Love is Portobello on a Weekend Morning

Portobello Market
begins here

The people of Portobello

You look wonderful, I told her, may I take your photo? And she smiled.

He sang American Pie with a voice that went straight through my heart.

The most beautiful stranger I've ever met.

Viagra, Pot, Paris, London

(The Good Fairy is a rabbit hole to jewellery wonderland.)

Of course, no trip to Portobello should be without the frivolous Notting Hill fanatic chase (but I was on business... for the Hugh Grant Appreciation Club). I couldnt tell which was The Blue Door, so I took a photo of every blue door I could find..

This has to be it. The Blue Door. Who am I to argue with a sign?

But I secretly wish it could've been this one. Right where we began, only I didn't see it at first. Sign says: " Secret Beer Garden @ the Rear. Come snog in safety, they'll never know!"


Signing off,

your comrade

The Last Day

This is the last day.

I am aching all over and grouchy and my suitcase is 10 kilograms over the limit. Book loans long overdue sit on the dining table, which has been a war zone of unpacked leftovers fighting for attention for the last few days now, and I tell myself I have to find a way to send them all to their respective homes at the airport. My handphone is jammed from the flood of affection the nanyang girls undammed last night, and I leave it choked in case the love I am still waiting for isn't as substantial as I need it to be.

We rush out to our favourite fishball noodle shop for breakfast, then visit my grandparents. My grandparents are beginning their day like they have done for the last half a century. We tease my grandfather and ask him if he wants to go to England with me - he laughs and says in doddering Hainanese he does not speak English. I laugh. Then I catch my father's eye and remember that it was my grandfather who took me when I first started Primary school. He stood outside the classroom the whole day, looking at my seven year old self through the brown window panels. I say in my carefully rehearsed Hainanese (at a speed of 3 words per minute), "Gong gong, I am going to England tonight."

Then we do our last minute shopping - instant noodles in my favourite flavours, more health supplements, more food. My brother insists on getting a pair of new shoes for himself as well, and I am glad that the focus is no longer on me (or my stomach).

The last errand for the day remains, we have yet to buy enough English pounds. I forgot all about money. My parents take the car out and leave me to collect my life. So this is my last day.

My sister gives me a silver, heart-shaped locket with photos of the whole family in it. It is a beautiful. My brother gives me a spork - a spoon and fork combined, with a knife's edge, he explains. I wonder why "knife" doesn't get featured in its name. It could've been called a sporfe, I guess, but then even I know that it sounds much less marketable than a spork. Some things have to be left out. I leave all my pajamas in the closet, and I place my favourite sneakers-with-three-holes by the door. They will be here for me when I get back.

I am dreading going to the airport. There will be those who will cry, those who will make me cry, and those who will wave cheerily and overlook the knife's edge.

This is the last day. But it is also the day before tomorrow.

Chicken Soup for the Ego

King's College.

Hm, Oxford? Cambridge?

Uh... London.

Aha! Excellent choice.

In other words, I have armtwisted the affections of my friends..

You know what makes me feel really good? People who promise to write (not type), especially if they don't particularly like to, but do it anyway because they know how much I love getting mail. (Of course, in one case it was guilt, but it's all the same to me..) What's the point of being 6754 miles away if I don't get snail mail, right?

Extra brownie points for (s)he who promises to write neatly.
(: