Memoirs of a Coup in Thailand - The Evening of Living Fatuously

News of a new military coup in Thailand, elicits memories of the last one, which took place on 23rd February 1991. The events that eventually resulted from this event were tragic with a great deal of bloodshed, much murder and the suppression of the political rights of a gentle people. On a personal note – it lead to my exile from a country I love. However, all this was to unfold, and that Saturday night was anything but tragic.

On first hearing news of the coup, David and I were propelled into resolute action. Fiercely grasping our trusty cameras in expert albeit clammy hands, we took to the mean city streets of the Asian capital – streets that seemed so strangely innocent but which at the same time exuded an atmosphere of well-neigh palpable menace and sinister political intrigue.

I hailed a taxi, brutally barked instructions and we were heading directly into the very ‘heart of darkness.’ Our destination: the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, then located on the top floor of the five-star Dusit Thani Hotel on Silom Road, Central Bangkok. The journey took a matter of minutes yet it could have been an eternity. David spent the time fiddling with his Nikon, his knuckles white with suppressed tension; seemingly more relaxed, I nursed my Minolta on my lap as though it were some dangerously deranged child and merely ground my teeth. On reaching the hotel foyer, we gave a curt nod to the resplendently clad doorman, strode across the deep-piled carpet of the lobby and were wafted to the top floor by a turbo elevator. Brusquely pushing through the padded leather doors, we entered the Club. Aside from a couple of bar staff, we had the place to ourselves; there wasn’t a journalist in sight.

Congratulating ourselves at being first on the real scene of events and sneering at the so-called professional reporters who were doubtless merely at some besieged government building or at the Army HQ, we resolutely ordered the first beers of the night and took up strategic positions in a pair of really comfortable and tastefully upholstered armchairs. From there we could command an overview of events as they unfolded. We gazed through the tinted plate-glass windows at the panoramic view of the brightly-shinning city lights some thirty or forty floors below and thoughtfully slurped our ice cold Singha beers.

It can’t have been more than a few minutes after our arrival that David broke the silence. With a decisive yet strangely cynical curl of his lips – a true mark of the ‘old Bangkok hand’ – he suggested that we ordered a book of drinks vouchers. I grunted my even more cynical assent. It was going to be a long night.

In that atmosphere of sombre menace, soft furnishings and even softer piped string quartet music, strange things can happen to a man, even to hard drinking, hard living and hard-bitten journalists. Perhaps it was the sense of bitter irony evoked by the sight of the lights shinning so peacefully yet so deceptively in the distance but I felt a change coming over me. Suddenly I was James Woods's character from Salvador while David was apparently transforming into that played by Mel Gibson in The Night of Living Dangerously. We took it in turns to snarl “god damn it” at each other through gritted teeth.

At some point in the evening we decided that it was important to get a little local colour, to obtain an authentic Thai perspective. Given that David claimed to possess an unsurpassed fluency in the language, this was ‘his baby’ (as we journalist call it). He headed or perhaps lurched in the direction of the only remaining Thai, the other bar staff having long since given up and gone to bed. Even at this distance in time, I can still hear his earnest, almost conspiratorial yet oddly slurred tones as he interviewed the somewhat perplexed-looking barman. It is hard to judge exactly how much the latter actually understood – David explained that he was from outside Bangkok and clearly had a rudimentary grasp of the local idiom – but he did come over later with a bowl of peanuts. However, both David and I felt that it would trivialize the occasion to eat them. For once in cynical agreement, we ordered potato chips instead.

On Approaching Seneca

…But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Just Possibly a Preamble

Three O’ Clock in the morning is always the deep dark panic hour, a time of bug-eyed terror, mournful sighs and palpitations. A gnashing or at least a chattering of teeth is not unknown. Sometimes I worry about whether the Jesuits were right: perhaps Hell exists in all its horror, in all of its eternally crepuscular fury; perhaps Hieronymus Bosch’s only artistic failure was a lack of imaginative fecundity; perhaps St. Ignatius Loyola was giving a highly expurgated version in his Spiritual Exercises and glossing over the particularly nasty bits. I have so far avoided the temptation to disturb the sleep of the local Roman Catholic priest, but I keep his number to hand just in case. One can imagine the conversation:

Me: It is an emergency father.
Priest: The Last Rites, my son?
Me: No, St. Ignatius’ Book of Spiritual Exercises and – if it's not too much bother – St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul.

