Funfair

It is amazing how it feels to win a prize! May be it was during school sports day, perhaps winning a trophy or some prizes at a golf tournament or its lucky draw. That is why sometimes you read about people who got called up and told they have won a lucky draw they have not even participated and they believe only to be conned. That is why you also have people putting hands on a car for some 80 hours or more to win a car.

When you were in lower primary school, the teachers will give you stars pasted on your home work or spelling tests and they may even add some remarks such as "Very Good!" or "Excellent!" It makes you feel good and vindicated but as you grew older, they not only stopped doing stars for you, they would sometimes put big crosses on your work, tore out a page and chided you endlessly. It can become worse when you go to work. When you won the World Cup nobody knew but one error and maybe you have to stand on the chair and eat chalk.

As a child I enjoyed going to a cousin's or a friend's birthday party occasionally. At some of these parties, they let you have a lucky dip and you get yourself a match box car or something. During Christmas, the biggest place to be back then were Metro and Robinsons. If I remember correctly, for a dollar you can get your lucky dip. You don't know what's in it, so everyone's a  surprise.

In today's world, if you give a match box car as a lucky dip, you will be lucky not to get dipped. People may expect to open the present and find themselves an ipad, ipod or iphone but why do I give you things like that when you can go and queue 3 days before it arrives? The surprises that you get these days are only nasty ones. No wonder they always talk about the good old days!

In the good old days, we have funfair and the night markets every now and then. You can buy 3 baseballs and throw at some tin cans and hope to win a prize. I suspected back then that these tin cans may be held up in stones or sticks as they don't seemed to fall quite easily.

So I had the opportunity to go to a funfair. For the uninitiated, it is a fair where you can have fun, usually for charitable purposes.

This was a school funfair. The organisation was very good as many students and parents were involved. Usually it is helpful to be a traditional school with a long history and a strong alma mater which in Latin means "nourishing mother".

There was a huge crowd. You can't even park your car anywhere near there and there are commercial security for traffic control. 

All the children and teenagers were having fun!

The younger ones were having fun with these air-pumped slides.

Or you can choose to throw a basketball at a target so that the young lady sitting there will drop into the drum and get soak in water.

Hmmm...there was a long queue for the mini "Vikings" or they called it the Pirates or something. During my time it was the Vikings. A friend of mine told me that he brought his female colleagues to try it and they came down crying. We used to have our Vikings and Roller-Coaster at Kallang.

One thing is for sure. Singapore has made tremendous progress.

A school funfair has all these things?

Yes! 

Like the seasons, they will go round and round and take you up higher each time. 

I want to go back to school again! But I don't think I can get past primary four these days. I may just excel at funfairs.

Burst some balloons with darts and get your lucky dips. Some of you may excel at this if they give you some beer to go along.

They hang all the biggest bears to entice you but usually you will only win the small ones.

Unfortunately, they do not have soccer or golf challenges. Otherwise, I can demo a reverse bunker shot ala Phil Mickelson. Funfair. Ah, it's been such a long time. Seems like old times. It may bring out the child in the man.