No. 4 : Di kor, you have a lot of meat on your neck.
No. 3 : Why, you think I’m a chicken, is it? (Faulty reasoning : chicken neck don’t have lots of meat but this fella loves his chicken – cooked, not clucking – in fact you can call him a ‘chickenarian’)
No. 4 : No, I think you look like a pig.
Recently I bought a bottle of chocolate spread to make eating bread more palatable for the kids. But it becomes hard to spread after refrigeration. You have to let it thaw a little to make it spreadable. The other half sends no. 2 and 3 to school on his way to work and they can all take care of themselves in the morning. (So I get to sleep in, yeah I’m blessed in this way.)
On Sunday night I told no. 2 : “Before you wake up, take out the bottle from the fridge first.”
I wasn’t aware of the slip of the tongue.
“Yeah, I’ll sleepwalk and take it out from the fridge,” she said.
I was still blur as a sotong.
“Did you realize what you just said?” she asked. I looked at her blankly. No. 1 filled in the gap for me.
” Oh! I meant, before you wash up, take it out first.”
The title of this post should be Think Before You Speak, Check Before You Yell but it’s way too long, hence Hold It…
As a mum, sometimes you tend to fly off the handle at something the kids do or say, right? Just like the other day. The moment no. 3 got into the car, he said, “I need to buy another bag, the bag spoiled already. Not good quality la.” No wonder he was clutching the bag by the small handle instead of hauling it up on his shoulders by the strap.
I blew my top. The bag was less than 3 months old and he had wore out another new bag which I bought for him at the beginning of the year, after less than 3 months too!
“How you carry your bag huh? Don’t know how to take care of your things! You’re like a bull dozer, bull doze everything and destroying them!”
Er, ok, that’s over-generalizing. Don’t we always do that in arguments. You always this, you always that, everything this and everything that. In this case it’s just one bag, not everything.
After yelling at him, I felt better, and worse. Better for letting out steam. Worse for screaming at him. Later when I inspected the bag, I discovered that it was just the buckles that had given way. Two weeks earlier, it was one buckle that snapped, now it was the other buckle, rendering both shoulder straps useless. The plastic didn’t look too sturdy. When buying the bag, I was more concerned that the sewing on the straps would hold. Looks like next time I’ll have to look for metal buckles, if there are such things on school bags.
Other than the malfunctioned buckles, the bag was in perfectly good condition. Despite the broken bar in the buckle, the straps can still be put to used by a spot of sewing. I adjusted the top and bottom straps to suit the boy’s stature so that the bag won’t sit too low on his body when he hauls it up to his shoulders and sew the straps together. Ditto for the other side. Voila! Bag is functional again.
I read this article in today’s Star. Telegraph has the story online but I’m reproducing it here in its entirety. It’s an inspiring story.
The latest publishing sensation Sadie Jones had everything – except for success as a writer. She tells Cassandra Jardine how it all dramatically changed
Aspiring writers will want to hate Sadie Jones. The 40-year-old who is curled up on the sofa of her Notting Hill home appears to have it all: sultry good looks, a happy marriage, two children and no great money worries. Slender in a floaty silk dress, she appears as pampered as the exotic Maine Coon cat that stalks her polished floorboards. On top of it all, her first novel, The Outcast, is number two in Amazon’s bestseller list.
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| Success at last: Sadie Jones |
But stop grinding your teeth. There are at least three good reasons not to want to lynch her. The first is that she has paid her dues to misery and frustration. For 15 soul-destroying years she sat at her computer churning out words that no one had a use for. She wrote four filmscripts and a play, none of which has seen the light of day. All she had to show for her toil was a few lines of a film that went straight to video. “They only used a third of my pages,” she says ruefully.
The second reason not to hurl this paper away in irritation is that The Outcast – about an unhappy, alienated young man in the 1950s – is extremely good. When it came out in February, reviewers compared its delicacy of tone to Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Although it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and chosen as a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, the vertical take-off in sales began less than a month ago when it was chosen as one of Richard and Judy’s summer reads.
But bad writers don’t suddenly become good ones, so why did her luck change? The answer to that is the third reason why Sadie Jones is interesting. In the depths of rejection slip-induced despair she learnt some lessons that other aspirant writers might heed. For one thing, she realised that she was aiming at an impossible target.
