Operation Mincemeat by Ben Mcintyre

Upon finishing Agent Zigzag by the same author a month ago, I started right away on Operation Mincemeat. I usually take less than one week to finish a paperback of 600 pages. However, April and May have been particularly busy months, and the weekends were no different. There was always one obligation after another. I was surprised to note that I took one month to finish Agent Zigzag and another month to finish Operation Mincemeat. At the rate I'm reading, it's going to take me more than one lifetime to finish all the books I have!


Operation Mincemeat was the codename of a very bizarre deception carried out by the British Intelligence to fool the Nazis.  One of the person involved in the deception was Ian Fleming who was in Room 35 of the Admiralty, the nerve center of British naval intelligence. He later went on to write the James Bond spy novels.


And his colleague, Charles Fraser-Smith, was the inventor who provided Ian Fleming with equipments for his more outlandish plans. Needless to say, Charles Fraser-Smith was responsible for the character 'Q' in the James Bond novels while 'M' was based on Admiral John Godfrey.


The deception involved getting a corpse with no family and dressing it up as an officer and floating it off to the Spanish shores with planted intelligence documents to fool the Germans about the Allieds' invasion plans.


I particularly enjoyed the first half of the book. Stephen King couldn't have been more macabre. 

Bentley Purchase came up with a solution. "I've got it," said the coroner. "We'll get an electric fire and thaw out the feet only. As soon as the boots are on we'll pop him back in the refrigerator again and refreeze him."

 The mouth of the corpse has fallen open. The skin around the nose has sunk, and the upper part of the face appears discoloured. The fingers of the left hand are bent, as if clawing in pain.

......a person was formally pronounced dead without ever having been alive.

I don't normally quote paragraphs from the books I read, but those passages just stuck in my mind.


Read together with Agent Zigzag and The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva, one has a better understanding and appreciation of how a war could be won even before it actually began. History lesson has never been so interesting, dead bodies do tell tales. 


And now I'm going to start on a fiction that has nothing to do with war....time to take a break from history.  Should I read The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson or Snow by Orhan Pamuk, or......

The Little Tyke Is At It Again

Plants and flowers used to be found in every crook and corner, and on side tables, coffee tables, or dining tables in my home. Those were things of the past ever since Blackie took over my home five and a half years ago.

Nearly two weeks earlier, a friend, AC, gave me a lovely bunch of chrysanthemums for my birthday. Thank you for those lovely flowers that brightened up my home, A.

Less than three hours later, Blackie started to chew them. By the time I returned from Cameron Highlands, they were half gone. 

And this morning, I caught the little tyke chewing the lavenders I bought at Cameron Highlands.

Trying to look innocent

Oops...he knocked down the vase....I caught it just in time

The vase is now sitting on top of my shoe cabinet outside, between the gate and the door, and Blackie is now sitting there, working out the details of how to get up on the shoe cabinet. He rushed back inside when I tried to take a picture of him. Goes to show the little tyke knows the flowers are off-limits to him.

Cameron Highlands Apples

You would be forgiven if you thought "Oh no, she got conned again with another dodgy apple from Cameron Highlands" (see Conned: Hybrid Guava Apple It Is Not). Forgiven, but wrong.  

My first thought when I walked into a farm and saw these plants was "What are these? Eggplants??" I wasn't alone in thinking that. A woman very authoritatively told her husband and kids that those were definitely eggplants. However, I wasn't as hundred percent sure as she was. And hubby was certain those were not eggplants. So I went and asked one of the farmhands. He said those were apples. Apples?? Yes, Cameron Highlands' very own apples. Are they sour or sweet? Sweet. They taste like honeydew. Ohhh.....

The farmhand said all the riped ones had been plucked. Being someone who loved to try new things, I didn't want to go home without getting some. After badgering him, he said if I saw any that was yellow with red stripes, I could pluck those. But I'd have to keep them in room temperature for about two days for them to completely ripen, otherwise they won't taste good.

Ready to be plucked, and should ripen in two days

We only managed to find six apples that could be plucked. I guess there must have been a lot of tourists that visited during the May 1st holiday, as this is not the peak season. 

Today, three of the apples ripened and they exuded a rich honeydew smell. After chilling them in the fridge for a few hours, we sank our teeth into them. And......they were wonderful. Very juicy, juicier than regular honeydew, and sweet, those apples taste exactly like honeydew. The skin was a little funny, though. Felt like plastic. I couldn't peel them with a peeler, but after I had cut them, I could peel it off by pulling at the edge and dragging it off in one neat tug. Another hybrid??!! But the farmhand did NOT say it's a hybrid apple-honeydew......

The apples were very juicy and sweet

Century Pines Resort @ Cameron Highlands

For some reason, hotels in Cameron Highlands are pretty run down, no matter whether they are in the range of RM100+, RM200+ or RM300+. Heritage Hotel, Hotel Equatorial, Hotel Casa De La Rossa, Smokehouse Hotel, are just some of them. I'm not sure why they couldn't be maintained better, but I suspect it could be due to either the damp weather or that Cameron is a seasonal holiday destination, and they do not have enough income during off-peak season. 


So, when I stumbled onto a review that Century Pines Resort at Tanah Rata has added on a new wing, I decided to check it out. 

The room was spacious, clean and comfortable with a super-king size bed

The housekeeping service was very prompt in attending to our requests to change the two light bulbs that weren't working. Someone knocked on our door less than six seconds after we hung up the phone.


The staff were very accommodating, too. At about 9pm, after the gym and sauna was closed, we asked if we could use them, and they immediately said yes, and one of them opened the doors for us right away.


