Monday, September 30, 2002
Sunday, September 29, 2002
It is a little difficult to concentrate on other things! I feel a bit like that poem of RS's.......
You ask why I don't write.
But what is there to say?
And you can see the state we are all in!
And in my fevered dreams I dress up in masterly disguise and visit Madam Doctor**** as she sleeps. Oh I don't think I ever said that the the Doctor was a woman did I? With one of those nasty quiffed hairdos so favoured by Thai 'miladies' and dripping gold-probably weighed down her wrist so much that is why she could not weild her dilator properly. There there enough spite!
You ask why I don't write.
But what is there to say?
And you can see the state we are all in!
And in my fevered dreams I dress up in masterly disguise and visit Madam Doctor**** as she sleeps. Oh I don't think I ever said that the the Doctor was a woman did I? With one of those nasty quiffed hairdos so favoured by Thai 'miladies' and dripping gold-probably weighed down her wrist so much that is why she could not weild her dilator properly. There there enough spite!
Saturday, September 28, 2002
Welcome to the modern village describes most of the villages I have lived in. Eglwys Fach in particular, where the hub of social life was a nasty layby, where we used to play Elvis on a portable record player and 'THRILLS' watch the traffic!-though it id have a waterfall and in the woods behind ant's nests of astonishing size. That was before the days of Pizza. Whitebrook, near Monmouth, where they would hire coaches to go across the Severn Bridge to spend the day at Carrefour and we would drive 40 miles to Cardiff to buy garlic and the only recreation was to spend Saturday afternoon with the Flymo mowing mud! Middle Barton, lurking between Steeple Barton and Sandford St. Martin-such charming names- where there was such an absence of transport that there were people who went to Woodstock once a year and squashed council housing was surrounded by swathes of estates owned by bankers and tobacco magnates families.
Friday, September 27, 2002
All the saga about Elodie comes after the pictures as another 26.09 2002 entry.I think I am too old to know what I feel. I have lived too long in a world where we think and plan and take measured and considered and even considerate decisions. I have no emotional resources really to deal with what I think about a doctor who does what was done. My good friend, who is a doctor, phoned me today and said that he had spoken to his GP who said it 'sounded like Hirschsprung's' ,...and' when this happens the whole skin and membranes of the bowel and rectum are weakened...you have to exercise enormous care'..............I think today I just am falling back on the old cliches that the Thais are seriously deprived when it comes to sensations and feelings.The whole point of the Land Of Smiles, after all, is that the SMILE conceals a cauldron of seething emotions which cannot be expressed..so you get 1001 ways to grin. The dentists drill without anaesthetics and the patients emerge white and trembling.....as Neville, my dentist, who is Chinese said...it is senseless..you cannot do the job properly if the patient is in pain...... actually it makes me think of peasant farmers confronting a problem of animal obstetrics... Children? well..don't have any feelings do they! explains why Thai psychiatric hospitals are full to overflowing....... and as for complaining...worse than the UK..don't want to get involved, don't want to make a fuss, could not possibly suggest that a Doctor had made a mistake....and it will probably all come down to whether I can find a lawyer with more influential friends than the hospital.. LA DI DA
Thursday, September 26, 2002
A DAY IN BANGKAPI
This was planned before all these awful events. But nevertheless I would like you to see it. I do not think most people have any idea of what it is like...'to LIVE HERE' !! so here is a first go at this craziness
Since I started on this I have begun reading Bangkok:Place, Practice and Representation. Routledge. London.2002 by Marc Askew from Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne It is part of a series-Asia's Transformation: Asia's Global Cities edited by Mark Selden from Cornell U. While it contains chapters one does not rush to read because of their titles: eg. Fields of Cultural Capital...there are others which are the most pertinent to daily life in Bangkok that I have come across: Condo Land and Genealogy of the Slum..so what follows is at least in the spirit of inquiry!
This was planned before all these awful events. But nevertheless I would like you to see it. I do not think most people have any idea of what it is like...'to LIVE HERE' !! so here is a first go at this craziness
Since I started on this I have begun reading Bangkok:Place, Practice and Representation. Routledge. London.2002 by Marc Askew from Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne It is part of a series-Asia's Transformation: Asia's Global Cities edited by Mark Selden from Cornell U. While it contains chapters one does not rush to read because of their titles: eg. Fields of Cultural Capital...there are others which are the most pertinent to daily life in Bangkok that I have come across: Condo Land and Genealogy of the Slum..so what follows is at least in the spirit of inquiry!
Here is the star of the show..of course
We look rather different at dawn!
Never mind we have a garden and look.. a swimming pool...behind the trellis of wires!
In the morning we wander about on walks to look at geese, vernacular architecture, dead dolls and canals. In fact the morning walk is a veritable historical tour. Bangkapi is 'built' on a swamp-like much of Bangkok. We walk along a metre wide concrete path raised on stilts above the stinking black canal. There are little lanes leading off this path...some on stilts, some just wet walways through the reeds..but all along there are people living in houses of varying degrees of wealth. The whole issue of land tenure inThailand is unresolved. A curious mixture of title, patronage and squatters rights
Bangkok Pavements/Sidewalks are a hazard. The sideawalks are awash with stalls and the owners are usually either sleeping or eating as far as I can see. In this shot there is, unusually, no food being eaten. Here, it is by far and away cheaper to eat at a street food stall than to buy food and cook at home..with one or two eexceptions..a few grilled prawns will be cheaper at home...but other grilled things..chicken, chicken hearts, pork will be cheaper in the street and anyway they have been seasoned and prepared already....there is a litle book on Hawker Food somwewhere in the house. A basic dish with rice costs 35p ie 50c..twice a day you can eat and then a couple of bottles orf water..day's expenditure on food $1.25
Our animals enjoy the morning. The cat eyes the bird..and itself. The dog has a difficult experience with a zombie doll while the slow eyed loris is well just...slow
So into the world. Major pre-occupations aof Thai teens are Karaoke booths. Thailand's answer to Mullah Omar, who has almost singlehandedly wrecked the country's major source of income, ie. Tourism , tried to declare these cabinets de chansons entertainment venues and therefore entry only to over 21s. As 90 % of the clientele is 14 to 16 there were 'a few protests'. ...Beggars are already lining up at the new Tesco Lotus store..and oh! look at this nice waterway next door...The smell....well!
I have mentioned The Mall Bangkapi before. Here we have the major pre-occupations: Gold, Mobile Phones and Food
Off to Market
Crabs and fish a plenty
And all manner of shells and crustaceans
Here we have those essential staples Praraa..Fermented Fish and the pastes that are the basis of all the soups and curries. My favorite story about the great Alan Davidson editor of ? what is it called the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food is that his spell as Her Majesty's ambassadoer to Laos was notable for the fact that he produced an erudite tract on Fish Sauce..sounds true?
This little Piggy went to market. Ears are very popular.
Also little birds and frogs....you think we do not eat all this.?..of course we do
Nicely cooked crabs..of a sort..they ARE good..and silkworm larvae and grasshoppers..nicely fried, high in protein -also good- shame about the fertilisers in the rice fields and the fact thet were probably killed with insecticides
Chilis, Asparagus..Thai and English style...ie bamboo..Normai and Normai Farang ...CHEAP
Walking by the canal......? take a river taxi? We have one of the few still working canals. It takes 30-40 minutes to get downtown. I realise that I have truly reflected my experience of BKK by managing to avoid taking any pictures of traffic jams and smoggy sunsets which would be truly characteristic of BKK. I just try and avoid it all.. If I am going to sit in a jam to get to Tesco or Piggly Wiggly- no we do not have those- I might as well do it in London
Buddha and Muhammed seem to have come to a decent agreement about life here. The Wat and the Mosque sit side by side. The muslims appear to have snaffled the majority of the good canalside land, nd historically of course they were squatters
Cats, Dogs, etc relax of an evening.....particularly like the dog doing its (very good) impression of my step mother. K bought the mask one Loy Kratong evening and lo Betty came to stay. Mostly she stays propped up on a china cat by the mirror just to remind us.
