Archive for March, 2010

So there I was on Saturday evening, congratulating myself on booking flights and seats for the Imogen Heap concert in Singapore. For some reason my mind went through an early “tickets, money, passport” check; and got stuck on passport. What was wrong? I certainly had a passport, and I had recently renewed my retirement visa and…oh dear.

When you obtain a retirement visa to stay in Thailand, you can remain in the country for a year. But if you want to venture out of the country during that year, you need a re-entry permit; something that is obtained after you have the main visa; and something I had yet to queue up for. As things stood, I could fly to Singapore, but when I came back without a re-entry permit, I would be given a tourist visa and have to start the retirement thing all over again. This would involve flying out to a Thai embassy in another country within 30 days and then coming back in and plodding through the retirement visa paperwork all over again. Just too much money, time and hassle. I had to get a re-entry permit before my flight at 1120 on Monday morning or else I would not be going; but it was late on Saturday and immigration closes on Sundays. It looked like Ms. Heap’s concert was not to be; and I had just dropped a pile of cash on air and concert tickets for nothing. Oh dear indeed.

A couple of years ago you could purchase your re-entry visa at the airport, but that facility had been withdrawn. She who must be obeyed had a contact in airport immigration and gave him a call to confirm this. He said he thought it was now possible again, but he could not confirm until he went on duty on Sunday evening. Willing to give anything a try, I decided to drive up to the airport after lunch on Sunday and see if I could get the permit. I was going to have lunch with SWMBO at her office before the trip, and as I drove to meet her I was feeling very stressed and thinking about what the hell could go wrong next. “How about this?” said my truck as it dumped its power steering hydraulic fluid on the road and immediately required the same strength to turn the steering wheel as a vintage Massey Ferguson tractor. Oh dear.

Dumping my newly acquired tractor at my wife’s office, I stole her car and headed for the airport. The roads were thick with traffic returning to Bangkok after the weekend; so the journey took a while, but eventually I was heading for the immigration office in the airport, which our contact had told us was on the second floor. It wasn’t. I went to tourist information and they directed me to the fourth floor where eventually I found a small office marked “VIP Immigration”; and it was closed. Back down to tourist information who tried to phone immigration somewhere in the bowels of the airport; they didn’t pick up. I called SWMBO, she made some calls and eventually found someone in the immigration office who was not asleep. They confirmed that they had not provided re-entry permits for two years. Oh dear.

So after wandering the fetid halls of the airport for an hour or so, I was on my way home. I picked up an iced coffee for SWMBO on the motorway, she doesn’t seem to mind if the coffee has then sat in a car for an hour, and made my way back into Pattaya. Just turning into the back road that runs parallel to the beach and the fuel light came on; accompanied by an internal light that flashed and said “need to pee real soon”. No problem, in twenty minutes I could be in a garage and both problems could be solved. Then the traffic stopped.

The back road has the advantage of being almost empty. Except on this day when there was some event in the area and I was suddenly in a huge queue of traffic going nowhere. I turned off the engine to save what little fuel I had left and sat there sweating; worrying about my empty fuel tank and my full bladder. For one feverish moment I considered resolving the issue by transfering the contents of one into the other. But there was the issue of cultural sensitivity; sticking your dick in a fuel tank in the middle of a traffic jam would not go down well with the conservative Thais (would not have been a problem in Union Street, Aberdeen). Plus, I don’t recall the sticker on the fuel filler cap saying “Octane 91 and/or piss”. Then my eyes fell on the coffee cup….

Twenty minutes of no engine and therefore no air-con, had turned the coffee into a rather unpleasant foamy mess; she who must be obeyed would not be drinking that. So I felt justified in opening the door an inch and pouring the mocha bocha frappubinto onto the road. Then, with awkward contortions to ensure all relevant body parts were kept out of sight of fellow motorists, I filled up the cup again. Oh the relief; and so glad that I had purchased a “Grande” size and not the feeble “Pico”, or whatever it is that Starbucks call the smallest size, to disguise the fact that you are paying half the daily minimum wage for a tiny plastic cup into which a minute amount of coffee has been dribbled. Not big enough to pee into, that is for sure.

