Now I’m back in Thailand I’m reading up on stories that make news fun. But in this Land of Smiles there’s always one story to wipe grins off faces. One ‘minor’ headline stirred my memory bank. “Gas tank in city van explodes in flames.”
Basically a gas fuel tank in a passenger van exploded, destroying the van and damaging nearby shops. The driver told the police that the fire broke out while he was waiting for more passengers. A busybody passenger raised the alarm and they all tried to put out the blaze. But it spread quickly. Wisely they ran away before the explosion blew them to hell. No one was hurt, which cheered me, as did the fact that the Thais were still doing quality events and explosions associated with them.
I’ve spent time in Bangkok. Back in the 80’s I was romantic to a fault about the city, using words like ‘mystical’, ‘graceful’ and ‘serene’ to describe it, casually forgetting poverty, corruption, pollution, traffic and danger. As an oriental city, Bangkok is about as serene as a chainsaw hacking through corrugated iron.
Bangkok, of course, is no Kabul but my favourite story is about a rocket slamming into a city department store. Back awhile, an aggressive ex-soldier became involved in a dispute with the owners of the store. They did not see eye to eye about the location of an unregistered motorcycle taxi business. Both parties wanted to monopolize this lucrative venture but whereas the owners might have compromised, the ex-soldier stuck to his guns, so to speak. Not interested in a negotiated peace treaty and being an ex-infantryman he decided on a frontal assault.
So there you are buying a genuine Gucci bag for buttons when, from inside his jeep, the old warrior takes aim with his trusty rocket launcher. Bang! Thais are not easily frightened and I reckon that most would carry on shopping. On the other hand, you and the other tourists, forgetting that Bangkok is to traffic what paddy fields are to rice, split for the exit and dash out into the road. Splat!
Back to the rocket launcher: the police, realising that this guy was Rambo incarnate, called in military assets. Following classic search and destroy tactics they surrounded his apartment and demanded his surrender. During the ensuing gun battle – he counter-attacked with a grenade launcher – they nailed him with overwhelming firepower.
I love this country! I remember another interesting explosion. Either poverty or opportunism caused a hundred or so Thais to descend on a truck carrying dynamite soon after it left a city road and overturned. As it started to smoke the driver knew it was time to look for another job. But the Bangkokians continued to filch the cargo. In the ensuing blast more than one hundred died: too many body parts for complete accuracy.
Bangkok’s traffic is epitomised by the curious driving habits of ordinary citizens. Take Thai motor-bikers: a sociable breed who happily accommodate extended families on two-strokes. Passengers sit where they can, hanging onto the rider or any bit of the bike they can latch on to. Kids bestride handlebars, petrol tanks, or sit on mums’ or grannies’ knees holding baby brothers or sisters. How they gurgle!
Askance, if not horrified, you look: they smile. Here comes a truck! The driver’s driven non-stop from Chiang Mai and he’s gone to sleep. Time to look away before the impending image sears your brain.
Mobile caterers push wheelbarrows piled high with portable restaurants along city roads. Living life on the edge, some position their establishments near bus stops. Good positioning: bus stops are well used in Bangkok. Unwary tourists use them because they think that’s where buses stop. True, but bus stops also serve as winning posts for the daily bus races. Another headline highlighted the problem: “Man escaped death yesterday after he was hit by bus.”
The driver admitted that while racing to be first at the stop he swerved on to the pavement, crashed into a telephone booth, a power pole and then “bumped” into a potential passenger. Competition between bus companies is fierce. Red, blue and green buses hunt down passengers aggressively then race off. I’ve seen tourists dismount, stoop forward and, pope-like, kiss the ground in deliverance. Smiling Thais gently kick-box them out of the way so that they can take the best seats in the restaurant.
You can imagine the carnage when, as everybody sits eating duck and rice with diesel fumes, a brace of competing buses collide, mount the pavement and career through the tables. No? I can.
