January 2005 Sawankhalok

OK I won’t stop…popular demand! But it will be a little ‘attenuated’.. and wouldn’t you like to know who else reads this?! Probably not.

Oh wow I was looking for that reference to French law on Islamic terrorism and I just got this....look at the bits on Thailand...How much to live in Korat/Nakhon Ratchasima?...which is to Thailand as Oldham is to the UK or St.Etienne to France......:

your next holiday mansion

With reference to the USA below and where to be :;!!This is the kind of crap that you get in UK newspapers
A decent 4 bedroom concrete/brick house with garden...even Bangkok... in Thailand costs about £70,000. Of course if you want to be well positioned for the next sea surge it will cost you...
My brother in law, of whose odd marriage you may have read, just bought a 2 bedroom house in Korat for 900,000 Baht that is £12,500..so he could have got 27 of them at that price. I don't suppose he has the view or the maid's quarters, but probably not that fussed.
I mean, he works in Korat; but once you've been to Khao Yai a couple of times..oh you would need to spend a further £35K on a Toyota Landcruiser to really get the best of its nightlife..animals I mean, what would you do all day or night?..Tesco and Golf, I suppose.
Also Morocco has earthquakes,even if the King did ask to join the EU, Bulgaria close to Chechnya...see below, too!, true extremely beautiful..must ask D to use the photo he sent me....Nicaragua..am I to believe it has changed permanently that much? I think not.
On Estonia I have no view or knowledge.

Month has got off to a bizarre start. The echoes of the tsunami are all over us. .satellite photos, endless coverage, slow realisation by Brits that some of them might have been there.. devastation of Swedish Villages….
Turns out the little house in Patong survived happily ..but who wants to go there?.. it was already colonised by Khmers (with our agreement)..and will live on.
And looks like those accidents of geography may well have protected Myanmar…
There has been much discussion in the media about.. ‘Whether to got to Thailand..or anywhere else in the region?’…
Don’t be daft! Have you any idea of the scale of mayhem in Phuket and Khao Lak, even if the Thais are desperately trying to ‘import’ beaches!! ??
Stay home! Go somewhere else

Photos are reduced due to purchase of handycam..so now we have hours of wobbly footage of yowling infant, wonky bananas and other dross. K has a habit of turning the camera on and then letting it dangle from her wrist while she answers the mobile. As her sister said..Headache!

On to the big questions!..
And the more I think about it the more serious it seems to be..but I am not going to write a text book about it.
How any of us come to be living where we are is complex enough…but just to reduce it to the particular…
I was born here, I went to school here, my family lives here as do my friends, I have work here…I married the girl next door..well within 20 miles… We speak the same language
But for so many people that was and is not the case..transported and deported by dreams and ambitions, fear and atrocities, circumstance and opportunity..
I once had a thought to write a series of articles to make a book about unusual ‘expatriated’ communities..Japanese in Argentina or was it Peru?, Welsh in Patagonia, Finnish peoples in Oregon (and Pen Llyn..also) Polish villages in Pwllheli, Thais in Finland, Hmong in California etc. etc, not the Brits in the Dordogne and Spain in other words.
Nor the great historic migrations..just displaced by disaster, ambition or happenstance.

So what about you and me?

If I am a victim, I am a victim of dreams. Elsi wanted to get away from London. RS had his ‘Dream of the setting Celtic Sun’ While they both achieved it I think RS was the luckier. He even wrote to Fraser Darling about setting up a self -sufficient community on some Irish or Welsh Island! RS was, if anything more cack handed and incompetent than ‘Leave it to me, Peg! Crash’ Tommy Twice. Fraser Darling being of a more sensible and pragmatic character advised him, strongly, NO….but I think the dream did not die!

And I guess I inherited.
You probably never saw a most execrable and sentimental movie in which Hayley Mills careered around a few hot islands in an old boat in an reasonable state of undress and a bandana..looked good to a 17 year old…and then there was Pierrot Le Fou.
Maybe Phuket was that too..I think not!

Growing up in Manafon attached me to the place. And Elsi loved it. But no reason to live there or return.. also Eglwys Fach and Aberdaron.. as I have said elsewhere their dream not mine. Sarn is a bit different. It is, well was-thanks Gwynedd C, quite exceptional by any standards of ‘good location’…. But still not my dream in adult life…

But for RS certainly and . to a degree Elsi , it provided them with the solution to their dream. Neither was much interested in ‘Abroad’. Elsi thought that she had ‘been there and done that’ and now it was ‘dangerous’; while RS at one point threw away his passport as he would not go ‘abroad’ as a ‘British’ citizen1 The offices of a restless wife and the prospect of some birds, some prizes and a few good lunches as the guest of honour and changed that!

I went to Cambridge to study (reasonable? Not sure) Maybe Shan had something to do with it. Stayed for Margaret. Went to Middle Barton half way twixt Ealing and Birmingham ie. Work. Went to Whitebrook-stupid ..looking for country living but had to go to London to work. Went to Kew
a. for Rhodri.. not a lot of use had to drive to Westminster every day and
b. for work.
S and I explored going to France, but gave up on the idea

We had dreams of other places..Is this a British problem? Dream of California not so dissimilar nor the wandering Chinese. Is Ahasuerus the prototype?

There is that little snippet in Lawrence Durrell’s Clea…he sits writing, while the child plays…
He had the sea..I just have the waving coconuts and bananas!

Discovered Corsica, Arizona and Phuket..no work in Corsica, unpleasant people in Arizona and for reasons already explored Phuket not wonderful.
So here we are in Sarn…Got it Use it!
And Sukothai..back to family

If you try to really escape this mesh is it worth the candle?

