The Curious Diary of Mr Jam by Nury Vittachi

Author:Nury Vittachi [Nury Vittachi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Signal 8 Press
Published: 2012-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

Saturday, July 12

My engagements diary is suddenly becoming crowded, what with invitations from schools, requests for columns, reminders about book deadlines, etc. But today, within a minute of waking up, I decide to take the whole of today off for family time, since I am going to Shanghai tomorrow for a gig. I shake the kids out of their sleep and we go to find their bicycles.

They’ve gone! Thieves have stolen them from outside our building.

“This is terrible,” I tell my three children. “They may hurt themselves.” What I was actually worrying about was: they may hurt themselves and SUE ME. These days, there’s bound to be some sort of law against “recklessly endangerment of the criminal classes by the negligent or deliberate supply of dangerous, substandard goods for purposes of theft”.

Stealing those bikes was not a clever thing to do. They were ancient, rusty death-traps dating back to the six or seven years between the birth of the oldest member of the Chinese politburo and the beginning of the Early Paleolithic Era.

“Where do you think they’ll be now?” one of the children asks. I realize the thieves are probably sitting in the middle of the expressway wondering why the bikes they’d been riding had disintegrated like baddies in an Indiana Jones movie. “They may already be in heaven, sweetheart,” I reply.

After a minute, the children whisper to each other and start to smile. Clearly they have worked out that it will be physically impossible for Dad to replace their bikes with older, more decrepit ones, unless Dad actually steals early Pleistocene forms of transport from a pre-history museum.

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