On the Blink of Extinction

These days, I try not to blink. Because I’m scared that, if I do, it’ll be New Year’s Eve, and there’s no way in hell that I’m ready for that yet.

Someone needs to tell me: How could it possibly be the end of the year already? Where did 2009 go? I actually remember it just being 1999. Back then – and excuse me if I sound like my grandmother – everyone was really excited about the year turning 2000. Y2K was on everyone’s mind. No one wanted to fly on New Year’s Eve just in case, when the clocks struck midnight, all the computers shut down, and Superman can only be in so many places at the one time.

Imagine if all the computers shut down today. Half the world’s population would drop dead from instant Facebook deprivation.

I started 2009 with so much hope and promise. There were so many projects I wanted to do. It was such an exciting time, though Amanda later pointed out that it was probably the champagne breakfast that made everything look so glossy and rosy.

“I’m going to brush up on my French,” I said on 1 January.
“Oooh, mais oui?” Saffy cooed. “Well, I’m going to lose three kilos! I am determined to fit into my skinny jeans again!”
“I’m going to find a boyfriend who adores me!” Amanda sighed blissfully.

Twelve months later, I can barely count to ten in French while Amanda is still wasting her time with the Cockroach, her long time on-again, off-again insectile looking boyfriend. “This is so incredibly depressing,” she said recently, her luxuriant hair vibrating with anger and missed opportunities. “Why am I still with that incredible loser? Why am I not working this out? I must be missing something. Because, seriously? I deserve a whole lot better. I’m beautiful, goddammit! And this kind of crap does not happen to beautiful people!"

To which Barney Chen posted on Amanda’s Facebook wall: “Oh yes, it does. Just look at Madonna!”

Meanwhile, Saffy…Well, let’s just say, it’s not looking so good in Saffyland.

She wandered into my room the other day, her face white as snow. “It’s not possible,” she breathed quietly. “How did I put on an extra two kilos? I’m supposed to lose three, not put on another two!”
“Well, you have been going to a few parties.”
“But I don’t ever eat anything at those parties. I just drink the free booze!”

I didn’t have the heart or nerve to tell her in person, so I went onto Google and emailed her several links to articles detailing the calorie count of your average Cosmopolitan, and gin and tonic.

This morning, Saffy announced that from now till January 1, she’s not eating any solids. “I’m just going to drink water and eat celery sticks,” she said with the kind of grim determination you normally associate with people who are about to get a face-lift and tummy tuck.

Amanda pulled a face. “Celery sticks? Why celery?”

“Because they have no calories in them. Apparently, you use up more calories just chewing them. So, it’s a win-win situation,” Saffy said. There was a haunted look in her eyes.

Not so random memory: When we were kids, the new year was such a magical event. In my books, it was way better than Christmas. Because somehow, in the space of seconds, we left behind the present. Yesterday, last week, last month, two seconds ago, last night…all these events suddenly, magically, became something called “last year” at the stroke of midnight. It was the coolest trick.

But marking the passing of another year is cool only when you’re five and the days seem so much longer. These days, I wake up, stumble into the bathroom, blink, and it’s the end of the day, and I have no idea what I’ve done all day. And increasingly, it seems to me that it’s not just the days that are disappearing without a trace; it’s also the years. At this rate, I’m going to be wearing adult nappies, hooked up to a respirator and eating jelly because no one can find my dentures.

“And the last words you hear won’t be ‘Good night, see you tomorrow’ but ‘Switch him off!’” Amanda said grimly.
Saffy says she doesn’t care if those are the last words she hears. “As long as I’m thin and can fit into my skinny jeans, you can say whatever you want to me just before I croak it!”

So no, I’m not looking forward to New Year’s Eve. I’m not ready. Which is why I’m not blinking.

Facing Facts

So after the longest time of holding out, I’ve finally succumbed to the Dark Side, otherwise known as Facebook.

“I don’t need to stay in touch with 500 people I don’t know,” I would tell anyone who asked. “I have trouble staying in touch with the two people I already live with!”

“Please don’t tell anyone you’re touching me!” Saffy SMS’d me once.

But one rainy Sunday, when there was nothing on television and I’d already read my latest copy of 8DAYS from cover to cover, I found myself signing up for a Facebook account. Just to see what the fuss was all about. And also because you know something is not quite right with the universe when your mother emails to ask why you’re not on Facebook.

