Saturday Reviewed

Listening to: Hot Stuff - ROLLING STONES - Jump Back- The Best Of The Rolling Stones

A brief entry before I crash, exhausted. At work today at the school which was formerly the SCGS, three things: 1. The road outside was chockers with star-struck fans, who were lining up to obtain Jolin Tsai's autograph. Who the hell is Jolin Tsai? Exactly. 2. A group of old SCGS girls were having a school reunion at their old campus, wearing their old school uniforms! I walked up, lugging some gymnastics gear, and saw several figures in SCGS uniforms, which, when I was a schoolboy, we thought to be the nicest (most revealing lah) girls' uniform around. I walked closer and slid my glasses onto my face and saw that in those uniforms were women whose right to wear those uniforms in a decent manner had long since been revoked. I can't quite describe it now, apart from my sequence of thoughts which ran thus: "wow, SCGS uniforms.... girls.... WHOA! JEEZUS! Ol' ladiez in SCGS uniforms! That ain't right!" 3. I went down the road to the Old Chang Kee curry puff and miscellany kiosk to buy a coupla puffs and skewered squid balls (ouch), and this girl, maybe in her twenties and part of the autograph hunting crowd popped right in front of me in the queue and brazenly just ordered a coupla puffs for herself. I am still feeling glad I shouted loud enough at her for her to jump out of her skin, mutter "wah lao, xia shi wo (wah lao, scare me to death)" and take her rightful place at the end of the queue. At home after work, I spied a copy of today's The New Paper, on the front page of which featured a snippet of a story about a WW2 airman who fought in the D-Day campaign, bailed out, got captured and escaped his German captors. Why is this unusual? He was the only Straits-born Chinese (a.k.a. Singaporean Chinese) to be a flight lieutenant in the RAF. Pretty brief, the story (but then The New Paper is like that, you know?) I did find more stuff on this story, and I'm sure the Chinese papers did a better job with it. I'd be more certain if only I could read. Addendum: I just remembered another Straits-born Chinese (well, half-Chinese) who was in the RAF. Thanks to my endless obsession with rugby: Rory Underwood (Girls, you will like him. Only he, like all rugby players, has no neck) was England's most capped rugby winger (1984-1996) and record try-scorer (49). He was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, to an RAF officer and his Malaysian Chinese wife, who, as winger Rory's mother, was discovered in a survey to be the most recognisable face in English rugby, given her very animated responses, captured on television, to her son's famous exploits at Twickenham. She was later to appear in a television commercial for Pizza Hut, which featured her tackling her son's rugby opponent (Jonah Lomu) and pizza thief/bully so that her son could have some Super Supreme. OK, I'm digressing, aren't I?