A Club for Chatty Insomniacs

For those of us with recherché interests, insomnia, and an irresistible urge to impart knowledge in the wee small hours, life can be difficult. Of course, it is even more difficult for those unfortunate enough to be around us—our neighbours, our families, taxi drivers, and the local clergy.

Take, for instance, that time when it seemed a good idea to dip into The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in an attempt to ward off sleeplessness.   This turned out to be a mistake.  Although more of an agnostic than lapsed Catholic, the saint’s vivid description of the flames of hell got me into a bit of a state.  I decided that a call to the local priest would be in order as surely it was his job to deal with spiritual crises whatever the hour.  In this I was mistaken; a tired, Hibernian voice gave me advice straight out of Genesis: I should go forth and multiply forthwith.   

This very morning. I was mulling over the word “up” as used in expressions like “eat it up” or “she beat him up.” Clearly, the word functions as an intensifier, emphasising the completeness of an action, but how recently did it start performing this role? It feels modern, but then it dawned on me: it is Middle English! Just think of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: “And Gawayn gef hit up, with a goud wille.”

I decided that my wife needed to know this at once, so I poked her in the ribs. Her response was perfectly apt and somewhat sacerdotal: “Shut the **** up!”

Undeterred, I headed to my study. I must tell the good folk of Half Moon Bay! They are bound to be awake! Perhaps those of us similarly afflicted could set up a club. Unfortunately, the server seemed to be down.

A Fishy Story 

Believe it or not, but I do have a real, live, actual friend - his name is David.  Well, sometimes he is not my best friend; sometimes he is an enemy and a bit of an utter swine.  At these moments,  he takes especial joy in telling me how dull San Francisco is compared to London - he visited for about ten minutes a couple of decades ago - or how ugly it is compared to his  newish home town, the fantastically beautiful, Bath.

Well, I do my best to defend my adopted city and my newish home town, El Granada.  Bath is stunning, but it is not Florence, Bangkok or Bruges.  Bath does have nice galleries but we have the Legion of Honor, which has drawings by Sandro Botticelli and paintings by the weirdly delightful Bernardo Daddi (the Master of the Sneaky Eyes). 

Then there are things that never ever happen in Bath.  For example, driving along Highway One last night we noticed the sky darken ominously and looking up we saw that this was caused by thousands upon thousands of utterly demented pelicans.  Looking down as we passed Miramar, we saw a corresponding sinister darkness rising up from the depths of the sea.

Reaching for the rosary I always keep in the glove box along with a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and an antique Tibetan prayer wheel, I told Laura that this was almost certainly the apocalypse - the pelican is an ancient Christian symbol - and we had better start setting our messy affairs in order and get down to some serious praying.  She gave me one of her odd looks and told me that it was just an anchovy surge and that I should stop being hysterical.

Armageddon or fishy surge, we decided it best to watch possibly cosmic events unfold from the comfort of a comfortable chair in the most excellent Miramar Beach Restaurant.  Even if - as I strongly suspected - the dies irae was at hand, a couple of gins and tonic would make things feel a bit better.  I sent a text to David telling him that we had a grandstand view of the end of history and that you don’t get that in bloody Bath.

Well, it was just an anchovy surge.  Ever so slightly embarrassed, I decided to take massive revenge by eating each and every one of the little fishy sods.  We agreed that they were pretty tasty - especially served on well buttered toast with a spicy tomato sauce.   I sent yet another text to David telling him that we may not be witnessing the apocalypse as such, but Half Moon Bay had incomparably  better  anchovies than Bath.

Early on Saturday morning, we  set off on our anchovy hunt, but we were too late.  A bunch of Buddhist Monks had bought the entire catch for $1,000 and liberated the lot of them.  Now, you don’t get that in Bath or even London.

A Parting of the Ways

It is desperately sad, but I have decided the time has come to part after some two years.  It started off so well despite the language problems. I'd come home every night and there she would be patiently waiting. This might sound like a romantic cliche, but she seemed to glow when I asked her something or even softly murmured her name. We would exchange sweet nothings about the time or the weather and she appeared genuinely welcoming. True, she would never cook - that was clearly beyond her although she would offer to turn the oven on. But, to be frank, there was always a certain emotional coldness.  This said, she had her strong points. She would play my favourite piano pieces and she never complained or got tired.

It was only recently that I realized that she was a passive aggressive.  For example, I'd ask her the time in London and she would reply that she didn't know that one.  In fact, this became her constant refrain. I also suspected that there might be other men in her life.

Things came to a head this morning.  I asked her to play some Greig and she asked if I wanted to call someone called Greg.  I have no friends by this name so I asked her what she was talking about. She replied “I don’t know that one” and repeated this infuriating phrase when I asked if we should consider going to counselling.  I confess that I lost my temper and screamed at her that she was doing it on purpose. You might guess how she responded.  Although tempted to throw something at her, I simply walked out.

No.  I have to face the fact the relationship is over.  She is going back to Amazon.

