Pattaya Days

Blackadder would have us believe that there is no German word for “fluffy”. I don’t know if that is true, but I do know that there is no Thai word for accountability. No word for deadline either. These are unimportant in Thai culture. But they do have a word for heart (jai), and they have a seemingly endless selection of other words that they use with jai to define conditions of the heart. You can have a glad heart or a hot heart or a cool heart or many other types of heart; the state of your heart is much more important to a Thai than whether you are on time for a meeting.

Jai dee is a good heart and my wife has it in spades, and when you meet her mother you know where she gets it from; just the sweetest lady you could hope to meet. Her father is less approachable, a hard-drinking army major, with a gun, with real bullets. He showed it to me once, it felt like more of a threat than an information session. They arrived yesterday to collect the sister, and the father promptly caught a fever and went to bed, which was useful in a way because we could take mother out for dinner without the risk of weaponry appearing during dessert.

Apart from detailing your emotional heart condition, the Thais have another custom which has to be understood. They have perfectly serviceable names, properly recorded on birth certificates, which they rarely use. Shortly after birth, having gone through the trauma and arguments of choosing an official name, the parents will also choose a nickname which will be used in preference to the real name from then on. The nickname is usually short and easily pronounceable, compared to the official name which can be a lengthy tongue-twister. If you are friends with a Thai, you will probably never know their real name, just the nickname will do.

A couple of years ago my wife’s family went through a bout of official name-changing having read some nonsense that converted your name to numbers and then told you which numbers were lucky and unlucky. My wife got caught up in this and her real first name was duly changed to Chonhatai, which when mixed with her family name and converted to numbers was really lucky (you get used to shrugging your shoulders at this sort of stuff and letting it go, just one of the minor challenges in a multi-cultural relationship). This resulted in a flurry of form filling whenever anything official was required, but to all her friends she continued to be called by her nickname, Oa. Note that however you have just read “Oa”, that is not how it is pronounced. I struggled for weeks before getting it approximately right, and even after five years I don’t think I have mastered it; so I usually call her sweetheart to her face or fat-ass when she is in another room. Not really. Anyway, mastering the Thai tones is a bugger, even with a little word, which is why my grasp of the Thai language has not progressed much beyond saying “good morning”, “you are beautiful” and “how much?” As experience has confirmed (by others of course), these phrases can get you into all sorts of trouble in Thailand.

As well as sharing my condo with a Thai lady, I also share it with two Thai lady cats. The breed is known as Korat, which is a province in Thailand, and I chose the breed because they have a reputation for being intelligent and wanting to be involved in family life. They have lived up to this reputation. Go to the toilet and, if they can’t get in there with you before you close the door, they are waiting outside the door when you are finished, disgruntled that they were not invited. One is sat on the back of my chair right now, checking my spelling, the other will be following Oa around in case she does something interesting that could be interfered with. Oa has spent the last two years working on an MBA, a substantial proportion of her work time was spent prising a cat off her keyboard. Attempts to keep them outside the bedroom at night have proved fruitless.

One insists on jamming herself between my legs, the other positions herself so that I couldn’t fully extend my legs even if they were unjammed. I awake every morning in a tangle of cats. But life could be worse. I am sure if you converted my name to numbers and added them up, the result would be lucky.

There is a gentleman by the name of Richard Madeley who is apparently a chat show host in the old country. He was interviewing a dwarf (as you do) and enquired “do you find people patronise you?” He then quickly added, in a louder voice “that means they talk down to you!”

How delightfully, cringingly, recursive.

My wife wants to lose weight. This could be achieved quite simply by eating less, but weaning a Thai away from a culture of snacking would be as challenging as making a Scotsman teetotal. Thai eating involves at least three main meals, linked together by continuous consumption of snacks of indeterminate content and zero nutritional value. So she has determined that exercising more will be the solution, which is worrying because it will invoke another Thai cultural trait; the fear of doing anything alone. Whilst we Europeans might be perfectly comfortable eating or travelling alone, Thais have to do everything with at least one companion. This means that the wife will need an exercise buddy, and that buddy will have to be me.

I do like exercising, provided it involves riding a windsurfing board. A few hours of windsurfing a week keeps me generally fit and spiritually calm. A few minutes in a gym would leave me bored and stressed. So far I have been able to avoid the joint fitness programme by claiming a lack of shoes. Whilst my wife has more shoes than Imelda Marcos, I have one pair of beach sandals and rather snazzy pair of white sneakers for use on the rare occasions that I need to look passably respectable. I did have a pair of general purpose sneakers but the soles have fallen off so many times that glue no longer makes an impression.

