Subversive Thais

On the face of it, much of Bangkok represents the apotheosis of capitalism. Its vast air conditioned malls boast designer shops with names like Prada, Mont Blanc and Bally. American chains are everywhere. The hotels are world class - the Marriott, Hilton and Sheraton compete with the famous Oriental Hotel.

The only fly in the capitalist ointment is the Thai sense of the absurd. For example, Japanese companies based in Bangkok had to give up on the daily singing of their corporate songs because their Thai employees just couldn't keep straight faces.

This morning I was in a large branch of Starbucks in the centre of the city and was given a book for collecting vouchers. I asked the smartly uniformed and extremely pretty senior manageress what it was for and she told me that if I collected 20 vouchers I'd get a special Starbucks planner.

"Yes," she continued adopting a highly portentous tone and pointing dramatically at the trashy thing "one day this could be yours". At this point she was so overcome with a fit of giggles that she had to sit down.

Men in Uniform

Alone in a passage at the vast Bayon complex in Cambodia looking hard at some details on the bas reliefs when a hard-looking Khmer wearing combat fatigues and a police cap strode up to me and presented his badge.

I went into major panic mode thinking that he might be after a bribe in return for not falsely arresting me for damage to the temple - a very serious offence. Knowing the etiqutte in these things, I forced a smile but was damned if I was going to salve his conscience by listening to some hard luck story - he could then maintain the fiction that he was merely presenting with the opportunity to improve my Karma. I went straight to the point and asked "how much?"

I was a bit surprised by the response "$7.50". The amount seemed too small and too exact. I was even more surprised when he opened a sack with a load of police badges. It turns out he wasn't a policeman at all, just a seller of tourist junk.

Yesterday, I was looking at cigars in the duty free (dufry) shop at Siam Reap airport when a hand grabbed my forearm. Turning, I found myself in the grips of an airport security officer. Another bout of panic - had I left my Swiss Army Knife in my hand lugage? Did my face resemble that of some terrorist? Were police marksmen training their weapons on me? One false move and one of those slow motion bullets you see on CSI would start its long journey into my upper left aorta.

Panic of one kind was replaced with panic of another when the firm grip of the law turned into a soft, caressing stroke and an effeminate voice said "You've got lovely skin. Are you married?".

Larval Horror

After the 15 hour flight to Thailand, I was still a bit jet-lagged when making coffee in the little Italian machine we always carry with us. I filled up the base, scooped coffee in and set it on the stove.

When I tried to pour the coffee, little came out so I opened the top and found a vile brownish slug-like creature, as big as a child's fist, quivering and pulsating in the top compartment. With a yell of utter disgust, I threw the pot into the trash bin along with the Asian insect horror.

My wife was really cross with me for throwing away a pair of brand new socks she had put in the compartment to stop the lid rattling during the journey.

Linnaeus Reconsidered

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Nature is just about tolerable provided that it doesn’t do anything too gross and knows its place. Indeed, although there is a bit too much of it in Dorset, it isn’t all that intrusive and thus far hasn’t proved particularly aggressive, although occasionally it does make slightly unpleasant mooing sounds. Granted an arid Southern Mediterranean landscape with a few picturesque Corinthian temples scattered about the place would be immensely preferable, but until we manage to get global warming to really kick in, we are stuck with it.

As far as coping with the green stuff, the best strategy is to protect oneself with a shell of utterly blissful ignorance. That way, nature remains quietly inconspicuous and on reasonably warm days can even provide a gentle contemplative background for a none too vigorous stroll. Of course one misses the soothing sounds of busy streets, the comforting hustle and bustle of the city and the sublime beauty of its buildings, but one can always recollect these things in a state approaching tranquillity. It is when you show too great an interest in it that nature gets decidedly uppity.

