Piers is away in Amsterdam with his buddies so I’m enjoying a weekend of solitude, the happiest feature of which is that I can have candy for breakfast without being told off.

On a normal day, we would Skype (since MSN has shut down) while he’s at work and I’m at home. And we’d exchange notes about our respective meals. I know it makes us sound like rather drab people but there’s an element of competition to it.

“I’m having a giant breakfast of bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, baked beans and toast. What are YOU having?”

“Pfft. Sounds boring. I’M having Rowntrees Sour Pastilles! :D”

Then the scolding comes.

“You can’t have sweets for breakfast!”

“Why not?”

“It’s not a proper breakfast!”

“It’s made with 25% real fruit juice!”

Okay, maybe that just makes us sound sad.

BUT this weekend he is away, so, while we still exchange meal notes via phone text, he is less eligible to be judgemental of my meal choices because he himself is not in any position to be Mr Healthy, right now.

Piers has gone away to Amsterdam for three days to celebrate(?) one of his mate’s upcoming marriage. Yes, it’s a 3D2N stag party and I don’t need to tell you what men do at stag parties. What more a stag party in Amsterdam involving 10 hot-blooded males.

Okay, I’ll tell you anyway.

They drink beer. Enough beer to displace every ounce of fluid in the human body, including the brain, which begets a vicious cycle of poor choices.

(From Wikipedia: “The total amount of water in a man of average weight (70 kilograms) is approximately 40 litres.”)

Here’s a look at the first half of their itinerary (because it’s still happening even as I’m blogging). The times are approximate because I’ve had to piece everything together from sporadic text messages.

Friday

1:30 pm – Arrive in Amsterdam.

4:30 pm – Arrive in rented apartment after picking up keys, commuting a terrible distance and getting supplies (read: beer) at supermarket.

5:00 pm – Drink beer in apartment while taking turns to shower (1 tiny bathroom shared by 10).

7:00 pm – Have dinner and beer at Irish pub.

8:00 pm – Drink beer at an ice bar (where every bloody thing is made of ice).

XtraCold IceBar Amsterdam. Not sure if this is the one they went to but this seems to be the famous one.

9:40 pm – Move to another bar to drink more beer.

12:40 am – Move to yet another bar to drink yet more beer. (A few of them went home at this point.)

Saturday

7:30 am – Take turns to wash up in tiny bathroom. (Piers reported that this took 3 hours, which sounds ridiculous, but I calculate that it’s only 18 minutes per bloke, a miracle, conjecturing that it would have taken 10 hours if it had been women.)

11:00 am – Brunch at Subway. (To get rid of hangover before the real adventure begins.)

12:00 pm – Heineken factory tour.

2:00 pm – Drink beer in a bar and smoke cigars.

5:00 pm – Beer bike adventure. (This is a vehicular monster powered by beer guzzling cyclists. They have rented it for 2 hours.)

TBC…

This is as far as I know because it’s only Saturday afternoon right now, although I am given the impression that tonight is the big drinking night.

Wow, really? You mean Friday wasn’t?

It is not such a stretch now to believe that each of these blokes is going to contain 40 litres of beer in his body by the end of tonight, is it?

I am so wracked with envy.

Instead of enjoying wondrous experiences such as drinking ice cold beer while sitting on a chair made of ice and putting my elbows on a table made of ice, instead of cycling through the colourful streets of Amsterdam, City of Freedom, pedalling nonstop for two hours while drinking beer out of a giant barrel, instead of drinking beer for 60 hours till I’m capable of sweating beer if only it weren’t so darned cold in Europe now, instead of all that, I am stuck at home playing as much as I want on my iPad, eating anything I want at any time, and looking forward to the premiere of Britain’s Got Talent 2013 on TV tonight.

I am so missing out.

Cheers.

Now, my iPad beckons! I bought 2 new games yesterday (on Piers’ credit card since he’s gone and left me alone {although that’s just a convenient excuse since I buy any games I want any time I want to on his account because I needed a UK credit card to buy games here, hee}.)

I have about two hours to play until BGT, so yay.

My only hope is that Piers and his pals come home in one piece (I mean, a piece each, not collectively) because I’m a bit worried about spontaneous explosion due to liquid overload.

So, wish them well for me.

Have a great rest of the weekend, guys, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!

As if.

Just a quick update now cos I’ve been busy and I’m leaving England for Singapore tomorrow!

Actually, that’s all I need to say but since I’m already here, I suppose I could say a few more things.

It’s Valentine’s Day today. I’ve never really been partial to the commercialism of the whole event, not because I think it’s a scam (which it kind of is) but because I think it makes people lazy in relationships, thinking that they’ve got this one day to excessively shower their loved ones with love, and then the rest of the year they can take it easy, take the relationship for granted.

Regardless, I am not above appreciating some Valentine’s Day flowers.

Piers got me tulips instead of roses because he said he couldn’t find roses in colours that I like (white and champagne pink) and he wasn’t overly sure of the exact shade of pink I like, anyway, cos to him, all pinks look the same.

Which is fine because I actually prefer tulips to roses.

Flowers are relatively cheap in England and we can get pretty tulips all year round so Piers was happy to buy me a bunch every week to pretty up our apartment at the beginning of our relationship.

Eventually, though, I told him to stop because I got tired of maintaining them, having to replenish or change the water every so often. I started leaving them to wilt for weeks before I could be arsed to dump them and give the mouldy vase a good clean.

You just can’t please a girl.

