Purple Grape

This week I have mostly been thinking I am seriously behind in the blogging and am hurriedly trying to piece together the events of the last few months. This means a bit of time travel back to last year and the lead up to Christmas, not that there was really much to report. I made a new friend at McDonalds where I am still forced to get my coffee of a morning. A little old lady who brings her own food into the place, a couple of cheese sandwiches and a bottle of water and some odd looking fruit.
We spoke at length about a lot of things that I didn't quite understand. When I saw her a couple of weeks later she rushed over, all but hugged me and from what I could make out started up where she left off with our last conversation. I don't remember my daily commute out the heartlands coming up in conversation, but she wanted to know if I was still riding my bike to work and looked quite disappointed when I told her I caught the train. Maybe she was looking for a dink home.
December was Lex's birthday and we went skiing, not your usual Singaporean night out. Reidy and I were running late for a change and the girl at the counter of what essentially is a big freezer said we should save $120 each and not go skiing. Instead she gave us a jacket each and a bottle of wine under the Purple Grape label to drink. Seemed like a good deal, so headed into the piste to check things out and opened the wine. Up until that point it looked like a wine bottle and looked like it had wine in it, the plastic top instead of a cork should have acted as a warning, but it was only at the first swig that I paid attention to the contents. I was quite frankly surprised at the taste, I was getting sugar with a hint of pruple grape and not much else, so referred to the label. Turns out it was 2.8% alcohol and the label suggested it goes well with tinned pork.
Needless to say we didn't hang around for long with that poor excuse for alcohol as our only option for booze. So we headed into an ice bar and then later to Anywhere, in full ski gear, which did draw some comment and attention from people there, which isn't an easy thing to do in this haven for gender confused weirdos. At the sacrifice of most of its character Anywhere has recently been done up to become an annexe to the Four Floors, complete with poles that were open to public use and the source of some surprising skills and not surprising bruises from our group. (Just by writing Four Floors I should see an extra 10 visitors this week, it is the number 1 search criteria that brings people to this spasmodic blog.)
And that is what happened prior to Christmas.