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  • An Amazing Coincidence Over Wirral Libraries

    November 7, 2009

    Late last year, a press release was sent out from our local council - very late in the day as is seemingly usual for anything contentious - bigging up an idea it had for the future. It announced the "fewer but better" facilities it was going provide through the provision of new facilities costing £20 million exactly, the money for which would be found in "savings" brought by, er, closing the existing facilities.

    They just didn't mention which facilities, though. Not in that press release, anyway. And of course, locally, we now know why.

    Because nowhere on this press release was there any mention of the closure of what was going to be thirteen libraries - and the possible relocation of a further one - out of Wirral's existing 24.

    Nowhere.

    Call me cynical - many do - but in the words of that press release I instantly suspected the cold hand of someone equally cynically hoping - or assuming - we wouldn't spot the real message behind the leaden words of hope.

    Because of massive local (and indeed national) opposition - around 60,000 people signed petitions in protest, which (without checking) is probably more than vote in local elections - the Government was forced to step in.

    The libraries were saved, albeit temporarily, while a local inquiry, headed by a Government inspector, was held to investigate how the council had gone about its business.

    The report into the results of that inquiry remain a mystery, although this correspondent is given to believe that it doesn't exactly say Wirral Council, in regards to its libraries review, is a beacon of local government administrative brilliance.

    But then I haven't actually seen the report - yet.

    Other people certainly have, though.

    You can read my article about the latest turn of events here.

    But if you can't be bothered, I'll summarise.

    On Tuesday, September 29 this year, the Government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport contacted Wirral Council to say a decision on the library closures was "70 per cent likely" to be made public two days later on Thursday, October 1.

    That same night, through and past midnight, senior councillors gathered in the town hall on the banks of the Mersey for a meeting. It's probably accurate to say this was not for a game of Twister.

    On hand nearby, coincidentally, were senior civil servants hanging around the town hall at the witching hour, as you do. They happened to include the man who'd put his name to the library closures proposal in the first place and the spin doctor who'd not mentioned them in the "fewer but better" press release they had approved.

    The following day, September 30, word got to us in the media that the council's administration was saying something about the libraries. After 5pm, of course, but that's how it works these days.

    The libraries were staying open.

    Nothing to do with whatever the DCMS was going to say the next day, of course (although we have only literally just now learned that the DCMS was planning to go public that day) but all to do with budgetary management.

    So trebles all round. Libraries are open, the people are happy, budgets are being met, and more importantly than anything else, no one was embarrassingly forced into anything and - exceptionally so - it's no one's fault.

    Like my headline says, it's just all an amazing coincidence.

  • Word Of The Day

    November 6, 2009

    Felicide, noun
    Killing of a cat

    "So the person we're looking for," hushed Nipper, with a stroke of his imaginary moustache, "is almost certainly called Mr Curiosity."

    He was fired, immediately.

  • Word Of The Day

    November 5, 2009

    Rhigosis, noun
    Sensation of cold; ability to feel cold

    "Brrrrrrrrr," shivered Nipper, ruffling his feathers.

  • Visiting Etiquette

    November 4, 2009

    If you'd fallen out with someone, rather badly, after doing something very, very stupid, how would you try to attempt to retrieve the situation some many months later?

    Would you:

    1) Send a tentative text, or email?

    2) Make an actual phone call, perhaps beginning with the words: "Look, I know it's been ages, but...?"

    3) Put a note through the letter box?

    4) Just not bother. Sometimes, there are wrongs that can't be put right, and you have to take the blame.

    5) Turn up at someone's shared house while the person they want to see is still out at work - working late, in fact, so probably just wants to put his feet up when he gets back - embarrass a housemate into allowing them to stay, smoke their cigarettes, drink their wine, then go out to replenish the devoured nicotine and booze and return with a bottle, a packet of fags, and a five course Chinese takeaway that you proceed to eat in front of your utterly bemused host?

    Thank fuck the dog bit him.

    Unbelieveable.

  • Word Of The Day

    November 4, 2009

    Hebephrenia, noun
    Form of dementia occurring at puberty

    "There's another name for it, too, isn't there?" asked Nipper.

    "There is indeed," said Zeds. "Women."

  • Word Of The Day

    November 3, 2009

    Janitrix, noun
    A female janitor

    "Do you reckon she has a dirty tunic, odd eyes, a creepy manner, a selection of wide floor brooms and a penchant for hanging around in the boiler room, though?" wondered Nipper.

    "I honestly have no idea," replied Zeds.

  • Angry People In Local Newspapers

    November 2, 2009

    Hilarious blog taking the piss out of local newspapers.

    Brilliant.

