The shelving in the bathroom looks great (the colour is called ‘Gentle Oak’), but be careful not to shake it or put something heavy on top of it. It’s rickety like a bamboo scaffolding on a 20-storey building in Hong Kong. The flat pack came with a cryptic set of assembly instructions, which he didn’t really follow. How hard was it to put together a shelf? It’s not, but patience and mindfulness are not things he’d like to expend energy on when building a shelf, which is an object he considers minor, inconsequential and for this particular one, something just for optics. Six new Country Road towels, three for each level. A pale green glass vase on top that could hold long, slender calla lilies. An imitation white coral shell.

He hates remote controls, especially for TVs, which he believes have evolved into something more complicated than the Presidential Emergency Satchel. His default behaviour when using one? Punching every single button until the screen makes sense, or show him what he wants to see.

He was mid-way through shaving his head when the shaver just died, and he thought, it can’t be- he just charged it two days ago. But S was suspicious. This same shaver was a replacement for one that just lasted 5 months. Both were the same model. Both started sputtering, then completely died even after having been charged. They returned the 1st one to the store as it was still within the warranty period, and got the same model; surely the defect was just a one-off, a fluke. But here we are again, and he was looking at his head, one half clean-shaven, the other half with that tell-tale sheen of gray regrowth which he hates.
Have you cleaned it?
There’s this little hatch on it, but it’s empty.
Yeah, but where do you think all the hair goes?
He NEVER really knew nor cared. So it was a bit of a shock, and a fascination when they opened the shaver head and saw five months’ worth of hair compressed in the rotors and the cap. It was so full, the mechanism was actually, literally choking.