Last night I was finally dragged to the shoe shop. I love shopping for techy toys, I hate shopping for everything else. We went in and I picked up the first pair of sneakers that looked acceptable. The wife did not approve. I asked her to choose something she liked, checked they had my size, and bought them. Ten minutes, sorted. Wife was amazed, normally takes her at least two hours to decide on a pair shoes (which she will bring home and immediately decide she does not like and deems them uncomfortable).

To celebrate the acquisition of the new shoes we went straight into Haagen Daz and filled up on ice cream with a calorie count which will take several hours of intense exercise to eliminate. I am advised that the first activity will be tennis which I am going to teach her because I played it briefly forty five years ago. I think I will claim the shoes are uncomfortable. Or cut them up and make them into Thai snacks.

I never enjoyed working, and nowadays I shy away from anything that could be construed as work. I am therefore disappointed to report that I spent this morning in what can only be described as a committee meeting.

I survived my working days in employment by hiding in my office, drinking murky brown liquid and sending out the occasional controversial e-mail that hinted that I was operating on the bleeding edge of the oil industry, even though I wasn’t really bleeding working at all. This pleasantly relaxed environment was punctured by the need to attend regular meetings, the price to be paid for the continuing receipt of a monthly salary. These were designated “committee meetings”, indicating that so many people would be attending that any decisions taken would be sufficiently compromised to ensure that no real progress would be made and nobody could be blamed for anything.

Worst was a weekly meeting of what was rather optimistically termed “the management team.” None of us were particularly adept at managing anything, and at any one time there was open war between at least four members. For three wasted hours a week I would keep my eyes partially open through a series of drab presentations, dropping in the occasional pithy comment to prove how in touch I was with the business. I positioned myself at the far end of the conference table and played bluetooth battleships with the drilling manager, until he spoiled things by shouting “sunk you, you bastard”, a comment which it was obviously not related to the production forecast presentation in progress at the other end of the room. I was then reduced to writing saucy SMS messages to assorted ladies on my PDA. These messages were then zapped, rather appropriately, across my lap into my trouser pocket where my phone transmitted them to my special friends.

More bearable was the Health and Safety meeting. Firstly, it only had to be endured once a month. Secondly, it was worth attending to hear the report from the company doctor. His name was Doctor Vimol, but to maintain his anonymity I will refer to him only as Dr. V. He was convinced that every employee was a drug taking, fornicating alcoholic (he was not far wrong); and he set out to prove his theories by implementing a series of stringent random tests. His monthly reports focussed on the miscreants that had dragged down our health statistics by taking a day off for such minor ailments as a broken leg. When an employee was sadly tested as HIV positive, he found it hard to conceal his glee. And the management team were not immune to his investigations. He arrived at my office one morning with a suspicious pot in his hand. I was to pee in it and he was going to make sure I did not substitute another pot of pee in the process. I was followed into the toilet and he was most disgruntled that I would not let him into the stall to watch the pee into pot operation. I believe I tested positive for disillusionment.

Fast forward to this morning, and I find myself sat in a weekly committee meeting again. This time it is to manage our condo. I attended the AGM last year and, through no fault of my own, I found myself dumped onto the committee. There are nine of us. Five are Thais who live in Bangkok and visit on occasional weekends, four are non-Thai and we live in the condo; so the Thais happily delegate most of the work to us.

Our leader is American and has an interesting past involving CIA missions. His first visit to Thailand involving springing someone from a Thai jail! Then there is a Brit who “invented the hard drive” and is clearly loaded. Finally, another American who rides around on an old bike, wears knock-off T-shirts and is clearly not loaded at all. It came as some surprise therefore to discover he comes from a family that owns a massive chain of chemists. He recently flew off to a university in California to attend a major exhibition of renaissance art. When we asked him why he was going, he informed us that he owned the art. Oh.

Anyway, they are a pleasant bunch of people; but I resent spending my morning in a meeting with them, or anyone else. But there is much to do. We have recently thrown out our incompetent management contractor and have discovered a long list of things that don’t work that should. Most of the staff for a start. And the fire alarm system which wouldn’t ring even if you lit a fire under it. The waste water treatment system, which is meant to render our waste water harmless before discharging it into the public sewer; doesn’t. And many pages more of defective stuff that needs fixing. Sigh. So every week we sit and discuss how little progress has been made, beat up our new management contractor and vow to do better next week. Sometimes I am so bored I almost wish that Dr. V. would burst in and demand urine samples from all present.