Children try to end the day.!!
The Bangkok Night is with us. The VW van is a cocktail bar. The bars are go-gos ie. pole dancing in bikinis.This is not really about BKK nightlife which probably needs a little photo-essay of its own. There is some quite good stuff written about it: Jeremy Seabrook's In The Cities of The South and the expanded book version of the chapter on BKK, Peter Jackson and Nerida Cook's Genders and Sexualities in Modern Thailand. There is also some unpleasantly moralising social science such as Ryan Bishop and Lillian Robinson's Night Market: Sexual Cultures and The Thai Economic Miracle
Bangkok Hookers. They are mostly just kids from the rice fields. If they work the streets and bars, like these two, they are already a long way up the ladder from Burmese and Chinese girls sold into Thai brothels, who have a hard time paying off the tea money. The reason Bangkok has the reputation as the brothel of the world is because the Thais have made it so. Foreign sex travel though obviously there is miniscule by comparison with the domestic sex industry which ranges from mobile brothels in pick ups at country fairs through, establishments where the girls are chained up or locked in to huge 'massage parlours' and 'turkish baths' with maybe up to 400 working girls on the premises..all pretty much exclusively patronised by Thais. The sex tourism phenomenon is a direct result of the Thais deciding to provide R and R to the US military in the 60s. The US fleet still puts in regularly at Patong and Pattaya, where they may be anything up to 10 ships at a time laying off. Not a good time to be in town. How many Americans know this?
Whereas girls like these, working as bar tenders/hostesses will always choose their customers, get paid a living wage by the bar in the first place and are free to supplement their income or not. The economics of 'kai tua' or body selling in Thailand is simple. You work in a factory. You get 3000 Baht a month. A room costs from 800Baht a month up to rent . Working in a department store is not much better. If you want to sell mobile phones at 6000 Baht a month ie $150 you need to be a GRADUATE! One night a week with an American or European will net you anything from 4000 to 10,000 Baht a month and one night with a Japanese may well net you 5000 Baht without even having to sleep with any of them QED
Cannot say when this all started there was the remotest idea that this would be what was being written.
However we are home, not sure for how long, but maybe a couple of weeks.
Whatever surprises we may have encountered in life, the sight of a baby shitting from its stomach is a first for me. She seems fairly unconcerned with the physical stuff.
However the extraordinary look of knowingness and terrible suspicion she gives everyone is not pretty to behold. Nonetheless she still grins at her mirror.
I keep changing my mind about whether to set out the whole grizzly and unedifying tale. One wonders what me dad would have made of it when he was still mens sana.
Why am I sending this into the world? I do not know. I suppose, in addition to the kindness so many people have given us, I just want it 'known'. We are both consumed with guilt- thinking that there must have been something we should have picked up on to suspect the hospital/doctors were incompetent. But the obstetrician was great…….and she seemed well…….
I think, too, the writing of it is therapeutic in a way. Maybe I am just trying to dream or write her better!
In spite of what follows…….. 'ahem' me learned friend speaks:
"I have been advised that neither the doctors, nor the hospitals, nor the little girl nor us should be named"………
I am not inclined to make it easy for the doctor to have the opportunity to do the same or worse to someone else's child. One of the heartrending aspects of the specialist hospital were the scores of kids who were there using up doctors time because they had been injured by private Thai hospitals.
We have to decide what to do. No-one wants to take legal action. But I am not young and we have to consider her future should she need long term medical care.
We have to be clear what we want and we have to be able to show that what occurred was negligent not misadventurous.
So.....yesterday you would have had the whole story...but I think it is better not. So here is just some of it!!
This little girl was born in May 2002 in a private Hospital in Bangkok Thailand.
She holds dual nationality from Thailand and a European country
The private hospital is recognised by insurance companies such as BUPA. It states that it holds ISO 9002 and ISO 14001 accreditation through the UK company SGS.
She was born by caesarian section there being some uncertainty as to whether she would alter her position which was over the pelvic bone. At birth she was given an APGAR score of 10 within 5 minutes and no malformations or defects were reported. She passed meconium and was urinating normally; she rejected infant formula and was breastfeeding. She was discharged from the hospital after three days.
Between birth and now she visited the Hospital on three occasions, was checked by the paediatrician and received appropriate immunisations. No problems were diagnosed nor presenting.
On August 31st 2002 she stopped shitting. Hitherto her movements had been apparently normal. As she is was breast fed there was apparently no undue cause for alarm; though some solid foods-banana, rice, papaya and prunes were introduced into her diet around August 31 she ate very little of them.
On September 2nd she was taken to the hospital for a routine immunisation and check up. No problem was diagnosed or presenting.
When by September 10 she had not passed a stool she was taken to the Hospital. The diagnosis, by two doctors, was that there was no cause for worry but that an enema could be administered. This was not done. There was no physical examination. On September 15 a hard mass could for the first time be felt in her stomach so she was taken back to the hospital.
She was admitted to the hospital. X Rays were taken and a mass of faeces was identified on the right hand side of her stomach; ..'suggestive of dilated sigmoid colon'. A small amount of faeces was also identified on the left hand side. The radiologist's report continues: 'dilated bowel loop in upper abdomen. Just below diaphragm; could be transverse colon. Some air density in small bowel. …Hirschsprung's disease should be considered.'
For whatever reason this report appears to have either not been read by the doctor at the hospital or ignored or rejected. No tests for Hirschsprung's disease were carried out, nor for any other possible malfunction; no barium meal was given for example, nor was any proposal for rectal biopsy made. The doctor's notes for the morning of September 16 raise, for the first time the idea that she has a congenital fistula as the enema administered on September 16 resulted in a discharge of fluid from the vagina. Such a diagnosis had never been previously stated.
We took the decision to remove her from the hospital and seek specialist advice. The doctor at the Hospital wrote a letter outlining the procedures that had been carried out and the diagnosis.
On September 17 she was taken to a specialist Hospital An internal camera identified that there was a fistula between the vagina and the rectum. He said that :'the fistula is very high up above the hymen.'
He said further that: ' I am astonished at what we have found. I have never seen such a thing before. It is certainly not a congenital fistula but a most serious trauma that someone had recently caused'
So amongst other things she now has a colostomy to begin the process of removing the faeces and cleaning the rectum, anus and vagina.
We now wait two or three months . If it does not close he will have to operate to try and close it surgically, with the attendant uncertainties of success. And we still do not know the precise cause of the build up of faeces.
On September 21 I went to the Hospital and obtained a copy of her medical history from birth. I spoke briefly with the paediatrician who inquired after her. I told her that she was with her mother and I did not know; and that the reason for wanting the notes was so that any hospital we took her to in England or the US would have her medical history. The paediatrician expressed the opinion that taking her abroad was un-necessary and 'that she had suggested to ** that she take her to C********** Hospital in Bangkok but that ** had refused'. This is an untruth. No such suggestion was ever made. Nor is any proposal for referral made in the notes.
The order of statements in the letter from the Hospital, the medical notes from that hospital, the sudden appearance of faeces in the vagina and the diagnosis from the specialist Hospital suggest to a reasonable degree of certainty that the trauma was caused by a doctor or an assistant at the hospital passing a dilator from through her rectum into her vagina at some considerable depth; and that the diagnosis from that hospital is a rather clumsy attempt to conceal their error.
..............................
