An early start, confounding brunch

This morning my alarm went off at six. I rolled over, turned it off, and slept for another hour. Then I got up and went out for a run.

I managed 10 miles, which would have seemed easy a few months ago, but today was an unmitigated slog. The only thing that took my mind off the pain was listening to the dragonboat teams, each presided over by one of The Angriest Men In Singapore, yelling at his rowers and telling them to put more effort in. I don't have the aptitude for dragonboating. Or rather, I lack the mental forebearance that would prevent me trying to bash a man's head in with a paddle.

I got home, showered and then found my wife aghast, standing in a puddle of liquidised fruit. We'd failed to adequately secure the base of the blender after the last time we washed it, and so when she'd lifted it up to tip out our smoothies, they exited through the bottom of the blender instead, onto the countertop. The bad news is all that fruit went to waste; the good news is that after we'd scrubbed and mopped, our kitchen has never been cleaner.

Still, I needed food and sleep. We had breakfast at Jones The Grocer in Dempsey Hill. It's a strange place where they only serve brunch after noon. But at noon, surely you're already eating lunch, which means it can't be brunch any more. That seems obvious to me. Not that I'd eat brunch anyway, for reasons I've explained a long time ago. Either way, I got no sleep until 2:30, when we got home and I crashed for half an hour.

But the day was not done. We had an English-style barbecue to go to. That is, it rained constantly, the charcoal refused to ignite, and when we did cook anything, it was charred on the outside and bloody on the inside. Even the vegetarian sausages.

I miss England so much.

The only thing I learned today is that it's useless to light a fire with Singaporean firelighters. They're one of the least flammable things possible - perhaps for safety reasons. We eventually got the barbecue going by setting light to the box the firelighters came in, but even when that was merrily ablaze, the firelighters appeared quite, quite inert. That must be a metaphor for something.