But, seriously, since I’m leaving tomorrow, it means Piers has to take care of these tulips and dispose of them when they die, so that’s perfect for me. I am very pleased!

A few days ago, I baked this fresh cream chocolate cake because I felt like eating cake.

It was a bit of a disaster.

It started off being an 8-inch cake and ended up being a 5.5-inch one because I left it in the oven too long and the sides got rock hard so I had to cut them off. Because of that, the sides looked ugly so I decided to cover everything with fresh cream, only I didn’t have enough cream so everything just looked uneven.

If you look on the inside, you can see a hole in the middle filled up with cream:

That was me gouging a hole in the middle of the cake to check if the middle was edible.

It was barely edible, tasting like stale cake because it was so overcooked.

Piers was excited when he saw it, coming home from work. He thought it was his Valentine’s Day cake because of the heart on the top. But that was just me trying to make the cake look less ugly but even then I didn’t do a great job of it.

We each had a small slice for tea and he said, “Wow, that is really delicious!”

And then he said, “Hang on, I need to have a sip of tea. It’s stuck in my throat, need to wash it down with a drink.”

On the bright side, the cream was quite tasty.

Well, I can’t wait to be back in Singapore where I can buy anything I want to eat, without having to try and make it myself, and poisoning my boyfriend in the bargain.

And now I’m off to spend Valentine’s Day with the boyfriend sans poison. We are eating out today.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all. Hope you have or had a great one, depending on when you read this.

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?

Piers pointed out to me today something funny that he saw on his Facebook feed.

There were my status updates where I was stressing about my essay, groaning about not having much time left to finish it. And then, on the same page, it also showed that I had been watching Prison Break on Netflix.

Now, this is a complete lie because, while I was toiling away at my essay, Piers was the one who was watching Prison Break on my Netflix account. Because my Netflix is linked to my Facebook, it auto-updated.

Stupid Facebook.

But it’s all good. I enjoy linking all my apps to Facebook so that everyone knows whenever I watch a movie, listen to a song, play a game or toast some bread.

Today, we live in the happy delusion that people actually care about every breath we take and every fart we make. If it keeps us happy and raises our self-esteem, why not, huh?

Indeed, why not.

But just remember not to believe everything you see in Facebook because someone could pretend to have watched an intellectual film just to appear intellectual, or another person could use someone else’s Netflix account to watch Prison Break while said someone else is supposed to be working hard on an essay.

But, still, all is good. I have scanned through Netflix quickly and not found any overly embarrassing films or TV programmes in there so Piers is welcome to knock himself out watching all the shows he possibly can because Netflix is like a TV buffet.

Anyway, the worst of my chicken pox is over now. I don’t even want to talk about it because it is the worst singular experience I’ve had in my life.

I am now trying my darnedest to catch up with my school work because I had to miss an entire week of classes, during which I was sick and miserable at home, at times fantasizing about rushing outside in the middle of the night to provoke random drunk students so that they would be inspired to stab me dead.

In the meantime, I have been honing my drawing skills on the new social game, Draw Something, which you can play on Apple and Android devices, and which you should because it’s fun. Download it and add me via Facebook or e-mail so we can play together and I can traumatise you with my crappy drawings.

Can’t stay to chat now. I have just finished writing a 5,000-word essay but I have one more to write, the contents of which were taught when I was absent from school.

Hoorah.

Have a good March and be as mad as a March hare!

Piers tried to pay me a compliment the other day.

“Your skin is so smooth,” he said.

I was about to modestly protest when he added, “Like a pumpkin.”

“What?” I said.

“No, wait,” he said thoughtfully, “Pumpkins aren’t very smooth, are they?”

“No, they’re not.”

“Okay,” he tried again, “Your skin is as smooth as a peach.”

Obviously, it wasn’t going very well.

I said, “Huh?”

He said, “Peaches have got these little hairs…”

I made a face. “Are you calling me hairy??”

“No, no, of course not,” he said defensively, “Peaches are not hairy.”

“They’re fuzzy,” I told him.

“That’s kinda smooth isn’t it?”

“How is that smooth? It’s fuzzy!”

He thought about it for a while, then said, “Okay, okay, not peach. What should it be then?”

“Tofu,” I said.

“Eew!”

“What?”

“Tofu is slimy!” he declared.

“It’s not.”

“Yes, it is!”

“It’s a common analogy to say a girl’s skin is soft as tofu!” I said.

(Actually, I’m not sure about that at all. It was just the first thing that popped into my mind. Silken tofu is very soft and smooth, isn’t it?)

“That’s disgusting!” he proclaimed again, “Tofu is slimy and wet.”

“It’s not slimy!”

(Which is true. Tofu may be wet but it’s not slimy at all.)

But he had one last argument.

“If tofu weren’t slimy and wet, Takumi wouldn’t have to worry about spilling it.”

I’m sorry if you haven’t watched Initial D (the Japanese anime) and therefore don’t get the Takumi reference, but don’t worry about it because it’s a stupid reference to begin with.

The point is that, after all that, I didn’t feel at all complimented because the conversation ended on “slimy”.

We didn’t go any further than that; I generally try to change the subject when Piers gets too silly.

Luckily for him, he’s useful in many other ways (such as fixing broken things around the house) so we can happily overlook his flaws (such as likening me to a pumpkin).

For his information (since Valentine’s Day is coming soon), I don’t need roses or compliments. I’ll happily settle for an iPad 3 (and not the gimpy 16GB Wifi one)!

:D