Personally I cannot conceive of what was going on in the mind of the doctor......a child comes with what turn out to be some classic symptoms, a radiologist, too, suggests what to look for. I can find the possible diagnoses in the online pages of hospitals in Boston, Cincinatti and Iowa in a couple of minutes and the tests and treatments. No one suggests sticking dilators inside a small child as a start!
And, whatever the late Lord Denning or any other of me learned friends may think, I cannot interpret what happened as 'misadventure' or the inevitable concomitant risks of any medical procedure!
However we are home, not sure for how long, but maybe a couple of weeks.
Whatever surprises we may have encountered in life, the sight of a baby shitting from its stomach is a first for me. She seems fairly unconcerned with the physical stuff.
However the extraordinary look of knowingness and terrible suspicion she gives everyone is not pretty to behold. Nonetheless she still grins at her mirror.
I keep changing my mind about whether to set out the whole grizzly and unedifying tale. One wonders what me dad would have made of it when he was still mens sana.
Why am I sending this into the world? I do not know. I suppose, in addition to the kindness so many people have given us, I just want it 'known'. We are both consumed with guilt- thinking that there must have been something we should have picked up on to suspect the hospital/doctors were incompetent. But the obstetrician was great…….and she seemed well…….
I think, too, the writing of it is therapeutic in a way. Maybe I am just trying to dream or write her better!
In spite of what follows…….. 'ahem' me learned friend speaks:
"I have been advised that neither the doctors, nor the hospitals, nor the little girl nor us should be named"………
I am not inclined to make it easy for the doctor to have the opportunity to do the same or worse to someone else's child. One of the heartrending aspects of the specialist hospital were the scores of kids who were there using up doctors time because they had been injured by private Thai hospitals.
We have to decide what to do. No-one wants to take legal action. But I am not young and we have to consider her future should she need long term medical care.
We have to be clear what we want and we have to be able to show that what occurred was negligent not misadventurous.
So.....yesterday you would have had the whole story...but I think it is better not. So here is just some of it!!
This little girl was born in May 2002 in a private Hospital in Bangkok Thailand.
She holds dual nationality from Thailand and a European country
The private hospital is recognised by insurance companies such as BUPA. It states that it holds ISO 9002 and ISO 14001 accreditation through the UK company SGS.
She was born by caesarian section there being some uncertainty as to whether she would alter her position which was over the pelvic bone. At birth she was given an APGAR score of 10 within 5 minutes and no malformations or defects were reported. She passed meconium and was urinating normally; she rejected infant formula and was breastfeeding. She was discharged from the hospital after three days.
Between birth and now she visited the Hospital on three occasions, was checked by the paediatrician and received appropriate immunisations. No problems were diagnosed nor presenting.
On August 31st 2002 she stopped shitting. Hitherto her movements had been apparently normal. As she is was breast fed there was apparently no undue cause for alarm; though some solid foods-banana, rice, papaya and prunes were introduced into her diet around August 31 she ate very little of them.
On September 2nd she was taken to the hospital for a routine immunisation and check up. No problem was diagnosed or presenting.
When by September 10 she had not passed a stool she was taken to the Hospital. The diagnosis, by two doctors, was that there was no cause for worry but that an enema could be administered. This was not done. There was no physical examination. On September 15 a hard mass could for the first time be felt in her stomach so she was taken back to the hospital.
She was admitted to the hospital. X Rays were taken and a mass of faeces was identified on the right hand side of her stomach; ..'suggestive of dilated sigmoid colon'. A small amount of faeces was also identified on the left hand side. The radiologist's report continues: 'dilated bowel loop in upper abdomen. Just below diaphragm; could be transverse colon. Some air density in small bowel. …Hirschsprung's disease should be considered.'
For whatever reason this report appears to have either not been read by the doctor at the hospital or ignored or rejected. No tests for Hirschsprung's disease were carried out, nor for any other possible malfunction; no barium meal was given for example, nor was any proposal for rectal biopsy made. The doctor's notes for the morning of September 16 raise, for the first time the idea that she has a congenital fistula as the enema administered on September 16 resulted in a discharge of fluid from the vagina. Such a diagnosis had never been previously stated.
We took the decision to remove her from the hospital and seek specialist advice. The doctor at the Hospital wrote a letter outlining the procedures that had been carried out and the diagnosis.
On September 17 she was taken to a specialist Hospital An internal camera identified that there was a fistula between the vagina and the rectum. He said that :'the fistula is very high up above the hymen.'
He said further that: ' I am astonished at what we have found. I have never seen such a thing before. It is certainly not a congenital fistula but a most serious trauma that someone had recently caused'
So amongst other things she now has a colostomy to begin the process of removing the faeces and cleaning the rectum, anus and vagina.
We now wait two or three months . If it does not close he will have to operate to try and close it surgically, with the attendant uncertainties of success. And we still do not know the precise cause of the build up of faeces.
On September 21 I went to the Hospital and obtained a copy of her medical history from birth. I spoke briefly with the paediatrician who inquired after her. I told her that she was with her mother and I did not know; and that the reason for wanting the notes was so that any hospital we took her to in England or the US would have her medical history. The paediatrician expressed the opinion that taking her abroad was un-necessary and 'that she had suggested to ** that she take her to C********** Hospital in Bangkok but that ** had refused'. This is an untruth. No such suggestion was ever made. Nor is any proposal for referral made in the notes.
The order of statements in the letter from the Hospital, the medical notes from that hospital, the sudden appearance of faeces in the vagina and the diagnosis from the specialist Hospital suggest to a reasonable degree of certainty that the trauma was caused by a doctor or an assistant at the hospital passing a dilator from through her rectum into her vagina at some considerable depth; and that the diagnosis from that hospital is a rather clumsy attempt to conceal their error.
..............................
Personally I cannot conceive of what was going on in the mind of the doctor......a child comes with what turn out to be some classic symptoms, a radiologist, too, suggests what to look for. I can find the possible diagnoses in the online pages of hospitals in Boston, Cincinatti and Iowa in a couple of minutes and the tests and treatments. No one suggests sticking dilators inside a small child as a start!
And, whatever the late Lord Denning or any other of me learned friends may think, I cannot interpret what happened as 'misadventure' or the inevitable concomitant risks of any medical procedure!
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Saturday, September 14, 2002
so I thought: If I am going to have to live in a place with oriental mudslides...I might as well live in the orient.
Don't take too much notice of these two. I am just thinking about privacy and ID and monopoly medicine!Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The agencies looking at youGuardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Health supplements: R.I.P.
Friday, September 13, 2002
I hope you DO realise that Hello Kitty is one of the great pre-teen and teen icons of our age. Aeon, a Credit Card Co. made a killing by issuing Hello Kitty Credit Cards. However The Future of Hello Kitty is a little different.
Thursday, September 12, 2002
Initiation ceremony complete. So who is the winner? amazon wasted a lot of time and money for no sale. I wasted a lot of time for no purchase.......I was thinking about books. And I tried to list my favourite ones. But I have been thinking of another list..and that is books that were influential in my life. Amongst these I would include those by Leslie Charteris that strange half white half Chinese gentleman who created the 1950s Robin Hood.The Saint. In one of his novels he has Simon Templar say words to the effect of.." you cannot compare us with real criminals....we do not aim to compete with Insurance Companies and Banks."
And of course the bank is the winner. $75 goes out at a cost of £49. $75 comes back at £47.-0. Bank in profit to the tune of +$4. And on the cricket score principle...ie everyone makes a few runs and the side turns in a reasonable score....they turn a nice little profit.
