December 2005
Sawankhalok
Well before the year ends I am reflecting on it; mainly because even by our standards of dislocation, grief and dysfunction it has been ‘unusual’!
We started off with our ‘Tour of the North’ in January. Well half of the North..we still have not got back to Mae Hong Son..maybe in January! Many beautiful but, for us, uninhabitable places. Wherever there is a Royal residence in Thailand you can be pretty sure it is a good place!
Through February and March I managed to get the pages of ‘Sarn and Siam’ together, as well as ‘In A World Of Our Own’.
Still not sure what to do with them. No great hurry.
The dead not running away, only our lives running on.
The Restless Boredom syndrome of Adam Phillips eventually took us back to the UK at the beginning of April and we went and got K here RTR visa with no hassles..just a lot of money.
We then made the mistake of going to the French Embassy in South Kensington to get her a Schengen Visa. Before we had got it with no difficulty in BKK. Big Mistake. Lot of people. Only one person can go inside..so K and E stay in the street. Once inside turns out you are locked in and cannot get out. No mention of this nonsense BEFORE you get inside. It is cold and I have the car keys….after much shouting between self and surly staff, aided by Philippino lady in same position.whose child, aged 4, the embassy staff hit so hard they draw blood..get to throw the car keys out of the door to K. Takes about 5 hours to get a visa…Have to have an ‘appointment’ I thought things mus be looking up and different from the old days of queues all round South Ken. Just turns out that 1000 other people have ‘appointment’ for the same time…..
Staff thoroughly rude and unhelpful. La Belle France. Maybe it is the difference between £500 and Free. I doubt it. And we are white…
Interesting what I was reading about Islam in France in the early part of the year and what happened later!
Made getting UK visa seem like dreamland..simple appointment system and visa processed by Muslim lady in full gear. Welcome to HM’s Civil Service 2005.
K and E go home on the bus.
K: “Please can you let me off at Ladbroke Grove and tell me when we get there?”
Bus Driver: “Dunno where it is!”
Lady on Bus “Don’t be so bloody stupid, the bus goes to Ladbroke Grove!”
Bus Driver: “S’not my fault she don’t know where it is!”
Lady on Bus “Don’t worry dear I’m going up there.”
K in tears: “Why are people in this country so horrible to each other?”.
Lady on Bus “Dunno, dear. Sometimes wish I had never come.”
Welcome to England
Welcome to France
Shall not do that again
Anyway, having achieved all that, we bought a white Mercedes and headed off to France! E very taken with boats and hotels.
So we spent the best part of 3 months in Beaune in Jean and Michelle’s beautiful house. E grew beans and turnips, peas and tomatoes! We had a sandpit ‘just like Wales’ and wandered around rural France.
It did seem even more remote than Sarn, and that says something; though of course Beaune and Chalons are hardly Pwllheli or Bangor..in either of those a market or a Leclerc/Carrefour would be welcome!!
But the playgroups were not fun and the amazingly ancient population pretty unfriendly; inspite of an amazingly louche performance by the locals on July 14!...So when the best friend that we made, an engineer from Grenoble died, we headed off to Spain and Portugal. Galicia and its beaches, let alone its fantastically roofed houses, looked pretty good. One day!?
And then we thought: we have a beautiful house in a beautiful place by the sea! We had better go and live in it. So J and M’s son, Louis, came to the house and we left.
K drove all the way from Beaune to Sarn. Not having driven in France before!
It was only later that I discovered that she had thought that, when driving at 80mph, she was driving at 80kph..and me being fussy with her for driving fast. We had several altercations about 45kph speed limits in France..but to no avail!!
So we spent a wonderful 2 months in Sarn doing all the usual seaside, prawning, fishing and gardening things and then came back to Swankhalok.
Elodie’s desire to go to school has been met and now she has been going to school for some 10 weeks; and is today going to dance with her class on a stage dressed in white frilly socks and lace gloves, white tap dancing shoes and a gold paper dress!
In amongst all that the peculiarity of the year was compounded by the amazing fairy story of Ana Pearce actually coming true and really offering up its treasure; which has made a difference to dreams and possibilities. I know that sounds oblique and obscure, but I am not sure I am yet up to recounting the whole story. It just meant we variously spent months in disbelief..(this can’t be true! Can it) and others in real disbelief..(Of course it is not true..behave as though nothing will come of it) And all that from a letter which I nearly tossed away as I looked suspiciously like some menacing debt collector!
But! We have paid off the bank, bought some land(s) and started on what is needed to stop the streams of Mynydd Rhiw running through Sarn! Though why we need to do this rather than our esteemed landlord remains a mystery!
We are planning ‘renovations’ to the house here which will give us more space and E a room of her own, and we will build a house in Chiang Mai against the day when she needs to go to an IB school, which at least exists there!
Whether we could acquire either house or land in the UK or Europe remains a moot point..and anyway.. Where? As I have said before!
We had one extravagance which is K's Vespa!
The building of the road at Sarn is starting; but we can’t really get worked up about it. I am sure it will be horrible at the beginning but the rampant growth of a couple of summers will bury it.
Anyway I will go back briefly in January to see whether we can in any way influence the design free zones of the National Trust and Gwynedd Council; and then we will see if there is any satisfaction in going back again in the summer of the year!
A year with little writing, then. We have left that up to whose book on RS, The Man Who Went Into The West, nears completion. He asks, at the end, what he is to write about B? Who?
K has been opening businesses of which she dreamed but had not the capital to start. All such ventures have to be opened on days sanctioned by monks. They look in disbelief at her and then at Elodie and finally at me. The last one having shaken his head in the same way as all of them said: ‘So much money; AND more to come’ If only!!
Happy Christmas