  • Word Of The Day

    November 2, 2009

    Garçonniere, noun
    Bachelor apartment

    "And what do you eat?" asked Zeds.

    "Soup, of course," said Nipper.

  • Steveinthighland - The Wonders Of BCUK

    November 1, 2009

    I've been noticing a few Feedjit hits from Thailand of late - turns out it's an old friend and fellow nutcase ex-pat still living out there who'd been passed my link by yet another lunatic who has also featured on these pages.

    Steve is the guy who let me sleep on his pool table when I had nothing else. Top geezer. Although I think his wife now wants to kill me. Check out his blog here.

  • Word Of The Day

    November 1, 2009

    Nesiote, verb
    Living on an island

    "Are you?" asked Nipper.

    "Yes," said Zeds. "Pretty much always."

  • Word Of The Day

    October 31, 2009

    Abature, noun
    Trail through wood beaten down by a stag

    Zeds was distinctly unimpressed.

    "Look," he said, as Nipper was carted off out of the bar towards the police car. "Just ask people to get out of the way in future."

  • Thai Tales - Seventeen

    October 31, 2009

    1

    IT'S REMARKABLY easy to define how unhappy you can be, yet seemingly almost impossible to accurately describe your joy, your contentment, that time you reach your goal. Someone recently asked what "joy" was, and I answered something about seeing someone you love fast asleep next to you with a smile on their face (which is indeed joyful, I reckon). But it was a passing, fleeting remark. Meant well, but not really considered.

    Joy, to me, is really about being a glutton: Eating up and savouring every possible experience available, and then some. Forcing life down your gullet, using your stomach to digest, your bowels to eject, your throat to throw out, your pores to ooze, your hair to sweat, your nails to grow, scratch and break. Life is nothing without actually living: It's empty without challenge; stagnant without fear.

    Chumbawumba had a point: You get knocked down - but you do get up again.

    2

    THE TEARS weren't mine, and they weren't unhappy ones, either. Maudlin, perhaps, but then Pen was allowed maudlin tears. Our deep and close connection was down to a former best friend of mine - and a former lover of hers - Keith, now passed, that makes our occasional and unexpected meetings so tinged with sadness; silver with a clouded lining.

    We'd bumped into each other on Lamai Beach Road as I was heading towards my parents' bungalow hours before the horrors occurred: I'd recognised the legs from behind. But though long and lithe, and very, very pretty, Pen is anything but the bar girl. She manages one, sure; she serves drinks, too; and her latest paramour is also a farang.

    But when I gasped her name - I thought she would have been hundreds of miles north of Samui with her family in Ubon - she delicately turned, said my name, ran straight at me, almost knocked me over, told me how lovely it was to see me, and promptly burst into tears.

    That's the thing about Keith, you see: No one I know, or at least see, any more, knows how much I miss my friend. But Pen does. Pen, a girl on an island 6,000 miles from where I write this. It's like we've got secret tattoos of grief that only each other can see. He was the most maddening, stubborn, strong, courageous, reckless, generous motherfucker, and now he's gone, succumbed to a heart attack aged 34.

    Like I said, though: They weren't unhappy tears. In every drop of moisture winding down Pen's face was a liquid memory of happiness, laughter, and, yes, joy: Keith had eaten life like it was the last meal on earth. I treasure Pen's happy tears as much as the memories of where they came from.

    3

    A FEW hours later, I am sat in the back of her now closed bar with my trousers around my ankles. We are not alone. With us are three scantily-clad bargirls. All four women are glistening in the darkness, the wetness of their skin catching the distant moonlight peeping in from the front.

    They are wet, because they are covered in ointment. Ointment they are insisting on kneading into my battered knee and thigh, up and down and seemingly into my throbbing calf. I have still not yet been in Thailand for 24 hours, and I'm being manhandled by four remotely-moist women with my trousers at my feet bearing injuries my drunkenness was dreading on giving in to.

    "Dut Tin," said Pen. "Why you always make trouble for you?" She jabbed a finger into my chest. "Always you find trouble! Why?"

    Good point, I thought, if a little preoccupied by the beating and the death threat I'd just received.

    Still. When the ointment was all rubbed in, and the girls had pulled my trousers back up, I was steered out of the back entrance of the bar into a darkened, quiet alley. My chest was pounding, my head throbbing, my leg booming, and my knee shrieking. My nose wasn't feeling too clever, either, and I looked like shit.

    Ouy (pronounced "Oi!"), as it transpired to be her name, was out there already, kickstarting a motorbike. I looked back at Pen, who said: "You must to stay safe tonight. Ouy take you."

    I didn't even know this girl, though - despite our recent leg massage experience. With Pen's help, I hobbled towards the bike.

