Though English is not my mother language, after a decade of living in the UK, I now even think and talk to myself in English. From time to time though, I am reminded by certain phrases that actually maybe I am not quite a native speaker. Still, I maintain that I am one … well, most of the time.
Here are twenty two things I have discovered about food by trial and error. Some of them may surprise you!
‘Why can’t you sit still like your cousin?!’ my mum scolded me at one of the family gatherings.
Those three words ‘like your cousin’ that fell onto my ears loud and clear seemed harmless. But they were the very codes that wrote the invisible script insistently working in the background of my mind, dictating my every move.
‘My poor brother! He had a good brain, but it malfunctioned,’ said my mum. ‘He was very bright,’ she continued, ‘but crazy from birth.’ Annoyed, I defended my uncle, ‘No, he wasn’t crazy. He was just different.’ I knew that fell on stony ground. She grunted some sort of agreement with my statement, but she still believed him to be crazy and will forever remember him as ‘my poor crazy brother, A...
I hate filling forms. They always ask for my first name and last name. I always have to make those up as I don’t actually have a first name, forename, last name, surname, maiden name or middle name. Then there’s also the decision as to whether I should put down my Burmese name or my English name. Grrr … life shouldn’t be this complicated. It’s no good telling the forms that I don’t have a last...
As part of my job, I engage in small talk with a lot of people day in and day out. ‘How are you today?’ ‘I’m fine, thank you. And you?’ ‘I’m alright. Thank you.’ At this point, I or the other person either shut up or look to the weather to continue this intellectually stimulating conversation. Bad weather days are perfect for this purpose. That’s one of the reasons I don’t resent bad weather. The...
It was the evening of April the 1st, 2019. I was walking back home at a leisurely pace softly humming the song I hadn’t been able to get out of my head for the last two days. As I was approaching my house, the cluster of tall trees came into view. Underneath them were the thin bony trees with bare gnarled branches sticking out towards the street. In darkness, stiff and motionless, they assumed...
‘What a stink!’‘It smells like sewage.’‘It smells like dead rats.’ What opinions these people have of the fruit that I worship! I never thought that I would feel personally attacked because of a fruit. A fruit that doesn’t look attractive. A fruit that is not juicy. A fruit that is the size of a football, brown and grey and has angry spikes. A fruit that lets out a scent that can fill a whole O2...
One Saturday, I decided to walk around Chesterfield town centre on my own. Guess what happened? As I watched with amusement, I saw lots of cars on the road grind to a total standstill. Not only that, one little incident reminded me of how I was once mistaken for a life-size doll …
As I reached the top of the slope lined with trees rustling in the gale, a pack of about forty dogs suddenly came into view. I froze. While I tried to make sense of what I saw, there appeared a man riding a big shiny black horse. He was wearing a red jacket, cream trousers and black riding boots. His short blond hair ruffled gently in the wind and his handsome face assumed a reassuring look that...