Eventually we were moving again and I made it to the garage to fill up the car and surreptitiously dispose of some unwanted “coffee”. SWMBO called:

Did you get my coffee?
Good news and bad news. The good news is that I got your coffee. The bad news is that it turned rather warm and changed colour. I thought of a way of making it brown again; but it would not have improved the flavour so I junked it, sorry.

So, home again and feeling rather despondent. Seemed to be no way I would make my flight; but I had to try.

0800 on Monday morning I was queuing outside Pattaya immigration for the 0830 opening. Annoyingly, an American was in front of me, and he was also after a re-entry permit He spent a loud half hour complaining about all the idiots who came to immigration with incomplete paperwork, and was then promptly turned away for having forgotten to photocopy the first page of his passport. Hah! So I was in the lead and by 0835 I had the stamp and had paid my money; just had to wait for the cashier to do her bit. But she had decided to come in late, then needed a coffee (I should have kept my special for her), then a chat with a passing friend; and it was 0850 before I was out of the door; still much sooner than I had hoped.

The traffic was light and I arrived at to the airport just in time to run to the Thai Airways counter before they closed the flight, I had made it! Handed in my ticket and waited for my boarding pass. Nothing happened. Phone calls were made. I enquired as to the problem. All passengers to Singapore have their details sent electronically to Singapore, and the Singapore computer sends back the permission to fly. The computer connection had gone down. Days passed and I imagined the aircraft door closing. Eventually they gave me my ticket and said they would advise Singapore by smoke signals or something. I ran, a sweaty mess, to the gate and fell into my seat; one of the last to board. The doors closed and the aircraft pushed away from the gate; at which point I realised that I really, really needed a pee.

This Imogen Heap woman better be worth it.

Receive a letter from my ex-employer. Every year they write to me to advise me that my pension is going to be increased by an amount so small it is hardly worth bothering to tell me. They also give me an update on the performance of the company over the previous year. Clearly there is no link between the obscene profits being earned and my pension increase. Then they tell me about the 6,000 jobs that have been cut in the name of efficiency and point out, rather obviously, that this has made it a tough year for many people. They conclude with: “as ever, we have done our best to show respect for the individual”. Yeah, right.

I went through this painful process myself about six years ago. Thirty two years a loyal company man, but I was about to be cast out into the wilderness. Having been given a particularly shitty job (transitioning our sold company to the new owner), I was asked what I wanted to do once the work was complete. I could have chosen to retire; but there were financial downsides to that compared to the option of “voluntary redundancy”. Of course I also had the option to apply for another job in another location; but I had just spent five years working in Bangkok, where in the world could I go that would beat that? So redundancy it was. Oh, the humiliation.

I can clearly remember the day when I sat down with Human Resources to discuss the impact of my decision; it was a painful process.

First of all, we will add to your pension entitlement so you retire on full pension, which of course you will start receiving immediately.
Well, that is of course a small comfort; but I still find it hard to stop weeping.
And we will pay you six months salary in lieu of notice, even though we are having this discussion two months before you leave.
Pass the tissues
It will be the full expatriate salary
I am smiling to hide my sadness
And tax free
That was not a whoop of joy, it was a yodel of sadness
Then are a couple of lump sum payments, offshore and tax free; just to soften the blow.
Do you think you can buy me off with cash? How much?
{shows paper with huge numbers written on it}
Are those pounds or baht?
Pounds.
Oh, well perhaps I feel a little better.
And finally we will make you a payment to help you settle back in your home country
But I am staying in Thailand
I know that, you know that, but the guys in head office don’t know that. Just give us an address in the UK and we give you the money.
I think I love you.
We love you too. Please don’t steal any (more) pens on the way out.

And that was it. A brief conversation before being cast out onto the streets, alone and with little prospects of future employment. “We have done our best to show respect for the individual”. Nonsense. The allowance for settling back in my home country may have covered carpets and curtains, but was insufficient for a wide screen TV and associated sound system. Cheapskates.