People must have installed some kind of a ‘Jason is now finally on Facebook!’ alert, because within minutes, messages began popping up on my screen. Many, from people I’d not seen or heard from for years. And quite a few from what I was convinced were complete strangers, possibly stalkers or potential mass murderers looking for fresh new victims.

Surely they couldn’t have been waiting for me to sign on, I wondered.

“Wah, what took you so long?” Melinda Goh wrote.

I sat for a while wracking my brain trying to remember who the hell Melinda Goh was. Absent mindedly, I clicked on the ‘Confirm’ as friend button, figuring I’ll work it out eventually. Later that night, after watching ‘Single White Female’ on DVD, I got up out of bed, logged onto Facebook and removed Melinda Goh.

“I can’t believe you’re actually on Facebook! Welcome!” Jenny Tan fluted across the internet.

“Post something on your Wall!” Darren instructed.

I stared at the screen a bit longer. And then picked up the phone.

“I don’t know what to say on my Wall!” I said to Saffy.

“Hang on, I’m coming to your room,” Saffy said as she opened my bedroom door, a little breathless from the exercise of walking 15 feet. She flopped down in the chair next to me. “Really, how you ever evolved from a tadpole, I’ll never know. Just say anything!”

“Like what?”

“Just say, ‘Sunday blues’ and then hit ‘Share’!”

“And what would that do?”

Saffy’s bosom deflated. Obviously, I was a lost cause. “You don’t have to do or say anything meaningful!” she sighed. “Facebook is just an excuse for people to waste time and be sociable! It’s sharing whatever is going on with you right now. I just posted a YouTube link about a Rottweiler puppy with the hiccups.”

“Why?”

“I thought it was cute. It’s just like a diary where you record things that interest you, or just reflect your state of mind at the time. Only all your friends get to read about it.”

“And that’s fun?” I asked.

“Sometimes, it’s better than sex,” Saffy replied firmly. “Ooh look, there’s your mother! She’s got a lovely profile picture! All that bling! Let’s see how many friends she has,” she said, her fingers clicking expertly over the keyboard. “375!"

My sister wrote to me (on email) saying that it was really depressing that our 60 year old mother had more friends than her three children combined. I replied it was really depressing that I still hadn’t posted anything on my Wall besides ‘Sunday blues’ which generated 35 comments, most of which ranged from the inane (‘Ya, me too!’) to the positively imbecilic (‘Sunday got colour, meh?’). That last one was from Melinda Goh, before I removed her from my friends list.

My cousin David posted a picture of a traffic jam that he was stuck in. I commented that I hoped he had both hands on his steering wheel, and as soon as I hit ‘Share’, I realized how much that made me sound like my naggy Aunt Carla. I spent the next day tortured that I should have included a smiley face in my comment.

I somehow wonder if I’ve missed the boat on Facebook. I still don’t get it. All my friends seem to spend their whole lives on it. I was at a dinner the other evening and Mike would whip out his Blackberry every time a course arrived and tap on the keyboard for a few seconds. After a while, I asked, “You’re not Facebooking this dinner are you?”

“Please,” he said, sounding just like Simon Cowell. “Facebook is so yesterday. No, I’m Tweeting!”

Just what I need: another stupid social networking tool I have to learn and then abandon two seconds later. Call me a tadpole, but I think I’m going back to posting letters.

