Maria has done it. And I’ve been thinking about it for a little while now. What am I talking about? Changing my blog theme. So consider this advance notice that things may look a little screwy over the next week or so while I get the hammer and pliers out and try to knock things into place.

Apologies in advance for any mutant effects.

In Poland, the day — which used to be celebrated in a major manner — has now slipped a bit in disuse as the society designates it a “Communist” day. In fact, it was created by the Socialist Party of America in 1909 (back in the day when the USA actually had a socialist party and an Anti-Imperial League; Mark Twain was one of the League’s more vociferous members) and, so Wikipedia tells me:

Demonstrations marking International Women’s Day in Russia proved to be the first stage of the Russian Revolution off 1917.

In Malaysia, the celebrations are low-key, if they exist at all. I’ve tried to find an article in Sunday’s The Star for you but it doesn’t appear in any online searches. For those who have the paper, it’s in Sunday’s edition, on page N17. The article is headed “Women’s Day forum receives poor response”:

An International Women’s Day 2010 forum organised by the … [Penang] … government received poor response with only 10 people attending the morning session although chairs were allocated for 100 participants.

State executive councillor, Lydia Ong, who’s been “active in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) since 2005″ goes on to say that:

“We noticed that whenever forums or talks on ‘hard issues’ are held, the turnout is poor compared too say, classes on cooking or self-grooming.” … Ong attributed this to the “very low” level of awareness among women of their rights.

Of course, as you dig deeper into the article, you find that you had to pay to attend the forum and that the poor response was for the morning, Mandarin, session. The afternoon session, in English, attracted 60 people, which isn’t bad. I still wonder about that comment of Ong’s however: do women shy away from politics and human rights, actively preferring seminars on cooking and fashion? Does anyone have a comment they’d like to make about this?

So, anyway, it’s International Women’s Day today. If you’re at all thankful to the women around you, from mother to co-worker, take a moment to be appreciative. It may be as simple as buying them a coffee or even sparing some time to give your mother or sister a phone call. It could be buying your daughter a lollipop as a treat. Whatever it is, it will be very much appreciated. And a good Day to all!

Knackered STOP Back from Singers yesterday STOP Shopping trip EXCLAMATION Exhausted STOP Wrestling with contract fine print STOP Double exhausted STOP Want to scream COMMA throat raw from repressed anxiety STOP Send scotch STOP

J and I have had the occasional domestic dispute over the past 12 years (ahem). And in the post-dust up analysis, we’ve both come to the conclusion that we’re both “highly strung”, though me more than him. And I’ll cop to that. The thing is, after speaking with a few other friends, it appears that an awful lot of Asian women are “highly strung”. Let’s have a look at that a little bit more closely.

What do we mean by the term? I’m just throwing out stuff that I’ve heard, and think about myself:

• a bit on the defensive side
• can get too focused on one thing
• exhibits insensitivity to others when they are perceived to be in her way
• easy to anger when perceived to be insulted/put down
• very ambitious
• tendency to jump to conclusions, usually to the detriment of her partner
• high expectations (sometimes too high) of her partner
• can be very money/status-focused
• very analytical

I hope you’re starting to get the picture. (And, just to repeat the implication in plainer text, men can be highly-strung too, but we’re not talking about them in this post.) Now, let me wander off a bit to an anecdote.

J was recently at a workshop where an engineer was giving a highly technical presentation. Because the workshop was quasi-public, there were a lot of people standing around watching. An acquaintance of J’s, being short, asked him to take a photo of the engineer because she (the photographer) couldn’t see over the crowd and she (the engineer) wanted to send some photos of her presenting her workshop to her parents.

Just as J finished relating the story to me, a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

“I bet she’s single,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes. We got into a conversation afterwards, and she told she she was. But how did you know?”

You know how you get an insight that takes many hops but coalesces in your mind in a heartbeat? That’s what happened here. I’ll try to explain it to you in fewer words than I used with J. Tell me what you think.

What is of absolutely no doubt in Asia — at the risk of descending into stereotype — is that education is important. You may find a parent who’s inordinately happy with their son for everything he buys for them because he’s a successful, let’s say, landscaper. But no matter how proud his parents are of him, there is always some niggle that they’d be prouder of him if he had a degree. And perhaps worked in an office instead. Or had workers who toiled on his behalf. In an office. Or school of some type.

