It's not just shredded wheat, mind. There are some teabags in the box too, and a container of washing up liquid. All things that it should make no economic sense to fly across the Pacific Ocean in my baggage, yet by the greed of a few shopkeepers in Singapore is made so.
Although I was terribly excited to open the box and look inside, I wasn't so overjoyed to carry it back to the hotel. It's only a mile or so to walk there, but it's bitterly cold this evening, I forgot my gloves and failed to put my hat on before I walked out onto the street. When you're manhandling several kilos of breakfast cereal, you don't have the opportunity to set it down and adjust your headgear situation. So I walked home as quickly as I could, my right arm complaining at all the work I was putting it through, and my ears threatening to fall off the sides of my head.
The trouble is, I'm dressed all in black, and carrying a cardboard box I suppose I resembled some sort of delivery man. That's my explanation for the aggrieved look I was given by another hotel guest as I returned this evening. The guy on the door recognised me and opened the first door for me, but the hotel guest skulking inside gave me a withering look of contempt, the sort that perhaps he reserved for anyone who makes their living delivering cardboard boxes. It's like the US equivalent of reverse-gweilo power.
I thought of stopping and telling him that no, I'm a high-powered executive in a leading e-commerce company and spend my days driving a database, not a diesel truck, but I was a bit out of breath and needed to have a sit down. I walked down the hallway to the lift. Another woman, stretched out in repose on a comfortable armchair, looked at me with a mixture of horror and disgust. What were the delivery men doing, coming in the front of the hotel when they should be skulking at the tradesmen's entrance?
Well, it's a nice hotel but it's not Downton Abbey, and if anyone's going to look askance at the hired help not being servile, it should be an Englishman, not a Yank. I was thinking of going back to remonstrate with her ("look in the box! what sort of person do you think gets paid to deliver shredded wheat to a hotel?") but life is too short, and the cheery receptionist called out hello to me, so it would have looked bad to go back and start a bit of argy bargy. I hopped in the lift and went up to my room, to quiver.
I deserve to quiver. I went for a run this morning at 6am, having woken up at 4am and been unable to go back to sleep (and I only got to bed just before midnight). If that wasn't enough, it was still so dark that when I got to the Mercer Slough, instead of being able to run through the woods, I was greeted with such impenetrable blackness that I had to turn round and go straight back - hardly the sign of a great athlete. Tomorrow, another day.
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