    "Come," said Ouy.

    Oh. I see. Well, if you're going to put it like that...

    "I call you Alek," she said, with a smile. And off we whirred, into the hot night, no helmets or harnesses, the wind whipping around our ears.

    I was battered and bruised, shaken and upset, but drunk enough to take the whole thing on board. The rushing air was warm, and as we peeled off towards the south end of Lamai, skipping past soup carts, wanton ladyboys, the ping-pong noise of the 7/11 door, I glanced left and right to see my various refuges of six years before.

    It seems a little strange, looking back, but that was when I finally started to smile a little.

    I needed some noodle soup. I was finally at home.

    * More to follow.

  • Brand Protection Is So Funny, Honey

    October 30, 2009

    I have just had possibly the greatest conversation with a PR person I have ever had, or ever will.

    His voice was full of trembling concern.

    We'd carried, on September 25, while I was getting battered on foreign shores, a preview piece about a panto this winter.

    For some reason, Snow White And The Seven Dwarves are this year being accompanied by a creature that adorns boxes of wee smell-changing breakfast cereal up and down the land.

    You know, that monster that likes honey...

    The PR person, who sounded like he very possibly put the sugar into puffs, is massively concerned about the images here.

    Because the monster of honey is "naked", you see.

    And children might see it.

    And get upset.

    I kid you not.

    They're protecting their brand. Even though passing generations across continents of nations famously refer to the nutty, wheat-like aroma that their piss takes on once they've eaten it.

    Of course I don't mind changing the picture.

    But not absolutely straight away, eh ;) ?

  • Animal Tragic

    October 30, 2009

    Jesus. They're flying in today.

    Dear Editor,

    As Remembrance Day approaches, it is important not only to remember the human victims of wartime, but also the animals who have been used for detection, scouting and rescue, as messengers, as beasts of burden and on the frontline. Vast numbers of animals – in farms and zoos, for instance – continue to be innocent bystander victims when conflicts start. Meanwhile, in secret UK Ministry of Defence Research laboratories, thousands suffer and die each year when they are infected with biological or chemical agents, or deliberately shot or otherwise damaged. To commemorate all the animal victims, Animal Aid has issued a purple poppy, which can be worn alongside the traditional red one, as a reminder that both humans and animals have been – and continue to be – victims of war. The purple poppies cost £1 each (including postage and packing) and are available from www.animalaid.org.uk or by calling 01732 364546. A free copy of Animal Aid’s colour booklet, Animals: the hidden victims of war, accompanies each order.

    Yours faithfully

    Kelly Slade
    Campaigns Officer

    Tel: 01732 364546
    Web: www.animalaid.org.uk
    Animal Aid, The Old Chapel, Bradford Street, Tonbridge, Kent, TN9 1AW

    Woof!

  • Yet Another Reason Why Marketing People Should Kill Themselves

    October 30, 2009

    "North West marketers poorly paid," reads the headline on a press release that is presumably meant to make me weep for the lowly, but in fact makes me want to bite trees.

    "The Chartered Institute of Marketing’s latest marketing salary survey, conducted by Croner Reward, reveals that pay for marketers in the North West is well below the national average. The survey found that the average basic pay for all marketers in the North West is £30,000 per annum – 5.1% below the national average.

    "Basic pay for marketing managers stands at £42,000 on average, 2.3% below the national average, and less than those performing the same role in London, who can expect to earn £44,000.

    "However, at the most senior levels pay remains competitive. A head of marketing in the North West earns a basic salary of £58,334, whilst a marketing director earns £76,750 – both slightly above the national average for these roles.

    "Across the UK as a whole, the survey revealed that average pay for marketers increased by 3.3% over the past year, and is forecast to rise by 3% in the year ahead.

    "The survey also highlighted the importance of professional qualifications and membership. Both senior and junior marketing managers who are members of The Chartered Institute of Marketing are paid more than non-members at these levels – between 2% and 12% more.

    "David Thorp, director of research and professional development at The Chartered Institute of Marketing, said: 'Marketers in the North West had better ensure they reach senior positions quickly if they want to achieve the pay levels seen elsewhere in the UK. One way of doing so is to become professionally qualified, which as the survey indicates, results in higher salaries. In what promises to be a continuing challenging business environment over the next few years, employing qualified marketing professionals, who will undoubtedly help their organisations thrive and survive, will prove to be money very well invested.'"

    Pass the mallet, vicar. I have to go out for a while.

  • Word Of The Day

    October 30, 2009

    Facetiae, adj
    Term for books of inappropriate or lewd nature

    Nipper looked gloomily down at the black and white mess that he'd unexpectedly made of his stained blue velvet pantaloons.