Here’s the problem with the Asian female. One, they’re told that Education is Critical. “Nobody will love you if you’re stupid.” She gets lots of pats on the head when she tops the class in school, becomes prefect, snags a spot at a good university, and graduates, beaming out of the photo frame that sits proudly in her parents’ living room. So far, so good.

The next obvious thing is to get a job. And that’s where the problems start. You see, the young Asian female thinks that she worked so hard, studied so hard, to get somewhere in life. The young Asian female’s parents, however, have inexplicably changed their tune. From, “So why aren’t you getting first-class honours?” it becomes, “Isn’t it time you got married?”

Now, this will throw any reasonable human being for a loop. What?! Why did you ride me so hard if all you’re going to say when I’m 23 is, “When can I expect the grandchildren? I’m not getting any younger, you know.”

At this point, our young lady is caught in an unfortunate case of cognitive dissonance. Of course she doesn’t want to throw it all away just to play mother, especially not if she’s smart and knows she can climb the corporate ladder. So, instead of marrying, she says to herself: “I just have to make my parents proud of me. And once they realise how important it is that I make something of myself — as a person in my own right, rather than just as a wife or mother to someone else — they’ll understand and approve of me and then we can put this marriage nonsense to the side for the time being.”

I hope you can begin to get an inkling of where the young engineer is in this timeline? Caught in the throes of this mis-thinking, she’s well on the way to seeking approval by sending her parents tangible proof that people hang on her every word. That she is doing Something Meaningful. And it doesn’t involve a wedding ring. Pity it won’t work.

The fact is, it never works, and the nagging grows in scope and frequency. “You’re getting so old, lah. No man will want you soon.” “Why are you so smart? Men don’t like smart women.” “You’re too big for your boots, thinking you can get this promotion/start your own business. No wonder you can’t get married.”

And the young woman keeps on thinking that if only everything looked a bit more sparkly, a bit more meaningful, then things would come good. After all, her parents were serious when they said her education was important. She has more examples than she can poke a stick at to prove that point. So if she can’t sway them from their one-track marriage mind now, it must mean she hasn’t proven the worth of her education — of herself — to them hard enough.

And that’s how it begins. She must be perfect. Her boyfriend must be perfect. Her apartment/house must be perfect. Her car must be perfect. Her wardrobe must be perfect. And, as I’ve said before, because the parents have completely and utterly changed their tune, it never is. The problem is not with her, it’s with them. And, because she’s Asian, that’s a verboten thought because, from Turkey to Taiwan, the authority figure in the family is Always Right.

I am of the firm opinion that one of the biggest obstacles to female empowerment in Asia are the parents. I have seen too many worthwhile lives descend into some kind of obsessive-compulsive tail-chasing because the parents have now summarily decided that they want grandchildren and bugger what it means for their daughters. Marriages have been destroyed through the kind of desperate, serial approval seeking that starts with a conceded ceremony and continues from there till the day somebody drops. For the sake of sanity, it’s got to stop but, short of just waiting for all the ignorant old farts to die out, I’m not sure how.

[NOTE: Jim C Hines recently had a post on rape on his blog, so I thought -- for reasons that will become obvious as this post continues -- I'd move this one up and save Monday's scheduled post for Wednesday.]

I swear. A Lot. If you’re ever in a relaxed conversation with me, the least offensive term you’ll hear me use is “bloody” and you’ll quickly discover that my favourite word (besides “utterly”) is “fuck” and its many, many, wonderfully evocative derivatives. When referring to people, I have no compunction about referring to them as “cunts”, whether in admiration or degradation. To me, it’s just a word.

I don’t temper my swearing in front of the kids, although I have told them not to use such language themselves because they will be judged by it and they’re too young for that to happen. So, despite hearing their mother swear like a sailor from the moment they were born, neither of our children swear. It’ll come, and I’ll deal with it when it does, but we’re not there yet.

As a compulsive swearer, there are a couple of things I’ve noticed about it. For one, it’s definitely all in the rhythm. You have to be relaxed to swear well. I have been more shocked by someone say “bitch” than a friend telling me about a few cunts he ran into at a nightclub. If you haven’t internalised swearing, relaxed into it, woven it into the very cadence of your speech, it sounds more provocative and jarring than if you have.

Does the fact that I swear mean I have a small vocabulary? No. I consider my vocabulary to be decent-sized. And it isn’t a pointer to a lack of education either. Likewise, I don’t regard it as any kind of mirror to my personal moral standing. So, why do I do it?

