August, 2013 - cushtie.com - Page 2

Month: August 2013

  • Remembrance Of Beards Past

    Today I went to the barber to get my beard and moustache trimmed. My moustache had grown so bushy that it wasn’t just beginning to cover my top lip: it was starting to get stuck in my teeth. Simple things like drinking soup or kissing my wife were becoming rather uncomfortable, and this was after […]

  • Living the dream

    Because I’m a lazy ne’er-do-well, I didn’t have a smoothie for breakfast this morning: the blender languished in the sink, unwashed and unloved. I had awoken from a troublesome dream within a dream. In the dream I’d been dreaming about, I’d borrowed a policeman’s bicycle and was riding it to Dover. I dreamt that I […]

  • A good start

    It’s strange how your tastes change. If you’d told me even six months ago that I’d prefer raw spinach to chocolate, I’d never have believed you. But here we are: half a packet of spinach, a punnet of blueberries, a punnet of raspberries, a spoonful of cocoa powder, two spoonfuls of flaxseed powder, a glass […]

  • Short Long Run

    Your long run should only be about 20% of the total distance that you cover in a week. That’s partly to prevent some intrepid (but idiotic) wanabee marathoner from trying to jog round the park once every evening, then make up his (and it’s pretty much always a male) mileage by running 60 miles on […]

  • Signed, sealed, delivered

    Happily, our daughter’s Dependent Pass was granted today, allowing her to remain in Singapore with us. It’s an amusing looking document, her face floating high above the normal position on an identity card, grinning happily out at the world. It expires in five and a half months (at the same time as my visa does) […]

  • Further Baby Inspections

    Tomorrow we have to take our daughter to get her Dependent Pass. A few days ago we wheeled her in her stroller down to the Riverwalk building, where they looked at our documentation and then started the processing. There were two odd things about this.

  • Adventures at the call centre

    For the last few days, I’ve been bombarded with sales calls from a Mumbai call centre. In the UK, some people get quite exercised about this, as though an unwanted phone call is much worse if it originates in the sub-continent, rather than from an office which doesn’t have to pay international calling rates. Perhaps […]

  • Singapore Cyclocross

    Singapore Cyclocross

    (If you know what cyclocross is, you can skip this first bit and start here. If you don’t know what Singapore is, perhaps you should skip both bits.) Cyclocross Cyclocross is a type of bicycle racing invented by mad Belgians at around the turn of the 20th century. Most people enjoy riding bikes in the […]

  • Back up again

    Preparing for tonight, I kept worrying that I had too much material; I’d chop and change and keep coming up with ten minutes when I only had seven. It began to feel like a curse: all that stuff to pick from, without a way to be sure that what I was leaving out was worse […]

  • Timing

    Tomorrow I’ve got seven minutes on stage, so I’ve been rehearsing. Somehow in the months I’ve spent away from regular performance, my set has got sloppy and fat, and what seemed to fit tidily into five minutes has mushroomed in more than ten, and that’s assuming nobody laughs and I maintain a constant stream of […]