Local Girl Distracts Herself with Lemongrass

The Sunday papers are always a challenge. Given the vast resources of time I find myself saddled with on Sundays, it's always difficult to avoid reading the Sunday Times in its entirety, sometimes twice. How am I to read the articles in a non-critical way? How do I avoid rolling my eyes the entire time?

The solution was always out there for me to discover. Use lemongrass.

Had a photo shoot yesterday at Fort Canning. Managed to get the time horribly wrong, so I woke up at the crack of dawn and rushed out for the shoot in my pajamas (Pokemon tee-shirt, shorts) only to find myself alone and 1.5 hours too early for the shoot. I tried walking around the grounds and taking artistic shots with the tripod and the 2 lenses I brought, but all that I got for the trouble was artistically positioned mosquito bites. I was getting eaten alive out there. At any moment, there was at least 1 mosquito perched on my bare leg. I killed 3 in the space of 5 minutes and I was still getting bitten everywhere.

By the time the photo class teacher arrived, I was almost in tears. Do you have any mosquito repellant? I forgot to bring. My legs are a bloody mess.

Use lemongrass, he said. Rub on your leg. It will help. (You would think it hurt him to speak). What he meant was, go steal some lemongrass from the spice garden, try not to get caught, then smash it up with your bare hands and rub the lemongrass juice over your bare skin in the vague hope that the blood orgy will stop.

And that's exactly what I did. Disgusting. I actually got some garden soil on my hands. And having misread the signs in the spice garden, I actually plucked some regular grass by mistake. Thank God for my lemongrass-scented shower creme otherwise I wouldn't have realised the error.

Anyway, the stuff is pretty amazing. Not only did the mosquitoes stop biting, but the existing bites didn't even itch anymore. There's still some swelling, but I could be rolling on the ground like a rabid monkey clawing at my legs if it wasn't for the grimy little rub-down with the lemongrass.

Ok? asked the teacher, halfway through the lesson.

Yeah. Ok. I said.

Came back completely exhausted, skimmed through the main part of the Sunday Times and am delighted to confirm that I can't remember a thing that I read.