Fatal Attraction

Anyone who’s been a date recently will know that it’s a cruel, vicious world out there. If you thought the slave gladiators fighting the lions in the Coliseum had it rough, you’ve not had to deal with the pain, humiliation and sheer nervous stress that come from spending a few hours with someone you like. And might possibly like a lot more if he/she would only agree to go on a second date with you.
It’s especially worse for women. For some reason, bum dates just seem to wash off men. It must be a superior genetic code encoded in our DNA that was left over from our cave days. “Bad day hunting for a mate? Not to worry, just go across the valley and club one over the head and drag her back by the matted hair. Oh, and while you’re at it, can you bring back another mammoth? We’re running low for winter. Cheers, darling!”
But give a girl a bad date and she falls to pieces.
“Why hasn’t he called?” Saffy screamed the other night. It was a full 48 hours after her first date with the delightfully named Bip Lim. Which, as Amanda pointed out, was not unexpected. “You can never trust someone whose name sounds like a Korean appetizer,” she said firmly.
Apparently, Saffy’s trolley had crashed into Bip’s in the spice section of Cold Storage. She took the location of the first meeting as a good sign. He was, according to Saffy’s breathless description, tall, well built and impossibly handsome.
“He’s an ABC!” Saffy said, her eyes shining. “Do you know how rare it is to find an unattached ABC in this town?”
“Sorry, is that Australian or American?” Amanda asked.
“American! He’s incredibly sexy. Have I said that already?” she Skyped Barney Chen who immediately asked if she was sure Bip didn’t bat for the other team: “Because in my considerable experience, ABC men who are tall, well built and impossibly handsome are…well, me!”
Saffy replied that the entire time they were chatting in the supermarket, his eyes were glued to her breasts. Amanda pointed out that meant nothing, adding, “Arthritic dogs can’t take their eyes off your breasts. I sometimes can’t take my eyes off your breasts!”
I really don’t need to tell you the rest of the story. If you’ve ever been on a date, you’ll know the scenario by heart. But for those of you innocents out there who still believe in fairy tale romances, sit up and pay attention to these cheat notes because you’re going to need them one day.
Bip asked Saffy out on a date. She spent the next week in a state of extreme sexual tension. She bought a new dress and borrowed Amanda’s Jimmy Choos and Bottega handbag. She had a facial, manicure, pedicure and a head to toe Dead Sea mud body exfoliation. Four days before the date, she stopped eating any solids and by the evening of the date, she was exhausted, malnourished but thin.
The instant she got back from the date, she disappeared into Amanda’s room where they went over every single second of the evening, covering everything from what Bip wore, to word for word recitations of what he said and what his facial expressions were as he was saying them.
The next day, Saffy kept her handphone glued to her side and checked it every two seconds for a missed call or a message from Bip. By lunchtime, she was a complete mess.
“He’s probably busy in meetings,” she told Sharyn.
“He’s got a very stressful job,” she Facebooked all 345 of her friends.
“Maybe he lost my number?” she asked Ah Chuan, our cleaning lady.
“You don’t think he’s been in an accident, do you?” she asked me.
“I have a really bad feeling about this Bip Bam Bong,” Amanda muttered after the first 36 hours had come and gone without a squeak from Saffy’s date. “You’d think though that she’d recognise the signs by now. This isn’t her first date!”
But here’s the thing: dating is a bit like giving birth. It can be so freaking painful. But once it’s over, and you’ve recovered, you kind of forget how icky it was the first time round. So you go again. And again. It’s not that you never learn, but I figure it’s nature’s way of making sure you keep dating, when the natural instinct is just to stay home for the rest of your life. Otherwise: hasta la vista to the human race.
Saffy says she doesn’t care. She’s decided to grocery shop online.
She’s also been crying a lot.

