When the chef completely runs out of ideas and the restaurant is empty grab any cook you can. Oh and who is cooking today? M.Leclerc a plumber from Foissac with a nice dish of Chipirons aux Pruneaux de Californie et Poivrons Thai. Not bad actually..but not 3***. We just ate it and the squid was Thai..maybe..or Indonesian..the Prunes French..maybe..the other ingredients??....but the Sichuan Spareribs were perfect, if a little similar, and Elodie ate the juice, the brown rice and a smidgeon of applesauce..I have a little dish of Fenouille au Citron lined up for lunch with some home-made Hummous..while the babe will be on a repeat course of ground oats, lentils and pear. I want to feed her beancurd too, but it is probably GM stuff here..who knows? I am still waiting for the viridian spinach of today's breakfast to appear. Yes I know spinach is unfashionable..all that oxalic acid. Gives awhole new meaning to home economics when ever mother is required to recite chapters from The Chemical Composition of Foods. There --I said it was a log about food, too,did I not !! But I shall not mention the 'waste'!..too much....its a bit like consulting the entrails...an aspect of cosmology that appears not to appeal to Thais, though entrails are an important part of all those soap operas we get every night. There are some very special Thai ghosts/ghouls which consist of head and innards and not much else. Welcome to Bangkok, Animist Capital of the World..

Well I did not think David Bellamy was dead; rather I had forgotten about him. Who would have thought He would turn out to be spot on? I sometimes, no most of the time, think we have no idea who anyone else is.

There is an updated version below of the Day in Bangkapi, with the beginnings of the commentary that should have been there in the first place.

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!

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.