We had a portable restaurant near our office. Located in a narrow lane it was equipped with gas and kerosene-powered barbecue facilities, as in ‘Whoosh!’ We all partook of cheap and delicious grizzled chicken, pig, prawns, fragrant rice and fresh vegetables. An adjacent business supplied bottled gas for household and industrial use. They had a variety of delivery vehicles from trucks to motorcycles. The position of the restaurant made access a challenge. Diners obliged by picking up their tables to allow bigger trucks through - cheerfully.
Well, if you can’t face poverty, hardship, monsoon floods, tsunamis, military coups and general inconvenience cheerfully, you may as well become a monk. (Easily arranged.)
One morning I arrived by motorcycle taxi - not recommended for those of a nervous disposition – to find deposits of sand, gravel and huge concrete pipes. A wooden hut - deluxe living-quarters for a cheerful bunch of flat-nosed Thais from some impoverished North Eastern province - had been erected. Sewage was the name of their game. Using steel spikes, shovels and wicker baskets they carved through tarmac and anything else to cut through to the crap.
As the trench grew in proportion to the stench, life went on. The gasmen struggled; the portable restaurant sizzled; dedicated customers giggled, and some wore facemasks between courses.
I love stoicism. I can watch it all day. My wimpy-western concerns about health and safety had long gone. Or had they? Suddenly I realised we might all be in terrible danger. If the malodorous fumes were toxic, might they not also be inflammable? What would happen if a spike hit an electric cable? What if a spark made contact with a leaking gas bottle on the back of a motorbike, just as the barbecue in the portable restaurant was being encouraged with kerosene? Would there not be one hell of a bang?
I went back to Bangkok some years later to find that the lane in which I worked had gone. But there’d been no big bang. The pipes were the harbinger of a huge block of luxury flats. A billboard offered ‘exotic views of a mystical, graceful and serenely oriental city’.
That was when I realised that instead of writing fiction I should have been an advertising copywriter.
Thursday, 26 November 2009
Monday, 23 November 2009
Decisions
It's true what they say about decisions; they come back to haunt us. One of the worst decisions my uncle Owen ever made was allowing me use of his green, 150cc Lambretta. Not as iconic as ‘Vespa scooter of Il Dolce Vita fame’ but quicker, he used it to go on fishing trips and to take himself to Stamford Bridge to watch ‘Chopper Harris’ do Chelsea’s dirty work.
Nagged by his wife, my sainted aunty Mavis, who took pity on me for the wretchedness of my commute from Wandsworth to Fenchurch Street in the heart of the City of London, and the fact that I was newly married and struggling, he handed it over reluctantly. When I handed it back it was a wreck. He didn’t talk to me for several years, only forgiving me as he lay on what he thought was his deathbed. After fifty-odd years of rolling his own he’d been advised to stop smoking cigarettes. Thinking the decision to stop would kill him, it nearly did.
I remember my first accident well. Steaming round a corner in Victoria during the morning rush hour I was surprised to see a bowler-hatted man in hesitation mode. I didn’t hesitate to hit the brakes but there was not enough space for the front of the Lambretta not to clobber him amidships. Down he went. Off I fell. I was even more surprised when he sprang to his feet and sprinted to the nearest pavement. How a black cab didn’t get him or I we’ll both never know. Safe on the pavement he raised his funny hat, smiled, mouthed ‘Sorry about that’ and sped off to catch his tube. Picking up the dented and scratched Lambretta I stopped cursing and drove warily on.
My best ever accident was in the evening rush hour on Wandsworth High Street. Near the town hall I was duelling with two car drivers who seemed inclined to make a sandwich out of me. As they had a weight advantage I had to brake and it was wet. Fortunately they’d both passed me when the skid maximised. Down I went. My scattergun effect on the surrounding, speeding traffic would have looked comical from the air, but God bless those London drivers. As I threaded my way through them I received nary a scratch.
The Lambretta was not so lucky. Sliding along the road and spinning like a top did it no good whatsoever. But do you know, I ventured out into the middle of the maelstrom, retrieved it, wheeled it to the side of the road and it started first time. Thinking no more about it and ignoring the slightly buckled front wheel it got me home.