Absolute purity of heart or mind is a difficult thing to preserve, and a few years ago mine was contaminated by the slightly depressing knowledge that amongst the green stuff out there could be found things called Scots Pines. I even discovered what the bastards looked like. Fortunately, my ‘education’ stopped at that point and after the initial shock I was able to adapt my system to cover this intrusion. Admittedly, there was no going back, as I now knew that the green blur could be classified into two distinct orders: there were things that were Scots Pines and things that weren’t.

Moreover, as non-Scot’s Pines by far outnumber Scot’s Pines and as the latter are rather large, one can be reasonably certain that a small messy bluish thing protruding from the general blur is a not-Scots-Pine. As another example, Scots Pines tend to be relatively quiet so a whitish, incessantly bleating thing would not fall under the classification either. At the risk of upsetting your sensibilities, allow me to offer an illustration of my extraordinarily elegant binary taxonomy:

Although ostensibly simple, it took some years to gain sufficient equilibrium to formulate this system. And it has served me very well indeed.

Unfortunately I made a devastating error of judgement recently and all is thrown into nightmarish disorder. Deciding to venture into the hills in search of traces of early civilisation - it can’t always have been this bad - I decided that my best bet as a companion would be a local farmer. This might seem a perverse choice – and indeed it proved completely disastrous – but my reasoning seemed sound. Surely, anyone working all day with nature would be heartedly sick of the whole vile business and would willingly discuss the latest metropolitan trends.

My intentions were not entirely unselfish. Doubtless the poor benighted wretch would benefit immensely from my sophisticated erudition. I was ready to wax lyrical on the works of Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers. I intended to instruct him in literary forms and the latest novels. The poor fool would have benefited immensely. A flood of culture would have irrigated the arid desert of his non-urban soul. On the other hand, I had every intention of placing him between myself and danger should any particularly fierce examples of flora or fauna emerge. I should have known better.

Obviously driven to distraction by years outside the wholesome, nurturing environment of a large city, the poor fellow simply issued a veritable torrent of profanities: “The flower over there is a Field Scabius … this is a Ragwort.” The torment went on and on and my peace of mind was shattered – possibly forever. I believe he actually went on to describe some of the things he was pointing out as ‘pretty’. He also appeared to harbour the grotesque belief that the various lumps of organic matter he dug up from the earth had some form of nutritional benefit. Even my patient explanation that vegetables were things that one bought from Waitrose failed to displace this idée fixe. I fled before the twisted swine got going on the subject of extracting some kind of juice from cows.

Now a few weeks on I still haven’t got up the nerve to consult a therapist. It is the thought of the waiting room that scares me most. They often put bits of nature in vases and my horror is that I might start wondering if a particular yellowish not-Scots-Pine was a ragwort.

Measuring out my Life with @Coffee Spoons

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea

The main problem with this whole time management malarkey is simply that it consumes so much of one’s precious time.

First, there is the no mean task of ploughing one’s way through the weighty and somewhat turgid sacred texts. These have a worthy if ponderous heritage in the US reaching back to Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated Autobiography, but now are largely represented by Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The former is full of less than inspiring and overly personal anecdotes, quasi scientific terminology, evangelical fervour, home-spun philosophy and diagrams, oodles of diagrams. There are some quite good ideas in the book, chief of which being to categorize one’s activities by one’s various roles in life thus ensuring one is achieving a degree of balance. However, to my mind there are not nearly enough to justify the vainglorious portentousness.

I don’t want a paradigm shift, Mr. Covey; I simply want to bring some order to a frenetically busy life. I don’t seek spiritual uplift from self-improvement books; I can listen to Handel’s Messiah or read Hopkins. I could even look into the profound depths of the new crack in the Tate Modern’s floor or at the simple beauty of a ragwort and mull over the impermanence of life. As for "sharpening the saw" (a metaphor for self improvement), call me a snob, but I deeply resent being compared to a humble workshop tool. In the unlikely event that I were to follow the author’s advice and pen my very own personal mission statement, it would be never to read anything by him again.

A slightly more practical stance is taken by David Allen. His more modest approach is to get things off one’s mind by writing them all down, giving them contexts and then deciding on the appropriate ‘Next Action’. Thus, for example, if I were to happen to be in Waterstones, I would consult my @bookshop list and note that the next action was to get a refund on Getting Things Done. Of course the ‘theory’ is a bit more complex than that; the book weighs in at some 250 pages and then there are the inevitable diagrams.

Stylistically, Allen’s work is moderately less annoying than Covey’s and I have only been compelled to throw the thing across my study some dozen or so times. The main irritants are the constantly upbeat, almost frenzied tone and the incessantly macho, hard-edged similes. To get an inkling of the former, you only have to visit Mr. Allen’s website and watch the promotional videos although you should have a bottle of aspirins at hand first(put this on your @irritating-places-on-the-internet list). For the latter, merely glance through the book. The beleaguered business executive, or “knowledge worker”, is encouraged to have a “mind like water” (apparently, this is something all martial arts practitioners possess); turning to field of aviation and doubtless Top Gun style flying, he must take various perspectives on his tasks ranging from the runway to a heady 50,000 feet; segueing into the world of IT, he must purge his personal RAM of everything except the immediate task in hand (if memory serves, this computing metaphor is mixed up with a spot of Zen).

There is something to be said for Allen’s ideas although almost certainly in far fewer words than he feels compelled to use. But if you were to take him at face value and treat his methods as an all encompassing system, you would go stark staring mad. For one, human recollection is not in the least like a computer’s random access memory. As a former teacher, I am pretty confident in asserting that writing things down reinforces rather than purges one’s awareness of them. Our minds do not have reset buttons. Moreover, isn’t the recommendation that one performs regular “mind sweeps” somewhat at odds with Allen’s claim that his techniques provide “stress-free productivity”? To follow Covey’s example and lapse into personal anecdote, I spent the other evening listing down all the things I had to do for a complex software project. I eventually retired to bed a nervous wreck and spent the night tossing and turning. Was there anything I had forgotten? Were any of my items mini-projects rather than actionable tasks? Had I assigned them the right contexts? By dawn, I was very far from being a calm and composed Tae Kwon-Do expert and more the sort of spineless wimp who gets sand kicked in his face in the old Charles Atlas advertisements.

Another problem with these proselytizing systems is that their fanatical adherents write about them incessantly agonizing over how many roles they should have or boasting about the efficiency of their index card based systems. They write blogs and subscribe to chat rooms in which they debate their masters’ ideas and the minutiae of their systems with all the obsessive reverence of Koranic or Talmudic scholars. Surely they have something better to do with their time. Come to think of it, shouldn’t I be doing something more useful with my own time? Well, as a very early self-help book has it, “To everything there is a season …”.

PS: I feel something of an apostate writing this as over the last few weeks I have been enjoying using an excellent little time management program called ToDoMatrix by REXwireless Software. Designed for the ever useful BlackBerry phone, its latest version is explicitly based around the ideas of Messrs Covey and Allen. It is very useful indeed but only if the underlying concepts are taken with a degree of scepticism and a good few pinches of salt. For example, after sitting at my keyboard for an hour or so I am in dire need of a tube of Anusol. I duly note this in my errands list. The context is clear enough (@chemist), but to which of Covey’s Quadrants should I assign it? Is getting the soothing lotion ‘Important and Urgent’, ‘Urgent but not Important’? To which of my roles should I assign it? What should be the duration? This list goes on, but having decided that my need is most definitely urgent, I abandon the entry.
PPS: This piece is dedicated to a good friend of mine whose somewhat eccentric approach to time management is apparently based on speed reading the I-Ching.

Most Peculiar Geishas

There are some very curious things in the grounds of Kingston Lacy House in Dorset. A row of faintly ridiculous toy-like cannons sits atop the ha ha; a huge pharaonic sarcophagus in beautiful pink hued granite rests heavily and incongruously at the edge of the formal lawn. Continuing the Egyptian theme, the obelisk at the end of the avenue leading from the south front of the house is no mere garden ornament or folly; it comes from the temple of Philae.

The Egyptian contributions to the garden were made by a former owner, William Bankes, intrepid explorer, early Egyptologist, distinguished classicist, eminent collector and part-time sodomite. I suppose one might say that Bankes was no stranger to inserting curiously inappropriate things in gardens: the poor fellow had to flee England in 1841 after being caught in flagrante delicto with a guardsman in Green Park. However, perhaps oddest of all the very odd garden features at Kingston Lacy is the quaintly charming Edwardian 'Japanese tea garden' and this was constructed by one Hermione Bankes (come to think of it, gentile ladies of the period probably didn’t actually construct things and rarely wielded spades or pickaxes so perhaps she simply requested it).

There is something more than a tad theatrical or operatic about the tea garden and one feels it owes rather more to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado or to Puccini's Madame Butterfly than to the Orient. It is all too easy to imagine Mrs. Bankes and other ladies of the house elaborately dressed as the more respectable sort of Geisha while they performed a highly decorous if somewhat improbable interpretation of the tea ceremony doubtless involving the very best Wedgwood Willow Pattern china, Earl Grey and wafer-thin slices of lemon. One hopes that the rules of their idiosyncratic version of the ancient Japanese tea ceremony were sufficiently civilized as to permit the serving of scones and cucumber sandwiches. However bizarrely inaccurate or simply silly Mrs. Bankes's Oriental theatricals may have been, they would have been a lot more interesting than Marie Antoinette’s inane posturings as a simple milkmaid at Versailles.

The Japanese Tea Garden is a pretty enough place and well worth a visit as is the rest of the estate. It does, however, prompt an unsettling thought. Do aristocratic Japanese ladies have exotic fantasies in which they dress as blousy British barmaids and serve warm pints of Theakston's Old Peculiar, crisps and pickled eggs?

Objets Trouvés or Eat Your Heart Out, Damien Hirst

I have recently discovered that if you give a heavy 'presidential style' antique desk an almighty shove you can completely tear it off its pedestal. It is the sound of splintering wood that gives it away.

Oddly enough, my somewhat startled host seemed slightly less than delighted; indeed, I almost suspected that he found it in his heart to positively dislike me. However, I think I managed to convince him that his new asymmetric and somewhat wobbly 'desk' was an interesting work of modern art - a postModernist ironic take on the outmoded and frankly rather crass bourgeois concept of a utilitarian desk.

First, there is an obvious Marxist spin in the way that through an interesting conceptual trope – a twisting in on itself or involution – Desk, as I shall now call my creation, exposes the plight of the exploited worker and thus the violence at the very heart of the capitalist system. The unfortunate wage lackey now faces the ever present risk of serious injury if the damn thing collapses on him as he works – echoes of Damocles - thus fostering a need to complete each task with the utmost alacrity. "Work fast or the system will crush you" is the obvious subtext.

From another angle, Desk makes a clear philosophical statement, calling to mind amongst other things Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit or Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. What better metaphor could there be for the rootless, baseless false mode of dasein’s being-in-the-world than this rocking piece of furniture, now forever only tangentially attached to its pedestal? One is almost moved to tears by this stark yet elegant articulation of everyday ontological experience. Desk, in short, opens up whole vistas of existential angst and even horror.

Third, of course, is the almost blatant allusion to the post structuralism works of the late Jacques Derrida. All texts are ultimately groundless; all language rests on nothing other than itself. There is nothing beyond the text. As a foundation for writing, the transformed desk is less than satisfactory - however, as Desk , it paradoxically does provide a foundation in the writer's constant awareness of its provisionality. It is a surface but not a base.

It is amazing that a couple of seconds of work by a high-octane deconstructive performance artist (as I am now tempted to style myself) could so utterly transform and enrich such a mundane object, investing it with hitherto unsuspected depths of meaning.

If you would like me to work similar artistic wonders at your property I am available for a reasonable fee. There is a small extra charge if the project requires wrecking balls or bulldozers.

You Looking at Me?

Glancing at the front cover of The Times the other day, it struck me that there is a fantastic and potentially highly lucrative business opportunity for companies like Cabbage Patch Kids® in places such as Tehran and Islamabad. Forget ‘Preemies’ and ‘Newborns’; they should be making cute little Bushes, Blairs and Rushdies. I don’t think that being flame retardant would be an especially strong selling point, though.

More seriously, just why does the Western media do it? Do we need to see yet another pack of clearly demented bigots waving their idiotic banners and burning really, really badly made rag dolls? Do we honestly need to waste good column inches reporting the mindless rantings of such luminaries as the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman or the Pakistan's religious affairs minister?

So, Pakistan has passed a resolution saying the honour was an attempt to "hurt the feelings of Muslims" and Iran says the award was intended to provoke the Islamic world. I am afraid that Messrs. Ebrahim Rahimpour & Ejaz ul-Haq are flattering themselves. Consideration for their feelings never entered the equation, and nor should it. Salmon Rushdie’s knighthood was based purely on literary merit. It may be an archaic honour but it is a matter for the British Government.

For some reason, the whole episode reminds me of a marvellous exchange in Casablanca:

Ugarte:   You despise me, don't you?
Rick:       If I gave you any thought I probably would.

PS: just as an afterthought, one wonders what will happen when Salmon Rushdie is nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

PPS: My good friend and school chum Gideon Mitchell was strangely enthusiastic about my posting this blog.

Modern Witch Trials and Tribulations

It must be hard, soul-destroying work being a modern witch. Not only do you have to do all those tedious magical things, like collecting newts’ eyes, harvesting mandrake and sacrificing the odd virgin, but you also have to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around popular tourist spots in Glastonbury looking really, really sinister. It’s a tough job, but I guess that someone has to do it.

A particularly sturdy young witch was on duty in the Abbey Gift Shop a couple of weeks ago. Clad in a curiously fetching albeit distinctly unseasonal heap of purple and black taffeta, she was wearing really interesting Goth-style makeup and absolutely loads of ironmongery. She was also clutching a slightly bedraggled funeral wreath in one hand and a black coffin-shaped PVC handbag adorned with a pentacle in the other (a bit of a give away, I thought).

The poor dear was making a huge effort to look mysterious and evil and it was a crying shame that none of the other tourists seemed to so much as notice her. They might at least have pretended to be a little bit nervous. It was such a hot day and she looked so uncomfortable and under appreciated that I was sorely tempted to buy her a rum and raisin ice cream.

Brian - The Ubiquitous Anti-Chameleon

There is nothing in the least exotic about Brian so the word protean feels a trifle excessive; however, he is something of a shape-shifter and he comes in various guises. His age varies from mid thirties to late sixties; however, he is generally middle-aged and always male. He can be found in various habitats from the Far East to Torquay Pier; however, whatever the environment, his physical malleability seems designed not so much to make him fit in but rather the reverse. Wherever he is found, Brian can be expected to stand out like a sore thumb. I strongly suspect he is the president of the Swindon Photographic Society or just possibly of the Crawley Camera Club.

My first encounter with Brian was in the rather glamorous surrounds of the five star Hyatt Regency Hotel in Hua Hin, Thailand. The year was 1986. We had escaped from Bangkok for a short break and were relaxing in the really quite magnificent air conditioned lobby. The waiter had just brought us cocktails when there was a sudden thrashing from an adjacent floral display and a rather alarming albeit diminutive figure emerged from the lush decorative foliage. Clutching a huge Nikon and looking like a stand-in for the photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, the bedraggled khaki-clad figure hurled himself to the ground and with an extraordinary look of grim determination started clicking. At first I though he might be a member of the paparazzi and glanced around to see if any celebrities were present. But then I realised he was taking photographs of the foliage. In a flash of intuition I realised that the short, dishevelled would-be photographer could be none other than Brian.

After that first encounter, I was always spotting Brian. Whether perched on a portable step-ladder (the ‘photographer’s friend’) and dressed in Gulf War camouflage at the Chelsea Flower Show or emerging from the shadows of the Coliseum dressed in his more usual khaki shorts, matching waistcoat and heavy boots, the only constants were the huge camera, ‘kit bag’ and the complete and utter incongruity with his surroundings. He also wears an air of what might be described as the inverse of studied nonchalance. It is a look of painfully self-conscious yet somehow wilful gaucherie.

My second close encounter was at Stourhead Gardens one early morning in the spring of last year. I was there to try out a very costly tripod that I needed for a photographic job the next day. I hasten to add that I am not a professional photographer and am most definitely not a member of Brian’s camera club. However, I didn’t want to look too incompetent when I turned up my client’s offices and the tripod required some mastering, being both heavy and extremely cumbersome. Realising I needed help, I happened to look up and there dramatically materialising from the swirling early morning mist who should I see but Brian.

Despite the affected professionalism, Brian turned out to be quite hopeless. After fumbling for a while he gave up and expressed his frustration in a glare of absolutely blistering contempt directed at my digital camera. It would seem that he is a purist, a ‘film man’. In a charitable attempt to defuse the situation and to mask any embarrassment he might be feeling, I asked what he thought of the hideously expensive tripod. His eyes took on the gimlet look of a high court judge and he considered for a moment. “A most acceptable bit of kit … for a first tripod” he opined with nauseating condescension before striding back into the mist. Had I been of a more violent disposition or had faster reactions, I would have hurled the thing at his head.

Last Friday I spotted Brian again. He was on Park Walk in Shaftesbury, a place much favoured by young mothers with pushchairs and elderly couples taking their afternoon constitutionals. As is always the case, it would have been virtually impossible to miss him. Not only was he clutching the longest telephoto lens I have ever seen, but he appeared to have transmogrified into a clone of Robert Capa and was busy striking extremely dynamic poses more suited to a particularly hellish war zone than to a genteel and rather sedate Wessex market town. I tried to capture his picture using my own pocket camera, but my wife thought I was being cruel and dragged me away. As I turned to go, I saw what would have been the perfect photo opportunity. Wearing an air that combined professionalism and menace, and with finger on the trigger of his camera’s motor drive, and with gleaming, perfectly calibrated telephoto lens, Brian was advancing towards a bed of pansies.

Fruit of the Loins

A solitary, unwholesome pleasure bringing a momentary illusion of connectedness, of being one with another – lover or stranger, it is just enough to sustain the brief fantasy that there is this shadowy ‘other’. An urgent, not-to-be-ignored quivering next to the thigh; a furtive personal pleasure that must be satisfied even if it entails a withdrawal to some squalid semi-private place, or – if too insistent – a discrete albeit public unholstering and frantic manipulation with fumbling or shamefully expert fingers. Indeed, satisfying such an intensely private act under disapproving public eyes adds a certain frisson to the thing. The spasm passes, the throbbing ends and a brief instant of gratification, la petite mort: yes, oh yes, your BlackBerry® has brought you mail.

We were always told that such ‘filthy’ activities brought with them the risk of blindness, although our Victorian forebears were probably not thinking of eyestrain due to staring at BBMilbank text on a minuscule screen. We were warned that it was a habit that if carried to excess broke up families.

A puerile joke about attending to throbbing tools in public? Well, Research in Motion asked – or just possibly begged – for it . Why on earth name the thing after that most engorged, must turgid of fruits?