Do you have any dietary requirements, sir? I was asked that almost all the time in the cruise ship recently. At first it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling. Thanks, they made me feel important, gave very special attention to my requirements. And they called me sir! In the egalitarian Australian society, no one is referred to as sir anymore unless he was an old knight. The last person knighted by the Queen was in 1986, the last of the twelve knights. And then an attempted revival of the monarchy in 2014 saw two more knighted before they were once again removed by the republican PM Malcolm Turnbull a year later. Yet on the cruise ship, I was called sir. Do you have any dietary requirements, sir? Thank you, sir. You’re very welcome, sir. When I was little, I used to call people sir. In school, with my right hand raised, I had to ask at the appropriate time, can I go to the toilet, sir? I had to wait for silence first in case I interrupted sir’s important lesson. In my dad’s shop, all customers were ma’ams and sirs. Well trained by the English colonialists, we behaved with much politeness. Was it about courtesy or subservience? I wasn’t clever enough to ask them. My dad’s shop was a dhobi shop, today it would be called a laundromat. The laundro bit I can understand but the mat bit  (from matic?) still baffles me. Totally laborious there’s nothing automatic about his business. We certainly didn’t clean anyone’s mats back then either. My dad did “dry-clean” an English lord’s Persian carpet once though. Only once. I’ll share a secret here. There’s no known technology in the 1950’s to dry clean Persian rugs. Well, if there was one, it was unknown to my dad. It took him a week to clean (with water) and dry it, not dry clean as requested. Pa and my brother had to deliver the cleaned rug to the lord, in tandem on two bicycles. After they laid the rug on its original location, Pa suddenly and inexplicably could no longer understand the lord when the English gentleman began mouthing at him. He hastily retreated from the lord’s bungalow, left his unpaid invoice on the clean rug which had gained a perfect border on the floor. The lighter shade of floor which framed the rug served as irrefutable evidence that the rug had shrunk.

There’s so much literature these days about the evils of salt and sugar in our diet. By these days, I mean the past two years, as far as my interest in the evils of salt and sugar is concerned. The evils of salt have been known for decades; sugar’s damaging properties on our health, a bit more recently. But I must admit I have reduced my salt intake markedly for just over a year now. The more salt there is in our body, the more our kidneys struggle to maintain the balance of potassium and sodium for osmosis to remove excess fluids from our bloodstream. The extra water retained causes high blood pressure and that leads to all sorts of problems for our heart, arteries, kidneys and brain.

Salt is mainly comprised of sodium with traces of iodine, potassium, magnesium and iron. Salts containing the least sodium are Celtic Sea Salt (33.8%), followed by pink Himalayan salt (36.8%). Table salt has the highest (39.1%). Our body requires salt, but no more than 2400mg a day. More than that is excessive, which leads to many health problems.

So, why is food in Europe still so salty?! Why aren’t they averse to salt? Everywhere I visited, I was made to feel special. Do you have any dietary requirements, sir? Yes, I’m on a low salt diet. Please inform your chef not to add too much salt. But, unfailingly, my food was always still on the salty side. The salt in my body must still be registering Way Too Salty on the salt meter. The meter’s arrow would still be pointed at the danger zone. I have been home for almost a week and on my usual low salt diet, yet I would not be surprised if my sodium levels are still raised. Thinking about this again, I can’t help but feel stupid. Why say low salt? How low is low to the chef? Don’t add too much salt? What’s too much?! A recipe for failure of course. Words are the greatest source of misunderstandings, sir. It was only the last meal there that I woke up to my idiocy. All along I should have said, no, not low salt, no salt please. Many ingredients were already marinated with salt, food cured or precooked, such as the prosciutto, pasta sauces and soups of the day.

Even the lobsters and Alaskan King Crab legs were salty.

The price we pay when we gain knowledge. Knowing that salt is bad for me, I have got used to a low salt regime at home. But, that means the food I look forward to on my holidays only look magical but rate rather poorly due to the relative saltiness. Urghhlings are impossible to please.

My first visit to Doha falls on the month of Ramadan. This suits me fine since I am an IF practitioner. Sounds professional, doesn’t it when I call myself that? A medical practitioner, a law practitioner, an Intermittent Fasting practitioner. Despite being a serious practitioner, I have gained an inch and a bit around my waist during my three week holiday. My body has too much carbohydrates and glucose to burn now, I have to deprive it of these so that it gets back to making ketones instead and to do that, it has to burn fat, not glucose. Apart from being able to fit into my well fitting clothes and not have to change my wardrobe, other benefits hopefully will include lowering risks of heart problems, Type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and maybe even some cancers. Even if scientific studies can’t be conclusive for IF in the future, it doesn’t matter. For me, I am already enjoying one important benefit. Genetically, my siblings all share one similar trait. The only part of our anatomy that is of over generous proportion is our waist line. With IF, I have finally managed to keep mine well behaved.

