Will these grow?!
Squash Chips??
So we have been to Samui again. A great deal of building work-Tesco apparently doubled in size-but the beach at Lamai hardly changed. Though the great waves that have been attacking Southern Thailand are in evidence here-great 2 and 3 metre breakers which makes swimming impossible for babes, including me who likes to drift on my back for hours.
The hotel, which is the same one we all always stay in, has invested in 3 Jet skis, unfortunately, which appear to have cost more than our Chiang Mai house and the owner has swapped his Mercedes for a huge Lexus Off Road monster. They are building a few more rooms which is a nuisance.
He and his wife and the palsied child sit looking at the dusty patch at the back of the house while we all gaze at the sea. K was trying to work out how much this few hectares of land, let alone the business must be worth. The ‘resort’ pulls in about £6000 a week I should guess, year round; expenses minimal-electricity and water, small labour costs, and the land must be worth upwards of £10 million so ‘comfortable’ I guess! And of course the family has lots more land elsewhere. Fruit farms and forests! The resort provides work and a life for dozens more people than appears necessary, which is no doubt to the good. It takes half a dozen people alone to look after the jet skis! And another half dozen to cook and manage the eight or so restaurant tables.
I have read the Kaplan, the Sijie and the Pamuk. I am lucky I can continue to unearth good books without reading acres of critics. The Kaplan and Pamuk particularly good. Pamuk on Istanbul evokes whole areas that echo Thailand and the Thai melancholy.I have always thought that the stress they put on smiles and cool hearts was nothing other than a mask for melancholy, together with a degree of surliness and a measure of suppressed rage1 just like anywhere elsi, I suppose.
One sees Pamuk detail the sensibilities and neuroses of Istanbullus in much the same way one could of Bangkok. Kaplan just made me realise what an appalling so-called Classical Education I had and how ignorant I was when I went to Sicily, Tunis and elsewhere.
Have also read:
John Keay Mad About The Mekong.
( Deranged Affluent Brit, with history of mad journeys etc. follows course of equally deranged French Expedition up The Mekong River)
Sherrill(sic) Tippins(sic)-yes I know..but,.. February House
Well written account of the unbearable Auden and various perverts…Britten, Bowles..McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee in bawdy house in NY 1940s
But then I don’t think I have ever been either a very ‘good student’ nor perhaps been very intelligent in taking enough time to look at what I was seeing let alone reflect on it. My journeys of the 1960s were conducted at top speed, or what passed for that when hitch hiking was the mode of travel and my journeys of the 80s and 90s to Europe and the US were undertaken too at the behest of work and in such a state of perceived illness that I reflected little, also.
Now it sometimes seems that we live at the polarities of the present. In rural Wales, where the land based population is rapidly diminishing as the economic viability of agriculture disappears and there has been an exodus to the cities; to be replaced by an aged pleasureocracy fuelling their last years on pensions and the proceeds of vast housing profits. In the Orient where pricing is cut throat, the struggle for social mobility intense, the aspiration for consumer goods and education vibrant, governments either autocratic or somewhat unstable-unable to deliver social services and the rule of law, here, we are living in the future.
Everyone here is fundamentally aware of the resource issues of the future-oil and gas, water and power generation, financial services, the availability and development of technology, (China, Korea and Taiwan, let alone Singapore, and no doubt other places, have their universities stuffed with science and technology undergraduates), the productivity of the agricultural sector, urban/rural divides and their accompanying income and wealth disparities. In Europe and the US?
After reading Pamuk and Kaplan I was reflecting on Cities of The Future. Not futuristic or futurology but how this might pan out. Reading the evolution of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul and the sudden rises and falls of Mediterranean empires and city states (and elsewhere some theory that both the Tang Dynasty and the Mayan were destroyed by drought, turned my thoughts to..where? Beijing and Shanghai, Kholkata and Mumbai, Caracas, Sao Paolo, Doha, unheard of cities in the Barents Sea and Siberia, Istanbul, Tehran and some again unheard of oil rich city in Somalia/Ethiopia, Moscow and Baku, Almaty(Turkmen and Kazakh) places unseen on the current political map. Will that change? The emergence of new empires, return of old ones. Was that what the 4 horsemen are really all about?!
If you watch Al Jazeera in English, which we do, you see and learn about the real news of the world. Not the froth of what happens in London, Paris, New York, LA, but what most of the population of the world are experiencing. We think Europe and the US have entirely lost touch with reality, though to be fair German, French, Spanish, Scandinavian TV have lost it a good deal less than the BBC and Fox News.
I suppose this can go on as long as US/European Money and Arms prevail…but for how much longer can that be?
Are there too many places to which I have neither been nor read about? What would it profit? Always too many lives not lived and too many lives misunderstood,, not encompassed; too little time, too little compassion or empathy. It would be more than the ‘Renaissance man’ to so do, do you think?
In a sense that is a problem wtih novels and why I tend to avoid them. They draw me into an illusion that I can both ‘know’ the characters and also recognise them in ‘real people’ and vice versa. On meeting anyone, though, they seem hopelessly too complex and individual to characterise. K. E and Granny have been to the monkey show. E very taken with the monkey that held her hand!