“Whenever I had a fantasy, it was always of getting up on to the podium to receive an Oscar, never of getting a book published,” she says in a low, sexy voice that will be yet another of her assets now that she’s in demand on the book festival circuit.
“I wrote film scripts because I liked the idea of being a paid professional, and of working with other people. But it gradually dawned on me that I was on a hiding to nothing because scripts submitted on spec never get made.
“Everybody always points to the success of Withnail and I [for which writer/director Bruce Robinson was paid just £1], but it’s the only example. Films always start life as books, or a producer has an idea and hires a writer.
“What I should have done, if I had been able to conform, was write for telly. I talked to people about that but it didn’t work out – probably because I don’t watch television. Producers can sense when you are doing something in order to get somewhere else. Now I think: ‘Thank God.’?”
However, she didn’t think that when yet another project came to nothing. But, with little left to lose, she decided she might as well do what she wanted during the long hours spent at her keyboard. Instead of writing yet another script, she let herself explore the early life of a disturbed young man who had appeared in one of her rejected scripts. Instinctively, by turning his story into a book, she played to her strengths as a writer. What is memorable about The Outcast is not the scripted dialogue but the nuances of feelings and the atmosphere she evokes of stultifying conventionality in the post?war Home Counties.
She draws a picture of a time when emotional turmoil was buried under the comforting rituals of Church, gin and tonics, and Sunday lunch. Her hero, Lewis, is deeply troubled, yet we never cease to sympathise with him, even when he becomes violent to himself and others. Such scenes are pure fiction, says Jones: “I believe we carry all of human experience in our heads. It’s a matter of finding the nun or the psychopath inside you, of opening that door. Research only makes you feel more confident about making the imaginative leap.”
Yet she speaks so feelingly of the disparity between “the vulnerable inner person and the violent behaviour on display” that it is clear Lewis may not be totally unlike her own adolescent self. She is writing about something she knows when she describes what it is like to want to fit in with conventional surroundings, but not to succeed.
In the arty, haut-bohemian west London set she has now found her spiritual home. But, as a child, Jones felt different from the other girls at her private school, Godolphin and Latymer, because her father was a Jamaican-born poet and scriptwriter and her mother had been an actress. “The other girls all seemed to be called Emily and Sophie,” she says. “Also, I was never a group person.”
While her elder sister was an academic star who went to Oxford, Jones scraped four O-levels and was in constant trouble. “I hated the school, hated the teachers. I was always being hauled out of assembly to change my holey tights. Other people got away with smoking and talking, but I never did. At home I experienced extreme love, but at school, I knew extreme failure.”
Having painted graffiti on the walls and called the teachers “bitch” and worse, she took A-levels at a technical college, decided against university and launched herself into scriptwriting, like her father. Instantly, she landed a commission but, in 1993, when she was in her mid-twenties, the producers dumped her.
Fifteen years of failure followed, during which she and her husband – Tim Boyd of the fashionable architectural partnership Michaelis Boyd – had Tabitha, 11, and Fred, nine. But Jones wasn’t content. “It would have been fine if I was a happy housewife, but I am obsessive about my writing. I worked to keep sane. There was a terrible contrast between my happy personal life and my miserable professional life.
“It is slightly mysterious what kept me banging away. I suppose there were always just enough crumbs of hope: a director who wanted to see this or that script. But I did get very depressed, and I feared not being a good role model, particularly to my daughter, because I was an angry and unfulfilled woman. The lesson I drew from failure is that you must write for its own sake, not for what might come out of it.”
Having acted on that she found that it is considerably easier, as an unknown, to get a book published than it is to get a film script made. On the very day that she typed “The End”, a friend who was becoming a literary agent asked if she had ever thought of writing a novel. Nervously, she handed it over. A month later it sold for an advance large enough for her to be coy about mentioning it. Was it more than she had earned for the past five years? “Easily. But that wasn’t saying much.”