Well, for one, it’s a habit. People have their own little mannerisms and twitches. Mine is that I swear. That’s just the result, however. In order to understand this more fully, you have to understand three other things, from consequence to source, from least to most important.

One is that swearers swear because the word loses meaning. I once worked with a very nice Basque by the name of Felix. He was a software engineer. And he used to swear a lot. “How the fuck do they expect us to fucking code this shit when they haven’t bedded down their fucking architecture and haven’t fucking prepared proper fucking design documents for it yet?” was along the lines of his usual objection. (That he was right, you can take as a given.) Even in casual Australia, this caused a bit of a stir. When questioned about it, mild-mannered Felix had a ready answer. “It’s not my language,” he shrugged. “‘Fuck’ doesn’t mean anything to me. Plus it’s fun to say.” And he’s right. Having also learnt some choice Chinese dialect words, I can say that calling people some pretty nasty names in another language doesn’t mean anything to me, either.

Two, when I studied martial arts, my training partners were mostly nineteen and male. Do you know how much testosterone is pumping through those young, toned veins? You can almost smell it the moment you step into the kwoon. And do you know how much disregard such young males have for the English language? But, of course, that doesn’t mean that I fell into swearing just because others were doing it. I hope you at least know that much about me, by now. It just made the environment more lax.

Three. Now this is the most important, so I left it to last. And please do think about this one. My previous Chinese boxing instructor used to hold anti-rape workshops. He did a lot of research into the topic. And what he told me was that men often use swear words to shock their victims. Women, not used to hearing such language, would freeze or hesitate when they heard foul words being shouted at them by an assailant. And in that moment of inaction, the attacker would then press his advantage through the use of physical force.(*)

One reason my instructor did nothing to curb the level of swearing in our kwoon was that he had the express purpose of inuring me to it, so I wouldn’t fall into the same trap. What can I say? It worked. A stranger can walk up to me and call me a useless fucking excuse for a diseased cunt, a motherfuckin’ abortion, spittle-flecked and straight to my face and I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Instead, I’d be watching for other things going on — any other people around? How is he standing? What is he doing? How is he moving?

Swearing is a complex topic and the knee-jerk response of saying it’s All Bad and that civilised human beings Don’t Do It is a gross over-simplification. Because of the kind of training I underwent, I know that I’m better able to stand up to verbal abuse as a precursor to violence than the average woman. Because of the kind of world we live in, this training has actually paid off. The “downside” is that I’m not offended by any swearing and, as a corollary, tend to swear a lot myself. You can’t really have one without the other and I have no regrets. Just something for you to think about the next time the moralists start up.

(*) Rape is an heinous invasion of another human being’s privacy and will. Author Jim C Hines (whose blog I read religiously but who doesn’t know me from toffee) has a page on rape at his website. If you know anyone who has suffered rape, please go here for further links and information.

We stopped at The Manhattan Fish Market on the weekend while shopping at Jusco Tebrau City. The Tebrau Jusco shopping complex is a bigger version of the one in Bukit Indah and it has a Harris/Popular book store, so it’s worth the additional mileage (kilometreage?) to get there.

When we first visited The Manhattan Fish Market 3 years ago, it was superb. The food was fantastic, the service top-notch, there were discount vouchers for future visits. Then, I don’t know what happened. The size of the side sauces that come with the meals diminished greatly, the staff became lacklustre in performance and the food, while still okay, didn’t quite zing any more.

Last weekend, giving it one last try before we scratched it from our list of favourite restaurants, The Wast ordered the grilled fish with rice and found two small stones in the rice before I told him to stop eating it. The price of the meal was deducted from our bill, but we couldn’t help but reflect on the falling standards in what used to be a very nice restaurant.

(As a note, The Manhattan Fish Market is a Malaysian-owned and -created restaurant chain. It’s also not cheap, by Malaysian standards. The grilled fish of the day with a drink cost RM23++.)

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. The Wast is very clear on what he eats when we go out, and our ten year-old doesn’t order from the kids’ menus. “The food on the kids’ menu isn’t very nice,” he told me on Saturday. “It all tastes the same and it’s boring.”

