About Nude Not Naked

I woke up this morning with a finger tickling me on my left side. I twitched my ten fingers and I was sure that the tickling finger was not mine. I laid still and pretended to be asleep, knowing that Alex is smiling like an elf if I turned over to look. So my 6 feet 2 inch pet elf named Alex continued to tickle and I continued to pretend to be asleep.

After a few minutes, I heard the woodpecker pecking at the bird feeder and jumped out of bed to watch the red comb baby bird pecking on some peanuts. Alex fetched for the white towel and went to the bathroom for his compulsory morning bath. That boy sweats a lot at night *bluek*

And suddenly, out of the blue I remembered an old song and my heart began to sing. Hey diddle diddle… The cat and the fiddle… The cow jumped over the moon… The little dog laughed…

There is always a long pause when the little dog laughed. That was how I learnt the nursery rhyme when I was a child, sat perched at the end of the table, listening to the vinyl playing in the old black plastic record player.


… To see such sport… And the fork ran away with the spoon…


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I smiled, switched on the TV to my favourite presenter each morning and swayed my crossed feet as another nursery rhyme float into my mind.

Such were my childhood. One that was filled with books and nursery rhymes and memories of my father that stretches as far as I can remember. One of my fondest memory I have of my father is him singing “Kookoburra” to me. My father recorded his voice and mine, singing to this song, when I was approximately 4 years old. I always hear how much my father loves me each time I play that recording and what a spoilt brat I was then.

Kookaburra is the epitome of my childhood with my father. Playing tennis in the evenings, picking my mother after she finishes the afternoon session, climbing the rambutan tree for sweet treats and going to the market to purchase coconut hearts. I do not know what is the actual terminology for this part of the coconut but basically it is the soft, sphere shaped white of the coconut. The size of a ping pong ball, the heart is found inside some coconuts and is deliciously soft and sweet to any four or five year old child.

Thirty years might have passed but my father is still as entertaining and youthful as he was years and years ago, when I was a child. Recently he has become internet savvy. These days my father sits excitedly by his laptop whenever he has spare time and he reads news and political gossips. I think he is beginning to realise how addictive internet can be.

“You are STILL at the laptop?” I asked him some weeks ago when he first began using the search engines and owned his own mailbox.

“The dinosaur finally woke up,” he said. His eyes were twinkling like Santa's and he was gleefullly typing on his black keyboard.


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I spent some time doing up this blog template yesterday when my father came online. I had a MSN chat with my father, with Ian in another box. My father was testing my grammar. When I told Ian that, he laughed.

May I remind you that I am already 30 years old but there my father was in the MSN box asking me questions such as:

The difference between:

• Resistant and resistance.


• Evolve and revolve.


• Assist, resist and desist.


• Pass and past.


• Facist, pacifist and anarcist.

I had a ball of time chatting with my father. At one point of our conversation, I changed my MSN avatar to my favourite childhood photo; that of me on a plastic pony. He immediately typed, “Is that you on that plastic horse?”

Years might have passed but no matter how old I get, my father will always be my father and I will always be his daughter. He will always be excited by every little thing I do and he will always be my teacher; teaching me how to be an elegant woman, how a man should be, of love and devotion, grammar, spelling, reading and English.

My first teacher taught me about life and living - be your best and give your best.





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Small Talk
Click here for a list of English nursery rhymes.
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