Talking Heads

Forget about the Virgin Birth. There are enough mysteries in this world to fully occupy all our waking hours without having to deal with the parentage of someone who may or may not have been who Dan Brown says he was. Like how telephone marketers just seem to know to call at exactly the most exciting bit of Desperate Housewives. Or why some people still think it’s acceptable behaviour to clip their fingernails on the bus.
But the greatest mystery is The Female Problem. This is not to be confused with The Male Problem. Because this is what The Female Problem looks like:
Amanda: I’m so angry with Jason.
Saffy: Oh my God, why? What happened? Tell me everything!
Amanda: Well, I’m having a hard time at work as you know. The case is [Blah, blah, blah. You don’t need to know what the case is about. She’ll spend the next 10 minutes talking about how difficult the case is. That’s all you need to know.]
Saffy: That’s terrible. How do you balance all this with your social committees and gym classes?
Amanda: That’s the thing! Men think we just get out of bed looking the way we do and that children just grow up by themselves, and the food magically appears on the kitchen. And [Blah, blah, blah. The next ten minutes are about how without women, men would just fall over and die.]
Saffy: Then what happened at work?
Amanda: Well, you know my colleague, Anna? She’s the one who went to SCGS and thinks she’s superior to the rest of us just because we went to JC, and [Blah, blah, blah. The next ten minutes are about what a first class bitch Anna is with long detailed examples.] And the worst thing is, she’s been trying to sabo me from the moment she joined my team.
Saffy: But why?
Amanda: Well, on her second day at work, she showed up in this Prada dress. You know how last year Prada was really big on lace and [Blah, blah, blah. Ten minutes on Prada’s 2008 Fall collection]. So, I said, “Wow, they must have given you a big starting salary!” I was just saying it like a joke, and she gives me this dirty look and ever since then, she’s been very snippy.
Saffy: Wow, so sensitive.
Amanda: I know, right? So, today, this is what happens [Blah, blah, blah. You know the drill by now.] I was so angry. I came home and told Jason about what happened at work and the first thing he does is say, “Oh, why don’t you just report her to your boss!” And I was, like, what is wrong with guys?
Saffy: Don’t you just love how they go charging in and try to save the world?
Amanda: Every single freaking time! It’s so annoying!
Meanwhile, this is how The Male Problem unfolds:
Jason: Hey.
Karl: Hey, buddy. How’s it going?
Jason: Alright. Amanda’s in a bit of a mood with me.
Karl: Oh. That time of the month?
Jason: No. She had some problem at work. One of her colleagues is being mean to her. Said some things about her and is making her life difficult. I told her to report the bitch to the boss. And then she got mad at me.
Karl: Oh. Man, that sucks.
Jason: Tell me about it.
Karl:Want a beer?
Jason: Sure.
So, here’s the thing. It’s a mystery how women are able to make a 24-hour period stretch into a week. It’s the only way to explain how they get so much done in a day. My mother always said that if you want a job done, give it to a busy woman. It’s true. No one knows why this is so. It just is.
And the other thing is that as busy as they are, they will always, always, always have time to talk about the problems in their lives. They love to talk about problems. Not just theirs. Anyone’s. Including their 567 closest girlfriends’. Talking soothes them. It makes them happy, secure, fulfilled and connected. To get the same feeling, a man would need to discover the cure for cancer.
What a woman does not need is for a guy to tell her the solution to her problem. She already knows what the solution is. She knows what to do. She doesn’t need you to tell her. She’s probably already done it. You’re just meant to nod and look sympathetic. Remember that the next time you open your big mouth and try to be helpful.

Art Attack

Here I am, gentle readers, in Paris on a little vay-kay, as they say, with the parents. We’ve rented an apartment just behind the Pompidou, that wonderfully designed modern art gallery with all the coloured plumbing and electrical piping on the outside of the building. Which means that every day, when we emerge from the apartment and head for a morning café and pain au chocolat (why does even a chocolate croissant sound sexy when it’s in French?), the Pompidou is the first thing we see.
And you know it’s got modern art inside, because in the vast cobble-stoned entrance, there is a giant column about ten metres tall, on top of which sits an enormous gold flower pot.
When Saffy saw the pot a few years ago on our first trip together to Paris, the first thing she said was, “Seriously? An empty flower pot? Painted in gold? Someone got paid to make this?”
That’s the thing about modern art. It always excites such extremes in opinion. In most cases, you either love it, or you hate it with a passion. Which is not the case with something like the Mona Lisa. I’ve yet to come across someone who’s said, “The Mona Lisa? That piece of crap? Seriously? Someone got paid to paint that?”
I remember once wandering around an art gallery in London and found myself standing transfixed before one of the pieces for at least ten minutes. After a while, I looked around, searching for a hidden camera, or just waiting for someone to pop out and sing, “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!”
Because the exhibit in question consisted of a little plinth on which was balanced a scrunched up ball of white paper. That was it. It wasn’t folded into a delicate origami. It wasn’t painted. It wasn’t festooned with holograms or painted with tiny images of the Mona Lisa. It wasn’t anything. Just a scrunched up ball of what was probably photocopy paper. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen.
Just then, two people came up behind me. One of them gasped. “Oh my goodness!” she said with the kind of accent you don’t normally hear outside of a Merchant Ivory movie. “That’s astonishing!”
“Isn’t it?” her companion said. “I think it’s one of his most moving works! His grasp of motion is just flawless, I think!”
I had to check that they were looking at (and talking about) the same exhibit I was looking at. Again, I glanced around with a nervous smile for the hidden cameras. Mentally, I berated myself for not seeing why that bloody ball of paper was so moving. I felt like an artistic Neanderthal.
That’s why modern art makes me nervous. I find myself unable to express an opinion about anything just in case I expose my horrible ignorance about the subject. What if I say I like something only to find that all the arty farty people think it’s revolting? Or, worse, what if I really hate that oil painting and it turns out to be one of the most important pieces in the artist’s catalogue?
And now, years later, I found myself in the Pompidou in a state of nervous artistic tension. Saffy SMS’d me from Singapore: “I can’t believe you’re putting yourself through all that rubbish again!” One thing you can say about Saffy is that she never has any doubts about herself. If she decided tomorrow that the world was flat, she’d have no trouble sleeping.
I stopped in front of a painting and I swear, I had a mini nervous breakdown. I use the word ‘painting’ loosely because there was – how do I put this precisely? – nothing on the canvas. Not a scratch. Not a daub of colour. Not a pencil dot. It was just a white canvas.
In my mind, I imagined the artist going down to his local art supplier, picking up a fresh canvas frame and then going straight to his art dealer. “Voila!” he says, as he hands over the canvas. “My latest work! It’s called ‘The Transition of Volatility’. It’s my best work so far!”
The art dealer looks at it and whispers, “My God, this is revolutionary!” before he slaps on a $1m price tag on it. A few days later, some sap from an art gallery comes along, takes one look at it and declares, “My gallery simply must have this! It’s such an important work!”
And so here I am standing in front of an empty canvas hanging in one of the world’s most prestigious art centres, and I’m still waiting for someone to tell me that it’s all a big fat joke.