It has been brought to my attention that I may be mentally deranged. Of course my wife has been telling me this ever since I agreed to marry her, but the latest warning comes from a more professional source, The American Journal of Psychiatry.
According to Dr. Jerald J. Block, there are several symptoms of internet addiction: a sense of anger or depression when users cannot reach a computer, the constant need for better equipment and the feeling of social isolation.
Block then goes on to tell us that internet addiction is one of the most serious public health issues in South Korea. Well done South Korea I say. A burning need to access the internet must be less socially disruptive than a burning need to continuously drink alcohol or stick needles in your arm; or play golf.
Anyway, I declare myself addicted. I really do need to be near some form of internet access at all times. Indeed I read the article about internet access via my iPhone web browser while sitting on the toilet. You probably didn’t want to know that, but it is an indication of the level of my addiction. I also use my iPhone to trawl the web while pushing a trolley around the supermarket while my wife loads up on pointless groceries. I will also admit to a constant need for better equipment. If we didn’t buy all those stupid groceries I could buy a quicker computer. As for social isolation, I always blamed that on my body odours, unusual facial hair and the tendency to break wind frequently; but now I know it is just because I access the internet too much.
So, how can I get help? Apparently I should visit www.netaddiction.com. This proposal equates to a plan to hold meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in the main bar of your local pub. I suppose I am doomed. Anyway, got to go to the toilet with my iPhone now; I promise to wash my hands.

Day trip to the Big Mango (Bangkok to you, Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit to the Thais, although they settle for Krun Thep). Objective of mission is to take wife’s little sister for a trip to Underwater World, of which more later.

Bangkok is a frustrating delight. If you approach it by road you can see the fog of pollution that hangs over the city. If you approach it by air you end up landing outside the city and then have the fog pollution experience whilst praying to your personal god in the back of taxi driven by someone with the aspirations of Lewis Hamilton and none of the talent. I lived in Bangkok for five years in the Pecten days. After four months I caught bronchitis which the company doctor pronounced as being one month later than normal for new arrivals. Thereafter my lungs collapsed on an annual basis, but that was just to be expected. Bangkok has amazing restaurants, world class shopping and a nightlife which would have prematurely aged me had I not been aged already. The problem is that you cannot get to the restaurants, shops or brothels (I mean, theatres showing ballet and stuff like that) without venturing out into the traffic; which means that everything will have shut by the time you get there.

If I worked on a Sunday (and I did, what a wanker), it took me ten minutes to drive home. Monday to Friday it never took me less than an hour and a half. You had to leave shortly after lunch to make it on time for a dinner appointment. Recent years have brought some relief. There is a skytrain which runs on top of the traffic jams and metro that runs underneath the traffic jams; and if you can live near one of the stations and eat, shop and watch the ballet near one of the stations, life is easy. Otherwise, it is gridlock hell.

But Bangkok is a delightful place to live. In spite of the traffic mayhem and the presence of at least fifteen million people attempting to survive in the same location, the city flourishes in an atmosphere of good-natured chaos. Electric cables hang from poles like over-fertilised creepers; and yet the power rarely fails. Water comes out of the tap and you can drink it if you are feeling brave. Waste products disappear down the various holes where waste products normally go, and you don’t see them again (mind you, I lived on the 21st floor, for all I knew the people on the first floor were up to their necks in communal shit). Most of all, the people in Bangkok are endlessly tolerant and optimistic about life (apart from the tourists). I loved living there and still enjoying visiting.

Today we whizzed down the recently upgraded motorway for about 100 kilometres (46 nautical miles, 23 carrots) before grinding to a stop on the outskirts of Bangkok. Thanks to my demon shortcuts we were parked in a shopping mall next to a skytrain station before our bladders exploded and we headed off on the skytrain for the Underwater World experience.

Thailand is a third world country. Farmers in the north earn less than 4,000 baht a month (92 Zlotys, 0.0000744 light years). And yet there is serious money living in Bangkok and it demands quality shopping. The latest mall to stuff itself with products that most people cannot afford is called Siam Paragon. There is a Ferrari shop on the second floor, and we are not talking about some tacky joint that offers Kimi jackets and keyrings with black horses on them, this shop actually has Ferraris in the window. Not to be outdone, Lamborghini and Aston Martin have shops on the same floor. Every designer label you can think of has an outlet here. So you scarcely lift a manicured eyebrow when you discover that the basement contains an entrance to a billion baht “Underwater World” (a.k.a several very large tanks of water full of fish).