There are a number of colleagues who have gone through this process. All have emerged emotionally scarred. Camberley for instance. He used to spend his days locked in an office, firing off emails complaining about his job. Now I rarely hear from him; I understand he is lost in a world of excessive alcohol and drugs playing too much bridge.

And now, the last of my old company contacts has been humiliated and thrown onto the streets with nothing more than a lifetime of financial security ahead of him. Poor Billy. His latest blog entry sums up his pain:

Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, I am free at last! (with apologies to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.)

Well done Billy, may your retirement be long, healthy and happy (and I hope you managed to escape with some free pens).

“Motor racing? It’s just cars going round in circles” my friends would sneer; fresh from ninety minutes watching retards kicking a ball from one end of a muddy field to another. What a simplistic view (unlike my accurate description of their obsession). Could they not appreciate the thrill of competition, the technical challenge, the cars battling for position, the sights, sounds and smells of highly developed engines and pit girls?

I love motor racing. Spent too much money doing it (full size, 1/8 size and whatever size Qon’s little machines happen to be), spent too much money going to watch it, spent too much time playing motor racing games. For goodness sake I even follow Jenson Button’s girlfriend on Twitter (the fact she is a lingerie model and occasionally posts photos is incidental). Happy to watch any form of racing, but of course Formula 1 is the pinnacle. Watching the lesser formulas just isn’t the same. The British Touring Car Championship, for example. Five abreast into corners. Tyre smoking, body contact action with overtaking everywhere throughout the race. Nothing like Formula 1 at all, where overtaking and excitement is just a distant memory.

And I have the memory. The likes of Ronnie Peterson for example, sideways in a Lotus in a corner. Nigel Mansell sideways everywhere. And plenty of overtaking. But then the aerodynamics became so advanced it was impossible to follow another car closely. The brakes became so advanced that braking distances became almost non-existent. And drivers changed from beer-swilling party animals surrounded by multiple hookers, to professional sportsmen who could drive flat out for two hours without making a mistake and then go home to their professional lingerie model girlfriends.

And the result has been boredom. The races have become increasingly processional, with any overtaking happening during a pit stop. The only chance of any excitement is the arrival of rain or someone being caught cheating. Something had to be done.

So the rules were changed for 2010 to ban refuelling. And we saw in Bahrain what a great idea that was. Relieved from the need to make multiple fuel stops, teams made a single stop for a tyre change; leaving the drivers with nothing to do except to run the rest of the race pursuing a tyre conservation strategy; i.e. driving slowly and not even attempting to overtake. It was so pathetic that even the drivers were complaining afterwards that something would have to be done to spice things up.

Fortunately for me, I had a new toy to play with which relieved some of the boredom. An application which streams live race data to the iPhone. There’s a map of the track and race positions:

A basic commentary:

Flip to landscape mode and you get a view of the whole track (this from a test run from this week’s Australian GP):

And you can zoom in and move around in full 3D. Can even select a particular driver and follow their progress. Here, Vettel is about to be passed by Alonso for the lead.

Or select another screen and follow all the split times:

It’s very, very cool; and really does make watching a race (or qualifying, or practice) more enjoyable. If you are watching the BBC coverage, you will pick up things before the commentators have time to talk about it. If you are watching the local Star Sports coverage, you will pick up things that the commentator never mentions. As I no longer have cable TV, I download the race and watch it the following day. No problem for the application, because it downloads the complete race to your iPhone and you can then re-run the race as you watch the downloaded coverage. Sitting at the windsurfing club on practice day before the Bahrain GP, there was no wind. So I fired up the application and “watched” practice live. Then on the Monday following the race, I watched the BBC coverage, complemented by the downloaded race on the iPhone app.

The only downside is the cost. I am used to paying no more than $1.99 for my iPhone applications; and this one was nearly 1,000 baht equivalent (seven million UK pounds at current exchange rates); presumably because the developer has to pay F1 to acquire the data. Never mind, at about 50 baht a race I decided it was worth it.