    "How's it going?" asked Zeds.

    "Shit," said the buzzard.

  • Hi

    October 30, 2009

    With the absolute and thankful creativity afforded by Landers - and I assume the equally lovely Brad takes a part in this, through patience if nothing else - I'm back.

    Paddy? You do realise my mum's in with love you now, right?

    More Words of the Day, loads more Thai Tales; loads more funnies - all true.

    But thanks to Landers and Scoobs - and readers waiting - for being so very kind, and so very patient, and so very caring, frankly..

    Let's kick arse tomorrow, eh? And get that sodding book finished.

    You've all been so supportive. I hope I can I maintain that good feeling.

    Thanks for your encouragement so far.

    Justin x

  • Thai Tales - Sixteen

    October 17, 2009

    1

    BARBECUES are a man thing, at least to the men who gather around the burgeoning flames. We really can't help it. See flames? Must gather more wood. Find more meat. Burn more flesh. Build the bonfire as high and as hot as we can. The end result is never the point, of course - it's the getting there that counts. The hunt. The chase. The fire. The flames. The burn, the fight, the pure machismo of hunter-gathering, flames and food. And smashing things to bits in the process.

    And we take these prehistoric genes ever onwards. Like any man, I like holding a hammer. Not because I have the faintest idea what to do with one; I just like the solid, heavy, damaging feel in my hands. It makes me want to break things. Axes, too. They're the same. Let's hit, damage, bruise, break, chop, crack, wither, defeat.

    Man always takes this action to the things, animal or mineral, that can't, or most probably can't, win.

    But unlike the average animal, man is far more fallible to his own kind, because that testy little thing called emotion comes into it, too.

    What follows is how I got kicked in by someone I have admired to a ridiculous degree for a good six years, and how it has, largely, ruined everything I ever felt about a place I genuinely thought of as a balm for a troubled soul.

    2

    I LEFT Odd and his family to wander along the beach, Lamai Beach, to meet up with another friend, an English teacher, who was out with her friends, colleagues, from the frankly marvellous school she has created, with assistance, out there.

    When I first saw this school in 2003, there were about 40 pupils. Now there are well over 100, and a new building has just been completed to accommodate the pioneering autism project she'd pushed and pushed and pushed to have. Her accomplishment makes me enormously proud for two reasons: My best friends have a son who is within the autistic spectrum, and I know what tremendous challenges that brings and continues to bring (the lad is marvellous, by the way); and that she'd battled through language, and endeavour, and sheer bloody-mindedness, to achieve the nigh-on impossible in a place where money and money-led opportunity was overthrown by her persuasion and, ultimately, genuine heart-felt care.

    So, now after about 40 hours of almost no sleep, but with a desire to see the people I cared about most in Samui, I wander along the beach, admittedly quite pissed, to see my friend, who eventually returned my call after she'd returned from a trip out out to another close-lying island for a colleague's birthday.

    I was probably fun for about an hour. I know I made people laugh with tales of derring-do. I know that I then slipped into outrageous "I once interviewed a man who shagged a goat" stories, which probably weren't appropriate for some of the mothers of the young teachers whose mothers were out visiting, and sitting with us, and sipping the cocktails I'd bought.

    Still: This is me, eh?

    But then: "Hello, Dut-Tin."

    It is the ex-(Thai)-boyfriend, who I will call X, of my friend, Y, who has appeared on the edge of the beach. He's also an old friend, a friend who used to take care of me once upon a time.

    "Hi," I say, a little awkwardly, because I am sat with his old girlfriend - who is merely just my mate.

    I hear nothing more from him. Must have gone home.

    3

    THE GIRLS - and boys - from the school, were finished. They'd been on the lash for a birthday party all day and night. They had a new school term to prepare for in three days' time. I'd sunk them into the floor with cocktails. And I was leathered.

    Time to go home, then.

    Or maybe, just wander back down to the beach to see Odd for a nightcap. It was around 1.30am. Officially been up for 48 hours, bar the odd nap. I was smashed. But I was happy. I was back in Samui. I was back on the beach where I felt safe. I was amongst friends.

    I'd been feeling so unhappy for so long after my last girlfriend, I was genuinely elated to feel the heat, smell the Samui smells, feel the breeze from the sea that was so familiar, follow the same undulating path along the sands, I really felt like I was at home again, walking up to Odd's.

    He ran down to the bar towards me, and I opened my arms for the embrace that only Odd can give.

    Then he punched me, really punched me, square on the chin, reeling me backwards, knocking me out.

    4

    I WAS out for seconds.

    Odd was standing over me.

    He didn't speak, at first.

    Bewildered, I sat there. What the fuck?

    Then he kicked me. Hard.