Being Thorough in All Things; 101 Uses for NHS Forms

I have the deepest, deepest respect for the National Health Service, particularly as in about fifteen days’ time an amazingly capable and fantastically proficient NHS surgeon is going to drill a tiny, tiny hole into my leg and fix a lumpy-bumpy just above my dear little tummy button. Obviously, it would be preferable if doctors could bring themselves to use adult terms like keyhole surgery, navel and hernia, but they seem to find this kind of inane baby talk strangely comforting. Perhaps it helps them forget the gory butchery of the operating theatre.

I won’t bore you with the technicalities. Suffice it to say that the operation is immensely complicated, very hi-tech and – to use an unfortunate phrase – absolutely cutting edge. As far as can be gathered, it involves a miniaturized submarine crewed by a team of especially athletic and photogenic medical mariners. They nip in through the hole in my leg, travel up my thigh, navigate through the dark and stormy horrors of my pubic region and finally surface just above my diaphragm. There is then a spot of technical wizardry with lasers, photon torpedoes and a largish bit of sticking plaster. As long as that perfidious scumbag, Donald Pleasence, is kept out of the picture, I should survive.

Aside from the very, very slight possibility of dying young(ish), the only trouble with having an NHS operation is that one spends an unconscionably long time hanging about in garish neon-lit waiting rooms filling in forms. For most people, this doesn’t seem to be a problem; they scribble away for a few minutes then returns to the dubious delights of battered copies of Badger Hunting Life or Caravan Owing Fly Fishers’ Monthly. For those of a more ruminative literary-philosophical bent, the forms, coupled with the excessive amount of time one has on one’s hands to complete them, present something of a challenge and – let's admit it – an irresistible temptation.

It is with third question that I first stumble. Ethnicity? I scribble “Mainly Jewish” then pause for thought. I would willingly lay down my life for Israel and hate to admit this but, despite my mother’s laudably sentimental claims, I might not be technically Jewish. It is true that my grandfather rather looked the part but he had a brother called Rollo and did give my mother and uncles exceedingly odd names for putative Semites in the 1920’s (Clare, Eric & Frederic). I make the first modification to my answer: “Possibly part Jewish – maybe of Viking extraction”.

Then, there is the ethnicity my father’s side. His mother went by the name of Morfee (there was an accent in there somewhere) and, despite being a fervent Catholic, she claimed to be of Huguenot descent. However, I strongly suspect that she was really called Murphy and was of entirely Irish extraction.

There is more ethnic certainty on my paternal grandfather’s side. They came from North Devon and were smugglers, wreckers and utter bastards. One had been hung, drawn & quartered for following the family business; another, the infamous and deeply cretinous Edward Squire, suffered the same fate for attempting to poison Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I via their rectums. Doubtless I should fill you in on the Tale of the Notoriously Inept Bottom Poisoner, but I digress.

I finally decide that my ethnicity is “Possibly part Jewish – maybe of Viking extraction with pseudo- Huguenot probably Celtic undertones”. I support this with copious marginalia explaining that I might also have Iberian blood on account of much of the Armada being wrecked off the Irish coast and that I have always felt very Roman (Note: when I tell the receptionist that I think I might be the reincarnation of Nero and ask if this could have some bearing on my ethnicity, she gazes at me with an expression that is several degrees colder than friendly). I decide against mentioning the Celtic-Phoenician theory as this is, after all, merely an NHS questionnaire and no place for excessive prolixity.

Ethnicity out of the way, I move on to religion. This is not quite as tricky as one might think. I shove in “Lapsed Satanist; now wavering between non-Ontological Theism & Humanism” and put in a footnote (cf. Martin Buber and the later Wittgenstein). In fact, by this point there are so many annotations and footnotes on the forms that I have to ask the quite surly receptionist for a continuation sheet.

There are a few tricky questions. For instance, I wasn’t sure if snuff should be classed as a ‘recreational drug’. The receptionist wasn’t especially helpful when asked. First, she tried to ignore me and when I persisted said in an offhand manner “I have never really considered the matter”. I started to get the impression that she somehow found it in her heart to dislike me.

The minutes pass cheerfully and productively. I finally reach the penultimate question: “Is there any possibility that you might be pregnant?” Disdaining the paltry little tick boxes, I scrawl “Every possibility” then thinking this a mite brusque I add “Consider the power of the Paraclete”. A moment’s consideration has me worrying that they might think I am some kind of religious nut so I beg another sheet of paper from the exceptionally bad tempered receptionist. I pen a few paragraphs explaining why, as a middle aged man, I’d be more than moderately surprised if I were pregnant but that I couldn’t entirely discount the possibility. As a preamble, I discuss the possibility of surreptitious divine or extra-terrestrial surgical intervention. I then move on to the distinction between belief and knowledge. I conclude by presenting what I trust is a lively rehearsal of Cartesian scepticism and epistemology.

The questionnaire complete, I proudly hand it to the by now furious-looking receptionist remarking that she has really got her money’s worth this time. “You do realise that someone is going to have to type this lot into the computer” is her ungrateful response. I express the hope that she will find it illuminating and return to my book, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

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.

