At our kids’ graduations, they showed off their yearbooks, autographed both by teachers and classmates. “Where’s yours, Pops?” they asked me.  “In my days, we never had one, let alone a graduation ceremony,” I said. “How about you, Mum?” the kids asked Laura. She shed...

At our kids’ graduations, they showed off their yearbooks, autographed both by teachers and classmates. “Where’s yours, Pops?” they asked me. “In my days, we never had one, let alone a graduation ceremony,” I said. “How about you, Mum?” the kids asked Laura. She shed...

Delta West Academy took charge of our two boys from Grades 1 to 12. In their early years, the boys' greatest joy was the end of each school day when they could romp on the jungle gym and playground outside. There, they were joined by fellow students, whose mothers...

Continued from Part I For a full day we had been isolated on a oversized tugboat ferrying us from Cyprus to Egypt. All we could do was plod around the deck taking pictures of the sea. Finally, our boat anchored in the harbour of Alexandria. At last, we were free. A...

When our boys were young, my wife Laura would take them to a park as their daily treat. Being Filipina, other mums and caretakers assumed Laura was a nanny. Canadian mums enquired if Laura could work for them in her spare time. The Filipinas asked where in the...

Leonard Q. Ross wrote a series of short stories about Hyman Kaplan. Kaplan was a mid-thirty-year-old Eastern European, an emigrant to New York after the Second World War. During the day, Kaplan worked in a garment factory. In the evening, he attended night school to...

Yay! The FIFA World Cup is coming! The FIFA World Cup is coming! Yet I still remember Qatar 2022 and one specific soccer game: the semi-final France v Morocco on Dec. 14. Morocco were the upstarts charging out of the African desert. France, the practiced Ancien...

In one way or another, we’re all snobbish. My snobbery revolves around intelligence. Of all my clients, the one I admire most in that category is Garry. Garry understands concepts in a flash. He has an unerring instinct in assessing people. All this has enticed him to...

My father died on 1 April 2012. Being an Ismaili Muslim, the community took charge of the entire ceremony at no cost. Discovering that my wife was Filipina, they kindly gave her a "cheat sheet" to memorise all the responses in Arabic for the funeral. What the burial...

As a veteran accountant, devoted to a lifetime of combatting errant tax returns, my sincere advice to you is NEVER spend Christmas in South Beach (SoBe to the initiated), Miami, Florida. It was all a ploy to steer The Monster, my younger son, away from the back...