Somehow I contrived to forget to ring Mum last night, probably because I got so caught up in the Chelsea game - I thought a draw was a fair result but was baffled as to how the mercurial Mike Riley saw fit to dole out 7 yellow cards to our heroes whilst apparently blind to a series of infractions (to use a polite word) from the boys in blue.
I made up for it just now to find that she won another twenty-five big ones at bingo yesterday. However, nowadays she appears to regard anything less than a three figure haul as strictly average so there was no real celebration involved. Mind you, she was just off to the chiropodist, a visit to whom she does not look forward, and that may have put a dampener on her mood. It seems there's a particularly unpleasant corn crying out for attention - I don't know exactly what they do to corns, but I'm guessing it's not relaxing.
I was telling her about our little outing to the bazaar at Geylang over the weekend and reminding her of times in the past when she went round it herself. The strange thing about that was how easily she fitted into it all when I'd expected the experience to be utterly foreign. Then I realised that essentially markets are pretty much the same the world over - which, I suppose, is why Noi loves roaming around Ashton, Hyde and Denton markets when we are in England. The only thing I think she found problematic about Geylang was finding somewhere for a quick smoke: the sight of an eighty-odd-year-old ang moh lady puffing away at a tab end did tend to attract a fair amount of attention from startled locals.
I think probably her all-time most startling moment over here though was at a little party poolside at some rather nifty condo when an innocent young lady (local, Chinese girl) confided in Mum how wonderful she (the young lady) thought Mrs Thatcher was. Big mistake - as the innocent realised after a colourful twenty-minute tirade from the old lady explaining precisely why Mrs T was not wonderful. She certainly broadened one or two minds, and vocabularies, that evening.
1 comment:
The last paragraph is particularly hilarious. Well done, your mum! I love wandering round the bazaars during fasting month too -- no one, I think, can resist a good jaunt around a lively market with delicious food and all sorts of attractive merchandise.
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