While we are on the niceties of scams...The Mall of whom I have spoken before...charges some kind of VAT on purchases. Result I buy an item priced at 100Baht..costs me 100B and 75 satangs..These are nasty little coins like old French centimes used to be....BUT you cannot use them except on buses where the fare is 3Baht 50 satangs (and in The Mall) I have got large jars of these things..probably $100 worth. Went to 7-11 with 100B worth to buy a beer.No thanks. Went to change them in the Bank.No thanks!!
So now the question is do I use PayPal to send money? And opeing that account was another saga, with which I will not bore you! Suffice it to say that PayPal has some nifty little spying device that KNOWS...you are using a Browser in 'HORROR' Thailand not Iowa. Seems to have escaped them that some Americans do go ABROAD....On this subject...you know I would rather not point to mainstrean news sources...because you all read them anyway; but Why we still don't get it, one year on is already a little elusive in the search engines (I wonder why?!)...and The dead and the guilty maybe this one may well be soon!
About these influential books. I am not saying they are 'great or good'.. and certainly not the same as the 'favorite' list....but
Aged 0-10
*Wise Owl's Story..Alison Utley...instructive saga on property ownership
*Adventures of The Little Brown Bears..anarchic animals...'a pound of cotton, a reel of cheese, a pod of bread and a loaf of peas'
*William..Richmal Crompton......DIY guide to insolence and excuses
*The Aeneid....Virgil........tedious under the bedclothes torchlight translations followed by flogging. Strangely the book endured
*The Scarlet Pimpernel.....Baroness Orczy.........DIY Guide to ID concealment
*The Flight of The Heron.....D.K.Broster (who?) Reasonable introduction to Anglophobia
*L'Enfant et La Riviere..Henri Bosco......Provencal escapism (before the rush)
*Down With Skool: A guide to school life for tiny pupils and their parents...Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle...Ethnography of Real Life
*1066 And All That...W.C.Sellar and R.J. Yeatman....We had separate subjects..History and Dates
*Nonsense Songs....Edward Lear
I did not read any of the 'standard classics' RS's taste in or knowledge of Children's Books did not extend much beyond Arthur Mee and The Book of Welsh Fairy Tales and MEE'S not much beyond Little Grey Rabbit. RS gave me Henry Esmond for my 9th Birthday!! And at school I think they thoght Romain Roland was kids stuff. There was Patapouf too-not the Kathryn Jackson thing about elephants...but about a bear or was it a wolf who destroyed pigs houses until they built one out of michelin tyres....maybe it was a promo! See how one remembers good advertising.
10-20
Shadow The Sheepdog...Enid Blyton..Heartrending sentimentality
Angelique...Sergeanne Golon..ie Serge and Anne....Prepubescent Porn with Pirates in The Vendee and The Maghreb
The Saint...Leslie Charteris...On Maidenhead, nice cars and international finance
Poems...W.B.Yeats....Mooning about
Sonnets...W.Shakespeare...More Mooning about
Journey To The End Of The Night...L.F.Celine....Inrush of The Real World
Return Of The Native...Mooning meets the real world
Odes..Horace...more under the bedclothes...but with Radio Luxembourg and no flogging
Homo Ludens..J..M Huizinga...more ethnography and an antidote to Nietzsche
Alexandrian Quartet..Lawrence Durrell....Read in French for some perverse reason..but discovered really did not have to live in England...just took a long while to get therell
Actually I am not sure about 10-20..Will have to give more thought also to this...only a beginning
20-30
L'Etranger...A. Camus......of course....justification for standing outside on the balcony/lawn at parties
The English Anarchists...George Woodcock....excellent introduction to the third way..or no way
The English Utopia...A.L.Morton........why Surrey is still the Land of Cockayne
My life...and lots of it..Alexander Herzen........I used to walk up Westbourne Terrace every day and think of him
Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle ....P-J Proudhon.....More printer's pensees
Elizabeth David..French Country Cooking......Not her best book and none of them as good as Jane Grigson, or as good as many cookery books discovered later..but critical in believing what I had cooked in France could be cooked in Oxfordshire
Russell Lord...The Care Of The Earth.......proto.Green..
babycare calls.............
Paroles......Prevert, Jacques.....seminal Oxford undergraduate affectation
The Raw and The Cooked...Claude Levi Strauss......gateway to ethnography, linguistics....reflective/reflexive everything
Waiting for Godot....Sam Beckett......discovered I could act............
So you see what an effective and stimulating English Literature Degree Course The Dreaming Spires provided.
**No. On thinking about this I would have to knock off A.L.Morton and Proudhon in favor of:
Confucian Analects...Mencius...otherwise my brilliant career as a sinologue would never have begun and therefore not ended so quickly...thank you to those two most uninspiring teachers Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe ,...but I was left with Joseph Needham!
The New Polytechnics,....Eric Robinson....tedious Penguin Special....but...influentially articulated the reasons for not working in Oxbridge, red brick, greenfield or other 'universities'
30-40
This is getting harder......Have to think about this.......HOW ABOUT YOU???
um..never kept a commonplace book..well til now!
The Bookman's London.....Frank Swinnerton.....became an antiquarian bookseller!
Gastronomic Bibliography........Katherine Bitting......wrote a thesis on Cookery Book Illustration!
Ivor The Egine-The Dragon...Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin...Rhodri and I have travelled on Ivor from Porthmadog to see the Dragon...and back
Corsica...Dorothy Carrington....went there...better than one could ever have hoped... like France in 1950...or Laos today
Victorian Publishers Book Bindings....Ruari McLean............eye opener to Book Design, Typography Private Presses and everything
am beginning to think that once we had the book business and Rhodri I did not read anything important except Mother and Child by Penelope Leach and The Clique and The Bookdealer!
And of course the bank is the winner. $75 goes out at a cost of £49. $75 comes back at £47.-0. Bank in profit to the tune of +$4. And on the cricket score principle...ie everyone makes a few runs and the side turns in a reasonable score....they turn a nice little profit.
While we are on the niceties of scams...The Mall of whom I have spoken before...charges some kind of VAT on purchases. Result I buy an item priced at 100Baht..costs me 100B and 75 satangs..These are nasty little coins like old French centimes used to be....BUT you cannot use them except on buses where the fare is 3Baht 50 satangs (and in The Mall) I have got large jars of these things..probably $100 worth. Went to 7-11 with 100B worth to buy a beer.No thanks. Went to change them in the Bank.No thanks!!
So now the question is do I use PayPal to send money? And opeing that account was another saga, with which I will not bore you! Suffice it to say that PayPal has some nifty little spying device that KNOWS...you are using a Browser in 'HORROR' Thailand not Iowa. Seems to have escaped them that some Americans do go ABROAD....On this subject...you know I would rather not point to mainstrean news sources...because you all read them anyway; but Why we still don't get it, one year on is already a little elusive in the search engines (I wonder why?!)...and The dead and the guilty maybe this one may well be soon!
About these influential books. I am not saying they are 'great or good'.. and certainly not the same as the 'favorite' list....but
Aged 0-10
*Wise Owl's Story..Alison Utley...instructive saga on property ownership
*Adventures of The Little Brown Bears..anarchic animals...'a pound of cotton, a reel of cheese, a pod of bread and a loaf of peas'
*William..Richmal Crompton......DIY guide to insolence and excuses
*The Aeneid....Virgil........tedious under the bedclothes torchlight translations followed by flogging. Strangely the book endured
*The Scarlet Pimpernel.....Baroness Orczy.........DIY Guide to ID concealment
*The Flight of The Heron.....D.K.Broster (who?) Reasonable introduction to Anglophobia
*L'Enfant et La Riviere..Henri Bosco......Provencal escapism (before the rush)
*Down With Skool: A guide to school life for tiny pupils and their parents...Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle...Ethnography of Real Life
*1066 And All That...W.C.Sellar and R.J. Yeatman....We had separate subjects..History and Dates
*Nonsense Songs....Edward Lear
I did not read any of the 'standard classics' RS's taste in or knowledge of Children's Books did not extend much beyond Arthur Mee and The Book of Welsh Fairy Tales and MEE'S not much beyond Little Grey Rabbit. RS gave me Henry Esmond for my 9th Birthday!! And at school I think they thoght Romain Roland was kids stuff. There was Patapouf too-not the Kathryn Jackson thing about elephants...but about a bear or was it a wolf who destroyed pigs houses until they built one out of michelin tyres....maybe it was a promo! See how one remembers good advertising.
