AN IDEAL LEVEL OF CRUNCHINESS

Last night when I returned home after several hours in the downtown, there was a lovely large tin on the kitchen counter: the Khong Guan EZ Choice Biscuit Assortment.
If you click on the embedded link, it will take you to a picture.
All well-ordered homes should have a tin like that.
Just in case someone who likes nibbling drops by, as well as precautionarily. What if there is an earthquake? You will need some tasty biscuits to calm you down. Thinking, in any emergency situation, is always easier when you have a biscuit with your tea.

A well-ordered home.

Which, apparently, we are not.
This morning the counter was empty. Those biscuits were meant for her
co-workers. As merely an apartment-mate, I do not rank biscuits.
We often chat, as we are in the house at the same times. But not being involved with each other, there are things we do not do together. We are friends. But we do not share biscuits.
That would be a very advanced level of intimacy.
Propriety must at all times be maintained.
Biscuits are, in a word, risky.

Years ago we shared.

At present, I lack someone to have an occasional biscuit with.
In some ways, life is a bit more boring now. It is biscuit-free.
Uncomplicated, too, but I'm not sure that that is a good thing.

Go ahead, click on that link again. Isn't that a charming picture?
I think so.


康元餅乾

I have this rather disturbing mental image of myself several years hence roaming the wilds of Nob Hill in the middle of the night, with a brand new tin of biscuits, and a thermos of hot milk-tea, looking for feral raccoons, crows, and perhaps sea gulls, with whom to share a biscuit and a delicious hot beverage.
The middle-aged social butterfly.

Moth. Social moth. If it's night time, it probably isn't a butterfly.

I've always found assortment tins incredibly alluring, their cheering visuals and stately presence a comfort to have in one's life.
But, of course, a single man cannot possibly gasak an entire tin by himself. The tins are too large for one person. They need to be shared.
That, too, is a paradigm inherent in the tin; it speaks of plurality, companionability, and pensive social crunching.

At the very least, someone who comes over once in a while, not merely to poke one with a sharpened stick to see if one is still alive and perhaps elicit an entertaining squawk of outrage, but someone who will happily sit down and have some tea.

Khong Guan Biscuit Factory (Singapore) Ltd also have cashew nut cookies, by the way. Which I found out quite by accident while exploring their site. Still haven't found the egg roll cookies (dry sweet hollow tubes with an infinitely pleasing flaky friability), but I am absolutely certain that they make those too, as I can distinctly remember buying them. All good bakery companies in HK and S'Pore produce egg roll cookies. I just don't know where they've hidden them on their site. One container should cost about four or five bucks, and even with several tea-time visits, there will be enough to last nearly a month.

This afternoon I shall probably head over to Stockton Street to purchase a tin of egg roll cookies.


I need them.



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