She is now working on her second novel. It will be about “how war and politics impact on a marriage, or vice versa”. In low moments she has to look back over the emails she sent to friends while writing The Outcast to remind herself that, three or four times a week, she was so depressed by the futility of the exercise that her hand was poised over the delete button. What kept her going then were the tales of writers such as Mary Wesley and J?K Rowling who became successful after years of struggle.
“Now,” she says, “it’s nice to be someone else’s hopeful story.”
Big price hike in Little India – Star Metro, Wed, 9 July 2008
Story and photos by ELAN PERUMAL
The cost of two pieces of capati and a glass of teh tarik, which used to cost about RM4, has shot up to more than RM5.
The Klang Consumers Association (KCA) is obviously fuming over the recent indiscriminate price increase by the operators of food outlets.
According to KCA chairman A. Devadass, it is certainly unreasonable to charge RM5.20 for two pieces of capati and a glass of teh tarik for breakfast, but that is what the food stalls are doing.
Devadass said the price of a piece of idli (rice flour dumpling) had gone up from 70sen to 90sen and it was the same case with string hoppers (putumayam).
“A customer who eats three pieces of any of those stuff with a glass of tea or coffee will have to pay RM4.20 for their breakfast whereas they would have paid less than RM3 earlier,” he said.
“The price of thosai has increased from RM1.20 to RM1.50 per piece and a glass of fresh milk is going for RM1.90 from RM1.70 earlier,” Devadass told StarMetro.
According to the revised price list issued by the Klang Little India Traders Association, a banana leaf rice meal with chicken is priced at RM8.80, while the mutton meal costs RM9.30.
Devadass said the KCA had received numerous complaints from consumers on the higher prices imposed by the food outlet operators and he had filed an official complaint with the Domestic Trade and Consumers Association.
He said the escalating costs of essential items like foodstuff had badly hit consumers, especially the low-wage earners.
“The consumers said that breakfast for a family of four, including two children, costs about RM15. A main meal for the family costs up to RM30,” he said.
This means that just the three basic meals of breakfast, lunch and dinner for a family of four would cost at least RM75 a day.
Devadass said although the petrol price had increased by 41%, there was no justification for the doubling of the price of the simple foodstuff such as capati, thosai, idli and string hoppers.
Kampung Jawa resident S. Taneermala, 58, said she had no choice but to pay whatever price for her meals since there was nothing consumers could do about the situation.
“When I’m hungry, I need to eat and the price is something I have no control over. I had to pay whatever is asked,” she said.
There is something we as consumers can do. We can eat out less often. Eatiing-in is the best way to cut down on food bill.
Eating out may cost RM15 for a family of four including two children as pointed out above. For my family of six, with a jumbo roll of bread (which we can’t finish in one breakfast), spread such as kaya and margarine, breakfast costs less than RM5 or slightly more if you factor in the beverage.
Lunch need not be expensive either. Today I prepared pineapple fried rice using the extra rice I cooked yesterday.
Home-cooked dinners can be dished up for less than RM20. Today’s menu to feed six -
One dish meals can even be cheaper. Eg. stewed pork meehoon only cost RM12. One tin stewed pork – RM8, sawi – RM1, meehoon – RM2, oil, onions etc – RM1.
What are you waiting for? Cook-lah!
No, I don’t mean done as in she’s throwing in the towel. Done as in the book is done. I just turned in the manuscript with a bunch of new stories to Eric. The book should be out next year.
I had been dilly-dallying over this book for way too long. It was in July last year that I had resolved to get the manuscript completed. One whole year to get it out! I was side-tracked by other writing jobs and book ideas, not to mention that little bug that so easily infects me – the procrastination bug. But if I really, really set my mind to it, I know I can do it. Case in point – I wrote four articles in less than two weeks to wrap up the book.
Now I can move on to other book projects. Since my first book, it has taken me three years to come up with one book which is way too long. Lord willing if Eh Poh Nim is released next year, this means that I’ve shortened the between-books-period from three to two years. Next target will be one year in between books. Maybe this is too ambitious. But as they say it’s better to aim for the moon so that if you don’t manage to grab the moon, you can still catch some stars on the way down.
Watch this blog for more news on Eh Poh Nim. I love to organize contests and there’ll be one coming up soon from Eh Poh Nim.
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