A Chopper to Chop Off Your Head!

Picked up Christopher Fowler's 'Bryant & May: Oranges and Lemons: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery' (2020). This is a long-running series featuring elderly English detectives Arthur Bryant and John May solving the most bizarre crimes. 

The whole Bryant & May series set in London started in 2003 with 'Full Dark House'. It ended with the 20th book in the series 'London Bridge is Falling Down' (2021). I have heard of it but I've never picked up a book.

Apparently this book is a thematic sequel to 'The Lonely Hour' (2019); that's like Book 15 in the series. I haven't read that. Never mind. Book 16 'Oranges and Lemons' works as a standalone too. In this book, a prominent politician Speaker of the House survived after being nearly crushed by a fruit truck on its delivery route to a festival at St Clements Danes Church. 

Now, the Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU) has been disbanded; and the old office is being turned into a vegetarian tapas bar. John May has been missing for a month and Arthur Bryant is recovering from surgery for a gunshot wound. We see Sidney Hargreaves introduced to the team. She's the new addition, gung-ho and full of attitude. The book rosters its narrators and shares different perspectives. 

It's a classic whodunit. It's a convoluted plot done by Professor Stride, a disgruntled academic. He uses nursery rhymes and folk songs in his attacks on other prominent figures in town, seeking to destabilize the establishment, exposing the rot within the church and government.

The title of the book came from an old English folk song 'Oranges and Lemons'. It's damn creepy lah because it's also a children's ring song singing about church bells, debts and payments, a candle to light you to bed, and a chopper to chop off one's head. LOL Anyway, the locations in the story also takes a page from the folk song — from the church bells at St Clement's, to St Martin's, Old Bailey, Shoreditch, Stepney and Bow.

I also felt as though I went on a tour of London. Ha.

It seems I am the only one who'll be left without a new position, which suits me perfectly, as I plan to retire and go as far off the grid as possible, in this case a bungalow with faulty wiring on the Isle of Wight. I no longer want to live in a metropolis that thinks it's acceptable to charge fifteen quid for a cup of artisanal coffee that's been passed through the digestive system of a tapir.

Adding insult to injury, I have received a letter of complaint that our most senior detectives used inappropriate language during the last investigation and are guilty of being, I quote, "old white males in a woke world.' I don't know about 'woke' but Mr Bryant certainly needs to be woken in our meetings. I imagine being old and white is somewhat beyond his control unless he's planing to reincarnate. 

Easy Plates of Madai and Saba

We finally found a date to catch the friends for an overdue chat! We don't see them often enough, and when we have the time to sit down together, it's extra precious. Stopped by the casual Sushi Ichinoji (it occupies the uni that the old Sushi Matsuo vacated) at Goldhill Plaza for an early dinner. 

We didn't bother with the current promotion of an unlimited omakase set dinner at S$118++. We can't eat that much anyway, so the a la carte menu is fine for us. Had a small glass of beer to begin. Went easy on the sake. Too much of sake always gives us a headache.

The menu is classic, and some might say boring. But it doesn't trot out annoying things like foie gras and truffle oil. So nobody feels ripped off. I simply chose the things that I wanted. We took the sashimi and sushi sets and shared it. Nigiri sushi please. Nothing fancy needed. Added on some oysters and tempura, as well as sea bream sashimi and saba. NOMS. 

A Delicious Bowl of ABC Soup!

We were thoroughly pampered by the friends with a homecooked meal. They had just returned from their annual long ski vacation. They also wanted Asian food, and wanted to eat at home instead of us all going out for a meal. My flat can’t contain this number of humans. So we were invited over to their home to partake in this dinner. Awwwww. 

Sometimes we decline invitations to dine at people's homes because we're honestly not that close, and I don't want to put people out. And I don't exactly want to tell them that I'm intolerant to 1001 things/foods. Often I might choose to suffer the effects of the allergy flares (even with antihistamines) back at home. When these are good friends, I suck it up and never tell them what my food allergies are. I wouldn’t want to do it with acquaintances.

If the friends are simply interested in cooking and do this all the time, with either a hired chef, or helpers to clean up, then I'm less iffy about it. Plus I feel a lot more comfortable dining at friends' homes when we have a solid friendship and regular interactions going on throughout the year. 

There were so many delicious things on the table! There were roast pork with an awesome crackle top, easy stir-fried nai bai, steamed salmon, basil minced pork, prawn omelette and ABC soup! We contributed the home-baked/oven-grilled siu yuk and prawn omelette. I couldn’t very well go empty-handed. We feasted. I ate so much vegetables. The soup was so good that I had two servings. Wheeeeeee.

It was too cute because we all agreed to go easy on the alcohol. Only one bottle of champagne was had. Whewww! Our darling hosts wanted to open up a bottle of red. We hastily assured them that it was really not necessary. We were really happy with fruits and water after the champagne.