10-20
Shadow The Sheepdog...Enid Blyton..Heartrending sentimentality
Angelique...Sergeanne Golon..ie Serge and Anne....Prepubescent Porn with Pirates in The Vendee and The Maghreb
The Saint...Leslie Charteris...On Maidenhead, nice cars and international finance
Poems...W.B.Yeats....Mooning about
Sonnets...W.Shakespeare...More Mooning about
Journey To The End Of The Night...L.F.Celine....Inrush of The Real World
Return Of The Native...Mooning meets the real world
Odes..Horace...more under the bedclothes...but with Radio Luxembourg and no flogging
Homo Ludens..J..M Huizinga...more ethnography and an antidote to Nietzsche
Alexandrian Quartet..Lawrence Durrell....Read in French for some perverse reason..but discovered really did not have to live in England...just took a long while to get therell
Actually I am not sure about 10-20..Will have to give more thought also to this...only a beginning
20-30
L'Etranger...A. Camus......of course....justification for standing outside on the balcony/lawn at parties
The English Anarchists...George Woodcock....excellent introduction to the third way..or no way
The English Utopia...A.L.Morton........why Surrey is still the Land of Cockayne
My life...and lots of it..Alexander Herzen........I used to walk up Westbourne Terrace every day and think of him
Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle ....P-J Proudhon.....More printer's pensees
Elizabeth David..French Country Cooking......Not her best book and none of them as good as Jane Grigson, or as good as many cookery books discovered later..but critical in believing what I had cooked in France could be cooked in Oxfordshire
Russell Lord...The Care Of The Earth.......proto.Green..
babycare calls.............
Paroles......Prevert, Jacques.....seminal Oxford undergraduate affectation
The Raw and The Cooked...Claude Levi Strauss......gateway to ethnography, linguistics....reflective/reflexive everything
Waiting for Godot....Sam Beckett......discovered I could act............
So you see what an effective and stimulating English Literature Degree Course The Dreaming Spires provided.
**No. On thinking about this I would have to knock off A.L.Morton and Proudhon in favor of:
Confucian Analects...Mencius...otherwise my brilliant career as a sinologue would never have begun and therefore not ended so quickly...thank you to those two most uninspiring teachers Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe ,...but I was left with Joseph Needham!
The New Polytechnics,....Eric Robinson....tedious Penguin Special....but...influentially articulated the reasons for not working in Oxbridge, red brick, greenfield or other 'universities'
30-40
This is getting harder......Have to think about this.......HOW ABOUT YOU???
um..never kept a commonplace book..well til now!
The Bookman's London.....Frank Swinnerton.....became an antiquarian bookseller!
Gastronomic Bibliography........Katherine Bitting......wrote a thesis on Cookery Book Illustration!
Ivor The Egine-The Dragon...Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin...Rhodri and I have travelled on Ivor from Porthmadog to see the Dragon...and back
Corsica...Dorothy Carrington....went there...better than one could ever have hoped... like France in 1950...or Laos today
Victorian Publishers Book Bindings....Ruari McLean............eye opener to Book Design, Typography Private Presses and everything
am beginning to think that once we had the book business and Rhodri I did not read anything important except Mother and Child by Penelope Leach and The Clique and The Bookdealer!
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
On the subject of books here is a nice book; and a nice review from the "artiste formerly known as The Imperative Cook":
The Book of Eels
I shall not be ordering it from amazon!
If we had some Swallows we could have Swallows and Amazons if we had some Amazons. I just wish something will swallow amazon. The BANK smile who are v. good... we should give them an airing...have spoken And well..."amazon should know how to get an address verification through the authorisation centre" They suggest that probably amazon have mis-spelled the address...it not being 200034 Turnip Drive, Austin.TX whatever. Of course amazon never requested the address in the first place -did not stop them getting the cash though- and appear to have no means of supplying a form for me to give it to them. The refund initiation ceremony appears to be on hold.
The Book of Eels
I shall not be ordering it from amazon!
If we had some Swallows we could have Swallows and Amazons if we had some Amazons. I just wish something will swallow amazon. The BANK smile who are v. good... we should give them an airing...have spoken And well..."amazon should know how to get an address verification through the authorisation centre" They suggest that probably amazon have mis-spelled the address...it not being 200034 Turnip Drive, Austin.TX whatever. Of course amazon never requested the address in the first place -did not stop them getting the cash though- and appear to have no means of supplying a form for me to give it to them. The refund initiation ceremony appears to be on hold.
I repeat myself..but I am told the Faber letter is illegible so it is now typed. And instead there is an illegible letter from Elsi, but pretty. In case you wonder, no I know you didn't, this jumping around is because it is tedious to put pictures on this weblog but very easy on the other. AND you cannot put multiple pages on this. Never mind most of this will be off to the Rainhammer soon!
Monday, September 09, 2002
Sunday, September 08, 2002
A Sorry Tale
I wanted to send an amazon Gift Certificate. In the dim and distant past one rainy day in Wales I opened an amazon account.I have never bought a book from amazon. I had no particular grudge against them I just like 'real bookshops' -the way I like real food and real coffee. So they fall into the same category as Starbucks and Pizza Hut. Places I never go. Anyway I have no idea what name or password or email or credit card I originally stuck onto one of those interminable forms that all these companies use. So I chose an email address from my drawer-but of course they knew my name and address at once..and would I like to login from my 'email address on file?'. Well no actually I would just like to go on using this one. Anyway all seems well. I order the certificate and pay for it. They say they will send a confirmatory email-but didn't. Check the credit card statement, online. They have taken their money. Told my friend. In a couple of days she says she has got the certificate.
When she tries to use it however amazon say she cannot. There is a problem and would she like to contact me about it? amazon do not contact me. So I mail amazon as does she. amazon sends me a message saying they only communicate with the email address on file. Track this down. They do not have 'address-verification on file' for the credit card. They are contacting the bank. After a couple of days nothing..they have had their money for 5 days now..no certificate. Oh they say the bank is not replying. So I email the bank and also suggest to amazon that as they have $75 perhaps they would like to sort this out. The bank says. amazon have not contacted them AND EVEN IF they had the bank would not give amazon my address. The UK Data Protection Act forbids this. It is OK for me to give amazon my address-which of course they already have. And presumably if I enter it on some amazon form and when they process the card nothing whistles that would be OK. So what are amazon gouing to do-are they going to tell me where the form is to fill in? No. Please FAX a credit card statement with the address on it. This is an internet bank that does not issue such things-except at £2,50 a shot and Royal Mail takes three weeks to send it here........in the meantime amazon tell me..'they are "making arrangements" to send me $75..........who can be bothered with these companies.?
The bank is pretty good. It even sends small sums of money abroad at not that great expense.Most UK banks appear to want to charge $25 for sending $5.
While I am grousing...!! You know it takes 4 days to send money around the UK banks-5 in the case of LLoydsTSB...here I go to the ATM and through it can tap in the bank code and account number of any Thai bank account and send any amount of money instantly. Of course the banks are all Chinese!
