Liquids


This morning we had another smoothie, although I failed to collect photographic evidence. This time we used a mango, a punnet of blueberries, a banana, half a packet of spinach and some yoghurt. Blended together, that gets you a gruesome grey liquid, speckled with unhappy looking black dots, but it tasted absolutely fine. As long as you like mangoes, because it didn’t really taste of anything else.

I rushed out of the apartment and off to work, and then had to come home at lunchtime to fetch the lunch I should have remembered to take with me. It is only a ten minute walk in each direction, but in the middle of a Singapore day, when only mad dogs and Englishmen should be out, that’s precisely far enough for me to work up a terrible sweat, returning to the office perspiring, ruined.

Having survived this, after work I went for a run with the guy who sits next to me. This was probably a mistake in the hot weather, because we did 7 kilometres in just over 35 minutes, including the big pause we took after his heart rate exceeded 190 bpm. That would be ok if he was a hummingbird, rather than a bloke who sits in an office all day. He wasn’t even drinking coffee, for goodness’ sake.

Still, we survived, and I walked home, ready to bathe the baby. I hadn’t accounted for how tired the run had made me though; I was an utter incompetent, hardly capable of making myself a cheese sandwich without collapsing into tears of frustration. My wife, seeing sense, told me to lay down and sleep next to our child for half an hour. That would have ensured my recovery, except after five minutes my child made a series of improbably loud, wet and foul noises, indicating it was time to change her nappy instead. At least she didn’t wake up, so we could strip and change her and then I could pass out again, getting enough nap time to then be able to give her a bath.

Felicity loved her first bath, hated her second, and seems to be alternating ever since then. Today she was happy to have her hair washed, then got very cross after we tried to clean her armpits, but on the positive side she didn’t defecate into the bathwater as she had the last time we tried to clean her. Truly, these are the memories I’ll always treasure. Not the first time she smiled at me, or turned her head to follow my voice. No, the time she voided her bowels while I was trying to give her a bath.

Although that’s much too optimistic. I’m sure I’ll remember the times she did that. Very much plural.

I should be happy the only liquids of note today were the smoothie, the sweat, and the stuff in her nappy. Nothing horrid in today’s bath.

Afterwards, I went to a comedy night over a pub in Boat Quay. Intermittent microphone problems, and my narcoleptic state aside, enjoyed it a lot, although I seem to now have the seed of a sitcom with a literal checklist of characters gestating inside my brain.

Or that’s just gas.
[bath, filth, baby, reach exceeds grasp]


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