It is really now a case of fortune telling and future watching

Rhodri will make his own choices..but for E?

I shall be repetitous
For E lots of good reasons for staying
Family
Quite a wealthy province. The land fertile and sufficient water (true?) Not an accident that it was the original capital. You come down off the Lamphun Hills, which are fairly barren-though good trees onto the plain. Sri Satchanalai is lovely. Bit like Richmond Park!
Don’t suppose anyone starved here in many a year
Perhaps one day Thailand will be as wealthy as it can be..When?
If the dollar collapses..
If America is in trouble..Britain too?
If China grows stronger…and then there is an E Asian currency…
Many wonderful things in Thai Culture…
Entrepreneurial, Confident…

BUT

Education system presently appalling.. why do all rich Thai, Malaysians, Hong Kong and Singapore Chinese send their children abroad to school and university?
Class ridden more than UK
Dirty beyond belief
Enormous rich/poor divide… therefore huge amount of theft
Thai plutocracy possesses very high percentage of the wealth
Violence against women commonplace
Racist in the extreme.. and E does not look Thai.. whatever languages she speaks
Corrupt. Not just the Police. And in many ways it is a police state
Thai boys a complete pain, undisciplined, indulged, irresponsible, violent. .same everywhere!?
Water resources undermined by logging and theft in many places
‘Insecure’ Sound like mother..’ abroad dangerous’.. but now I think Bognor quite dangerous too!


If Mr. Bin L manages to bankrupt America..what will happen. On the one hand good luck to him,
See these two articles

us fun 1

us fun 2


(You don’t know what I spend the day reading!!)

but on the other the fallout will be horrendous and I do not see he has much to offer other than beards and burkhas.


Notice he has been quiet about the tsunami, while others have said: How does Islam explain this to its believers.. After all Aceh is quite significantly Muslim

Waiting for the answer!

Here is an interesting article from France..on the same subject.. Islam is not presently my domiciliary difficulty!! Though in the future....? if what follows pertains

Judge Dread!



I am old, so for me it is really immaterial now. K is Thai. So she has to sort that out. But we can choose for Elodie.

The most conservative sides of me opt for Australia. ie. How far away can you get from ‘dangerous abroad’ where they are (mostly) white and speak English..and it is sunny so better than Ireland!

The middle ground says go for the EU. Take a risk that it will work, in spite of the US, and won’t come to blows again..so France or whatever.

Or we could just stay here and in time she will have to decide whether to cash in her option on a UK passport.

When the heady 1990s were with us it was projected that Thailand would be the 9th biggest economy in the world in 10 years. Might still be
Thais far more savvy and contrary and thus independent than Latin America…but they have not got much in the way of natural resources,(left!) as opposed to human ones. Still it is quite a big country, very fertile.. Just need to do something about Knowledge!!

Anyway we have been here for nearly 4 months now and have had ONE day of rain. Does not appear to have made much difference. The level of the river is quite low but I see the paddy fields being flooded and planted fairly normally..but maybe I am missing something. The large stand of bamboo looks a bit yellow, but then it is winter. When we went up to Chiang Mai, Lamphun and Lampang looked dessicated.

Chatted for hours to both D and B. Cheaper to ring them from here than in the UK…we have been trying to nail down the thing about Ronnie and Millie and ‘class’. Some one told B that as RS was an outsider at Bangor Coll that was when he started to affect the toff pose. Elsi on the other hand did move in some fairly bohemian/wealthy circles. Mostly as a result of Royal College of Art stuff. While she abandoned that she kept on quite a few friends and correspondents.

RS used to moan that he had never provided Elsi with a ‘decent residence’. By which he meant a Rectory with croquet lawns, French windows and maids. Mind you both Manafon and Eglwys Fach had those strings of bells in kitchen and bell pulls in all the rooms. To summon the lackeys. Manafon had fires in the bedroom and I had a nurse so he must have thought that was OK…and then he pushed me off to ‘be educated’ As I have said pity he did not go for top of the range. Might as well have been abused at Eton or Winchester rather than by the River Pang!

There were a whole series of things that they considered indicators of ‘good breeding’..no milk bottles or jamjars on the table, no light bulbs without lampshades etc. Please say either not eether. Definitely lavatory not toilet. Really just normal bourgeois stuff. In Eglwys Fach they might as well have had a Club. It was a sort of colonial posting with RS as the Padre I suppose. There were all those retired people; many of whom had indeed done service in far flung parts Louis Behrend had been in Egypt, Hunter was Cap’n Norman. Mrs Gall in India, .Cap’n Ransome and the notorious Gen. Lewis Pugh. Girls all in good thick skirts and sensible shoes. They lunched (Mary and Bow Behrend had a cook and a maid) and the little Grey House at Llanwrin stuffed with Henry Lambs and Stanley Spencers , where the swans loomed over you as you chewed the leg of lamb and splintered the meringues, had sherry parties and went on ‘trips’ and ‘hunting parties with picnics’ to view exotic flora and fauna together with the architectural remains of ‘celtic culture’!

At the end he dressed like a retired brigadier. I think he would have quite liked to be George Herbert! The squire and the parson measuring out charity and grace. Is that unkind?

B and I also talked about ‘The Last Days’. Which is sufficiently St.John The Divine or Revelations.

Yes, I think there is a big unanswered Q. When he left Sarn in 1995 he was elderly but fit. He had some heart flutters and a previous history of ‘nerves’..no more. He went to Llanfairnghornwy in 1995/6 and within 5 years he was dead…what happened? I have neither seen his death certificate nor know from what ailment he died!. I have reported he is to be found, in Thomas Hardy like repose, under a gargoyle/drainpipe in Porthmadog churchyard with a pricey bit of stone.