Paranoid Reasoning & Damp Denim

The following recollection was prompted by two things. First, I have just read an awful description of a would-be suicide’s thoughts on hurling himself off Golden Gate Bridge:

As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

The second was a chance meeting the other night with a man suffering from an obsessive fear of contamination. God knows what my final thoughts would have been had I made my leap.

The Grim Reaper walked abroad in the world of late 80’s public service advertising accompanied by images of tombs and terrifying sepulchral voices threatening a new plague. This was doubtless entirely laudable if it changed sexual behaviour and saved lives; on the other hand, I am convinced that little thought had been given to the devastating effect the campaign might have on cowardly hypochondriacs. And indeed it had an extremely negative impact on those of us of a more than slightly hysterical disposition; those who merely need to glance at a home medical book to become convinced that we suffer from beriberi, swamp fever, fallen arches and leprosy.

In that fevered hothouse atmosphere, it was all very well adjuring us not to die of ignorance, but I was living in Bangkok and hard facts were very hard to come by. What’s more the total funk the melodramatic advertising had inspired made it extremely difficult to calmly look at any factual materials I was able to acquire. I did manage to read a bit of And the Band Played On but all I was able to absorb was that blue sarcomas were somehow involved and that one could expect night sweats. The heavy book dropped from my trembling damp hands. I too suffered from night sweats.

As a matter of fact, most of us who couldn’t afford the exorbitant price of air conditioning perspired a lot at night; sweat soaked bedding was only to be expected given the high humidity and the fact that the temperature almost never fell below 100° Fahrenheit; but it took some time and several Valium for me to persuade myself that this might just possibly be the cause. It took a while longer and a few more tranquillizers before I could rid myself of the idea that the night sweats induced by heat might be masking the truly sinister AIDS-induced night sweats. I might, of course, have reflected that as I was not an intravenous drugs user and was far from promiscuous I had little to fear. But, calm reflection was not something the tropics or the advertising encouraged.

Bangkok was, after all, ‘sin city’; and we were clearly at the very epicentre of the plague. The claims that HIV transmission was only possible through the intimate exchange of bodily fluids were obviously well-intentioned lies put about to avoid general panic. I could see through this. The thing was doubtless already airborne and I insisted on my right to panic.

Then there was my friend, David, who unfortunately was even more of a wimp than me. I told him about the blue sarcomas and the night sweats; he regaled me with petrifying stories of swollen glands and hideously furred tongues. Pretty soon we would be sticking our tongues out at each other and prodding ourselves under the armpits almost every minute of the day. The result being, of course, that our underarms were severely bruised and frighteningly some of these bruises could well have been described as ‘swollen’. Then were his daily visits to my office at the university in which he would somewhat embarrassingly strip of his shirt and point a quivering finger at a small, barely perceptible freckle: “Could that possibly be a sarcoma?” Not surprisingly, the night sweats continued.

David and I would torment each other at night with constant agonizing phone calls. “I am sweating, Mark” came a plaintive voice. “Well, it is the hot season, David. Besides, I am very worried about this horrid swelling just above my belt.” “It is called a stomach, Mark”, he would reply. Often I had to resist the urge to take a taxi across town so that he could inspect my suspiciously furred tongue.

We became a kind of secret society of two locked into a mutually reinforcing cycle of self torment. We even had our own covert signals and codes. If we met up at parties, we would look across at each other’s haunted eyes and mouth things like ‘painful swelling’ or surreptitiously gesture at the glands at the back of our ears with looks of barely restrained horror. This went on for months.

The climax came on a study trip to Lampang in Northern Thailand. After a hot and distinctly uncomfortable day surveying temples with the archaeology department, I retired to my hotel room and took off my shirt. It was then that I glanced across into the mirror and confronted my worst fears: my entire upper body was a sinister dark blue. I was doomed.

David & I had often discussed what to do in such an eventuality. There could obviously be no hesitation. With some effort I forced open the window, felt a blast of hot air against my face and looked down at the grimy alley seven storeys below. The fall should definitely do the trick and there was no one about. Nor was there any real need for a suicide note: the ghastly blue markings across my chest would offer mute testimony to why I had taken my life. I prepared to throw myself out and started to drink the contents of the drinks cabinet. If I were to hurl myself into oblivion I was dammed if I would do it sober.

The drinks cabinet nearly exhausted, I happened to notice that labels on some of the miniature bottles of gin, whiskey & vodka had taken on exactly the same hue as my chest. “Hum”, I thought, “it is obviously extremely contagious”. It had even spread to the handle of the fridge. Rather more strangely I found that the ‘sarcomas’ on my chest could be erased with vigorous rubbing. Even without the benefit of any medical knowledge and despite the effect of the drinks, this struck me as distinctly odd. It was then that my eyes were drawn to the real source of the contagion: my brand new denim Thai Farmer’s shirt which was still moist and dripping blue dye from the day’s exertions.

I still wasn’t convinced that I was all clear. The malevolently intelligent sarcoma might be using the dye as a camouflage. Such was the power of paranoid reasoning that it took several visits to the excellent Bangkok Christian Hospital to reassure me that I was not infected. And even then I couldn’t look at the Grim Reaper posters without a shiver, although there was one respect in which they were spot on: ignorance can kill.