The room came with a western and local buffet breakfast, and the spread is so far, the best that the hotels in Cameron has offered. I like that I could customize my orders although I think the chef wasn't too happy with my very detailed requests, like, "Could you make my omelette a little under-done please? I don't like those well-done ones" or, "Could you make me some French toasts, please? I like them well-soaked in the eggs before they're fried." 

The garden

The lobby

Other topics of the same trip:
Conned - Hybrid Guava-Apple It Is Not
The Best Scones in Cameron Highlands

Conned - Hybrid Guava-Apple It Is Not

Till today, Cameron Highlands remains one of my favourite places to unwind and relax, second after Penang. The last time we went to Cameron Highlands was in September 2009, and we thought it's time to revisit the place. There were not much changes, other than a couple of 'new' fruits. 

One of the fruits that could be seen everywhere in Cameron was Jambu-Epal, a hybrid of guava-apple. It comes in a packet of two, and sells for between RM8 and RM10 each, depending on the store, and RM15 for two packets. The colour of the fruit is a very bright apple-green colour. 

The colour is so unnaturally green that it looks like it has been colour-treated. When I posed the question of whether the fruit had colour dye added to it, the vendors denied it. They claimed that this is the natural colour of the fruit. The fruit, they claimed, is known as guava-apple and grown locally. It tastes like an apple but has the texture of a guava. 


On the day we left Cameron, we succumbed and bought two packets for RM15 after one of the vendors let us taste a small slice. On hindsight, the slice was too small for us to realise that the apple sweetness we tasted is not natural.

The shock came when we got home and I cut one of them. As I was washing it, I thought I saw greenish water running down the sink. As I rubbed the fruit more vigorously, I could feel the sliminess of the flesh of a fruit that has been de-skinned. 

What I discovered after I had cut it into slices and even removed the green part was that the guava-apple is none other than your ubiquitious regular guava, nothing more, nothing less. It must have been soaked in an extremely sweet green colour syrup for a very long time, for the saccharine sweetness has permeated all the way into the guava. Despite removing the green coloured part, it was still too unnaturally sweet to be eaten. 

I threw all four away. But before I did that, I washed and cut another one for the photos and this blog.

The green colour water that dripped from the fruit after I scrubbed it with my hands.

Is It Better To Be An Insomniac Vampire or A Walking Dead?

It's 4:58pm on a hot, sunny Wednesday afternoon, and I am feeling particularly sleepy, and with nobody to talk to (hubby is at work, mum and two kitties are sound asleep, emails from cousin and friends have been replied to), it's time to indulge in some verbal diarrhea a.k.a. ramblings in my blog. Dear readers, this is your modern day's old lady mumbling to herself. I think I could grow to love this image of myself. It is more sophisticated than that of an old crotchety lady, sitting on a rocking chair, knitting and mumbling to herself, no? 


More than two and a half years ago, I rambled on about the nicknames hubby gave me in a self-indulgent post titled List of Nicknames. The nicknames have not changed much. I am still called the Insomniac Vampire, due to my insomnia. But a new nickname has emerged. I now have the dubious honour of being called The Walking Dead. Is that a promotion or what??


I've always had low blood pressure (hypotension), but it's not something in the forefront of my mind. Ever since hubby started monitoring his blood pressure and blood glucose level diligently, he puts me under the 'microscope', too. And he found, to his horror, that my blood pressure does not vary too far from what has now become the benchmark of my 'normal' blood pressure readings: 88/52. My systolic reading does not sway too far from 88, and neither does my diastolic reading. The highest ever recorded was 90/55. But it's usually 86/50, 88/52, never dropping below 50. 


According to the doctor, if my diastolic reading ever plunges below 50, I am to be rushed to the hospital immediately, because that is considered a critical morbidity stage. So, when my readings are 88/52, hubby says he sees his dead wife walking around. And that's how the nickname The Walking Dead started. I can't quite make up my mind if I should be flattered. I do believe I prefer to be an Insomniac Vampire, at least a vampire is more attractive than a zombie.....the latter has a rather distinctive, err, scent.  :)


And now I have a cousin with Graves' Disease. What is that?? Is she a grave-robber? Or grave-digger? No, nothing so glamorous unfortunately. Graves' Disease is an autoimmune disease that causes high thyroid, and I am so concerned for her. I've always pictured her to be forever young, healthy, bubbly and happy, to imagine that she could be anything less than that is very disconcerting, to say the least. 


It's now 5:22pm,  time to 'pen off' and perform some wifely duties -- hoover the floor and then retreat to my kitchen to cook up a storm for hubby. 

Book Review: Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre

A friend who read a review that I wrote on The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva suggested that since I enjoyed reading about British double-cross espionage during World War II I might like Agent Zigzag, a true account of love, espionage and betrayal . And she was right. 


While I had learned a fair bit about how the British concocted a very daring and remarkable deception plan to deceive the Nazis, Agent Zigzag completed my 'education' and I knew all the spy masters by name now, if not their complete personality, on both the British and German sides. Well, almost, anyway. There is one more deception, a very famous dead body operation called Operation Mincemeat, which I will write a review on when I finished reading it.


Eddie Chapman was the most unlikely hero I had ever come across. He began his life as a criminal and was a member of the Jelly Gang who used chewing gum to stick the gelignite to the safes on their heists. 


And yet, he was also a gentle criminal. He abhorred the use of violence in his crimes. He was also a very charming young man, and made friends easily, both of the female and male gender. This was a man with two fiancées at the same time! 


He was serving a sentence in Jersey when the Nazis took control of the island. And so began a story that was more astounding than fiction. His British handlers codenamed him 'Zigzag' due to his erratic personality.


The book's account is taken from documents released by the British Secret Service MI5 to the UK National Archives in 2001 and is a must read for fans of espionage.