I wanted to send an amazon Gift Certificate. In the dim and distant past one rainy day in Wales I opened an amazon account.I have never bought a book from amazon. I had no particular grudge against them I just like 'real bookshops' -the way I like real food and real coffee. So they fall into the same category as Starbucks and Pizza Hut. Places I never go. Anyway I have no idea what name or password or email or credit card I originally stuck onto one of those interminable forms that all these companies use. So I chose an email address from my drawer-but of course they knew my name and address at once..and would I like to login from my 'email address on file?'. Well no actually I would just like to go on using this one. Anyway all seems well. I order the certificate and pay for it. They say they will send a confirmatory email-but didn't. Check the credit card statement, online. They have taken their money. Told my friend. In a couple of days she says she has got the certificate.
When she tries to use it however amazon say she cannot. There is a problem and would she like to contact me about it? amazon do not contact me. So I mail amazon as does she. amazon sends me a message saying they only communicate with the email address on file. Track this down. They do not have 'address-verification on file' for the credit card. They are contacting the bank. After a couple of days nothing..they have had their money for 5 days now..no certificate. Oh they say the bank is not replying. So I email the bank and also suggest to amazon that as they have $75 perhaps they would like to sort this out. The bank says. amazon have not contacted them AND EVEN IF they had the bank would not give amazon my address. The UK Data Protection Act forbids this. It is OK for me to give amazon my address-which of course they already have. And presumably if I enter it on some amazon form and when they process the card nothing whistles that would be OK. So what are amazon gouing to do-are they going to tell me where the form is to fill in? No. Please FAX a credit card statement with the address on it. This is an internet bank that does not issue such things-except at £2,50 a shot and Royal Mail takes three weeks to send it here........in the meantime amazon tell me..'they are "making arrangements" to send me $75..........who can be bothered with these companies.?
The bank is pretty good. It even sends small sums of money abroad at not that great expense.Most UK banks appear to want to charge $25 for sending $5.
While I am grousing...!! You know it takes 4 days to send money around the UK banks-5 in the case of LLoydsTSB...here I go to the ATM and through it can tap in the bank code and account number of any Thai bank account and send any amount of money instantly. Of course the banks are all Chinese!
Saturday, September 07, 2002
So here is a BIG number..and it has taken me all day to do so you better read it!!!THE SHAME OF CRAIG RAINE AND OTHER PICTURES and not just read it but SAY something!!...(please?....)!!
Friday, September 06, 2002
How nice of MSN Messenger to tell me they are going into maintenance mode in 5 minutes..and would I please arrange to SHUT UP. Luckily I am only
a. Talking to myself
b. Talking through the wine as Ms Griffiths (Nanci not Suzanne) would have it
c. Conducting one of those eehh...aaahh, who is this ?? conversations with Elodie Sirin Wayo in the mirror. She is heavily into this mirror..more so than the ducks now..4 months old...bit precocious I shouldn't wonder. Where did she get that from?
Actually MSN Messenger is both a boon and a pain. Boon because I can talk to the Uk for nothing and a bain because they keep changing the F*** versions and no two versions appear compatible. Also don't use Hotmail as it appears to have more bugs in it than the sparrow's nest in my bathroom window..and that is unbelievable!!..were it not true.
Oh on the subject of bugs....we have a whole 30 minute programme here on Thursday evenings about Prawn Farming...mainly about what deadly chemicals to use. Big problems with Bacillus Subtilis. Must find you some real info on this. Then I can open my forthcoming page of food horrors in style!!
a. Talking to myself
b. Talking through the wine as Ms Griffiths (Nanci not Suzanne) would have it
c. Conducting one of those eehh...aaahh, who is this ?? conversations with Elodie Sirin Wayo in the mirror. She is heavily into this mirror..more so than the ducks now..4 months old...bit precocious I shouldn't wonder. Where did she get that from?
Actually MSN Messenger is both a boon and a pain. Boon because I can talk to the Uk for nothing and a bain because they keep changing the F*** versions and no two versions appear compatible. Also don't use Hotmail as it appears to have more bugs in it than the sparrow's nest in my bathroom window..and that is unbelievable!!..were it not true.
Oh on the subject of bugs....we have a whole 30 minute programme here on Thursday evenings about Prawn Farming...mainly about what deadly chemicals to use. Big problems with Bacillus Subtilis. Must find you some real info on this. Then I can open my forthcoming page of food horrors in style!!
I like "'what is left of Thai culture in the C21st". I have not been on A trip back in time to old Sena but I have been many a place similar. Mainly in Issan. But there the pigs did live under the house..and the 'before dawn dark"..is that the Ted Hughes phrase in The Horses?...was all gruntings and charcoal burning and mainly the strange Sensurround of the cockerels waking each other up in a quick East to West chorus..far away in the East...over the house and away to the West with the dawn following fast
Must be the only person in the world not yet said anything about The New Empire, I suspect nothing has been learned from Vietnam nor Chechnya. The usual mixture of incompetence and huge expenditure is probably what we will get:
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Wake-up call
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Escape from Tora Bora
I doubt the US is up to the imaginative strategies probably needed.Once upon a time the proposal to eliminate someone was considered 'immoral'. Now that stigma has been removed I would have thought that, with all those resources, the US could find a way to eliminate Saddam without a war. Presumably all the stories about the SAS and Seals are myths. It is all really The Great Game continued with Tommy Franks as Younghusband. I feel sorry for the soldiers and their families. I tend to agree with
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Mo Mowlam: The real goal is the seizure of Saudi oil. It is all about oil and the US must want mayhem. And what better revenge than to have huge civilian populations in turmoil, whatever the outcome. So much for all the stuff about the government(s) is/are our enemy not peoples. The follow up comments are interestingGuardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Grassroots views on war.
If all that is too much this is what we? are thinking about here!
The Nation's Web Special: Thai women demand to be as polygamous as men
Polygamous comments!
and All about Radio when we are not thinking about money that is. The relief money for the floods in the north will provide another bank account bonanza for local politicians!
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Wake-up call
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Escape from Tora Bora
I doubt the US is up to the imaginative strategies probably needed.Once upon a time the proposal to eliminate someone was considered 'immoral'. Now that stigma has been removed I would have thought that, with all those resources, the US could find a way to eliminate Saddam without a war. Presumably all the stories about the SAS and Seals are myths. It is all really The Great Game continued with Tommy Franks as Younghusband. I feel sorry for the soldiers and their families. I tend to agree with
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Mo Mowlam: The real goal is the seizure of Saudi oil. It is all about oil and the US must want mayhem. And what better revenge than to have huge civilian populations in turmoil, whatever the outcome. So much for all the stuff about the government(s) is/are our enemy not peoples. The follow up comments are interestingGuardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Grassroots views on war.
If all that is too much this is what we? are thinking about here!
The Nation's Web Special: Thai women demand to be as polygamous as men
Polygamous comments!
and All about Radio when we are not thinking about money that is. The relief money for the floods in the north will provide another bank account bonanza for local politicians!
Wednesday, September 04, 2002
Should have posted this Economist.com | Civil liberties and Jan Morris's piece in The Spectator, the moment I read them. What strange bedfellows Welsh and Uighurs! But, of course, land, identity, language, tribe/nation/people is one of the great issues of the day.
After the intifada of the FAX we have the intifada of the weblog ei: Electronic Intifada I am at once excited by the possibilities and actualities of communication and organisation beyond the police and state eye, and wary beyond words. I come from a generation that saw the state on a learning curve through the 60's in dealing with dissent from Paris to Lion Square. 'You've got a brick in your pocket sir'. 'Well if I have you put it there, officer.' You will remember the last London 'events' were web organised as were the 'anti-globalisation' ones. Who will be next after Beijing to limit access? Washington? London? Harare? or the Butcher of the Levant? After Google..Blogger?
Now there is a nice turn of phrase: 'Thailand, one of the more democratic countries in the region.....' Discuss!Welcome to The Nation
Tuesday, September 03, 2002
MUSIC
Something about which I know nothing...well another thing!
What are the orthodox explanations for why music became the defining art-form of the last 50 years?
I am not heavily into toons..but we were playing Desert Island Discsof an evening....mind you in Wales you would not need to play... it would be real.......and it probably will be in Chiang Mai...if we ever get there. I don't think I want to say songs or pieces...what I would want is discs that contained......of course in no particular order:
Schubert's 9th Symphony
Tom Waits including Grapefruit Moon
John Coltrane Blue Train
Anna and Kate McGarrigle..must have Heartbeats Accelerating
Paul Brady
Indochine...must have J'ai Demande a la Lune
William Boyce Symphonies
Varunee..Best
Suzanne Vega...?
J.S.Bach..probably Brandeburg concertos
Why?
Well there are of course other things that were probably greater milestones. Lawrence Tibbett singing De Glory Road-played endlessly in 1960! Elvis-Its Now or Never, echoing over Glandyfi along with Living Doll and Ricky Nelson, Scarlatti(Wanda Landowska) and Carmina Burana!. Hank Williams, John Lee Hooker.... Later Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Missa Creola and Brahms, Other Schubert, Neil Young, even later Nanci Griffith and Karla Bonhoff then Bird-Tongchai Mackinthai, Patchala and Mai Charoenpura...but these are people I still listen to! and that is the difference!
Something about which I know nothing...well another thing!
What are the orthodox explanations for why music became the defining art-form of the last 50 years?
I am not heavily into toons..but we were playing Desert Island Discsof an evening....mind you in Wales you would not need to play... it would be real.......and it probably will be in Chiang Mai...if we ever get there. I don't think I want to say songs or pieces...what I would want is discs that contained......of course in no particular order:
Schubert's 9th Symphony
Tom Waits including Grapefruit Moon
John Coltrane Blue Train
Anna and Kate McGarrigle..must have Heartbeats Accelerating
Paul Brady
Indochine...must have J'ai Demande a la Lune
William Boyce Symphonies
Varunee..Best
Suzanne Vega...?
J.S.Bach..probably Brandeburg concertos
Why?
Well there are of course other things that were probably greater milestones. Lawrence Tibbett singing De Glory Road-played endlessly in 1960! Elvis-Its Now or Never, echoing over Glandyfi along with Living Doll and Ricky Nelson, Scarlatti(Wanda Landowska) and Carmina Burana!. Hank Williams, John Lee Hooker.... Later Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Missa Creola and Brahms, Other Schubert, Neil Young, even later Nanci Griffith and Karla Bonhoff then Bird-Tongchai Mackinthai, Patchala and Mai Charoenpura...but these are people I still listen to! and that is the difference!
ANOTHER DAY OF NONSENSES
This gets worse. Just wrote a whole page and Blogger has 'lost' it.
Upgraded Blogger to Plus to get pictures. All that has happened is they have removed the ads!. Of course, being from across the water they have taken their money in return for nothing. Also sent a amazon gift certificate to the one who is going hold my hand with all this. Amazon, too, have taken their money..but she cannot get the certificate!! Not impressed with The Big Country today. Mind you France no better. Spent ages registering a couple of domain names to which all this is going to migrate. But I entered a contact phone number, not the home phone...and anyway their forms are all upside down so the ZIP comes before the Postcode unlike the UK. Result? Bank sends me PANICKY email saying an attempt has been made to use my Credit card fraudulently and would I know anything about this....WHAT??
On the brighter side the Bangkapi Street Vendors have had a good day. Got a girl in the pm. selling White Prawns from a styrofoam box perched on a supermarket trolley........$6 a kilo....$12 in the supermarket. A little bit of garlic, red shallotts, chili and lime juice. MM. I like them stirred with butter and salt. BUT they are not Welsh Prawns and basically tasteless...by comparison.....and the larger they are the worse...All those tourists ordering jumbo shrimp in Phuket to receive "Cardboard in the shell" with a lethal chili sauce. A couple of dozen prawns taken from the sea in Wales worth $20.in a restaurant.......Rhodri used to put on goggles and a wetsuit to catch them late into a September evening, as the tide flooded slowly and swimmingly into his net!!
This gets worse. Just wrote a whole page and Blogger has 'lost' it.
Upgraded Blogger to Plus to get pictures. All that has happened is they have removed the ads!. Of course, being from across the water they have taken their money in return for nothing. Also sent a amazon gift certificate to the one who is going hold my hand with all this. Amazon, too, have taken their money..but she cannot get the certificate!! Not impressed with The Big Country today. Mind you France no better. Spent ages registering a couple of domain names to which all this is going to migrate. But I entered a contact phone number, not the home phone...and anyway their forms are all upside down so the ZIP comes before the Postcode unlike the UK. Result? Bank sends me PANICKY email saying an attempt has been made to use my Credit card fraudulently and would I know anything about this....WHAT??
On the brighter side the Bangkapi Street Vendors have had a good day. Got a girl in the pm. selling White Prawns from a styrofoam box perched on a supermarket trolley........$6 a kilo....$12 in the supermarket. A little bit of garlic, red shallotts, chili and lime juice. MM. I like them stirred with butter and salt. BUT they are not Welsh Prawns and basically tasteless...by comparison.....and the larger they are the worse...All those tourists ordering jumbo shrimp in Phuket to receive "Cardboard in the shell" with a lethal chili sauce. A couple of dozen prawns taken from the sea in Wales worth $20.in a restaurant.......Rhodri used to put on goggles and a wetsuit to catch them late into a September evening, as the tide flooded slowly and swimmingly into his net!!
Monday, September 02, 2002
FOOT SHOOTING
What a day of nonsenses!
We live in Bangkapi which is, I suppose, to Bangkok as ?Richmond is to London or ?St.Cloud to Paris or whatever. It is, for here, wealthy. We have a huge shopping Center, called The Mall and just up the road are Carrefour and BigC.
Also Makro
We have three good hospitals, schools and a major University-Ramkhamhaeng. In about a month a huge Tesco Lotus Hypermarket
will open..more of that in a moment.
We went to Makro today to buy some Gaz cylinders and a baby-walker. Very hot in Makro..why?
"Oh Makro has taken the decision to turn off the air conditioning as too many people were wandering around in the pleasant ambience without buying anything!!"
Ah well.
So we get to the checkout with our Gaz, a bottle of Chateau Cadillac and a plastic bag of Oysters!
Can I have your card please?
Sorry? What Card?
Oh Makro have decided that they are only selling wholesale now. You must have a Makro Card. So Kunjana turns to the three people behind us in the queue and asks if they will swipe their card. No-one has a card. Kunjana then observes. "I wondered why Makro was empty"...true, it was normally teeming...Makro have managed to tell all their customers to f. off...and Tesco is opening. Another multinational cock-up.....
We wonder how long it will be before Boots closes? Already closed in Japan I gather. Good stuff as at home..but EXPENSIVE!!. Bottle of shower cream downstairs $1.30 bottle.In Boots $4.50. Watsons the HK pharmacy will clean up.
Anyway back to Tesco. They opened a big store down Rama 3 way. As everywhere, there had to be motorcycle taxi ranks. Some bright spark decides there should be one at each side of the store. Unfortunately they give one franchise to a mob run by a policeman and the other to a gang run by a soldier. Result: gunfights in the carpark and customers shot in the store.However they seem to have sorted it for now! We eagerly anticipate the awarding of franchises in Bangkapi.
