaten in years but remember now that I actually don't mind, despite having a deeply weird texture.  All in all, it's not horrible.  Don't get me wrong - it's not dessert, for sure, but it's not completely horrible.  But then I guess I am comparing it to sheep's stomach so....

The menu at the dessert stand is... let's just say interesting, and it seems there is huge potential here for gastronomic disaster.  Tadpole and sea coconut anyone?  I'm going to have to try that one. Maybe, just maybe, I could even count it as eating frog (she says more in hope than expectation...).

Day 13 (is it really only Day 13????): cockle kway teow, dumplings

Yeah yeah.  I go lite today.  I have no excuse other than that I am in the middle of the second week of marathon training and I am seriously rungry, as a friend describes it (although in my case it seems to have graduated from 'rungry' to 'hangry').  I Need Carbs!  So I get myself a plate of noodles.  The queue is enormous and once again I make the automatic assumption that this is a good thing.  Surely I should know better by now? Am I learning nothing from this experience?!

Clearly not.  The noodles look unprepossessing, and taste worse.  They are an overcooked, underseasoned, mushy, gastronomic trainwreck.  Normally I love kway teow - carby, greasy, salty, meaty: what's not to like? - but this really has me questioning that love, which I had always assumed was unconditional.  The cockles don't help; for the second time this week, watching my food prepared has been actively damaging to my ability to eat it, and seeing those sad little shell-less fleshy nuggets spooned out of an ice-cream carton of opaque slime and into the giant wok of noodles was not an inspiring moment.  And for the second time this month, I am looking at something that resembles a bucket of eels rather more than I would ideally like.  It's not good.

A couple of days later, Smaller Child is flicking through the photos on my phone and comes across the picture of the kway teow. "Ooh", she says, with grim relish.  "Yucky."  I couldn't agree more.

Fortunately I have a side order of dumplings, so my hunger is abated sufficiently that I don't actually kill anyone in the afternoon.  It occurs to me that it is little short of a miracle that nobody has been harmed in the making of this blog.  Nobody except me, at least.  Yet.

Thursday is a public holiday.  On Friday I have an appointment over my lunch hour and this time, unlike last week, I can't summon up the will to drag myself to the Chinatown Complex.  Instead, I sit at my desk and go hungry.  It doesn't even occur to me to eat my recycling pile.  The Challenge has, it appears, finally killed my appetite.

Next week I will have the finish line in sight, with only three days left to eat my way through the List of Doom.  I am determined that I will use those days bravely if not wisely, but am concerned that I still have frogs, geoduck clam, and black chicken to check off the list, none of which appears to be available in the Chinatown Complex, and that I may have to spill this over into October in order to try everything I promised.  For the sharp-eyed among you, I am awarding myself a tick for pig organ soup on the basis that I tried its ovine sister this week, and have no desire to challenge further my carnivorous instincts.  So maybe, just maybe, I have learned something, at least...

Week Three: fish balls and durian

I begin the week feeling generally lackadaisical and unenthusiastic about everything, and the challenge is no exception. I'm nearing the mid-way hump and it is beginning to feel like a self-imposed gastronomic prison sentence.  I just can't find any enthusiasm for it, and the knowledge that there are still a number of the most feared items yet to be ticked off, and almost three more weeks to get through, feels like an axe hanging over me.  With that in mind, almost zombie-like on Monday I head to the food court and get number 4 on the Top Ten out of the way, fish ball soup.

Day 8: Fish ball soup, calamansi juice

The thing that I most dread about fish ball soup is not actually the eating of it, I think, but the smell.  It stinks.  The thought of sitting for 20 minutes inhaling the aroma of a bowl of it is not a pleasant one.  But when I sit down, I am surprised.  It doesn't smell.  It doesn't smell at all!

Or does it?  I am reminded of the wonderful Tim Gunn's comment when looking at a Project Runway contestant's catwalk collection of garments gruesomely embellished with real human hair:  "I have this refrain about the monkey house at the zoo. When you first enter the monkey house, you think, ‘Oh my god this place stinks!’ And then after you’re there for 20 minutes you think, ‘it’s not so bad’ and after you’re there for an hour it doesn’t smell at all. And anyone entering the monkey house freshly thinks, ‘this stinks!’".  I realise that I have become so acclimatised to this place that I don't even notice it any more - with a few limited exceptions (see Day 9 below), I barely register the olfactory overload that so overwhelmed me when I first came here.  Is that a good thing?  I'm not sure.

Anyway, monkey house or no, the fact that I can't smell the soup sure makes it easier to eat.  Broth: OK.  Noodles: OK.  Pointless token vegetation: OK.  Fish balls: ... urgh.  What even IS this stuff?!  The texture is like nothing I have ever experienced.  It is rubbery, reconstituted, resistant - kind of how I imagine the inside of a squash ball to be.  It bears no resemblance whatsoever to fish, not even in taste.  It is the spam of the sea.  It is horrible.  I spit it out and as it plops heavily into the bowl of stock, sending up a spray of fishy droplets, I question the wisdom of ordering noodle soup on a day when I have a full afternoon of meetings.

I eye the chicken rice on my neighbours' trays with ill-disguised envy, and push down my food-thieving murderous thoughts.

The dessert shop is still shut.

I spend Monday afternoon and all of Tuesday in meetings.  My reward is to have lunch on Tuesday  with the same people I have been locked in a room with for the last two days.  On the plus side, it's not chicken feet.