The worst decision I’ve made for a while is one I made last Thursday. I decided to rent a studio in Kata, Phuket and the deal includes a new set of wheels. The connection with events all those years ago is ironic rather than iconic. The bike is a streamlined 150 cc scooter, model Mio Amore, but the name was coined in Tokyo. Yamaha make great bikes but isn’t it sad that they have to resort to lifting names that are synonymous with Italian-made two-wheelers? Well I think it is.
But it is a bike. It goes like ordure (shit) off a sharecropper’s clod buster, a sharp spade the Irish call a shovel. Nought to a hundred in about nine seconds but we’re only talking kilometres. Hills? Yes it does hills. And so far as my use of it is concerned, this is a good thing.
Do you know Kata/Karon Beach? It’s a sort of paradise. They say that James Bond rested-up here between scary trips to spiky islands where a man brandished a golden gun. Kata, Karon and neighbouring Patong can only be accessed by scary roads or by boat. To get in and out, hairy hill roads are involved, roads that look to have similar gradients to the A39, the trunk road between Devon and Somerset. The A39 features Porlock Hill and like that monster these Thai roads feature unusually explicit signs. In Thai and English they shout ‘Danger!’ ‘Slow down!’ and for God’s sake ‘Use low gear!’ What they keep to themselves is probably more important.
At this time of year, Phuket and elsewhere is subject to the prevailing north-easterly monsoon. Like typhoons blow, monsoons rain. Rain? Dear Lord, and how. But it seems to be official policy to ignore it, to act as if torrential rain was just one of those things. The fact that it can bucket down several centimetres as you cross a road seems to be no big deal. And probably isn’t. But, my dears, in my opinion the one sign that I would have liked to see, hear or feel before I biked across from Karon to Patong the other night was ‘Don’t go tonight. Change your mind. Tomorrow will be fine’.
Dear Lord, the journey of just seven kilometres was unbelievable. Dressed in light trousers and a blue, short-sleeved shirt I was as physically and mentally unprepared for danger and hardship as I have ever been in my entire life. The moment I felt the first drops bang into my face, splat onto my glasses and ping off my helmet I should have turned around and fled the scene. But no. I decided to blast on with the rest of the mainly four-wheeled traffic. Spray? I’ll say.
The downhill bits were the worst. Tarmac spread on steep slopes obeys the law of gravity and eventually slides downhill. Cracks form and widen, and I didn’t see one of them! Bang, crash, wobble, wobble, fright after fright. One thought I remember well. ‘Did I pass wind involuntarily just then or was it something worse?’
On a dry day at the bottom of the last hill before Patong there is a water feature. It has all the attributes of a permanently burst water main. On a dry day one should approach this feature with caution. On a black and super wet night one should only approach it in a military hovercraft.
Having reneged on a decision to never again drive a two-wheeler, my friends may want to know if, upon my arrival in Patong this year, whether I made a splash or not. I’m not telling until the insurance assessor has submitted his report and if my claim for a new, blue, short-sleeved shirt is approved.
Nagged by his wife, my sainted aunty Mavis, who took pity on me for the wretchedness of my commute from Wandsworth to Fenchurch Street in the heart of the City of London, and the fact that I was newly married and struggling, he handed it over reluctantly. When I handed it back it was a wreck. He didn’t talk to me for several years, only forgiving me as he lay on what he thought was his deathbed. After fifty-odd years of rolling his own he’d been advised to stop smoking cigarettes. Thinking the decision to stop would kill him, it nearly did.
I remember my first accident well. Steaming round a corner in Victoria during the morning rush hour I was surprised to see a bowler-hatted man in hesitation mode. I didn’t hesitate to hit the brakes but there was not enough space for the front of the Lambretta not to clobber him amidships. Down he went. Off I fell. I was even more surprised when he sprang to his feet and sprinted to the nearest pavement. How a black cab didn’t get him or I we’ll both never know. Safe on the pavement he raised his funny hat, smiled, mouthed ‘Sorry about that’ and sped off to catch his tube. Picking up the dented and scratched Lambretta I stopped cursing and drove warily on.