I omit the unfortunate sleep-befuddled priest’s rejoinder but I imagine that it would be delivered in a heavy Irish accent and would be to the effect that I should go forth and multiply forthwith.

More usually than not, the sweat inducing panic is over things I have omitted to do and that I might never have time to do now. Sins of Omission were always more terrifying than Sins of Commission because there were just so many things you could omit. At 48 and somewhat on the stout side, the SAS is out of the question and I don’t suppose the Americans would be particularly keen to have me in the Special Forces. In fact, given my propensity for improbable accidents, they would probably prefer that I joined the opposition. I grow old, I grow old … will I have time to become a famous novelist, read Dostoyevsky in Russian, walk the entire length of Patagonia or visit Bognor Regis before the Grim Reaper pats me on the shoulder or rather more likely before I inadvertently kick him in the groin?

Am I, as my ever cheery friend Mike suggests, an obsessive compulsive? This is another thought that constantly runs through my mind like a toy train spinning manically round a track to the rhythm of W.H. Auden's "Night Mail". Obsessive compulsive … Obsessive compulsive …. The thought plagues me on a nightly basis and it might well be true; on the other hand, the possibly Iago-like Mike is always applying some label to me. At another time he described me as neurotic. Another train joins the track: obsessive compulsive … obsessive compulsive … neurotic.

This time anxieties centred around post-Socratic Greek philosophy. Do I know enough to justify my existence when I meet my Maker? Might Charon not demand a drachma, sesterces or Euro but instead insist on a deconstuctive analysis of, say, Epicureanism before allowing me onto the ferry? I could face extinction at any moment. Deciding to start at once – that is, at 3.22 AM – with the Stoics, I hurled myself out of bed, picked myself up off the floor & made for the computer, pausing only briefly to apply some Savlon to the carpet burns. A few minutes later, Amazon was in receipt of a fair amount of my cash, and my salvation was on its way in the form of a number of standard texts. But still, there was at least a day to wait and anything might happen.

Quivering wimpishly before my keyboard and rubbing more ointment into my sore knees, it occurred to me that that a good dose of Stoicism might be just what I need.

To be continued (maybe) ...

Grief Done Badly - The Fifth Anniversary of 9/11

Yesterday being the fifth anniversary of the dreadful attack on the Twin Towers, I turned on my television and caught a little of the memorial service from the site of ‘Ground Zero.’ One is forced to say that this secular requiem was handled rather badly.

Against what sounded like an extended version of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony a pair of bereaved women recited the names of victims – I gather all 2,749 names were read out. In theory this should have been deeply moving; in fact, dreadful as this might sound, it touched on bathos.

This is mainly down to the somewhat crass choice of music. Substitute, say, John Williams’s theme from Schindler’s List for Górecki’s symphony and you will see what I mean. In simple terms of scale, the terrible events of 9/11 pale in comparison with the Holocaust. Both admittedly were examples of what Hannah Arendt's famously described as “the banality of evil”, but the Nazi wickedness reached much deeper, killed millions rather than thousands and lasted far longer than this instant of Islamic-Fascist onanistic puerility.

Not only is the issue one of scale; it is also one of dissonance. Heart rending music like Górecki’s Third Symphony or, say, Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Tenth cannot form a ‘backdrop’ to something less harmonious than itself. A list of names – especially a list of culturally and ethnically diverse ones – is of and itself inharmonious and cannot possibly work as a foreground.

We are, of course, not talking simply about the aesthetics of the presentation, but rather of the way in which humans can relate their personal loss to a major tragedy. For the individual, it matters not whether their loved one was the sole victim of a lunatic or part of a huge event. Perhaps it is a matter of focus – making the personal stand out from the whole. Briefly hearing the name of one’s loved one in a torrent of other names does not, I suggest, provide this focal point. Being aware of the number of other families involved does little to assuage the individual pain of losing a child, mother or father.

For an example of ‘grief done well’, if such an expression is permissible, one could visit the Hollandse Schouwburg in Amsterdam. Here you have the devastating background music; here you have the list of names (those of some of the 60,000 Nazi victims are inscribed in dark marble on the wall); but the focus is on one thing: a single flickering candle.

Pious Pirates and Swinging Thuribles

Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man

For some, the heady scent of frankincense is richly redolent of Christmas, evoking nostalgic memories of holy and ivy, of the Journey of the Magi and of carols sung before the Crib at midnight mass in richly bedecked churches. For others – well, OK, just me – the smell elicits quivers of embarrassment and of guilt, fears of hellfire and horrific memories of heavy black boots and of the terrible swinging thurible.

No parents in their right minds and certainly no sensible Catholic parents would ever dream of sending their male offspring to a convent school. Mine did. The result was that by the age of eight I had become a child of absolutely revolting piety with two main ambitions. One of these was to become a pirate. We are not talking here of the conventional blood and guts type, but rather of the ‘shiver my timbers’ type who doesn’t steal or curse, maraud or plunder, drink or kill but who still manages to have a rollicking good old time by regularly reciting the ‘Hail Mary’, saying his rosary and dedicating the lives of himself and of his swarthy swashbuckling crew to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. You may not have encountered this particular sort of pirate but the Junior Catholic Truth Society Adventure Comic for Boys assured me the Caribbean was absolutely infested with them.

My other ambition was to become an altar boy. Lest this admission raise homophobic eyebrows, it should be added that was not for the chance of getting into a frilly surplice but rather for the opportunity of wielding one of the long brass candle extinguishers and above all for the chance of getting my clammy hands onto the mysterious smoking thurible. Would that my aspirations had reached no higher than to become a pious pirate! However, since the convent had no sloop, schooner, barque or even brigantine conveniently to hand, but did boast its own little church, becoming an altar boy was the more easily realisable ambition.

Of course, no sane or half-way sensible Catholic priest would so much as consider arming an inexperienced altar boy of tender years with such a potentially devastating item as thurible. And the truth was that our local priest didn’t. As I vaguely recall, a deal was struck with an older, much taller and seemingly much more responsible boy who acted as the official Thurifer, the bearer of the gleaming thurible. Doubtless the deal would have involved the exchange of a number of back copies of the Junior Catholic Truth Society Adventure Comic for Boys, the Fun Catechism for Young People or some minor division devotional cards (we are talking of such relatively little known figures as St. David of Wandsworth, also known as the Blessed Procrastinator; Michael of Shaftesbury, Patron Saint of Catfish; or the Blessed Rebecca of Pevkos) .

For those readers fortunate enough not to have been sent to a Roman Catholic convent at an impressionable age, I should perhaps describe a thurible, or censor as it is sometimes known. Bearing a somewhat sinister resemblance to an old fashioned hand grenade, the device is a brass sphere with a pattern of ventilation holes cut into its upper surface so as to facilitate the burning of the red-hot incensed charcoal within. Suspended by a chain which also serves to retain the lid, it is intended to be gently swung to & fro thus resulting in small clouds of fragrant incense wafting through the church.

The day of my initiation dawned – a normal week day and not even a famous saint’s day. At the time, I rather regretted the lack of a large audience for my debut and – as it turned out – final performance. In hindsight, given the total loss of faith suffered by some of the observers and by at least one of the main protagonists, this was fortunate. Receiving minimal instruction in the use of the thurible, I emerged into the church at the end of the procession, swinging the brass orb for all I was worth. Murillo’s Virgin gazed sadly but benignly down, soft Autumnal light filtered through the stained glass window above the altar, the priest advanced towards the congregation.

All went well until about half way into the mass. However, by the time we reached the end of the homily my arm had begun to tire. Being a good deal shorter than the official Thurifer, I had not only to swing the heavy brass orb but also to keep my arm raised uncomfortably high in order to allow it to safely clear the rich crimson carpet. By the close of the Nicene Creed, my arms were aching horribly, my eyes were streaming from the smoke and I had all but given up, concluding that possibly being a Thurifer wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and that the life of a buccaneer might be the easier option. It was at that point the priest noticed my diminishing efforts and gestured rather imperiously for me to resume.

Under the circumstances, I think I might possibly be forgiven for forgetting one small but significant procedural detail: the absolutely crucial importance of raising my arm. In one last manful effort, I gave the thurible a hefty swing, the smoking metal orb flew rather than swung up, rotated through a full 360 degrees before hitting the carpet with a loud clang, and bounced up again with open lid showering everything and everybody in the immediate vicinity with sparks and fragments of burning charcoal.

From here on all was utter pandemonium and my memory of events consists of no more than a few excessively lurid snapshots. One is of the elderly Mother Superior hitching up her habit and athletically vaulting the altar rail to extinguish the smouldering charcoal on the carpet. Another is of the priest’s heavy black boots as he jumps up and down savagely batting the sparks from his cassock (this particular image has haunted me ever since). A third is of the priest’s face, contorted with such rage as to resemble a pirate of the first, very much non-devotional variety; indeed, in my imagination, it could have belonged to Blackbeard's evil twin brother . Yet a fourth is of the other altar boys being doused with water. Finally, there is a shot of the nuns looking aghast as the priest mouths some blood-curdling, vaguely piratical imprecation at me. I don’t remember much else as at that point I fled the scene, singed surplice wafting in my wake.

As I recall, there were few consequences as far as I was concerned. Indeed, the nuns were very sweet and I don’t think I was so much as reprimanded. What I do recall is much use of phrases involving millstones being cast round necks and something about suffering children. I am not sure what happened to the unfortunate priest, but I believe he left the church. As for thuribles, I gave up on the wretched things. What I really wanted to get my hands on was a monstrance. Come to think of it, despite the lapse of time and of my faith, I still do.

Terror and Oil of Olay

…Fox-lox took them into his den and he and his young ones soon gobbled up poor Chicken-licken, Hen-len, Cock-lock, Duck-luck, Drake-lake, Goose-loose, Gander-lander, and Turkey-lurkey; and they never saw the King to tell him that the sky had fallen.

It started with an announcement that a United Airways flight has been forced to land at Boston, that US air force fighter jets had been scrambled and that sniffer dogs were going through the luggage. We were told that a woman has been found aboard with a box of matches, a screwdriver and – quelle horreur – a jar of Vaseline. Much earnest discussion followed in the sombre yet strangely hysterical tones that are so characteristic of the BBC’s News 24 Service. One expert opined that the devilishly cunning woman might have evaded security because her screwdriver had been made of, say, plastic or even wood. The tension becoming all too much for me and fearing that any moment John Reid might be wheeled on to make a ‘presidential’ announcement, I switched the television off.

Later, it transpired that the woman was in her 60s and had been carrying nothing illicit except a pot of hand cream. Suffering an attack of claustrophobia, she had ‘caused a disturbance’ (that, one feels, is putting it mildly). The newscaster noted with – I feel – a degree of malicious satisfaction that she had been restrained prior to the forced landing and that she was now being interrogated by US police.

If Al Qaeda has reduced us to such a quivering state of pusillanimity that a panicky elderly lady with a jar of Oil of Olay can ground passenger planes, scramble the US Air Force and hit world headlines, what hope is there left for us? One prays to God that whatever ‘items of interest’ the police are turning up in their search of the woods near High Wycombe for terrorist evidence, these don’t include moisturisers and other skin care products.

Postscript (Sunday, August 20, 2006)
Chicken-licken continues to rule the roost. A plane has been grounded because a sick bag was found on which some fool had scribbled that there was a bomb aboard. Meanwhile, a passenger mutiny has resulted in two innocent albeit dark skinned foreigners being evicted from their tourist flight from Malaga to Manchester.

Ersatz Life & Moleskine Notebooks

…Notandum,
A Rat had gnawne my spur-lethers; notwithstanding,
I put on new, and did go forth: but, first,
I threw three beanes ouer the threshold. Item,
I went, and bought two tooth-pickes, whereof
one I burst, immediatly, in a discourse
With a dutch Merchant, about Ragion del stato.
From him, I went, and payd a moccinigo,
For peecing my silke stockings; by the way,
I cheapend sprats: and at St Markes, I vrin'd.

Sir Politic’s Diary from Ben Jonson’s Volpone.

As an angst-ridden 12-year old in the early 1970s, the things that fascinated me about my father’s copies of Diners Club Magazine – to be truthful, the only things that could have possibly fascinated any adolescent about that depressingly staid publication – were the incredibly rich vistas of full and important lives revealed through the glossy advertisements for luxury diaries and appointment books.

No buying toothpicks or urinating in St. Mark’s for those who wrote in these magnificent works. Gazing at the carefully staged photographs with same lubricious intensity as my contemporaries might have applied to the glossy yet curiously sticky pages of Penthouse International, Electronics Today or Super Car, I saw a clearly leather-bound tome, artistically placed at an oblique angle alongside a three-quarter full, cut crystal brandy balloon, a verdant tropical house plant, and an antique globe (doubtless a disguised drinks cabinet). An expensive, gold fountain pen lay carelessly athwart the open volume, a magician’s wand or rather Byzantine bishop’s staff blessing the life within. The tasteful cream vellum-like pages had beautiful entries in effortless copperplate:

• Flight to New York
• Meet Maurice for lunch (Hyatt)
• Flight Paris
• Meeting with President
• Dinner with Marie-Claire at ‘Les Deux Magots’

In comparison, my own Letts Schoolboy Diary was anything but sumptuous; in fact, it was a stomach-churning mess. The writing was execrable and the doodled drawings quite appalling even by schoolboy standards. Between its embossed blue plastic covers, the scrawled entries were frankly rather dull:

• Research history homework
• Write history essay

After the first month, I usually gave up on even bothering to tear off the clever little perforated corner tabs.

Was it that if one acquired a diary of such magnificent opulence as that shown in Diner’s Club Magazine, one’s life would somehow be forced to live up to it? You couldn’t just scribble in “4.00 PM Dentist” on such pages; surely you would have to enter “Appointment with Sir Clifford, Harley Street”. The diary would force you to live such a life; it would elevate your existence beyond the quotidian world of history homework to virtually Elysian heights. You might indeed be gathered into the “artifice of eternity” to sing if not of “what is past, or passing, or to come” at least of breakfast at the Café Royale and transatlantic flights. Childish, arse-about-face thoughts but ones that have haunted me – and it would appear, many others in a less consciously articulated form – ever since. My appeals for a leather-bound journal and matching, preferably onyx or Chinese lacquer, deluxe fountain pen falling on baffled but resolutely deaf parental ears, I had to bide my time.

A decade or so passed and I acquired a modest income, a wife, an untenured teaching position and – at long last – a Mont Blanc (a gift from a well-heeled student) together with a leather-clad diary. Now life might begin in earnest. I set to work:

• Prepare lecture on Donne
• Deliver lecture on Donne

Admittedly this was a slight improvement on my juvenile efforts, but with eight weeks of much the same entry, it did get a bit monotonous. Adding the occasional social entry didn’t help matters much. “Meet wife for noodles” sounded abysmally trite and utterly lacking in the glamour of the exciting meetings, dinners and trysts recorded in the advertisements.

It is possible that John Donne’s own appointment book would have been equally dull (“Knock off yet another divine poem”); but fortunately he wasn’t exposed to the Diner’s Club Magazine at a formative age. Come to think of it, even the great Immanuel Kant’s entries wouldn’t have been all that exciting. Day after day one would have found the same item: “Carry on with Critique of Pure Reason”. But then, of course, neither Donne nor Kant had any need to record the snail tracks leading to their “monuments of unaging intellect”; their works alone suffice to confer immortality.

The most depressing thing was that my appalling handwriting bore no resemblance to the elegant flourishes that had so impressed me. Indeed, it took an enormous effort of will to first put expensive pen to expensive paper, to sully the textured pages with my constipated scrawl. Having forced a few lines onto the page a malicious little voice in my head would mutter “Now you’ve gone and spoilt it”. And I really felt I had inadvertently performed a sacrilegious action; it would have been far better if I had left the wretched thing alone as a mute reproach to a life not in the least less ordinary. If “the medium is the message”, as Marshall McLuhan wrote – or nearly wrote – then this particular medium’s message was nothing if not unambiguous: keep off the parchment.

Computerised appointment books and eventually Microsoft Outlook saved me from this dispiriting state of affairs. Appearing in neat type on the computer screen, first in glowing green on black and then in full colour, my appointments might have been just as monotonously mundane, but they were no longer scrawled and they gained a kind of spurious authority from the hi-tech context. Plus, with the advent of ‘cut and paste’ one could fill the eight weeks of similar entries in an instant, rather than have to laboriously copying them in by hand while miserably dwelling on the amount of repetition.

And of course with the advancement of maturity and the arrival of fatherhood, one became less self-obsessed, less concerned with some invisible critic looking over one’s shoulder. Was some higher power judging me on the quality of entries in my diary or even on that of the physical object itself? I no longer gave a damn, or much of one. I was too busy enjoyably living my life without worrying about the agenda. Sure I keep a sort of desultory diary – but that is stored in computer files and is a record of what has happened acting as an aide memoire rather than as an exercise in calligraphically perfect self aggrandisement.

One would have thought that in our age of texts, emails, blogs and social networks, an immature anxiety about writing one’s agenda on quality paper with luxury pen would have gone the way of the quill, the stylus and the wax tablet. However, it appears that the obsession with creating a meaningful life through the mere possession of elegant writing materials is as alive as ever. Take, for example, the recent rebirth of the Moleskine notebook – available from all branches of Waterstones at the princely price of £8.95 for the diminutive standard pocket version. Take too, the number of blogs devoted to the thing. Filled with informative interactive discussions on such topics as what pen best suits them, how to care for the simulated moleskin jackets or what to put in the expandable inner pocket, these sites even have loving photos of the things, these to me being curiously redolent of those old Diner’s Club Magazine advertisements. Needless to say, I bought one the other day; I couldn’t have done otherwise. After all, the advertisement does point out that “Moleskine was the choice of Picasso, Hemingway and Chatwin”. The next stop, it would seem, is to be Patagonia.

Amsterdam

A weird conversation in the charmingly tatty Smokey’s Coffee Shop on Rembrandtplein:
Me: A coffee – espresso – please.
Barman [puzzled but cunning look]:
How special do you want your coffee?
Me [puzzled but even more cunning look]:
How special can you make it?

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy …

It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."
"And freezing."
"Is it?" "
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately.”

If you wish to preserve any joy in life or any semblance of sanity, never even so much as contemplate helping Athenians with their Macs. I am still recovering from a session last night with my good friend, Yiannis, a man of such implacable moroseness of soul as to drive any would-be Zorba from dancing on the beach to the top of the nearest cliff. The session should have taken no more than 10 minutes as it merely involved adding a printer to my friend’s network; in the event, it seemed to drag on longer than any Greek tragedy.

The evening began with an utterly redundant pre-installation discussion, full of chain smoking, dark prognostications and obscure Hellenic obscenities. Macintosh engineers, it seems, are much given to self-abuse, which is doubtless the result of their dubious parentage. I suspect that the real cause of this bitterness is that one had the temerity to bill my friend for £400 for a visit (remarkably cheap, in my opinion if he had to experience an nth degree of what I went through).

I should have insisted that I be left alone with the machines; instead, not being at all familiar with the Macintosh operating system, I foolishly thought Yiannis might be of some use in finding things like the printers folder. However, as an especially god-cursed Greek, he appears incapable of accepting - far less following - simple instructions. For instance, when asked to print a document, he spent a good quarter of an hour expounding on a) why it probably wouldn’t work and the pointlessness of even trying and on b) his ‘little idea’ about what to do with a spare ethernet wire. Needless to say, after I finally lost patience and gave him a few little suggestions of my own as to what to do with the bloody wire, the document printed perfectly. This made him even gloomier and there was another protracted discussion session before I was allowed to try printing from the other machine. Of course, this worked too.

Instead of expressing any gratitude or the slightest hint of pleasure at my success or – as he would doubtless put it – my failure to fail, Yiannis's despair reached new depths, becoming almost palpable. I left him sitting in a dark despondent miasma examining the printouts for imperfections with the morbid intensity of a forensic scientist; the scene strangely evocative of that in the Oresteia where, to the accompaniment of Agamemnon’s dying screams, Cassandra contemplates her own imminent and exceedingly gruesome murder at the hands of the psychotically vengeful Clytemnestra.

Should any theatre director ever decide to put on an adaptation of Winnie the Pooh in the mode of Aeschylus or of Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle, I know exactly who should be cast as Eeyore.

Life - A Health Warning

Torbay Council officials said in a letter to Torbay's Chamber of Trade that the trees had sharp leaves which could injure people's eyes or faces.
But the council has denied it was "going health and safety mad"… (BBC Report)

Here is yet more evidence of ‘health and safety’ timidity. Having discovered the potentially lethal dangers posed by palm tree leaves, Torbay council is not even contemplating an outright ban. Nor is it is prepared to face up to the other life-threatening hazards facing unsuspecting visitors to the resort.

First, despite the clear danger of slip-related injuries or of self-induced hypothermia, there are no health notices on ice cream cones. Nor is the ice cream ‘user’ provided with a complete list of its constituents upon purchase. Just as food purveyors are obliged to provide the information that ham sandwiches may contain meat traces, so vanilla ice cream should have a label attached with the advice that it may be unsuitable for people with allergies to vanilla.

Second, there has been absolutely no attempt to address the problem of the large quantities of sand that surround the resort. Moves should be made to immediately set up ‘sand in the eye’ treatment centres on all beaches together with medical personnel trained in the treatment of psychological traumas induced by getting sand in swimsuits. The long term goal should, of course, be the removal of the substance from the beaches. An alternative might be to cover the beaches with a protective layer of concrete or with industrial-grade latex.

As a short-term measure, beach users should be issued with, and required to wear bio-hazard suits. They should also be obliged to sign disclaimers explicitly stating that Torbay Council will not be held liable for sand- or splash-induced injuries.

Finally, signs should be set up on all beaches warning users that if they go in the sea they may die. These signs should be at least 50 feet high and should feature graphic depictions of drowned corpses, bloated body parts and shark-induced injuries.

If Torbay Council shows the courage of its convictions, the resort will be transformed into a healthier, safer and far emptier place.

Post hoc, ergo prompter hoc

After you set up our database, the cat got sick and the fridge stopped working

The above might be a slight exaggeration, but the level of rationality is about the same as that shown in the typical support calls I receive. For example, I came home on Friday after a long, hot day on the road to find an urgent message. It seems that there has been a sudden change on a system which means that whenever they open a database, Word files on a different machine inexplicably vanish. Despite my attempts at an explanation, the poor customer simply couldn’t grasp the fact that there was no possible connection between the system and the missing files.

Another case was a lady who insisted that a programme I had written had adversely affected the volume of her telephone calls. “All I can say is that since you installed that thing, I can’t hear a word anyone says,” she grumbled. This was all the more bizarre because the computer in question was not even connected to the phone line. Fortunately, I was able to avoid a visit by demanding that she had an engineer inspect the plumbing first to see if that had been affected too.