    And I mean hard. This is no small nor agile man.

    He kicked at my thigh with a flat, arched, foot, muay thai (kick boxing) style.

    I cried out. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

    But he carried on. Spittle flecking from his mouth. Kick, crunch, slap, smack, punch.

    "X say you write shit about me on internet!" he screams, as his agonisingly powerful feet first go into my face, knocking off my glasses and bleeding my nose, my shades - in my short pocket - following suit into the sand. "You write shit!"

    I'm rolling, groaning. Trying to speak. Why would he think this? I have only ever adored and admired this man? Why is he hitting-

    "I kill you, Dut-Tin. I KILL YOU. Now fuck OFF.!"

    Then he stamps and stomps upon my left left knee and thigh, pummelling it into what is now a very hard, concrete-like sand.

    "FUCK OFF, Dut-tin," he screams, as I run away, crying, along the sand. "X say I kill you. You lucky I not kill you now,. Fuck! Fuck you! Bastard.! Pah," and then he spat, towards me, as I gathered my shoes, left my glasses, and ran away, into a past I thought I'd left well behind.

    This wasn't turning out to be the first day back in Samui I expected.

    Anything fucking but.

    And the thing is, I have never written anything but absolute praise and admiration about Odd, as all Thai Tales readers know.

    No. I was simply caught in the crossfire, a crossfire of which is someone else's story, and not mine to tell. Not at all.

    * More follows.

  • Thai Tales - Fifteen

    October 11, 2009

    1

    THE AIRPORT caddie wheeled him up onto the slightly raised platform, and me and mum followed on foot. Then we stood, in slight rain, as the lift began to raise. Us and another wheelchair-bound man, him with a genuine disability, as against recovering from the mother of all raw vodka hangovers. We were being hoisted up, forklift style, into the back of a truck in full view of the regular passengers queueing bemused at the gate. "Mortified" doesn't even come close.

    Later, as the plane banked and lowered ready to land at Schiphol in Amsterdam, he woke up. He was in the aisle seat, me in the middle, mum next to the window. "Where's the bloody breakfast?" he snarled. "You were asleep," I said, through gritted, tired teeth. "Why didn't you wake me?" "We tried. Here - I kept these for you," and handed him the dry, salty Tuc crackers KLM had so generously provided. He munched down on one, the cracker splintering across his chest, grumbling about the bastards who hadn't fed him. No way, no way, was I having this seating arrangement on the ten-hour Amsterdam-Bangkok leg of the journey.

    No way.

    2

    "NO, NO, in sterling," said mum, as she attempted to pay for three bowls of chicken noodle soup and three cans of beer at the Noodles Bar at Schiphol. It was around midday. We'd been up, two of us, for a day already. He'd of course slept in a vodka coma for a few hours before we left their home and got another hour on the plane. "Oh," said the Japanese woman at the counter, "no problem." She pressed a button on the till to convert the 53 and something Euros bill that we'd encountered. A new figure appeared.

    Fifty four pounds and pence.

    Mum gasped. Double checked. Gasped again. But yes, fifty four quid for three bowls of hot water, a few noodles, six slices of chicken in each, some beansprouts and herbs, and three cans of The World's Most Expensive Beer. So we piled on the chilli powder with wild abandon, seeing as at least that was free.

    Then it was back to being a carer again, as my father slipped back into paraplegic mode again the moment he sat in the wheelchair. "Doesn't he manage to get up every single fucking day and walk a mile to Wetherspoons, and back again, pissed?" I asked my mother.

    She rolled her eyes. We had another flight to get.

    3

    HOW DID this happen? How did the pre-booking of two aisle seats and one adjacent become a set of three together: window, middle, aisle? How come I'm sat wedged, aged 38, between my ageing by now bickering parents? What the fuck am I doing? Why did I agree to this? What am I letting myself in for? And why he is rubbing his hands together constantly, then clenching his face, grimacing, eyes sinking into the back of his head? Then grabbing and rubbing his crotch? And forcefully rubbing his thighs? He's become a demonic Vic Reeves without the jokes, as the fearsome grip of his vodka overload slowly starts to seep out of his pores and the cold turkey onslaught begins.

    Across the aisle, one row in front, is a Thai family returning home. There are three beautiful children, a boy who seemed to sleep the whole way through, a baby girl who was impeccable, and her gorgeous sister, three years old maybe, who between naps sat up on her mum's lap staring around at the strange people around her.