My best ever accident was in the evening rush hour on Wandsworth High Street. Near the town hall I was duelling with two car drivers who seemed inclined to make a sandwich out of me. As they had a weight advantage I had to brake and it was wet. Fortunately they’d both passed me when the skid maximised. Down I went. My scattergun effect on the surrounding, speeding traffic would have looked comical from the air, but God bless those London drivers. As I threaded my way through them I received nary a scratch.
The Lambretta was not so lucky. Sliding along the road and spinning like a top did it no good whatsoever. But do you know, I ventured out into the middle of the maelstrom, retrieved it, wheeled it to the side of the road and it started first time. Thinking no more about it and ignoring the slightly buckled front wheel it got me home.
The worst decision I’ve made for a while is one I made last Thursday. I decided to rent a studio in Kata, Phuket and the deal includes a new set of wheels. The connection with events all those years ago is ironic rather than iconic. The bike is a streamlined 150 cc scooter, model Mio Amore, but the name was coined in Tokyo. Yamaha make great bikes but isn’t it sad that they have to resort to lifting names that are synonymous with Italian-made two-wheelers? Well I think it is.
But it is a bike. It goes like ordure (shit) off a sharecropper’s clod buster, a sharp spade the Irish call a shovel. Nought to a hundred in about nine seconds but we’re only talking kilometres. Hills? Yes it does hills. And so far as my use of it is concerned, this is a good thing.
Do you know Kata/Karon Beach? It’s a sort of paradise. They say that James Bond rested-up here between scary trips to spiky islands where a man brandished a golden gun. Kata, Karon and neighbouring Patong can only be accessed by scary roads or by boat. To get in and out, hairy hill roads are involved, roads that look to have similar gradients to the A39, the trunk road between Devon and Somerset. The A39 features Porlock Hill and like that monster these Thai roads feature unusually explicit signs. In Thai and English they shout ‘Danger!’ ‘Slow down!’ and for God’s sake ‘Use low gear!’ What they keep to themselves is probably more important.
At this time of year, Phuket and elsewhere is subject to the prevailing north-easterly monsoon. Like typhoons blow, monsoons rain. Rain? Dear Lord, and how. But it seems to be official policy to ignore it, to act as if torrential rain was just one of those things. The fact that it can bucket down several centimetres as you cross a road seems to be no big deal. And probably isn’t. But, my dears, in my opinion the one sign that I would have liked to see, hear or feel before I biked across from Karon to Patong the other night was ‘Don’t go tonight. Change your mind. Tomorrow will be fine’.
Dear Lord, the journey of just seven kilometres was unbelievable. Dressed in light trousers and a blue, short-sleeved shirt I was as physically and mentally unprepared for danger and hardship as I have ever been in my entire life. The moment I felt the first drops bang into my face, splat onto my glasses and ping off my helmet I should have turned around and fled the scene. But no. I decided to blast on with the rest of the mainly four-wheeled traffic. Spray? I’ll say.
The downhill bits were the worst. Tarmac spread on steep slopes obeys the law of gravity and eventually slides downhill. Cracks form and widen, and I didn’t see one of them! Bang, crash, wobble, wobble, fright after fright. One thought I remember well. ‘Did I pass wind involuntarily just then or was it something worse?’
On a dry day at the bottom of the last hill before Patong there is a water feature. It has all the attributes of a permanently burst water main. On a dry day one should approach this feature with caution. On a black and super wet night one should only approach it in a military hovercraft.
Having reneged on a decision to never again drive a two-wheeler, my friends may want to know if, upon my arrival in Patong this year, whether I made a splash or not. I’m not telling until the insurance assessor has submitted his report and if my claim for a new, blue, short-sleeved shirt is approved.
Monday, 2 November 2009
Bankers!
Banks became important to us as individuals when companies demanded that ‘we’, their employees, needed bank accounts. Putting cash in a brown, window-envelope complete with payslip had become too much trouble for them. As bankers looked at the advent of millions of deposits from captive customers they knew they’d cracked it.
