Anniversaries of Birth-Days

Hello, my name is Sick Like Dog. Which is how I came to be stuck in a hot little room with a dead chick, Kami Sakura. Easy pickings for a weekend dinner.

Said chook felt faint at the prospect of something somewhat indelicate being done to her with a lemon.

1 chicken
salt
pepper
butter
olive oil
lemon

1. Give chook a rinse.
2. Pat dry, paying special attention to her under-wing area.
3. Massage with butter.
4. Anoint with olive oil.
5. Season with salt and pepper inside and out.
[At this point, she will ignore your offer of chardonnay.]
6. Roast at 220°C for 1h.
7. Deglaze pan with residual chardonnay.

Very Dead and Also Resting.

My name is Pukka, I live on the second floor.

And enough to shred and make a sandwich of good thick bread, slightly melted "cave-aged" gruyère, lingonberry jam and fried sage leaves.

After superinfecting the office, managed to recover somewhat in time for the boss and colleagues poking their heads round the piles of paper with a cake (and the injunction not to blow out the candles for fear of infecting the uninfected - a heavy reference book snapped close suddenly did the job as well);


a satisfying lunch with colleagues at Brotzeit, satisfying someone's sauerkraut cravings, discussing parenting styles;


an old friend popping down for lunch at Ajisen, chatter about missionaries and OMF, old preachers and male leadership in churches;


surprise longevity buns during a very tasty work dinner at East Ocean Teochew Restaurant where the off-menu food was fantastic and remarks were continually made about my relative youth amongst the two tables;


the mish-mash hilarity of too many journos and ex-journos in the same room brimming with stories of the gross and grotesque and something about mystery shoppers and food reviewers,

washed down with much alcohol, salty Sakura tea, and fortified with three different types of cakes;


good shabu-shabu buffet at En Dining, Crown Centre. Well-marbled sliced beef, good beef capaccio, yummy grilled beef cubes, sashimi salad, bittergourd with egg and spam. The yakitori was ok. But the chicken dishes were either made from poor quality chicken or overcooked. An interestingly milky sake not on the menu. Later, the smoochee was traumatised, but the smoocher was quite proud of himself. Still later, the 12 year Bowmore would have gone down even better after a ski trip, while lounging before a roaring fire in a snow-covered chalet. Godstuff gossip;


favourite Teochew-Hokkien ngor hiang and hei cho, fish maw soup, stodgy dark noodles (and not so favourite roast chicken) at Beng Hiang;


long overdue catch-up nosh at Nirai Kanai then dessert at P.S. Cafe, Palais;


and of course, what would celebrations be without a juicy patty of dead cow, with bacon, melted cheese and portobello mushroom. Behold a burger so thick you'd have to dislocate your lower jaw eating it. Washed down with Flying Dog's Doggie Style Classic Pale Ale.

While sms greetings clogging up the inbox, cards in the mail, presents tied up with silk ribbons and good food with good friends and much more slated in the weeks to come are all nice things, I have never really gone in for the celebrating of birthdays. Too me-centred. And I hadn't even asked to be born, so not much of an achievement there.

However, listening to William Taylor of St. Helen's Bishopsgate on a series on Discipleship with Distinction: the Book of Daniel has made me repent of this. In Daniel, we see the God who not only outlasts generations of Babylonian kings who come and go like a breath in the wind, we also see the God who raises up and brings down these kings to suit his purposes. So while birthdays aren't celebrations of me and a measure of my personal popularity, they should at least remind us that it was God who ordained this birth, who kept such-and-such a person watered and fed and gave him/her growth, and who ultimately gave him/her life for only one purpose: to worship God.

And the scales (Daniel 5:27) that weighed the great kings of the past like Nebuchadnezzar and Darius and the lesser kings like Belshazzar will too weigh us. If a birthday boy/girl was sent to meet his/her Maker still togged out in party hat with cake knife in hand, will we be found wanting, massively failing the purpose of our very existence?

Possibly a self-check question best asked more than once a year.

(Notes, mostly to self, 'bout changes in interests, recently observed:

1. fiction - either written or in audio-visual format is rarely interesting anymore. The gritty reality of really living in a community of sinners and being fairly aware of own sinfulness is enough drama for me.

2. nature programmes - having grown up on marigold yellow piles of National Geographic, we took a break from all that eating, thinking that Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Home would be just the thing to end the week. But though the aerial shots were beautiful, the irritation just grew through the 90 minute film. Glenn Close as narrator tried to make the most of a weak emotive script that unsurprisingly failed time and time again to acknowledge the Creator, instead attributing the miracle of life to the earth or to inheritance. (Watch the movie here.))