    The strangest was my father. Sat there ordering drink after drink, gin and tonics, lagers, red wine, brandy at one stage, between rubbing his hands, thighs and crotch, contorting his face into a clench of pain-relief; twisting his features in desperate attempts to hold off the body-wracking agony of no raw vodka. "No more," I said to him. "Fuck off you fucking cunt," he said, loudly enough for anyone within four metres to here. Thank god they mostly Dutch and Thai, I thought, before remembering how well other nationalities speak and understand our language.

    "No, really, that's it," I said. "You're grimacing at that little girl over there while rubbing your genitals. It's disgraceful. Go to sleep. Get a fucking grip."

    "Cunt," he replied. "You fucking cunt."

    Mum intervenes: "Just stop it, will you. This is terrible."

    Me: "Yeah, stop it. Now. If you must fucking drink, drink lager. Stay off the spirits. For christ's sake. You're making a holy show out of us."

    "Fuck off, cunt."

    Then he staggered up out of his chair to slowly stumble towards the toilet. The back of his catalogue beige trousers were soaked through, which I only noticed after leaning over his chair to get up and go to the loo myself, only find his seat drenched.

    Magic. And only five hours to go.

    4

    CHINA AIRLINES. Jesus. Not only was the seating arrangement precisely not the one we wanted, the food was absolutely atrocious - and I'm one of those sad travellers who still gets a kick out of airline grub - and the in-flight entertainment consisted of one screen at the front of the cabin showing a blurred copy of Angel and Demons. Needless to say, only one side of my earphones worked and even that was muffled. It was that, then the tedious map of where you are and how fast you're travelling.

    I must have drifted off at some stage, because I remember waking in the gloom. The plane was traversing across six time zones, hurtling at over 500mph towards many other nation's night and, I guess, tomorrow's daylight. Silhouetted in the dark, next to me, I saw a plastic cup being raised up towards my father's mouth, and the unmistakable smell of brandy hit my nose.

    "Haven't you had enough? Yet?" I asked him.

    "Oh fuck off you cunt," I got as a reply.

    "Look. We've got to get off this aircraft, find our way around Bangkok airport and then get another plane. We cannot do this if you're arseholed."

    "You're an arsehole."

    Mum woke up. "Mike, just-"

    I interrupt her: "I'd really like to see how you'll wheel yourself around when we land, because that's what's going to happen, okay?"

    Him: "I'd really like it if you two never spoke to me again, you cunts."

    Me: "Fine by me. You're on your own in Bangkok." Pause. "Oh, just so you know, we will have one more conversation - when I put my fist through your mouth at Bangkok and leave you for dead."

    I've now been awake for about 36 hours, give or take the odd nap. His head nods, slowly, and he drifts off to sleep. I order a glass of water.

    5

    HIS HEAD lifts up, out of slumber, and I know already he's completely forgotten what has been said before. Well, either completely forgotten or pretending it didn't happen. The sweat on his brow is heavy; it might as well have Smirnoff logos on every bead.

    Last year he was diagnosed with Korsakoff's syndrome, a form of dementia brought on by a lack of the vitamin thiamine; the syndrome is most commonly associated with malnutrition which in itself is most commonly brought on by chronic alcoholism. His brain has shrunk. He does, indeed, have issues. He has a "drop foot" because he slept all night in the toilet, got a blood clot, then refused to use the equipment the hospital provided him with because "it hurt". That's why he's on sticks. He was in hospital, dry, for six months, and on the lash within hours of eventually leaving.

    But the main issue is his solid refusal to look at the main one. Ask him how many drinks he's had, when he's sat in a puddle of his own piss - in a restaurant, no less, more of which later - and he replies: "How much have you had?" Then calls you a cunt.

    This from a man who once upon a time kept ocean tankers electrically sound as they carried multi-million dollar cargoes across the planet, whose garden was once his pride and joy, who would insist we all went to St Alban's church in Wallasey every Sunday morning, and once gave me a ferocious bollocking for not genuflecting properly. He has, it is fair to say, not a friend in the world.

    He woke, anyway, and leant over to me, like I imagine some fathers do quite naturally with their sons in other planets, other worlds, and, as he started to take off his seat belt, said: "I'm going to go for a lie down."

    "Where?" I asked.

    "In bed," he said.

    "Dad, we're on a plane."

    His face fell, crestfallen. He let out a low moan, and then rested back into his seat, looking thoroughly pissed off with the world and everyone else who lived on it.

    Bangkok was ninety minutes away, local time somewhere after 6am.

    6

    MY THAI TALES have frequently mentioned a man called Odd. He's a man I've admired, greatly, for six years. He was one of the two people I couldn't wait to see as I headed to Samui. The other person is problematic to write about, but is again someone of whom I'm very fond.