From then on we had to check with our banks that our money was in our accounts. Invariably it wasn’t. We went to the accounts department and remonstrated with the bean counters. ‘My kids have to eat, so what’s the story?’ They held up their hands and cheerfully blamed the banks. They were right. It became standard practice for bankers to exploit our money for as long as they can get away with it. That’s what bankers do.
Workers did receive an envelope. Inside was a meaningless document called ‘Payslip’. Originally a simple record of money earned, the slip had morphed into a something resembling a research paper by a demented nuclear physicist. To this day, most workers do not understand what, how or why they are being rewarded and robbed at the same time.
Concerned that my ubiquitous UK high street bank did not have my best interest at heart – they failed to inform me that my savings interest rate had been lowered three times - I changed to a bank owned by Spaniards. It was no big coup on their part. I’d used all my redundancy money to buy a motor-caravan, which I then sold at a huge loss. Fearful I would be impoverished before my desultory pension kicked in, I sought a new haven for the remainder of my nest egg. Nest egg? A predatory cuckoo’s misplaced chick would have heaved it straight out of the nest with ridiculous ease.
Nothing went right. (I blame the Spaniards.) They not only duplicated the new account, they fouled up my address details. Stuff sent to my Dutch address never arrived. I made phone calls to their Customer Service department located, not in Santander, but in Pokhara, a small town in central Nepal. Wherever! An unreconstructed Maoist and I - he claimed to be an advisor – misunderstood each other. Stalemate prevailed and nothing changed until I went to the UK and kicked an underpaid English teller’s ass.
The Credit Crunch played into their hands. To my relief and their credit the Spaniards had not been sucked into the sub-prime, derivative-beribative vortex. My northern Spanish bankers were not dopey Northern rockers or nasty Lehman brethren. Off the government’s controlling hook they blew their own trumpets mightily. They’re so chuffed with themselves they’ve decided to ditch the iconic UK banks they own, electing to go public about a Spanish heritage.
If their UK banks had worthy reputations this might be a mistake. But they don’t. Indebted Britons won’t give a damn that Spaniards now control the money they don’t have. Elizabeth the First’s Protestant (and Jewish) moneylenders must be turning in their graves.
To add insult to injury caused by painfully low rates for the common man – that’s the rest of us - the Bank of England’s interest management policy serves the bankers well. They have just announced that their unworthy UK subsidiaries have made lots of money: for them. Profits are sizzling like paella in a pan. In the first nine months of 2009 they made 1.3 billion euros. Now that’s a nest egg!
Realising that the announcement sounded like gloating, when nearly 4 million heavily indebted Britons might be unemployed by the end of the same year, they had the brass neck to add a ‘oops!’ proviso: “The UK economy is still fragile.” What colossal chutzpah! Fragile? I’ll say it’s fragile. Spanish or otherwise, these people are Bankers with a capital B.
I’m off on my travels and will be forced to use their wretched debit card at ATM machines in exotic locations. I’m getting too old to carry cash around and fight whoever would relieve me of it. Did you know that banks sometimes block cards for security reasons, especially when you’re abroad and want to use them? They do. It happened to me, and guess what? You have to phone a Maoist in Pokhara and beg him to unblock it.
He’ll hum and haa, check his list and ask embarrassing questions. The one about my long dead mother’s maiden name tends to catch me out. Despite him calling you ‘sir’ you want to crawl down the line and kill him with his own Kalashnikov. Why? Because you’re paying for the call!
To avoid this blood-sucking trap I sent an email asking them to make sure that my debit card was not blocked. Two days later they replied: not ‘they’ but their automatic, standard letter reply system. Did it understand? No it did not. It merely told me how expensive it was to use their card in foreign ATM machines and that my daily limit was insufficient to feed and accommodate a cuckoo’s well-muscled chick. Next time I’m in the UK…
Bankers! Akira the Don got it right when he advised us to ‘put our fingers in the corners of our mouth and say, “Wxxkers”’.
