Might Be Mad

"Was she awake behind her pale lids, he wondered, her nakedness a deliberate provocation? He suspected not. There was something too artless about the way her legs were splayed, too childlike about the way her hands were tucked up against her breasts. And the final proof'? She was snoring. If this was indeed a performance, then that was a touch of genius."

It's quite a fortuitous thing, I’d say; a bout of illness has reacquainted me with the joys of a steamboat. Nothing fancy, it’s just a boiling pot of stock, into which you put an assortment of ingredients only limited by the your imagination and the diameter of your steamboat. The Swiss have fondue, we have steamboat. And into the pot, you can have anything from chicken broth (an excellent choice for weak stomachs or when you’re still suffering from stomach flu) to chilli oil Ma La soup, which is numbingly spicy and apt to give you diarrhoea unless you’re made of sterner stuff. But some people swear it’s how southern Chinese women stay svelte and shapely, as opposed the popular conception that it is the rigours of planting rice that explains their enviable BMI. But back on the subject, it sure beats eating porridge. The very idea terrifies me. But steamboat, it seems, never gets tired. I could eat it every day. For a successful steamboat, I have found the following ingredients to b...

As I write this, my faith hangs as claws dug into a chalkboard, slipping and making an obscene racket. Life is hard. I have often even, exclaimed that life sucks. Yet how precious is life! What would we do to extend our own lives, or even that of our loved ones? Anything. But as experience shows, such iron resolve is in vain, and largely irrelevant as events overtake our lives and best laid plans like an incoming tide over a sand castle. As individuals, we can effect woefully little; the Bible tells us, we cannot make ourselves any taller, or our hair, any blacker. Where then the cause for arrogance? It must come from stupidity, or else one is living in denial. As I do. Not intending to be coolly self-deprecating, I count myself most unworthy of a Christian. Bitter, cynical, angry; carnal, worldly, and alienated, I am in speech, and action, near indistinguishable from the heathen. Yet I am a Christian because I believe in the God of the Bible, and have a relationship with Him; a relat...

Of course, Asher had been a spy. And when Jan van der Platz--sixteen and Asher's loyal shadow for weeks--had learned that Asher was not German but English and had confronted him in tears, Asher had shot him to protect his contacts in the town, the Kaffirs who slipped him information and would be horribly killed in retaliation, and the British troops in the field who would have been massacred by the commandos had he been forced to talk.

"She wondered, too, whether she had hampered them by giving him her virginity. She knew that in his mind, she had forced them to start with him taking something from her. She could tell he felt guilty about it. The ribbon of blood on the sheet was a simple statement in cipher: this is serious. Blood , she wrote in her diary, is the colour of love ."

Learned a couple of things over lunch yesterday, and being the generous soul that I am, I thought I would share. Much of this concerns boiling eggs, which to me are one of nature's most sublime gifts (along with clouds and light breezes), full of goodness despite the cholesterol controversy, voluptuously beautiful and pregnant with a wealth of erotic metaphors in their admiration, preparation and general experience. Simply, one could not be near an egg without thinking unclean sorts... in a clean sorta way. I love eggs for the shape of the shell, for which I am at a loss for words to describe, beyond “perfect”, “sublime”, “mmm”; the shocking luminosity of “sunny-side up” which lights up a morning better than a kiss; the fluffiness of the rice wine infused egg white that forms the soft bed of a steamed crab; the rich taste and texture of the yolk, the way this seduces one's sense of taste, touch and smell in the mouth, before doing wonderful things to my head as it is swallowed....

I am sure, on many counts, we do. As do many, many things, in all fairness. For starters, the world, and life, just ain't fair. The good die young and we are left with assholes for company. People who need money, can't ever find enough of it; those with time on their hands have no idea what to do with it. Toast always lands on the side that's buttered, etc. But back to Christians. Irking the world with silly notions and unwanted good intentions; always talking about salvation, thanking an unseen God for everything, always trying to convert people to Christ who is not even older than Buddha, have no respect for tradition (most offensively, at the refusal to partake in traditional funeral rites)... I shall not explain everything at one go; the virtue of brevity is, after all, that it is relatively painless. But primarily, Christians suck because the world would not let us be. Christians (and here, I am generalising -- there are just so many types) have an other-worldly mindse...