Day 9: chicken rice, durian smoothie

Mr Hooker makes the journey over from the CBD today for his weekly dose of the Chinatown Complex, which means it's Asia Lite Day again.  Yay!  We order the chicken rice that I was eyeing up yesterday, which is probably the least adventurous thing it is possible to encounter in a Singapore hawker centre.  Although the stall does feature this on display, which should be sufficient to make even the strongest of stomach feel queasy:

To restore equilibrium to the gastronomic universe, I order a durian smoothie.  Not for the first time this month, the stall owner does a double take.  "Not for you?" she asks.  I confirm that it is indeed for me - that everyone should try it, after all.  She looks doubtful, frowning as she scoops frozen durian puree into a blender.  "You won't like it.  It's really horrible."  Quite the sales pitch!  As it turns out, though, she is entirely correct: it is absolutely revolting.  Even from a couple of feet away it stinks, and the taste, when I summon up the courage to try it, is the taste of decay, falling somewhere between rotten banana and rotten mango.  It really is awful, and I can't bring myself to drink more than a couple of fingers of it. 

There is a chain of durian shops in Singapore called 'Durian Lingers'.  I've always thought it was an odd choice of name (though that would not be unusual - there is a clothing chain here called 'Wanko', after all) but it turns out to be poor, but undeniably accurate, advertising: five hours later, I can still taste the rank overripe sweetness of the fruit.  It is deeply unpleasant.  Durian, there can be no doubt, is another one to add to the 'never again' list.

Will the dessert shop ever open again???

Day 10: black carrot cake

I have a physio session scheduled across my lunch hour today, and at 4pm I am still sitting lunchless at my desk, weighing up whether it's better to go hungry or man up and take myself off for some more hawker centre magic.  Eventually I acknowledge that even black carrot cake is better than taking a bite out of my recycling pile, which my hunger-addled brain is beginning to contemplate as a viable food option.

The food court is strangely still at this time of day, and many places are closed.  I find an open one selling carrot cake and oyster omelette, and order a plate of the black stuff.  It appears to be the white carrot cake chopped up and fried with various local ingredients, mainly egg and sticky black soy.   There is a toxic-looking oily heap of chilli sauce on the side, which I make a mental note to avoid at all costs.  It looks rather like a plate of dog food garnished with spring onion. It is not appealing.

But once again, I am pleasantly surprised.  It is absolutely fine.  In fact, it is probably better than fine.  The texture of the carrot cake is much more acceptable when it's chopped up small, and let's face it there's hardly anything that isn't improved by being fried.  I eat nearly all of it, avoiding a semicircle around the chilli sauce, but failing to observe that there is a slick of chilli oil that has escaped and oozed further than I have bargained for.  And it is explosive, a weapon of mouth destruction.  I practically have steam coming out of my ears.  Who eats this stuff - seriously?!?!

It seems the dessert man has run away with the circus.  I am going to have to find a new dessert shop.

Day 11: Mystery Queue Roulette

I'm feeling a bit uninspired today.  A very minor league hangover from a wine dinner last night plus an all-over ache from my body getting used to marathon training means that other than a nice cold glass of sugar cane juice I have no idea what I want to eat.  Every day that I've been to the Chinatown Complex, though, I've noticed a long, long queue of people snaking over a walkway and around a corner, and have wondered what was at the end of it.  So, without any idea of what I am in for, I join it.  And I wait.  And wait.  And wait some more.  The line moves painfully slowly and I wonder what can possibly be so time consuming that so few people can be served in such a long time.  Dim sum maybe?  Spring rolls?  Something yummily calorific, deep-fried to order?  My imagination is working overtime as I wait, and when I turn the corner, almost 30 minutes later, I am starving.  And what do I see?

Fucksticks.  It's tofu.  You couldn't make this up!  Not only is it tofu, in fact, it's tofu and fish balls.  I order three bucks' worth of noodles, tofu and fish ball soup, add a sprinking of ikan bilis, and dump a slimy slice of aubergine on the top.  Then I slump at my table for one, feeling a bit sorry for myself, being surveyed by a dozen shiny disembodied dried anchovy eyeballs, and cursing not having taken on board the lesson I learned on day one of this challenge that the size of the queue has no relevance to the quality of the food on offer at the end of it.

It's while sitting here morosely shovelling vermicelli noodles into my mouth and trying to ignore the glassy gaze of the ikan bilis that I notice an intriguing-looking claypot stall.  The signboard is written only in Chinese, and I wonder idly whether they serve frog.  My knowledge of Mandarin extends only to the absolutely essential: hello/goodbye, yes/no, thank you (not please, for some reason), and "I want 1/2/3.../10 beers", so I pull out my phone and bring up the Google Translate app.  And the results are GOLD.  So entertaining, in fact, that I forget how horrible my lunch is, for a moment at least.

For the uninitiated, to use the app to translate Chinese you simply snap a picture of the text and the app will translate the characters for you in little boxes - for example, as you can see below, if you order the second item from the top on the left you will receive a portion of "The old one".  Whatever that might be.  One to be avoided, probably.

So here are a selection of my favourites:

Not satisfied with these gems, though, I persist with my translation exercise, and am richly rewarded.  Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!  I give you:

So, kung pow chicken sesame penis is on the menu for next week, obviously.  I also noticed that the next door stall was offering pigs trotters with red bean sauce, so I think that has to go on the list too.  Sheep stomach soup will make an appearance (quite possibly twice in rapid succession, if the picture advertising it is an accurate representation of the dish itself).  And I must, finally, find a dessert stall that is open, although I can't promise that I will try durian again.  In fact, I think I can probably promise that I won't.  For now, though, there's a chocolate muffin on my desk, a weekend of Formula 1 excess in store, and hopefully no tofu in sight for a few days.  See you next week!