He has a point. The Fish Market’s three kid choices were, from memory, fish nuggets with chips, calamari rings with chips, or fish nuggets with calamari rings with chips. Kids at Kinsahi, a Johor-based chain of Japanese restaurants, have a similar choice of fried vaguely Japanese (or other) looking food with fried potato stars and/or chips. Why would you take your children to an otherwise excellent Japanese restaurant only to order them spaghetti with chips? When you start paying attention, you’ll notice that the children’s menu items are way below standard compared to the adult offerings, often greasy, unimaginative and carelessly compiled. Little Dinosaur ordered a kids meal @ Fish Market but the nuggets she received were strangely too soft under their batter, almost a puree. Being the less discriminatory type that she is, she told us it was “nice” but ended up not eating most of it.

It wasn’t until The Wast explained the facts of kiddy eating-out life to me, compounded by Little Dinosaur’s meal, that I saw the truth in what he was saying.

Do kids get such a bad deal when it comes to restaurant food because they aren’t the ones paying the bill? If we are enjoying our meals, do we blithely assume the quality of our children’s food must be equivalent and carry on regardless? Or is it a case of just being relieved that there’s something “kid-friendly” on the menu (buying into the pernicious myth that kids only enjoy food with deep-fried potato strips next to it) and so we’re content to close our eyes to sub-standard quality? (I have to admit, I’ve been guilty of that.)

Right now, though, I have no excuse. Over the past year, we’ve been moving to a policy of always checking that what we feel like eating (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, kopitiam, Taiwanese, Hong Kong cafe, ramen, steamboat, bbq grill, seafood, etc.) is close to what the kids also feel like eating. If we can’t come to a consensus, we leave and find another restaurant. The Wast has been eating from the adult menu for months now (mostly because the kid portions are too small for him. He’s as skinny as a rake, so where he puts all that food I’ll never know!) and I think, after this past weekend, I’ll be pushing finicky, fussy Little Dinosaur more aggressively to do the same. I know what this means — more restaurant-hopping, more cycles as we wait for our children to look over a variety of menus, more disgruntled opinions — but The Wast was right to point out the lower quality of kids’ meals, and we’re happy to listen. It means a bigger restaurant bill, but this is their nutrition and satisfaction we’re talking about. When it comes to food quality, children, and teaching them about quality, you have to go for the best you can afford. It’s as simple as that.

How does “lucked out” mean something positive? I go through some of my ruminations and I’m really after enlightenment here, so if you can help out, please do.

I work in IT Support, so you’d think I’d have some pretty funny stories about customers, and I do. Customers are contradictory, capricious, carping, and other words that begin with “c” (yes, sometimes even that). But, you know, I would take a difficult customer any day over a Sales rep.

Sales, sales, sales. They say we can’t do without them but there are times when that’s patently untrue. Recently, I got off the phone with a Sales rep handling a large utilities company. The man had never met me, or spoken to me before, but that didn’t stop a kind of patronising tirade that basically put all the blame for a current issue at the feet of the company (that is, the company both he and I work for) and absolutely none at the feet of the customer. This is despite the fact I had investigated the issue and found issues and missteps on both sides.

Last month, I had the “pleasure” of attending the call with two Sales reps (the account is rather large). When a couple of us from Consulting and Support pointed out that, in fact, the customer had — in public — said A, B and C, directly contradicting our own analyses of what had gone wrong in a particular situation, our esteemed sales-oriented colleagues had the gall to suggest that while those were the words that were said, we were deficient in “not reading the body language correctly”. At several phone conferences??!! You guessed it; it was Our Fault once again.

These two accounts have one thing in common. The Sales teams are putting together substantial proposals for future business from the customers concerned. So, while they have an all-expenses trip to Bora Bora on the cards, everything that goes wrong at the customer’s site is our problem. They just want to swan in, host lunches and expense it and, in the meantime, leave us with the heavy lifting. Next time, I’ll ask if I get a cut of their commission for making their job so much easier.

Sales reps will do anything to make a commission, and that includes selling their peers, and the company that pays them their salary and bonuses, down the river if need be. I remember the rep who sold a customer ten servers, but only charged them for three support licenses. “Just rotate the licenses to whatever box is giving trouble,” he told the customer, “and that way you’re 100% covered.” Or the rep who didn’t sell any Support at all, but still assured the customer that bugs would be fixed. Guess who used to cop the irate overseas phone calls while he was off in Hawaii getting a suntan?

