Long Hours. Poor Diet. Lack Of Exercise. Your Heart Doesn’t Need More Stress.
These are the slogans, in big white text on a lime green background, that assail me every time I take a train to work from Tanjong Pagar. The solution the advertiser offers is to drink more milk. Drink more special, high sterol milk, the new panacea for everything.
It’s perhaps risky of the advertiser to suggest their milk is neutral for the quality of your diet. Maybe they mean it isn’t food at all, it’s some special something that can clean your arteries and then wash away out of your body, unnoticed by your metabolism. I should ask somebody with a degree in biology to unpack that conundrum for me.
It’s also something that La Serpiente would like. Even at her most intransigent, she’ll sweetly ask "can I have some molt?" (pronouncing the word "milk" was never her strong point) before guzzling it. Being told by nine inch high white letters to drink more milk would count as a roaring success in advertising for her.
Although talking of pronunciation, I only found out this week that when she’s yelled "you on me" while doing any of her varied acts of blindingly stupid derring-do, what she’s actually been saying is "look at me". Or so my wife insists. I’m fairly convinced the three of us are just separated by a common language. Who knows what accent Destroyer will get out of this?
My illness is mostly at an end. My midriff is still painful, but I’m no longer riddled with fluid-filled blisters of misery. I seem to have got off fairly lightly from this bout of shingles. Now if the kids would go back to sleeping through the night, rather than this morning’s two-hours-of-sleep shots how, Wednesday should be better than Tuesday.