Home Alone

Ask anyone who’s been single a long time about what she fears most and, chances are, she will tell you (if she’s honest, or failing that, drunk) that the one thing that keeps her awake at night is the thought that she might die old and still single. And by old, she usually means 40 years of age. (Ask a teenager, and he’ll tell you old is 30. He, of course, has no idea and part of me so wants to be around with a video-cam when he hits 30.)
It’s one of the cruelties of each passing year. And it really hits home when you’re filling in your personal details on the website and you get to the bit about your birth date and you find you have to scroll down for what seems like an eternity before you get to your year of birth.
And then it occurs to you that somewhere out there, like that Linda Rondstadt song, there are actually some people who were born in, say, 1997. That was the year ‘Ally McBeal’ first aired, way before Calista Flockhart was in ‘Brothers and Sister’; Lucy Liu was a nobody; and ‘Friends’ was still a fresh TV show. Especially when you remember that Jennifer Aniston hadn’t even met, married and divorced Brad Pitt yet. For these 1997 babies, 30 isn’t going to happen till 2027, by which time, you’re going to be…
Well, the thought doesn’t even bear thinking about, really.
But then, one dark night, when it’s storming outside and you’re stuck at home watching an illegal download of ‘Flashforward’, your thoughts turn to time and what you would do if you could predict your life 6 months from now.
“I’d better not be single,” Saffy threatened. “I’ll kill myself if I’m still living with you two!”
Amanda and I looked at each other.
Saffy said, “What? Why are you looking at each other like that?”
Amanda coughed. “Well, we’re not quite sure how to break this to you,” she began gently. “It’s just that, well…”
I’m a firm believer in ripping off the metaphorical bandage. “Amanda’s being sent to her Hong Kong office to work on that case of her’s for two months, and I’m going to London for a month with my parents. On holiday. It’s going to be horrible, but they’re paying for it. So, uhm…” I trailed off in the glare of Saffy’s disbelief.
As she told her best friend Sharyn the next day, “God almighty, those two might as well have just stuffed a pillow over my face, killed me and then shoved me down the rubbish chute! How can they leave me alone for two months! What kind of inhuman people are they?”
“Aiyoh, they not your husband, what! How can you stop them from going?” Sharyn said reasonably.
Saffy puffed up. “Excuse me,” she said in a chilly tone. “You don’t go and leave your poor single flatmate alone for months on end! If I wanted to live alone, I wouldn’t have had flatmates in the first place!”
“You come stay with me, lah!” Sharyn offered brightly though, as Saffy later reported, you could tell it was only a half-hearted offer. “I’m sure she thinks I’m going to seduce Alvin!” Saffy said and added, “In his dreams!”
“It’s only for a couple of months, Saf,” Amanda said desperately recently shortly after Saffy suddenly burst into tears at the dinner table.
Saffy sniffed into her tissue. “The scary thing is that I could trip and fall in the shower and nobody would know I was dead! Nobody! And by the time the smell from my rotting body seeps out into the corridor, it will be too late!”
“Pooch will call for help!” Amanda said. “He’s very clever!”
I coughed. “Uhm, I’m sending him to a dog hotel.”
Saffy looked up. “Good idea. Because I so don’t want him around when I’m lying there dead!” she declared. “He’ll probably start snacking on me! By the time you guys come back, I’ll just be a pile of neatly sucked bones!”
Amanda looked down at her beef stew, and pushed the dish away from her. Saffy sighed. “This is just great! I’m single and about to die alone, and without having had sex in nearly 8 months! I might as well be back at home living with my parents. Where is the justice?”
That night, she fed Pooch an extra serving of dinner. “I need all the time I can get for the emergency crew to get to me!” she told him. He never even looked up from his bowl.