And there’s the whining. “Oh why can’t you give them X and Y free of charge? They have the potential to turn into a Very Important Customer, and you’re being an obstacle by insisting we follow the rules.” And I have a company-paid holiday hanging on this, doncha know?

And then there’s the shifting of blame. Because, of course, it’s never Sales’ fault that they can’t estimate their way out of a paper bag. “We lost the deal because Consulting didn’t come up with a competitive value proposition.” “If Support Services hadn’t demanded pre-conditions from the customer, we would’ve won the deal.” “Legal didn’t vet the agreement within the accepted time-frame.” It’s never, ever the fault of the Sales rep. Listening to them (and I used to have some small lever of control over a regional Sales team at one point), you’d think they were nothing more than dandelion flowers of fate, prey to every capricious whim that dares blow their way. Poor darlings.

Of course, ever since I’ve decided not to take any more bullshit from the Sales reps I’m forced to deal with, not one has contacted me. Typical, isn’t it? You finally work yourself up to scorching the bastards where they stand, and they don’t front up at all.

(Sorry about Wednesday. Had to get into Singapore for something. Back to normal programming now. Er, maybe.)

I’m going through an Umberto Eco kick at the moment. I finished his “How to Travel With a Salmon” and have delved back to re-discover “Travels in Hyper Reality“. I think I’ll write on that volume sometime in the future, but what struck me was a congruity between the introduction of Hyper Reality (written in the original Italian back in the early 70s) and Immanuel Wallerstein’s latest commentary (this week).

(ASIDE: Immanuel Wallerstein is an American sociologist who’s interested in world systems. He’s Senior Research Scholar at Yale. I subscribe to his Commentaries so get them via email, but the one I’m alluding to (Number 275), can be found here.)

Eco mentions that, on a visit to the USA, he was asked by a reporter how he reconciled his work as a scholar with that of a columnist with one of Italy’s most widely-read newspapers. It’s interesting that Eco sees no conflict between the roles but that the US journalist does.

And in reading Wallerstein’s latest commentary, I was struck by the following paragraphs:

At this point [of great governmental impossible choices] enters that greatest of world pundits, Thomas I. Friedman, to write a column entitled “Never heard that before.” What had he never heard before? He heard non-Americans talking at Davos about “political instability” in the United States. He says that in his past experience such a phrase had been used only about countries like Russia or Iran or Honduras. Imagine that. People actually think the United States is politically unpredictable. And Thomas Friedman never heard it before.

There have been some people who have been writing this, and explaining this, for some forty years at least, but Thomas Friedman never heard it before. That’s because he has been living in a self-constructed cocoon, that of the political Establishment in the United States and its acolytes elsewhere. Things must be really bad for them to recognize this basic reality. The United States is politically unstable – and likely to become more so, not less so, in the coming decade.

While the USA makes a wonderful target for this specific post, I would like to posit that the point I wish to make is broader. See if it applies to your country.

The line between Thomas Friedman and Umberto Eco begins and ends with politics. In Country X (again, is it yours?), the major political newspaper columns are written by people with little knowledge of the subject upon which they’re pontificating. Of course, you get the normal self-serving guest spots by politicians attempting to show how they were more ethical and rational about a particular issue but, in general, the calls to explain — or change — domestic or foreign policy are usually doled out by people in, as Wallerstein put it, “a self-constructed cocoon”.

Thus, an escalation of the war in Afghanistan is usually trumpeted by people with little knowledge of history but their own vested interests. A desire to have a war with Iran is written by people with little knowledge of geo-politics but their own vested interests. And the war with Iraq was prompted by people with little knowledge of UN resolutions … and little moral fibre. But with their own vested interests. As a result, the catastrophic breakdown of the wall between investment and commercial banks was pushed through by financial lobbyists … with nary a word of publicised protest. The anything-but-not-a-public-option medical “reform” was/is touted highly by insurance companies … with nary a word of publicised protest. And the mushrooming of the USA defence budget has been encouraged by arms manufacturers .. with nary a word of publicised protest. None of the above parties are uninterested bystanders looking at the big picture, but very interested players looking at the bottom line.

That’s not to say there isn’t any protest. The apoplexy, disbelief and refutations from certain sectors of the country are strident and never-ending. But, by and large, they are the academics, the intellectuals, and so are beneath the notice of the general population. (When did you last read Gore Vidal or Noam Chomsky? No no, they’re still alive. And still commenting. Just not anywhere the average citizen is likely to read about it.)

