What a fun poster for learning the alphabet! The hiding “M” is a cute touch (which no doubt helps the aesthetics, too).

Please pardon the radio silence over the last couple of days because I was busy becoming/being a rookie dad to a baby girl called Eliza.

Baby and Wife are now safely home after a couple of days in hospital. It’s been great fun so far but a lot of hard work, too. One may be adept with Photoshop shortcut keys and dexterous with CSS shorthand selectors but I am fast finding out that there is no easy way out with this parenting thing.

And yeah, there is no Command-Z (or Control-Z) for things like midnight tantrums and unexpected bowel movements during nappy changes either.

We worry about our children getting in with the wrong crowd, taking drugs, drinking, teenage knife crime. Anutans worry about their kids playing homemade ukuleles.

›› Sounds like a great place to live, no?

The Wife and I just got back from a good five-day holiday at Koh Lanta. It’s a quaint, unspoilt and sparsely populated island in the south of Thailand. There are some great beaches and clear waters in Lanta which we had heard about but didn’t experience.

Because when we were there, it was raining most of the bloody time.

Although it was the ‘green season’, it rained in the day and through the night, which was a lot more than we had expected. We caught a couple of hours in sunshine on the beach, but otherwise most of the time was, rather unbelievably, spent watching television.

We caught Hot Fuzz for the first time–I thought it was hysterically brilliant! I also caught the very entertaining 1972 French classic Le Grand Blond Avec Une Chaussure Noire and the somewhat disappointing US vs John Lennon. We also watched (not for the first time) Gladiator, Jerry Maguire, Mambo Kings, Herbie and Frequency, although I would rather have been out on the beach. I also had the misfortune of watching the Black Storm, Basilisk and Underfunded, only because there was nothing else to watch on the television. Oh, I also watched a lot of Ben 10, a bunch of classic Liverpool matches and Discovery Channel documentaries.

So, after travelling two hours by air, three hours on land and another hour on sea, covering close to 900 kilometres from Singapore to get to our island destination in southern Thailand where we had a room in a spiffy boutique hotel, we ended up spending most of our beach holiday watching TV.

Now that we’re back, I can’t wait to catch The Dark Knight…

My dad came to Singapore as a young boy with absolutely no money and worked incredibly hard his whole life. With a combination of sheer hard work, luck and some help from the Big Guy Upstairs, in just one generation, he managed to break out of the poverty cycle.

I will always remember his tenacity, endurance and determination and will never forget that my dad chose to suffer so that my siblings and I didn’t have to.

Rest in peace, dad. May you find peace and happiness in the life to come.

Jalaludeen Abdul Kasim
28 Jan 1946 - 21 Feb 2008
Father and friend