    Because of my father's walking impairment, along with the heat, I'd suggested they stay in a set of bungalows in Lamai, not Chaweng, the larger neighbouring town where they used to stay. I chose Lamai Wanta because it was right next to the beach, 100 yards from the main road, was on the flat - and because it was three or four doors down from Odd and his family, a family that had taken care of me many years before and who I knew would take care of my parents, as would I, should any situation arise.

    I first met Odd when was I working in Auy Bar, on Lamai Beach, after a brainstorm saw me refuse to return home to the UK and end up living there for eleven months. I'd been asked to hand out flyers to farang - foreigners - for a party we were apparently going to host that night. Not at our bar, but on a beach on the south of the island.

    Myself, documentary maker Mikkel, and Odd drove down to the venue at around 3pm. The party was starting at 8pm. When we arrived, after juddering through a coconut plantation in a pick-up, at least fifteen minutes away from any kind of human life, we found a section of beach smothered in coastal debris. The place was a mess. And there was no electricity.

    "No problem," grinned Odd, whose battered teeth had up to that point, unfortunately, made me think he was far less bright than the remarkably intelligent and versatile man he is.

    Off he went. Mikkel and I stood feeling, and being, helpless. What on earth were we going to do? We half-heartedly plucked a few empty water bottles from the sand, chucking them to one side. But this was useless. We'd taken money from tourists for a party that could not happen.

    Then, after thirty minutes, Odd arrived back. In a Bobcat. He cleared the beach in minutes, laughing in the cab as he smoked his beloved, powerful Khrong Thep cigarettes (Khrong Thep is the original name for Bangkok, although it has many, many other names).

    He disappeared again, to return once more in the pick-up with some local lads in tow. He fixed some sheeting around his feet, then shimmied up a coconut tree, nails in his mouth, hammer and small rectangular wooden planks tucked into his fisherman's pants, quite literally forging a ladder as he climbed.

    Then he went backup again, with the boys clinging onto his ladder beside him, as he heaved a huge speaker up on his back to the brace he'd prepared for it. Then the whole thing all over again, on another tree. He finished off by stringing black lights - the ones that make white clothes appear all illuminous - and then, after lighting up another cigarette, declared: "Okay."

    "Erm, Odd," I said. "What about power?"

    "Ah, no problem," he said, with a wave of his powerful hand.

    And then disappeared off into the jungle with a cable reel in his hand, heading I absolutely know not where.

    But ten minutes later, the lights came on. We were ready to host a party.

    The man was, is, a fucking genius. I genuinely have never been more impressed with a single human being than I have been by Odd. He's the consummate family man; a workaholic; amazing fisherman; brilliant water skier; unfortunate paraglider; chicken farmer; bar and restaurant owner; tour guide; friend. Apart from being terrible at weather forecasting, Mikkel will attest that we both hold the view that there seems little the man cannot do.

    He's amazing, and puts so many of his contemptuously lazy contemporaries in the shade.

    Some might say, to coin a phrase, that he kicks ass.

    7

    THE PARENTS loved their bungalow. It was new, and clean, and safe, and all the things I promised it would be, thank god. Right on the beach, with easy access to town, a few doors away from Odd, incredibly quiet - apart from the 6.15pm bird encroachment, more of which later - yet blissfully calm and inhabited by their kind of tourists.

    I finally departed their company after what seemed like a week of waking hell (I won't bore you with the rest of the flight details - suffice to say, it was a nightmare, but all nerves were fraying) and went to see my friend, who I hadn't laid eyes on for two years. He was, as usual, working, sat cross-legged at the front of his bar fixing something or other. He saw me wandering up the sand, and immediately burst into laughter. "You chance your hair!" he laughed, that broad, toothy grin all over the place. It's true. I have. Last time I saw him I'd not long performed a parachute jump for charity, and shaved my head as part of the bargain. Now my locks are long and frankly in need of a haircut (and perhaps some dye).

    He embraced me, warmly. As did his eldest son, now a young man, His beautiful wife, Daeng, who used too cook and look out for me, hugged me, too, and kissed me on both cheeks. I rushed to the toilet. I was so tired, so worn out from the travelling and everything that went with that, I knew I was about to burst into tears. Which is precisely what I did. Then I washed my face, hoped hopelessly that my eyes didn't look too red, then went back to my old friends.

    Later that same night, though, everything would change forever.

    * More later. This is so very, very difficult to write.

  • Thai Tales - Fourteen

    October 10, 2009

    DESPERATELY trying to cheer myself up after a disastrous first 48 hours, and frankly quite a little fearful, I headed on down to the delicious beachside bungalow resort I'd recommended to my parents. We were going for dinner, and so I'd put on one of my customary long sleeve rolled-up shirts and applied myself with a little Pomegranate Noire cologne, a gift from my dear and much-missed, much-loved ex from her first New York trip, back in the not-so-far-off-at-all days when she loved me to death. The cologne is a Jo Malone product, of which I'm rather partial.