Ramadan in Doha can be daunting for non Muslims. Upon arrival, we were warned not to eat or drink in public until after sunset. Apparently, a westerner was once jailed for drinking water in a men’s toilet. A public toilet by definition is a public place. It’s in Doha that I found out I have unknowingly been pissing and pooing publicly when doing those necessary activities  in “public” toilets.

An air stewardess encouraged me to visit Qatar’s National Museum, it is simply a beautiful place to visit, she said. But it’s Ramadan, which means opening time is eight pm. I have to leave for the airport at  six pm, so that’s something I will have to miss. The GDP for Qatar must crash during Ramadan, I surmise. The working hours are much shortened.

At the buffet lunch, I felt like taking an apple back to my room, but will that be deemed as stealing in Doha? Would I be risking losing a hand for an apple? Adam and Eve let us down over an apple, I shall learn from their mistake. No apple for me today then. Chickpea hummus will have to do.

At the spa and steam room, it is usual for me to go in without my glasses. Men Only, a sign said. Please do not touch bottoms, another sign in front of the steam room said. Fair enough I thought, this is a Muslim country and it would be very wrong to touch a fellow man’s bottom. The steam was a lot hotter in Doha than in the cruise ship. I imagined the pain of the bamboo clams I once had in Xiamen. Writhing in a slow death, I recalled. A friend ordered that dish for me. I reminded myself that would be the last time I ate anything that was killed in front of me. Urghhling, that makes me a hypocrite. Every life has to be taken before it becomes food. The heat stings much more here. I started writhing too in sympathy with the clams. It got almost unbearable when reprieve came in the form of a huge man in uniform. He released some steam from the room when he opened the door, and peered inside like a security guard. Checking me out? From outside through the fogged up glass door, did I appear to him to be gyrating inside with another man? No sir, I did not touch my own bottom! I was so relieved to be in a Man Only room. No one is next to me to make me look guilty of any perverted crime in Doha, perceived or otherwise. Dare I do the Cha-Cha in Doha? Would it be deemed to be a western form of debauchery in a steam room? After a cold shower, I put on my glasses and checked the sign outside the steam room. This time it reads correctly, Please do not touch the buttons.

On my way to the airport, a cordial conversation with a local revealed that many of my concerns and questions were baseless, based only on fake news and naivety. Observing the rules of Ramadan is a self cleansing ritual, of body, mind and spirit. If you are caught drinking water in public, you wouldn’t be arrested and put in jail. It is out of respect for the adherents that we are reminded of their customs, and we won’t be flogged or have our hands cut off either if we stole an apple. Stealing someone’s wife is a serious crime though, rightly so I suppose.

Doha’s Hamad International Airport is a magnificent airport, almost palatial for my tired feet. Every palace I visited during the past 3 weeks involved a lot of walking. Hamad Airport and the neighbouring royal airport, the stunning Emiri terminal are no different. Both palatial in size and beauty. How many royal airports are there in the world, I wonder, and how many of those are of such magnificence and size. I imagine there would be many good reasons to build royal airports of such splendour. Of course an urghhling like me can’t think of one.

I have been bored shipless ever since I waved goodbye to the cruise ship that brought me to Stockholm yesterday. Having arrived from St Petersburg, this city seems sparse of interesting history and stunning palaces and gems such as those the Tsars left behind in Russia.

Apart from learning about Sten Sture’s victory over King Christian 1 in 1471 at the Battle of Brunkeberg, and his eventual demise at the hands of King Christian II forty nine years later, Stockholm’s history didn’t have interesting characters such as Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Rasputin. Many of Sten Sture’s supporters, nobles and burghers of Stockholm were beheaded in the Stockholm Bloodbath, that deserves a mention, I suppose.

Stockholm, although beautiful and scenic, does not hold my attention for long enough. Gamla Stan was especially beautiful after nine pm when the crowds thinned and the evening light became alluring. Infinitely more inviting without the lime scooters and rumbustious heavy set Americans, many of whom think they own the streets.

To me, Sweden is made famous by her iconic brands such as Saab, Volvo, Ikea, Ericsson, Spotify, Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, Bjorn Borg, ABBA and also for the Nobel Prize. Alfred Nobel was a brilliant inventor; he would have died with a reputation as a terrible urghhling. He was very much alive when he read his own obituary in a French newspaper; the headlines read “the merchant of death” is dead! There would have been nothing noble about Nobel, whose wealth was accumulated from selling his destructive invention, the dynamite. His premature obituary was the catalyst for him to change his will; his fortune would be used instead to create prizes for those who confer the “greatest benefit on mankind” in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. The prize for economics was added later.

My second day here was spent like a homeless vagabond, as described by a fellow traveller. Shipless, and even after a late hotel checkout, I had twelve hours to kill in Gamla Stan. That meant a lot of walking and standing, aimlessly. It was a surprisingly warm day, I may have been described as bored but at least I got to do something I hadn’t done since I was a uni student in 1980. I slept on a green patch of lawn in a park, without a worry on my mind nor a furrow of my brows. What a carefree life it is to not have a task to do or a responsibility to shoulder.