As is normally my luck, the day after I pressed the “buy now” button, F1 released a separate, totally free application which does essentially the same thing. But it doesn’t seem to have the 3D map thingie and, more importantly can only be used in live running mode; no use to me when I watch the races the following day.

You can read more about the application here.

And for those of you with no interest in F1, or without an iPhone; thanks for reading and as a reward you can see more of Jenson Button’s girlfriend here.

A couple of weeks ago I met up with one of my readers. He lives in Bangkok, but was visiting Pattaya, and suggested lunch. She who must be obeyed, who considers it part of her job to take an obsessional interest in my well-being, was convinced I would be snatched and sold into slavery; but after 32 years sitting in an office for an oil company, slavery was something I was used to. And anyway, as I pointed out from a distance, I was married to her; so how would I spot the difference.

Anyway, she had nothing to fear, because my lunch companion, let’s call him Jim, was a fine fellow and we ended up in conversation for two hours; and he even paid for the meal. He makes his living from the internet and gave me many tips on how I could make some cash out of Pattaya Days. Given that my daily readership hovers around 200, I rather doubt I will be buying a Ferrari any time soon; but maybe I will give it a go. For a start, you can all send me $100. Thank you.

I follow Jim on Twitter, and yesterday afternoon he posted that the red shirts were outside the Esplanade shopping centre in Bangkok, and that, from his condo window, he could see a stage being erected. This provoked pangs of jealousy and regret in yours truly; because at the time I was covering a polo game on the outskirts of Bangkok; and questioning my decision not to fight my way into Bangkok after the game in order to make my way to the stage that was being erected outside Jim’s window.

If I had a “ten favourite bands” list, and I probably do have one somewhere, then Placebo would be on it. They might even make the top five if they asked me nicely. I have every album they have ever released, DVDs of their live performances, and the obligatory T-shirt. But I have never seen them live, and that is a failing I would like to rectify (it’s on my “seventy four things to do before I die” list, along with less likely activities such as the one involving Jennifer Love Hewitt and baby oil). They came through Bangkok a couple of years ago, and I missed them. And they were playing last night, and I missed them again. It was always going to be a little difficult because I had a polo game to cover first, which meant a bag full of camera gear to stow somewhere; but then the red shirts chose the day to do their grand tour of Bangkok; and I just couldn’t face the hassle. Next time. Maybe.

Perhaps the real reason is that I am just getting too old for this sort of thing. I stood in the rain for five hours to watch The Rolling Stones. I endured a couple of hours in the mosh pit when I experieced the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Bangkok (damn, they were good), but after a couple of hours in the sun with a camera, I am ready for a sit and a gin & tonic. This must be what they mean by the long, slow decline into senility and death.

But it has been a busy week. A day with the bikes on Wednesday, and then a four hour round trip to the polo field in Bangkok on Thursday where “my” club are playing in a tournament. They win their first match.

Same trip yesterday, and they win their second match.

About to climb in the truck to make the trip again today. They have made the final, which will be the last match of the day and will be played under floodlights and will therefore be a bastard to photograph.

Expect to get home late; have stuffed the phone full of Placebo tracks to keep me awake for the journey back.

Or rather, Graham’s got a brand new bike.

As you can clearly see, it’s a Kawasaki something (insert assorted numbers and letters). You can also see he is very pleased with it. Graham is the boss of Highside Tours and the Kawasaki is destined to be one of the track bikes that will be thrashed and inevitably crashed by his customers; so he wanted to get some pleasure out of it before handing over for the destruction derby. It also needs more racy bits attaching before being officially released as a racing machine.

Even so, in its virgin state, Graham was hustling round the track:

I like the rumble strip reflection on the helmet:

Did a couple of publicity shots in front of the Highside banner. Can’t decide whether the bike is best displayed on its own or with added Khun Honda. She is, rather annoyingly, obscuring the red shock absorber spring.

Some of the existing bikes are showing a little wear and tear:

But they still go as fast as ever:

This guy was circulating on his own bike with matching leathers. A little too smart to be a real biker.