I’ve been thinking of getting back into running. My Nikes and Adidas fell apart a couple of years ago and I haven’t run since then.

I have been putting off getting new ones because there are so many other things I need to spend money on in England, such as warm clothing and… even warmer clothing.

But I am finally putting my feet down to have them fitted for a new pair of running shoes.

Now, Bournemouth (where I live now) is not a shopping paradise like Singapore is. You can’t just take a short MRT ride to Orchard Road and immediately have access to 500 sporting stores offering pretty much the same stuff but all the brands and models are represented within a 500m radius.

(That means if you don’t like the attitude in one store, you can walk 10 seconds to another store to get exactly the same thing.)

You can even find trained consultants who professionally flirt with you and make you run on gait analysing thingies, then know exactly which pair of shoes you need to instantly improve your speed, stamina and intelligence by 300%.

In Bournemouth, on the other hand, you could choose to walk 10 minutes to a small sports supermarket (and I’m using the term “super” very loosely here) offering products that would make all the fashion policemen in the world vaporise from agony.

And there are two staff members in the whole place, one manning the cash register and the other bustling about pretending to be busy with stock or something.

Or you could drive an hour to a slightly bigger sports supermarket offering similary fashion-offensive products, and there are three staff members manning the cash registers or pretending to be busy.

I chose to go online.

And after a bit of looking around, this caught my eye:

I am partial to Adidas shoes. I had a pair several years ago which were the lightest and most comfortable track shoes you’d ever wear. I almost felt like I was flying in them. Sadly, they didn’t last very long because I wore them almost every day, not just for running but for everyday use.

So I’m hoping to find another pair that feels the same.

I was quite excited to find the pink and black Adidas because I love the colours and design and it’s really hard to find running shoes with nice designs. Most branded running shoes seem to me to be designed for aliens. Which makes them only marginally better than the ones in Bournemouth.

I quickly MSN’ed the link to Piers (who was at work).

I said, “I’m going to buy this!!!”

It took him just one second to reply, “Those trainers look ugly!”

“What?!” I said, “They don’t!”

“They do to me!”

I said, “You’re just saying that cos it’s £75!”

He said, “I am not!”

Then, he was silent for two seconds and came back with this:

“These ones look much nicer!”

I said, “That’s £8!!!!!!!!!!”

“Oh! Are they?” he said, “Wow, that’s good value!”

“Yeah, right,” I told him. “Too bad, cos I need an Adidas.”

Then another three seconds and he sent me this:

“These look nice!”

I said, “Those are man shoes!!”

“And old!”

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

Not to be deterred, he took a few more seconds and came back with this:

“Nice!”

Indeed, it was time to change strategy.

“Thanks,” I said, to lull him into a sense of false security, “I love that.”

He doesn’t know that I have gone ahead to order the £75 Adidas. With his credit card! Mwahahaha.

I suppose he will find out when he receives the bill at the end of the month.

Or when he reads this post, which will presumably be sooner.

But that’s okay because I have suddenly and mysteriously turned into a good cook so I will distract him with some nice Chinese cooking.

He liked the wat tan mai fan and curry puffs I made in the last week, which is saying a lot because men’s taste buds are as good as their fashion senses are bad.

Vermicelli in egg gravy

Curry puffs

I don’t mean all men, of course. Just the ones who equate expensive with ugly and cheap with sublimely gorgeous.

Which is why I will never take a man shopping with me. The best strategy is to go online to buy anything and everything you want while the man is at work. It’s fast and convenient and when the packages arrive, you can feign ignorance. “Goodness me, where did that come from?”

Just remember not to send him any links.

Or if you must, send him eBay links of really cheap stuff to drive him into a permanent state of deep, deep security.

In other news, I am micro-blogging on Facebook more than updating this silly blog so I would respectfully suggest that you go to Facebook for quicker updates on my superfluous life.

Thanks!

I had great plans for the summer. And that was to complete every last one of my waist-high homework assignments (see last paragraphs in link).

Not quite the party of the century but it was a great and noble plan because the amount of homework we have in my course is of epic god-level magnitude and I wanted to start the new term in September with an empty inbox so I could have at least one stress-free day before the box piled up again.

Unfortunately, Piers ruined my plans by buying a new oven.

Suddenly I acquired a new hobby — baking — an absurd turn of events since the only time I ever wanted to bake anything was during my Agricola phase when I wanted to make cute clay figurines for the game.

(These aren’t made by me; I found the photos on the Internet.)

The thing is, me enjoying cooking of any sort can be considered a phenomenon as bizarre as a meteor hitting Singapore and killing off only cockroaches and my enemies.

I was capable of cooking easy stuff (thanks to Home Economics classes in secondary school and the invention of instant noodles) but have always felt it an inconvenient chore.

A year ago, if I’d been asked to write a Personals ad, it would have read:

I love gaming and hate cooking, so expect to eat out or live on instant noodles. On the bright side, you can game as much as you like.

Living in England changed that. Missing my favourite food from Singapore, I’ve had to try and make stuff myself, like my experiment with bak kwa. It actually tasted quite decent and no one died eating it.

That astonished me, since I’d always thought that being able to cook anything more complex than instant noodles required years and years of study and you had to start age age three or something.

I learnt instead that cooking is simply looking up a recipe on the Internet and following instructions. It did make me feel a bit cheated for having always thought that people who can cook are demi-gods. (Maybe they were before the Internet but not now.)

A few weeks ago, the nursery I was interning at threw me in the kitchen with three toddlers and said, “Today you bake bread with the children.”

“Excuse me?” was my immediate thought.

But I wanted to make a good impression so I said, instead, “Yes, please!”

Then, “Um… I’ve never baked anything in my life.”