Urghhling, an American couple grunted as they walked past me, were they describing me with my unkempt Rasputin hair and sweat-infused, once-cherished Boss shirt or were they talking about POTUS. Their President this morning unilaterally imposed trade restrictions on the Chinese company Huawei, I wonder how they felt about that. Urghhling indeed.

When I was little, I was alert to the chimes of our pendulum clock. Its metal plate was stamped Made in Occupied Japan. I hated it when it struck six times every evening, that was the wordless instruction for me to close the louvre windows in the front room upstairs.

I grew up in a shop house, the penultimate in a link of twelve shop lots. From the upstairs stone balcony at the back of it, I could see the Blue Mansion across the muddy field from us. Built in the style of the Imperial Era, this was a stately mansion belonging to a Manchu mandarin, a Consul general to Singapore, Cheong Fatt Tze. The only common feature our shop house had with this impressive building was the age (completed at the turn of the 20th century) and the vernacular timber louvre windows. Oh, do not let me forget the other common feature the houses shared. Both were haunted.

To get to to the upstairs’ front room at six pm was a daily ordeal for me. By that time, all the workers would have already left for the day. When I looked upstairs with sad eyes that showed a great reluctance and regret of my task ahead, I could feel the foreboding heavy cloud descending the stairs, the silent command that no one was to walk past the middle landing. It was not uncommon to sense the sudden whiff of floral perfume wafting from upstairs. A sibling many years later echoed the same suspicion I had, that the alluring scent came from the direction of the Blue Mansion.

To get past the middle landing, I had to run up the staircase at full flight, to break past that heavy invisible barrier. That was the easy bit, I could feel the dark barrier but it never harmed me. To get to the front room was a lot more daunting. The last room never posed a threat, it was basked in warm sunshine for most of the afternoon. The middle rooms were always menacing. In front of the third room’s door was an altar table. The brass joss stick urn was never empty of red stick stumps. Hanging a foot above the altar table which was usually covered with a faint layer of joss ash, was my paternal grandmother’s black and white photo. A handsome woman, the matriarch was unknown to us except for her official status and the commanding stern gaze she gave. A creepy corner, it never failed to make the hair on the back of my neck stand as I ran past her photo. You just knew her eyes followed everyone’s movements. The second room was the scariest. It was forever dark and had that dusty, musky smell of death. It was the most dreaded room, used as a store room for excess kitchen utensils, cutlery, glassware for the dead ancestors improperly mixed with exquisite Japanese tableware. Festive occasions were most enjoyable, with the reappearance of crates of Sarsi and F&N’s but they also meant some of us would have to face the agony of being sent into that room to fulfil the list of required glassware and tableware. A dark room not just in terms of light intensity, equipped with a 5W globe, it would remain dark and menacing even with the lamp on.

What I must not look into as I rush into the front room is the dressing table mirror. I cannot describe what I saw in the mirror, maybe that’s due to the blurry apparitions that caught my eyes or maybe my eyes had the wisdom not to see them clearly. Shutting the louvre windows was usually a breeze unless a breeze catches one and it refuses to shut properly. I’d quickly tell myself it was just the wind, as my back felt as if it was being pierced by a penetrating gaze by something in the room.

Recently, a friend shared his experience with me when they visited the Blue Mansion. Today, it operates as a heritage Straits Chinese eclectic hotel-museum, and has appeared in many movies including the Crazy Rich Asians. With its wonderful architecture and elaborate fittings it is no wonder that my friend and his travelling companions took many photos of their stay there. All those photos have since been deleted, they contained some graphic images of them with people from the early 1900’s, some headless, and some too grotesque to repeat here.

Two years ago, I went back to the building that was the old shop house. Nearing sixty years old by then, I just wanted to see the place where I grew up in. It is now a bar. I asked the staff if I could venture upstairs, just to see the front room. I said, “Is that alright? I shan’t be up there long, just a quick browse and I’ll leave, thank you.” It was a hot mid afternoon, just a couple of tourists were drinking at the bar. The Bangladeshi worker gestured to me to use the staircase which was no longer a timber one in colonial style. Carpeted and awful looking with metal balustrades, I eagerly went up the stairs. Upstairs was dimly lit, smelt of stale tobacco, empty of life, poorly maintained, crammed with empty tables and chairs. The layout resembled nothing that I had kept in my memory, no middle rooms, no front room, no altar table. But the timber louvres were still there. As I gazed at them, I could see that little boy struggling to close them all those years ago. I rushed downstairs as quickly as that little boy did when one of the louvres violently slammed shut by itself. I became the foreboding dark cloud that descended the staircase. Urghhling, it was just the wind, again.