As to other nonsenses
Well here is a story.
We have two friends called-well I had better not name them-lets say the girl is called Gay and the guy Asoda. She is Thai and he Japanese. They have lived together, on and off, for three or four years. he has some doubtful watch business. There was a great panic a couple of years ago when his Japanese colleagues threatened to move the production to India. She is an orphan. But has a husband who is in jail for dealing 'chemicals'. Asoda thinks he is her brother. Common mistake, here. In the early days life tootled on. Gay, who is 21, went out, drank Johnnie Walker, danced the night away etc. Asoda, who is 60, stayed home, watched unlikely Japanese videos, ate salad and went to work. But there was some other chemistry at work! A couple of years ago Gay started to investigate chemistry more seriously. Mainly she met a guy who was an advanced researcher. So after a while she is doing several tabs a day of what is called here Ya Ba.....literally mad medicine..amphetamines...with a few E tabs thrown in at the discos. A few lines of ice for good measure. She comes out in serious lesions....next we know Asoda is tripping away with her, also the maid and the driver. Kunjana spoke to her today and Gay says. The dogs are not well. Why not asks K. Oh I guess its the amphetamines. What? Well no-one has the energy to buy food for themselves, let alone the dogs, so we give the dogs tabs. They are very thin and their fur is falling out. Oh. What about you? Well I am down to 31 kilos!! And I cannot go out because I am too shy with all these red patches all over me. K reckons they have 2 years unless they pull out of it. Me, being naive about this stuff says...have to do something etc. K says..look I knew half a dozen people or so from school and another 6 from university who did this..they are all dead. Its a Thai problem......................??? I have talked the nights away with them, she says. They don't care. It is happening all over Bangkok and up country too. If the politicians were not making so much money out of the trade they would have to do something...as it is..All the amphetamine factories in Burma are funded by Thais...so..when anyone complains they just shrug. Can't come between a Thai and his money!
What a day of nonsenses!
We live in Bangkapi which is, I suppose, to Bangkok as ?Richmond is to London or ?St.Cloud to Paris or whatever. It is, for here, wealthy. We have a huge shopping Center, called The Mall and just up the road are Carrefour and BigC.
Also Makro
We have three good hospitals, schools and a major University-Ramkhamhaeng. In about a month a huge Tesco Lotus Hypermarket
will open..more of that in a moment.
We went to Makro today to buy some Gaz cylinders and a baby-walker. Very hot in Makro..why?
"Oh Makro has taken the decision to turn off the air conditioning as too many people were wandering around in the pleasant ambience without buying anything!!"
Ah well.
So we get to the checkout with our Gaz, a bottle of Chateau Cadillac and a plastic bag of Oysters!
Can I have your card please?
Sorry? What Card?
Oh Makro have decided that they are only selling wholesale now. You must have a Makro Card. So Kunjana turns to the three people behind us in the queue and asks if they will swipe their card. No-one has a card. Kunjana then observes. "I wondered why Makro was empty"...true, it was normally teeming...Makro have managed to tell all their customers to f. off...and Tesco is opening. Another multinational cock-up.....
We wonder how long it will be before Boots closes? Already closed in Japan I gather. Good stuff as at home..but EXPENSIVE!!. Bottle of shower cream downstairs $1.30 bottle.In Boots $4.50. Watsons the HK pharmacy will clean up.
Anyway back to Tesco. They opened a big store down Rama 3 way. As everywhere, there had to be motorcycle taxi ranks. Some bright spark decides there should be one at each side of the store. Unfortunately they give one franchise to a mob run by a policeman and the other to a gang run by a soldier. Result: gunfights in the carpark and customers shot in the store.However they seem to have sorted it for now! We eagerly anticipate the awarding of franchises in Bangkapi.
As to other nonsenses
Well here is a story.
We have two friends called-well I had better not name them-lets say the girl is called Gay and the guy Asoda. She is Thai and he Japanese. They have lived together, on and off, for three or four years. he has some doubtful watch business. There was a great panic a couple of years ago when his Japanese colleagues threatened to move the production to India. She is an orphan. But has a husband who is in jail for dealing 'chemicals'. Asoda thinks he is her brother. Common mistake, here. In the early days life tootled on. Gay, who is 21, went out, drank Johnnie Walker, danced the night away etc. Asoda, who is 60, stayed home, watched unlikely Japanese videos, ate salad and went to work. But there was some other chemistry at work! A couple of years ago Gay started to investigate chemistry more seriously. Mainly she met a guy who was an advanced researcher. So after a while she is doing several tabs a day of what is called here Ya Ba.....literally mad medicine..amphetamines...with a few E tabs thrown in at the discos. A few lines of ice for good measure. She comes out in serious lesions....next we know Asoda is tripping away with her, also the maid and the driver. Kunjana spoke to her today and Gay says. The dogs are not well. Why not asks K. Oh I guess its the amphetamines. What? Well no-one has the energy to buy food for themselves, let alone the dogs, so we give the dogs tabs. They are very thin and their fur is falling out. Oh. What about you? Well I am down to 31 kilos!! And I cannot go out because I am too shy with all these red patches all over me. K reckons they have 2 years unless they pull out of it. Me, being naive about this stuff says...have to do something etc. K says..look I knew half a dozen people or so from school and another 6 from university who did this..they are all dead. Its a Thai problem......................??? I have talked the nights away with them, she says. They don't care. It is happening all over Bangkok and up country too. If the politicians were not making so much money out of the trade they would have to do something...as it is..All the amphetamine factories in Burma are funded by Thais...so..when anyone complains they just shrug. Can't come between a Thai and his money!
Sunday, September 01, 2002
As she becomes more vocal, we are talking a great deal about the languages she will speak. We came on this about Bilingual and Multilingual Children. Seems like good sense. If she speaks English and Thai as parental tongues and goes to a French school. We would not be unhappy! Over ambitious father would quite like her to have either Chinese or Japanese! Many people here speak three and four languages. Thai and Lao, Khmer, or Kammuang-the languages of the North, SW and East of Thailand as well as a more local dialect. Many in Bangkok and the central areas of Ayutthaya and Suphanburi, as well as Phuket speak Thai and a Chinese language-usually Teochew or Hokkien. Indeed possibly more people speak a language other than standard Thai as their first language. In all there may be over EIGHTY languages spoken here! See Ethnologue report for Thailand So four does not seem so many! Rhodri is miffed that we did not enable him to speak French as a native tongue, though speak he can, as can I. And of course we have the doubtful skill of reading Latin! But my mother spoke French with me. And she had some Italian too. I have yet to hear an authoritative view on how well RS spoke Welsh. What I do hear suggests he spoke it too correctly. He used to moan that he could not speak pure Welsh in the grocer in Pwllheli as they just laughed. And however well educated were the population of Lleyn they must have found his conversation a little hard going. The hard task will be to find the school. I dont think we want to go the Westminster route again. So this adds all the more piquancy to our game of choose the French town! We read this top to bottom. Aix en Provence would be OK-a bit too urban I suspect. Otherwise the front runners were Vannes and Nantes (bit too damp), Montpellier and Valence (except Valence has a nuclear power station!), Gap and Chamonix (bit out of the way no TGV or airport) so now we are onto smaller places: Annonay (Ardèche / Rhône-Alpes) and Romans Sur Isere (Drome/Rhone Alpes) this week!
I have asked some of you already the question-if you did not live where you do where would you live. Been asking it all my life really and no sign of stopping. You could not prise Rhodri away from London except, maybe, to NY.
I have asked some of you already the question-if you did not live where you do where would you live. Been asking it all my life really and no sign of stopping. You could not prise Rhodri away from London except, maybe, to NY.