Mass Communication

This might come as a shock to some people, but I actually remember a time when people actually corresponded with letters. It was quite relaxing actually. You wrote what you had to say to the other person, slipped it into the envelope and posted it. Then you forgot all about it for weeks on end, until the other person replied eventually. In the office, once you’d sent off your stack of letters, you still had time to knock off early and go grab a game of golf before dinner.
These days, I don’t actually do any real work till after lunch as it takes me that long just to get through all my emails and catch up on Facebook. That’s the trouble with instantaneous communication. There’s just not enough time. You send a note, and two seconds later, you get a reply. So you feel compelled to write a reply, and a reply comes shooting back. And on it goes. And before you know it, it’s time to retire and cash in your CPF. And you’re left with the haunting feeling that somehow you kind of should have done more with your life instead of hitting that ‘Enter’ button 5000 times a day.
Meanwhile, your boss wants that report filed while you are on leave. “Surely they have internet at that resort? You can do some work while you’re there, right? And we can call you on your handphone?” (Bosses can be total assholes, but that’s a topic for another column.)
And then there’s Facebook. My cousin David spends his whole life on it. Every minute, he’ll update all 589 friends with what he’s doing. But it’s not as if he’s telling us how he’s saving his world, or how the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol are going. Instead, they range from the stupid (“Need to pee”) to pseudo-philosophical. “Why?” went one of his posts. This elicited 34 ‘Comments’, and 20 ‘Likes’, which led me to wonder whether I was missing some hidden code. “Why what?” I asked him on e-mail. I got a smiley face in reply. A few minutes later, he posted “Things are turning to prime time!” I stared at that post for a bit, and then removed him from my friends list.
And a few weeks ago, Amanda asked me if I was on Twitter.
“Seriously,” I replied. “Why do I need yet another mode of communication? I can barely keep up with what’s going on in Facebook, and last time I checked, I have 45 new emails.”
Amanda sniffed. “Email is so last century! Nobody emails anymore except to send documents.”
According to Amanda, these days, you can’t get ahead if you’re not on Twitter. Something about condensing information to its bare essentials and then transmitting it to an exponential database. “You never know who you might meet this way,” she said wisely as she tweeted on her Blackberry that she was living with someone who wasn’t on Twitter. “I’m a follower of Oprah, Paula and Ellen. I really feel connected to them!”
I peered over her shoulder as she scrolled down to a recent tweet by Paula Abdul: “Just got back to the hotel after a day full of meetings. I haven't slept! Early night for me. Love you all”.
In spite of myself, I asked, “Where is she?”
“London. She was supposed to be there earlier for Simon’s birthday party, but then she got sick and her doctor stopped her from getting on the plane.” As I later said to Saffy, it sounded like Amanda was in daily BFF contact with Paula.
Saffy shrugged. “Well, I’m following Ashton and I can see why Demi is in love with him.”
I blinked. “Ashton who?”
The bosom inflated. “Ashton Kutcher! Please keep up! I’m also following Anderson Cooper. I keep hoping he’ll get more personal like where he’s going to have dinner, but his tweets are really so deadly boring. All he ever talks about is Afghanistan and the Gaza crisis. I’m sorry but a crisis is the fact that I’ve not had sex in three months!”
I’m still holding out on Twitter though. As it is, I’m now looking at my Facebook friends with the kind of critical eye you’d use to decide who to throw off the lifeboat. I can barely keep up with correspondence on email. Do I really need more friends?
Saffy told me this morning: “Keep this up and you’ll be that guy who dies alone in his bathroom and doesn’t get discovered till the smell seeps down the corridor!”