It’s well done and although I had been before I did not mind trailing round after the sister who was being journalistically photographed next to every fish by the wife. After an hour or so we emerged and consumed an above average lunch. Sadly for me, there was insufficient time (or funds) to pop up to the second floor and buy a Ferrari. Luckily for me, there was insufficient time for the wife to indulge in her twin passions of shoes and handbags; because it was off to the toy shop for the little sister toy treat.

My initial attempts to steer her towards a Lego Star Wars Battle Cruiser met with little interest and we ended up with a Barbie Doll. Girls are crap at toys, my son had a Scalextric before he was even conceived.

With sister asleep in the back, clutching an over-priced example of sexist exploitative consumerism (the Battle Cruiser was cheaper), we had an uneventful journey home, interspersed by the usual breath sucking noises from the wife at certain moments which is her way of saying “you are driving in a manner which will very shortly result in the death of all onboard.” I have learned to ignore this. We stopped for noodles and pork on the roadside near home. I like the pork so much that I ordered an extra dish, which means that the whole meal cost us nearly a pound a head, refreshments included. Extortionate.

Back home and the cats were making “we are pretending we missed you, now get your asses in here and feed us” noises. Watching a fishing boat heading out into the setting sun, I felt like it had been a good day in the Big Mango, but I was glad to be home next to the sea.

Apparently it’s Easter. That fine pagan tradition involving rabbits and chocolate eggs, latterly hijacked by a certain Mr. J. who did a not very convincing ‘back from the dead’ trick which is now celebrated with almost religious enthusiasm by certain sections of the population. Personally I will always support the version that promises the most chocolate. For the poor suckers who are still locked into the drudgery of employment, the important thing about Easter is that it is a HOLIDAY.

The UK offers a paltry eight days a year of public holidays, half of which are related to the festival of chocolate eggs and the festival of fat men coming down chimneys (also claimed by Mr. J. as his birthday). For a country that claims to be a multi-cultural, secular melting pot; this is pathetic. If you want to maximise your holidays, go work in Malaysia.

Malaysia clearly has a mix of cultures. The Muslim Malays wield the political power, the Chinese earn all the cash, and the Indians glower in the corner and claim intellectual superiority. Throw in an assortment of other races and beliefs and you have a real jumble of people; and they all want holidays. And they get them. Work in Malaysia and you will be rewarded with nineteen days of public holidays. Add in your company holidays, create some sick leave, and you spend very few days in the year actually working; which is how it should be. You will get the Mr. J. holidays, the Muslim, Chinese and Indian holidays, and an assortment of national holidays just to make up the numbers. There are so many, you lose track of why you are actually on holiday; but who cares, as long as you can sit in a comfy chair watching TV and eating snacks instead of sitting in an office.

Apart from the obvious plus of working less, all these public holidays have another benefit; they break down cultural barriers. Take the Muslim holiday at the end of their fasting month. First of all, you acquire a natural, warm fuzzy feeling towards the Muslim community for having a long holiday which you can enjoy without having gone through any of the fasting to earn it. Then your Muslim acquaintances will invite you to come and share their post-fasting feast, so you find yourself spending the holiday visiting one house after another and being plied with endless plates of food. Apart from becoming bloated to the point of nausea, this experience will reinforce the realisation that those who support Mr. M. are basically the same as those of us who worship chocolate or Mr. J. They love their families, they worry about their children, they wonder if they can afford a widescreen plasma TV, and they have a tendency to vomit if they eat too much. Like the rest of us, they have no time for the shitheads who have hijacked their religion for political purposes.

Whatever your personal beliefs, most of us have the same basic desires and needs. If we could all understand this, the world would be a happier place; and the solution is more public holidays. Join the movement: More holidays towards world peace! There will be T-Shirts (”Less work, more love”). For a start I proclaim November 11th as a public holiday in the UK in celebration of Poland’s Independence.

Naturally I expect to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this wonderful initiative. However, right now I would gladly swap this for a couriered box of Cadbury’s Cream Eggs. Thank you and Happy Easter.