    "Ooh," said my mother, as we walked, so terribly slowly, up towards the main road in Lamai, Koh Samui, my Thailand haven. "You smell nice. Is that your lovely Germaline?"

    How apt, and what a metaphor, with which to introduce you to my latest instalment of Thai Tales...

    1

    IT STARTED with a dreadful bump in the night. Two, in fact.

    The first, as I sat in my parents' living room watching crap on the TV and sipping a gin and tonic and eating a thoroughly white-peppered mush of microwaved Young's Admiral Fish Pie, came from directly above me, my mum's bedroom. I grimaced. But then I heard more noise. Slow grunting; a man dragging himself out of a door frame back towards his own bed, where he'd rested his head, apparently for the night, three hours earlier at 7pm. He'd gone looking for a nightcap, thinking it was downstairs, not up, but fell over.

    The second came twenty minutes later: a crash, thump, shout of "bastard!" and a clatter. I rushed out of the room and up to the top of the fourteen stairs I'd learned to climb on as a child. Stairs where my brother, Tim, and I had hidden when we were supposed to be in bed, spying on what the adults were up to. We were always found out, of course, and used to get shooed back to bed. But roles reverse.

    The toilet at my parents' house is a small single room, quite literally an old fashioned (if comparatively modernly decorated) water closet detached from the bathroom. It's one step lower than the landing, thirteen steps from the ground floor. There are African mementoes on the walls from their travels in his merchant navy days, paintings, and a wind-up clock, sitting on the landing windowsill, that chimes so often I want throw it into the immaculately clean wheelie bin outside. Grey one, of course. It's made of wood and metal.

    Also there that night was my father, lying on that one step landing, his back to me, in pyjama bottoms, legs around the cistern, urine everywhere, toilet paper strewn across the tiled floor, his pants soaking in piss, his big toenail missing and the remaining gap bleeding, and his eyes shrunken into the back of his head through what we can only assume was a bottle of neat vodka he'd secreted away somewhere before he went to bed. He was, in the true sense of the word, arseholed.

    Mum, of course, was panicking. I, on the other hand, was furious. But we had six hours before we got up. So I picked the useless bastard up and helped him back to what is my old bedroom, where pictures of my youth still hang on the walls and my childhood books stare out at me from the shelves. I plonked him down on the bed, firmly told him to stop waving clenched fists at me, and got told that I was "a cunt".

    Then I washed my father's urine from my body, and wondered if there was even the slightest chance we would be allowed on the plane in a few hours time. Frankly, it didn't seem likely.

    2

    "WE DON'T need to be at the airport three hours before," I'd said.

    "Yes we do," said mum. "After 9/11."

    "But they've stopped that now."

    "No they haven't."

    Christ. Readers, take my advice: never, ever, EVER, travel with your parents. It doesn't matter that all three of you have traversed the entire fucking globe on your own or in company - a mum is programmed to be the highly-strung clucking hen when it comes to ordering taxis, finding check in desks, and where the gate is. Like no one else can do it.

    But her panic, though irritating after a night largely without sleep (for her and me), was justified. We had to get this lunatic to Koh Samui. Or rather - we had to get ourselves to Koh Samui, and unfortunately had to take him there, too.

    We woke, ish, at 4am, and then he took an hour to put his clothes on: ranted, sweated, cursed, shouted, moaned, swore. Everyone was a bastard.

    And then taxi was late. Mum thinks we'll miss the flight. My father thinks he'll miss the 24-hour bar, which is a feat. I think I'll miss going to see the friends I so dearly want to go and see.

    The cab arrived 30 minutes late. The family panic was clear. So he drove at a terrifying speed through rain and wind to Manchester Airport, where we arrived to find we were an hour too early (ticks one up to me, mum).

    But.

    Because my father walks on sticks, through his alcoholism, they accept that he's disabled, find him a wheelchair, and walk us through a check-in gate - which is not yet open, as mum insisted on us being there an hour too early - and also security.

    And suddenly, he actually is disabled. He's that out of it, sat in the chair, that he takes on the persona of a paraplegic. I find myself, a little dazed, wheeling him to toilets, watching him wave his walking sticks at people to knock people out of the way, grumbling and growling and moaning about everything.

    We're only at Manchester. We have three flights ahead. From Manchester to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Bangkok, Bangkok to Koh Samui, to see the friends, two of them in particular, that I cannot wait to see; need to see, frankly.

    Tune in tomorrow to find out about the worst three flights I've ever had. And the horrible thing that happened next.

    x

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