Basket.

Ever bought a $57.95, hard cover, 600-page book and completely forgotten about it? Well, now I have. Niall Ferguson's War of the World lay comatose behind my chair even as I looked for some way to spend a quiet day. I needed my mother to remind me about "some book you bought that time" (in Chinese). It's embarrassing.

I think I'm absent-minded and rather blinkered a lot of the time. I nearly lost my IC once because I put it in the book-borrowing machine at the library and forgot to pull it back out after I was done. Fortunately someone returned it half-an-hour later, just as I was on the way to lodge a police report. I can't take too many scares like that one. Also, I seem to take an inordinately long time to notice certain things; someone close could change their spectacles to a completely different colour and design and I can take something like two weeks before I realise it - thus being subjected to much eye-rolling derision.

My family sardonically likens the far-too-late surprise I always show to Columbus' sense of wonder on discovering a whole new continent. I deserve it.

Somewhat surprisingly, I am also extremely poor with dates. I cannot tell you offhand the date World War I officially began, and I once put the Anschluss in 1934. Most mortifying.

In any case, tdoay is a convenient public holiday I can spend with my "new" book, and a chance of a breather before the hopefully chimerical terror of tommorrow's audit. I can't help but feel that two years of blood, sweat and toil, first in the sodden, mosquito-infested outfields of Singapore then in the rather less uncomfortable but sometimes no less menacing atmosphere of the office, lead right up to this moment. But surely I'm exaggerating. Whatever happens, I'm gone within the next month. Hopefully Thailand will be a go, barring floods, because it's been six years since I last stepped off this island, Pulau Tekong and Pulau Bukom (yes, I did go there once) excepting.

I really need to see the world because Singapore isn't just the opening of a well through which one can only see the sky, it's a pinprick of light streaming through a boarded up, tinder-dry, watering hole.