I was given verbal instructions and then thrown into the deep end.

I managed to wing it. My toddlers didn’t realise I was clueless as they were too busy grating cheese and trying to eat it all up.

In under an hour, we had bread and it was good and tasty.

I was stunned by the ease of breadmaking and that was without a breadmaker. Which made me realise that actually expanding my cooking talent beyond bak kwa and instant noodles was a delicious possibility.

On the first week of my summer break (right after my time at the nursery), our oven door at home completely broke off, so Piers had to buy a new oven.

I wanted to use the oven right away to bake something, never mind I didn’t have all the ingredients and tools necessary. I simply searched for the most basic cake recipe, then whisked up a batter using a fork, and made a baking pan out of kitchen foil.

It’s called hot milk sponge cake and supposed to be light and fluffy, I think. But what came out the oven tasted and felt more like a Chinese steamed egg cake. Which was actually fine too because I love that cake.

Except it was too sweet, so I looked up many more recipes of random cakes and found that they all prescribed similarly lethal amounts of sugar. I think Internet recipes must be written by children.

But I had made it.

I had baked a whole cake from scratch and the achievement was addictive.

Two days later, I bought proper cake ingredients and made a vanilla poppy seed cake, which ended up with an overpowering vanilla taste because I had trouble measuring out 1/8 of a teaspoon of vanilla extract (I quartered the recipe since I didn’t want to bake a cake for 16 people).

Apart from the vanilla overdose, it was quite a good cake.

And I made some bread for our breakfast the next day. But the dry yeast made my skin prickle and hairs stand. The tiny long grains have the ability to stand up on their own (like if you were to run a magnet over iron filings).

Unfortunately, I’m incapable of taking a photograph of it because even thinking about it makes my skin prickle.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, never mind, it’s not important.

What’s important is that maybe, by the time school starts again, I will have fine-tuned my baking skills to perfection and will then be able to bribe my lecturers into overlooking the fact that I haven’t done any homework at all.

I hope they like cake.

Great plan, isn’t it?

It’s always a bit hard blogging after you’ve been gone far too long, isn’t it?

What do you do? Explain your absence or proceed as if you were never gone?

Many bloggers choose the first option. They start with a lengthy, ingratiating apology-explanation, continue with a current life update, then end with a “I will try to blog more now”.

I might even have done that myself at some point or other, I can’t remember. But I’ve been thinking that it’s a really sad thing to do. Not to mention silly.

1. Readers don’t need an apology. There are literally a billion other blogs out there for their reading pleasures.
2. Half your readers probably didn’t even notice you were gone because (see first point).
3. The other half of your readers are actually the ones responsible for your absence because you’d rather go out with friends families loved ones than stare at a lonely blinking cursor on an empty screen.
4. It’s a waste of time for both blogger and reader. Because nobody actually gives a shit.

So, now that we have the ingratiating apology-explanation out of the way, let’s move on to my life update.

Not really.

Today, actually, I want to talk about the weather.

Yes, the weather is always a safe and convenient conversation starter, unless you’re in Singapore, in which case you will be considered a retard if you attempt a weather opener: “Hot today, isn’t it?” Because, in Singapore, every single day is hot, so thanks for stating the obvious.

But if you’re in a country where the weather actually changes and the meteorological station doesn’t report 33°C/28°C every single day of the year, then the weather is a fantastic topic for the conversationally challenged.

Good reason to wear very little in Singapore.

I’ve been in England for over a year now and I’ve talked about the weather about 400 times.

In England, they have four seasons every year. That’s right, seasons. (Cue looks of astonishment.) And when fashion columns report that the latest Autumn trends are now in the stores, it actually makes sense.

I used to be fashion/beauty editor in Today (newspaper) and I always felt dumb using seasonal labels in my pages but I had no choice because everything in Singapore is imported, including Olympic medalists.

So, in England, the weather makes for scintillating conversation.

Random Brit: “Oh, the weather has been so lovely over the weekend, the sun out and all, hasn’t it? Did you do anything special?”

Me: “It was hot so I stayed home and played on my iPad.”

Then I get a chance to talk about Singapore and how it’s hot every day so cold weather is a novelty and the random Brit is all amazed because they don’t get enough sunshine here. It’s nearly two months into the summer now and there’s probably been about two weeks of sunshine in all that time.

When the sun comes out, the Brits literally go mad. The whole country suffers a traffic meltdown because every last person here has taken the day off work or school and is trying to get to the beach.

If they’re not already there.

Bournemouth Beach, August 2011

Sometimes I pretend to enjoy the “lovely weather” because there’s only a minute to exchange pleasantries and no time to go into a full dissertation of why I don’t like the sun.

In all my conversations, I never, of course, talk about how I’m really a vampire and it’s dangerous for me to be exposed to sunlight. That’s a secret so let’s keep it that way.

The point is that I fear I might not adapt too well here socially. People love talking about the weather since it is something that significantly influences their moods and activities.

The weather is also very unpredictable, as in, it could be 25°C today and 15°C tomorrow. So, every day, people are praying for lovely sunny weather while I’m crossing my fingers for it to be overcast and cold.

Won’t exactly make me very popular, I don’t think.

The good news (for me) is that I’m having my summer holidays now, a time during which presumably students are given a break so they can enjoy the “lovely sunny weather” and be delinquents.

That means I can hide at home and not have to face the sun until school starts again in September.

The bad news is that I have homework up to my waist. I mean if you were to stack all my homework one on top of another it would reach my waist and I am quite tall.

That’s why I’m blogging.

With any luck, I will be blogging more this summer and my homework won’t get done.

Have a nice summer, if you’re reading this from England.

And if you’re in Singapore, um, enjoy the air-conditioning?