well, i was out burglaring a house yesterday.

joel swung by after collecting his car from the workshop at ubi and after making several manoeuvers barely this side of legal on the roads of hougang (and narrowly beating a red light) we drive to changi village for lunch. joel says that in exchange for scurrilous stories about xinyi he will buy me expensive chocolate, but i decided that xinyi's honour must be preserved for the time being. this is not out of friendship to our dear miss kanebo, but plain contrariness and cunning, because joel told me i was easy to bully and take advantage of, so i thought i'd take advantage of him for a change and hold out till the chocolate offer was raised. (what is the going rate for scandals, anyway? one box of chocolate can't possibly be exchangeable for more than a bit of playground tittle-tattle.) i had almost persuaded him to drive all the way to maxwell market from katong (after a car wash that advertised itself to be fruttily-snowed, and accordingly priced, but wasn't snowy or frutti) so that i could buy sweet potato flour dumplings (for which addiction i hold yeen teck entirely responsible) but the day's proceedings were entirely poorly timed, and all we were able to squeeze in before his 4pm basketball practice was a drive down branksome road (off tanjong katong) to look for my grandmother's old house, which had been sold 25 years ago, but in which my mother spent her girlhood.

i'd heard so much about the old house all my life (they had a tennis court, on which no one played tennis, but held many barbecues and not a few wedding dinners. all of my mother's friends knew the house intimately (my mother was a great one for bringing stray foreign students home from university for meals) and there are pictures of me, already toddling, in the old house, so i must have been at least a year old before they sold it, though i have no memory of it at all. i thought perhaps the old house would still be standing, as it had been, or renovated, perhaps even with extensions. that wasn't unlikely. they sold the house to a foreigner, and i understand that until recently, there were property laws that prevented foreigners from tearing down or reconstructing an existing property, so the old house might very well still exist. nothing prepared me for a bare plot of land, a slushy expanse of orange mud after the rain, save for some construction equipment and a mobile toilet and a developer's notice on the fence stating that three bungalows will be built on the site. if we had come a few months ago we might have found a house under demolition, but some edifices would probably have still remained. all that was left of the house of old was the house number, not individual numbers screwed down to the doorpost, but one that resembled a car plate, nailed to one side of the gate. i suddenly felt rather sad and joel egged me on when i expressed my desire to burglar the house numbers. when i gave the number plate a tug one side came loose readily enough - the wood underneath was half rotted, and i managed to pull the nails, but the two remaining nails could not be pried off with fingers, and at 3 in the afternoon the operation lacked the necessary surreptitiousness, and sure enough after a while some neighbours showed up so we had to leg it. though joel says afterall if we did get caught for theft or vandalism i could plead sentimental attachment, and why don't we come back after dark with pliers and hammers? (su-lin: why is joel so unmanly? doesn't he keep tools in the car?) and in a pinch i'll get a psychiatrist to say i'm pathologically attached to old things so they mightn't punish me too much. proper planning shall go into the next foray.