The best man

It’s apt that me and the best man at my wed­ding are on oppo­site pages in today’s paper. ‘It’s weird see­ing that’, said my fiancée while she was flip­ping through the National Day Spe­cial. We called the best man, and the best man said, ‘eh, I really look like chow reservist right?’, and I said ‘yah, and you’re one year older than me, accord­ing to the story’.

Hos­san and I didn’t serve NS together. He was a chow store­man at Gom­bak Base, while I was the long-suffering com­bat trooper who at some points in his national ser­vice stint, really believed he was a soldier.

I was the rugby guy and he was the drama club mem­ber who was forced to also join the Gar­den­ing Soci­ety because he didn’t have enough ECA cur­rency (points, they called it — you needed ECA points to get to uni­ver­sity or some­thing). I was the grunt and he was the sen­si­tive new age dude who was sen­si­tive and new age in an age when it wasn’t quite fash­ion­able to be, but still ahead by miles when it came to get­ting along with the girls in junior college.

We were dorks together at our first ‘tea dance’, where we jived to the back­ground ele­va­tor music think­ing it was the discotheque’s (yes, that was the word for club then) music, until the discotheque’s DJ started putting on the real music. Then we jived some more, pre­tend­ing we were intend­ing to do that all along.

We made our own mixed tapes for our own com­bined birth­day par­ties, which we started at the age of 18 all the way to 36, though we keep refer­ring to them as our 24th birth­day par­ties. My mixed tapes were mostly Depeche Mode, his mostly Bana­narama, and he could dance to them to boot, while I merely pouted and mimed Dave Gahan’s monotone.

Next week, Hos­san helps me tie every­thing together, and will announce my fiancée and I as hus­band and wife.

Thanks for being best man by default, dude. As with every­thing else.

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