It was Eddie Izzard who observed that being invited in for a cup of coffee after a date was a sure sign that you would not be getting a cup of coffee, but that sex was likely. He also warned that there were exceptions to the rule; if the President of Burundi invites you in for coffee then don’t take that as an indication that horizontal activities will follow shortly. The strategy has never worked for me. I did try inviting a young lady back to my abode but it turned out she didn’t drink coffee. And as far as I could ascertain, neither was she to be tempted by tea, wine, beer or an assortment of cocktails. Finally I was reduced to the prospect of offering a slightly chilled glass of water, or sex. This was a proposition too far and we parted, never to meet again. But I do like coffee.

During my previous life I was limited to the offerings of the mighty machine that sat in the corridor with a myriad buttons offering a plethora of choices. It didn’t actually matter which button you chose, the result was always a tepid, murky brown, mess. It never quite tasted like coffee, or tea, or chocolate; depending on which button you had pressed. It was dire but I drank gallons of the stuff, more as a form of therapy than refreshment. Drinking endless coffee is more managerially acceptable than sucking your thumb and weeping openly (trust me, I tested this).

As retirement approached I planned my coffee perfumed future and invested in a coffee machine. I did not want some impersonal electronic box which would spew forth liquid upon command. I wanted involvement, I wanted a relationship, I wanted challenge. I wanted a La Pavoni lever-action coffee machine (with optional cat).

The La Pavoni is what a coffee machine should look like. If it turned up for casting for a Martin Scorcese movie set in a New York coffee house in the Italian quarter, it would get star billing and a chance to have a love scene with Angelina Jolie. It looks gorgeous and when you turn it on it sounds gorgeous. It makes real coffee machine hissing and fizzing noises which provide a sense of impending danger in the kitchen; as if you are mere seconds away from a major explosion (although this only rarely becomes a reality). Sadly, as with so many beautiful things, the beauty is only skin deep. The chrome peacock (for that is her name) is a real bitch when it comes to actually producing drinkable coffee.

The instructions are simple enough. Grind some beans and stick the ground coffee in the holder. Squash the grounds so they are firm in the holder (this is know as tamping) and then attach the holder to the machine. Lift up the lever and then pull it down to push water through the grounds and into the cup. Serve it to The Godfather and immediately be offered the hand of his daughter in marriage. But of course it is not that simple. Grind the beans too coarsely, or apply insufficient tamping, and the water will flow past the beans with scarcely a pause to collect some flavour along the way; and the result will both look and taste like well-used dishwater. Grind too fine or tamp so hard you create a solid brick of coffee bean, and you will not be able to pull down the lever at all. Result, no coffee in the cup and a red face. Striking the correct grind/tamp balance takes weeks of trial and error and thousands of baht worth of coffee (apply your own currency conversion).

Once you have drinkable coffee flowing, you can move on to the milk challenge. How do you stick the steaming wand device into a jug of cold milk and end up with hot milk and frothy foam. I had no idea, and the output from a sizeable herd of cows was wasted in my attempts at a cappuccino. Drastic action was called for, so I dated the manager of a local coffee shop. She had the secret and shared it with me. It only seemed reasonable to marry her.

So, for the last three years or so my La Pavoni has hissed and threatened, and delivered hundreds of cups of wonderful coffee with accompanying milk delights. My wife has also hissed and threatened, but she is delightful too. But then, two days ago when I went to turn the machine on, the switch responded by spewing itself across the table in a shower of spite and small components. I was devastated, how would I obtain my daily caffeine fix? Attempts to reconstruct the switch were futile, and I couldn’t get inside the beast to play with the wiring because it needed a special tool forged in the fires of Vesuvius and fashioned between the thighs of Italian virgins (which is a slightly more poetic way of saying that I did not have the appropriate screwdriver). I went to bed and slept little, a key component of my daily life was threatened.

Of course this is Thailand where you can get everything if you know where to look. I started looking at an outlet which claimed to support La Pavoni devices, but they mocked me for owning such a manual machine and turfed me out. So the next step was to embark upon a hunt in the lower shelves of all the dusty electrical shops which occupy the back lanes of this haphazardly planned metropolis. Finally I found something that looked suitable and I rushed home to try it out. A few false starts with wires plugged into the wrong place, but then the hissing started and I pranced around the kitchen singing “it’s alive, it’s alive.” And it was, and all is well with my world again. When you don’t have the affairs of some insignificant company keeping you stressed and awake at night, you have to find something to fret about occasionally. All it takes is a broken plug. Still, if the President of Burundi pops round for a quick one, he is really going to enjoy my cappuccino.