To win the heart of an audience you must not explain or show too much. It's quite the opposite. Seduction is all about discretion and subtlety.
- Eva Green, France
My younger brother, Bernard, asked me 2 days ago on whether I know of any good jeweller in Hong Kong that I could recommend to him. He wasn't about to go raking his credit card bills given Rio Tinto is scaling down the projects he's on, and what he thought a trip to do some missionary work in remote sides of Shanghai may give him some diversion through Christmas. So Hong Kong was a nice shopover (stopover) to spend some time with his girl, Vicki and some other friends.
This rock he was looking for sounded really much like church bells ringing in the distance. Oh well, I've never been one to dig too much into my brother's matters. I like to enjoy the self-inflating ego trip from knowing that it's my "big brother" cool style with things between us that has kept him consistently coming to me on things. As a fact, I do enjoy this bond, especially we are just the category of "the two of us".
Anyway, while I was doing the State of The Union Skype spree with my folks in Perth, the topic came down to whether they knew what Bernard asked me about (re: topic above). The big strip tease continued into a word charade and it was pretty much a no-brainer that Bernard must have told them about it. But the funny thing was mum didn't realise that even though her video was off, mine was clearly pointing at her - and mum had a usual habit of not looking at your eyes if she's telling a lie. She told me that Bernard had asked her to look at some missionary work websites. I knew that he needed help to translate some Cantonese from those diamond sites.
Folks can be real cute, and pretty relentless too when it comes to decoding down to the final word. I felt I was conducting a spy game talk show.
I just hope that the wedding will not coincide with World Cup 2010.