From then on we had to check with our banks that our money was in our accounts. Invariably it wasn’t. We went to the accounts department and remonstrated with the bean counters. ‘My kids have to eat, so what’s the story?’ They held up their hands and cheerfully blamed the banks. They were right. It became standard practice for bankers to exploit our money for as long as they can get away with it. That’s what bankers do.
Workers did receive an envelope. Inside was a meaningless document called ‘Payslip’. Originally a simple record of money earned, the slip had morphed into a something resembling a research paper by a demented nuclear physicist. To this day, most workers do not understand what, how or why they are being rewarded and robbed at the same time.
Concerned that my ubiquitous UK high street bank did not have my best interest at heart – they failed to inform me that my savings interest rate had been lowered three times - I changed to a bank owned by Spaniards. It was no big coup on their part. I’d used all my redundancy money to buy a motor-caravan, which I then sold at a huge loss. Fearful I would be impoverished before my desultory pension kicked in, I sought a new haven for the remainder of my nest egg. Nest egg? A predatory cuckoo’s misplaced chick would have heaved it straight out of the nest with ridiculous ease.
Nothing went right. (I blame the Spaniards.) They not only duplicated the new account, they fouled up my address details. Stuff sent to my Dutch address never arrived. I made phone calls to their Customer Service department located, not in Santander, but in Pokhara, a small town in central Nepal. Wherever! An unreconstructed Maoist and I - he claimed to be an advisor – misunderstood each other. Stalemate prevailed and nothing changed until I went to the UK and kicked an underpaid English teller’s ass.
The Credit Crunch played into their hands. To my relief and their credit the Spaniards had not been sucked into the sub-prime, derivative-beribative vortex. My northern Spanish bankers were not dopey Northern rockers or nasty Lehman brethren. Off the government’s controlling hook they blew their own trumpets mightily. They’re so chuffed with themselves they’ve decided to ditch the iconic UK banks they own, electing to go public about a Spanish heritage.
If their UK banks had worthy reputations this might be a mistake. But they don’t. Indebted Britons won’t give a damn that Spaniards now control the money they don’t have. Elizabeth the First’s Protestant (and Jewish) moneylenders must be turning in their graves.
To add insult to injury caused by painfully low rates for the common man – that’s the rest of us - the Bank of England’s interest management policy serves the bankers well. They have just announced that their unworthy UK subsidiaries have made lots of money: for them. Profits are sizzling like paella in a pan. In the first nine months of 2009 they made 1.3 billion euros. Now that’s a nest egg!
Realising that the announcement sounded like gloating, when nearly 4 million heavily indebted Britons might be unemployed by the end of the same year, they had the brass neck to add a ‘oops!’ proviso: “The UK economy is still fragile.” What colossal chutzpah! Fragile? I’ll say it’s fragile. Spanish or otherwise, these people are Bankers with a capital B.
I’m off on my travels and will be forced to use their wretched debit card at ATM machines in exotic locations. I’m getting too old to carry cash around and fight whoever would relieve me of it. Did you know that banks sometimes block cards for security reasons, especially when you’re abroad and want to use them? They do. It happened to me, and guess what? You have to phone a Maoist in Pokhara and beg him to unblock it.
He’ll hum and haa, check his list and ask embarrassing questions. The one about my long dead mother’s maiden name tends to catch me out. Despite him calling you ‘sir’ you want to crawl down the line and kill him with his own Kalashnikov. Why? Because you’re paying for the call!
To avoid this blood-sucking trap I sent an email asking them to make sure that my debit card was not blocked. Two days later they replied: not ‘they’ but their automatic, standard letter reply system. Did it understand? No it did not. It merely told me how expensive it was to use their card in foreign ATM machines and that my daily limit was insufficient to feed and accommodate a cuckoo’s well-muscled chick. Next time I’m in the UK…
Bankers! Akira the Don got it right when he advised us to ‘put our fingers in the corners of our mouth and say, “Wxxkers”’.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)