All Mouth and No Trousers - Sichuan Food in Singapore

It is a truth universally acknowledged that women's jeans are the tool of the devil.

We have access to excellent advice here at the Privy Counsel, what with being in communication with so many intellectual people, and one piece of advice that has really stayed with us comes from Australian Friend and goes, "When buying jeans, go for the tightest you can squeeze yourself into. They will stretch". This is good, solid advice, and was confirmed by the semi-hot dude who sold us a pair of very nice and very tight jeans once.

There is, however, a problem with this approach. It impedes breathing, blood circulation, and digestion. It became apparent, for instance, that wearing the jeans mentioned above caused us stomach pains and shortness of breath. (Seriously, one might as well be wearing a fucking corset.)

A trifle! you might jeer, derisively, while sipping your fennel twig tea, sitting down carefully, lest your jeans split, on a velvet chaise-longue from which you will not be able to get up due to your poor circulation and propensity to faint. Well, at the Privy Counsel we like to stay not just intellectually, but physically active (within reason). We are rather fond of breathing, and doing stuff, and eating things. So for a while we took to wearing skirts.

This constitutes a change, rather than a break - you still get misery, but at least it’s a different kind of misery. A skirt usually doesn't have pockets, meaning you have nowhere to put the random, crumpled-up post-its that are the basis of survival in this perilous world; it necessitates the wearing of tights, which will leave your crotch sweaty and uncomfortable; and it will worm its way around both horizontally and vertically, requiring you to keep pulling the fabric into place in the manner of a Tourette’s-addled drug addict, scratching and yanking at random parts of your body, lest you abandon your skirt to ride up to just below your arse, leaving all of your thighs bare for pervy old men to leer at. (Try keeping this up while running for the bus.) Also, when teaching, a skirt that keeps riding up is a seriously uncomfortable thing to be wearing, on so many levels. Skirts, like jeans, are not good.

It's not just us. Tight jeans are DANGEROUS.
Image: doctorsrepublic.com

So we bought some less tight jeans. (This was not easy, by the way. Have you tried looking up women's jeans online to see what's available in the shops? There is a plethora of jeans, sure, but they are all modelled by skeletal women with the kind of shape that means you might as well have put the jeans on a pair of stilts, or a baby giraffe, for all the good it will do you in determining how the jeans will look ON YOUR ACTUAL ARSE. Wouldn't it be good if jeans models didn't look like a pair of stilts, or a baby giraffe?)

This worked really well until they - as Australian Friend had warned us, many times - stretched, and started to sag. If there is one thing a toilet blogger does not want while engaging in intellectual pursuits, it's a pair of jeans sliding downwards, and dragging one's underwear with them. Jeans, in our opinion, should stay firmly in place, and not go anywhere.

To make a long story marginally shorter, we found an internet tutorial on how to take in the waist of a pair of jeans. We performed this operation the other night, meaning our new jeans now a) don't sag, and b) don't allow us to breathe, circulate blood, or digest food. We're back to where we started, and are considering joining a religious cult of some kind, in order to be able to wear a tent with impunity.

Caitlin Moran obviously manages to find jeans that are both comfortable and attractive
- certainly in these pictures she appears to be breathing and performing all normal bodily activities 
including intellectual exertion, while looking leg-thumpingly gorgeous.
Where does one buy jeans that allow one to do all of these things?
Image: spillerena.com

Our actual point with this harangue was that we haven't got round to posting Medievalist (With a Side Interest in Roman Archaeology) Friend's fantastic pictures from Singapore yet, due to being preoccupied with breathing, putting the sewing machine back, and picking bits of thread and fluff off the furniture. Let us quickly post the pictures now, before we faint from oxygen deprivation.

Medievalist (With a Side Interest in Roman Archaeology) Friend says:

I've been meaning to send you these for ages! These are from my trip to Singapore last year. The first three photos are the best toilets I have ever seen, from The Jewel Box in Singapore. The toilets have floor to ceiling windows which look out over the whole of Singapore bay (view included). We had to make a pit stop there after a certain relative's bum couldn't handle the delicious Sichuan meal we'd just eaten! 

The second photos are from the loo at Singapore zoo, but many loos in Singapore have that classic open garden thing going on. It's so cool! 

The final set are from the Singapore Night Safari, which is totally awesome, but I had to wait until people had left the dunnies before I took them. In all, Singapore is basically better than the rest of the world at everything, toilets and autocracy included! 

P. S. I only saw one loo in Singapore that didn't have sensors on the sinks. Blended taps ain't got nothing on this!

Isn't this beautiful! And disability-friendly, too - check out the shorter sink!
Does this remind us of something? Well, yes. The Battlestar Galactica bogs!

This is very stylish, but, as we famously complained once in Iceland, a place this posh should be able
to afford doors that go all the way down to the floor. (We have a horror of flimsy cubicle doors.)

Loo with a view!

Same problem with the doors, here.
But look! You can almost see Medievalist (With a Side Interest in Roman Archaeology) Friend in the mirror!
Truly a sight for sore eyes!

Masses of points for the lush greenery and mixer taps!

Doors.

But greenery!

Wasn't that lovely? Do you yearn for a warmer clime, where men are men, women are women, and all taps are mixer taps and most have motion sensors? We sure as hell do!

This post is quite long now and it appears we are expected to do actual work today, so we should probably just fuck off. But there ought to be a festive video. This one seems eminently suitable, being tropical (like Singapore), flamboyant and musical (like Medievalist [With a Side Interest in Roman Archaeology] Friend), and festive (like this bog blog, and also like Medievalist [With a Side Interest in Roman Archaeology] Friend). Also, like us, Elton John appears to reminisce about the jeans of his youth, which somehow allowed one to breathe and didn't rip except perhaps if one slid on one's arse down a massive rock.

Damn it. We just dropped an ibuprofen in our tea, and haven't got a spoon handy to fish it out with. Definitely time to fuck off.

Festive video - Elton John and the Muppets, Crocodile Rock

Related Reading

Our favourite post (so far) featuring Medievalist (With a Side-Interest in Roman Archaeology) Friend:
Hungover Ranting: Festschrift to Medievalist (With a Side-Interest in Roman Archaeology) Friend

An account of all the different ways in which a pair of tights can ruin your day

All posts featuring Medievalist (With a Side-Interest in Roman Archaeology)

All posts featuring Singapore

Another zoo-related post: HTFU - Wipe for Wildlife

Here's a random thing that a friend sent us, that we though was deliciously ironic