Adventures at the coffee shop

We often think of Singapore as a nice and safe place. But you will occasionally find some bad hats around, especially after midnight. Yes, the convenience stores are not allowed to sell alcohol beyond a certain hour, but you still get crazies. When McD's started having their 24 hour joints, there were a lot of tramps hanging around at 3 in the morning, and I've seen more than 1 occasion where the police had to be called in. Now you know why the Al Fresco sections of the restaurants are all closed after midnight.

There was once, when I was watching a match in Euro 2008, between Austria and some other team. I was sitting in the middle, in front of me were a bunch of Chinese cab drivers (or may hauliers) and behind me were a gang of Malay schoolkids. This was 4 in the morning, and yes I did work the next day but I already had my beauty sleep.

The Malay boys were loud and rowdy. Harmless, I suppose, but this was a football match after all. Suddenly one of the cabbies started a staring match with the Malay boys. "You there. You got a problem here?" I got a little nervous. The Malay boy knew he was a hair's breath from getting beaten up. It doesn't matter if there were around 6 or 7 of them, because in the end it would be a gang fight, hardly a pleasant alternative. Another of the cabbies didn't want trouble either, and was prompting the guy to just say "there's no problem" and walk away. Another person was cajoling the confronter to take it easy, but the rest of them were just watching.

I was trying to concentrate on watching the match, but I occupied the distinctly uncomfortable position of sitting in between the 2 gangs.

In the end, the Malays left. And afterwards, the bad tempered cabbie was darkly muttering under his breath stuff like "All Malays are thieves". It was quite uncomfortable. This is not Kuala Lumpur in 1969...

At another time, we were having lunch at the usual place in - let's call it Liverpool coffee shop. As usual since I was there we were talking cock. Then Mr Fisherman appeared, he was later than us because the colonel had wanted to meet the managers. So he wanted to join us at our rather cramped table but I asked him if he wanted to go join hot and cold water taps instead. (There is someone called water tap, and then another person who always goes out to lunch with him. I'll call them hot and cold water taps because they are always seen together.) We were about to finish up and go.

Suddenly I spied at the corner of my eye this Indian guy who was walking around topless and holding a bottle of Chinese rice wine. I thought that was weird, but I knew that he was cuckoo. So as Mr Fisherman was tucking in, suddenly he railed at the lot of us who was nearby. Rapidly a few tables around us whose occupants had been shaking legs and talking cock after lunch cleared out. And Mr Fisherman was eating so fast he was almost choking.

At first he said a few things in Tamil. I almost wanted to ask Nat, as the only Tamil speaker at our table to translate, before I realised that it was probably a terrible idea. I don't know if he picked up on us saying something about a "report", but he screamed out that people were out there "reporting" on him for stuff he didn't do. And ranting about how they put him in there for (can't remember how many years) and had 24 strokes. Then he yelled at us, as we urged Mr Fisherman on to hurry up, he asked us if we wanted to see his backside. Later on some of us pondered what would happen if we were to say yes. At that time, we just wanted to get the hell out of there.

I suppose funny things happen at coffeeshops, especially with the economy now being what it is - funny how us middle class folks design things so that it's always the low end workers who lose their jobs first. Anyway, whatever. Like my sister told me recently, life is a little boring if there are no scandals.