Month: September 2006

It was really cold one morning last week, and I mean, like 24 degrees celsius type of cold. The type that makes you want to head out to a coffee kiosk and have a comforting cuppa coffee and an equally comforting piece of confection. Like a brownie or something, because they were going for $1. And that’s cheap.

You know how it is when you wake up some mornings and the weather’s dreary, and you find yourself telling yourself, ‘Man, what a gloomy morning, and man, do I feel gloomy too’?

Yah, so it was that kind of morning, cold, 24 degrees, hands in pockets, shuffling to the coffee kiosk, hair tousled by a stiff breeze. I ordered a black coffee from the kiosk for seventy cents, and contemplated buying the dollar brownie. But three sips into my beverage, a few beads of sweat formed on my nose, and it was no longer that kind of morning, but warm, stifling and uncomfortable.

It gets warmer as the day goes on, and next thing you know, you’re complaining about the heat, and wondering to yourself how people still order hot coffees and teas at the coffee stall across the street, and eat mee siam and mee rebus that you can no longer describe as steaming, because in this weather, if your bowl of noodles still steams, it’s gonna probably melt the bowl.

Gloomy in the morning, uncomfortable in the afternoon (or from late morning onwards), wishing for a late afternoon shower. These are things that one shouldn’t feel, unless one were a farmer or something and one really needed that thundery shower (isn’t that a great term for heavy rain?).

I mean, the weather really shouldn’t affect you otherwise, unless it caused flash floods, like the time I had a classmate in secondary school arrive really really late for his ‘O’ Level Mathematics paper, with still the best excuse ever: “I was swept into the Bukit Timah canal and had to walk back from Jalan Besar”.

Or like when my uni mates and I slept in fear of further hailstorms after the one that ripped through our suburb was classified as the most expensive natural disaster on record. Then again, that provided more of a perverse pleasure than any gloomy disposition, with weeks of stories that went like, ‘hey didja hear about that idiot Singaporean who went out with an umbrella because he hadn’t seen a hailstorm before and wanted to take a look?’ (he almost had parts of the umbrella embedded in his head, but was otherwise unscathed save for some bruises).

Yah, that was fun. In fact, we had further fun off that, because all you needed to do to freak a car-owning uni mate out was to pour a bag of marbles outside his apartment window, and count how long before he rushed out to cover his car with a blanket to protect it from the killer hailstones.

Yah.

OK, what was it I saying about the weather?

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