What Wallerstein says is correct. The idea of the United States as a politically unstable house of cards is not a new one, but the people who know this, who are aware of this, are not heard because … they’re academics. And Country X is very very firm about drawing a line between its intellectuals/academics and its columnists.

To a degree, it’s also a self-censoring situation. For a non-political reference, just recall how shabbily Carl Sagan, an eminent scientist, was treated by his peers. The derogatory label levelled at him was that he was “a populist”, as if making complex ideas accessible to the general population is a bad thing.

The problem is, of course, it is. Because if you understand things, then you may start questioning things. And if you start questioning things then — oh, I don’t know — you may actually start to behave like a citizen in a democracy and demand answers of those people you’ve elected to their positions. And we can’t have that.

I’m attending a series of Customer Experience seminars at work at the moment and among the many fallacies that the instructor has regurgitated was one particular case study. She detailed a conference where two speakers were giving talks on the economic situation. The first speaker got up and told people that they weren’t out of the woods yet and that things may even get worse. He backed this up with various charts, showing the decline of several indicators. The mood in the conference hall when the first speaker was done, the instructor said, was sombre. The second speaker got up and told people that things were looking up! That the stock market has rebounded. And that major countries are facing solid growth.

“I much preferred the second speaker,” the instructor said. “He was optimistic and he raised the spirits of all in the conference hall. And that’s how you should operate because nobody likes listening to depressing news.”

Really? Is that what people would prefer? Pretty lies over ugly truth? Is that what you prefer? Because, if you do, then you’ve created your own problem. If all you’re after are the happy-happy-joy-joy moments, then you’ve set up a situation where you don’t want to hear from academics about the tortured, ancient morass of history that is the Middle East. And you don’t want to hear from academics why the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act under Bill Clinton was the baddest economic idea of modern times. And you don’t want to hear from academics why a country that condones, and even glorifies, torture (the cosy arrangement between the Bush government and the writers of “24″ being a case in point) is doomed to descend to brutality itself. And guess what happens? You wade into a region you know nothing about, you interfere with the checks and balances of the financial system (such as they are) and you end up dehumanising your entire society. And all because someone with a loud mouth and vested interests told you so, and you didn’t know any better and — perhaps — you didn’t want to know any better.

In the chaotic situation that we all now find ourselves in, cut loose from the tether of any kind of knowledge of how any part of the world works, we are tossed from one giant wave to another, clinging to the authoritative pronouncements of editors, pundits and columnists in our media, all of whom seem to change their opinions at the drop of a hat. One moment, the situation we’re facing is the direst in the world; the next week, everything’s looking up; the following week, it’s all doom and gloom again; and so on.

This is the time when we need, above all, some deeper analysis to understand the big picture and chart a way forward. Every society needs its intellectuals and academics, if only to present something to argue cogently against, if nothing else! What we don’t need, and are getting far too much of, is the kind of ten-second, gimmick-ridden, permanently fickle punditry of the Jim Cramer types. Don’t you deserve better? I certainly do.

So, both Valentine’s Day and CNY fall on Sunday this year. This means a double celebration for all those people of Chinese descent and all those hangers on (like me!) who just like to gorge on Chinese food goodies! However, I will say that this is NOT the time to go shopping. It’s a jungle out there!

After being solemnly informed by The Wast that J and I are not entitled to celebrate Valentine’s Day (“You’re already married, so you can’t celebrate Valentine’s Day and you only give flowers to girls you want to marry”), we probably won’t do very much. Our son’s right of course; Valentine’s Day is a day for lovers, not grumpy married couples with kids and warring domestic pets, so I hope that all lovers everywhere have a great day.

As for Chinese New Year …. Although I’m not an adherent of things mystical, I really do hope that the new year brings a change of luck for me. The last decade hasn’t been fantastic and I could do with being thrown balls of a different spin. To everyone celebrating CNY, have a great time and do take care on the roads, won’t you?

Monday and Tuesday are public holidays in the region, so I’m not sure if I’ll be sufficiently motivated to do a post. We’ll see.

And, in writing news, edits for “Singapore Sizzle” have come and gone, and I’m working on the second book in the “His Bodyguard” series and having a good time. Sian Bernardine and Chris Lance are quite different to Helen Collier and Yves de Saint Nerin, and so is the setting. More on that, maybe next week.

Have a good weekend everyone and have some fun.