This morning, Dred sent a photo from her archives.
“That time when we were strong independent women!” she exclaimed.
At least I think she did. It’s hard to assume tone on text, but I know her well enough to imagine how it must have sounded in her head.
That night is one of the memorable funny moments of our friendship.
It was sometime in 2016, when Dred, Jems and I were flatmates in Singapore. One night, we decided to open a bottle of Moscato d’Asti wine (our fave) and just chill in my bedroom.
We excitedly took the chilled bottle out of the fridge, rifled through the kitchen drawers for our flatmate Nantoy’s corkscrew opener, and looked at each other expectantly.
“Okay, who’s gonna open this?”
“Not me, I’ve never opened a bottle of wine before.”
“Me neither.”
“Oops, same here. Now what?”
“Is Nantoy still up? Maybe he can help us.”
We moved away from the kitchen and walked towards Nantoy and Lang-Lang’s bedroom. I don’t think we knocked, because it was late and we didn’t want to disturb them if they were sleeping. We probably just softly called out Nantoy’s name and tried to listen for any sounds of someone rustling from inside. Nothing.
“You know what, we are strong independent women who don’t need no man!” Dred declared.
“But need YouTube,” I realized, as I whipped out my phone to open said app and search: how to open a bottle of wine with a corkscrew.
You’re probably wondering how three grown women in their thirties have managed to go through their whole lives without ever opening a bottle of wine. We’re just not drinkers, I guess. I mean, our choice of wine is Moscato, which basically tastes like juice. That should have been your clue.
We had to watch a few YouTube videos before we found one with a corkscrew that looked like the one we had. I’d love to say that it was easy peasy after that but I think it took all three of us to open that one bottle of wine.
I should have listed that as one of my major accomplishments in 2016.
Well at least we had a corkscrew this time, because years before that, there was an incident when we brought home a bottle of wine from our pantry, only to realize that we had no corkscrew at home.
So we used YouTube to attempt to find ways to open it without one, and ended up wrapping the bottle in a towel and tapping it against the wall.
Yes, we did get the wine out – but it came with lots of shards of glass, from – you guessed it – the bottle breaking. YouTube isn’t always helpful.
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