Sawankhalok
Woken by an even more dire musical cacophony than usual. Town Council’s attempt to inspire us all with the spirit of New Year?
7/11 has provided residents with a present.. they will now only sell alcohol between 11 and 14 and 17 and 24. These mad hours were dreamed up by some ‘Revolutionary Council’ some 30+ years ago and have been lighted upon by the publicly puritanical Toxin as worth enforcing, also the bizarre situation whereby the racks that used to house packets of cigarettes are now covered with a sign in huge letters..WE SELL CIGARTETTES (sic)…well of course you do. I see the Chinese grocers have, as yet, taken no notice..but after all 7/11 belongs to a chum of Toxin’s. This nonsense has been going on for some months elsewhere but has now unfortunately reached us!
The children have stripped the Christmas Tree of tinsel and silver balls; the tinsel is being worn by E as ‘Rapunzel Hair’ for which the dog has a penchant thus reducing E to tears whenever he gets the chance to make off with a strand; the balls are, of course, being worn as earrings! So that’s Epiphany come early this year.!
I have put a piece of loin of Sanglier to marinade which should account for supper and a few other dishes. Am not feeling too enthusiastic about food..nor indeed a lot of things Thai!
I ordered seeds and potatoes for Sarn from Thompson and Morgan which told me what I was really wanting to do. I chose some Charlotte and Belle de Fontenay Potatoes and some Artichokes. I thought I would pass on the Pink Fir Apple ones this year; they did not crop that heavily last year. And then peas and beans for E who enjoys picking them, together with Sunflowers and Pumpkins for fun and some odd shaped other gourds, also a variety of Salad Mustards etc.! They are out of those Black Russian tomatoes I found in Leclerc in Chalon; but growing tomatoes in Sarn is a bit of a labour of love without a greenhouse. We might well not get there, this year, til the end of May so have to choose things that will come through quickly. Had to leave all those pumpkins the year before last and they had been 5 months a-coming, and had to leave the pumpkins and peas in Beaune. E is growing, here, Jaoying flowers ie Rapunzel flowers..I think they are Lavatera and Butternut Squash, all of which are looking better than my previous attempts with Courgettes!
E is very keen to get back to ‘my seaside/my sandy house’ too! Funny as I should have thought she thought she had more fun here with children and outdoors all day..but she tells me she misses her ‘jumping’ ie. trampoline and her prawns! But the magic of Sarn is very powerful. K of course does not want to go as she is now busy; we might therefore go a deux! Not this month, though E is quite keen, but has been dissuaded by reports of rain and cold and no going in the garden. I shall go alone for R’s birthday. We have a good party planned and dinner, probably at Chez Max for old time’s sake, though it will hardly be like Kew. Maybe we won’t try and go to Bibendum instead. Or somewhere even more a la mode? Gordon Ramsay? Zuma? Nobu? R probably happier with a 2 foot Pizza at Ask. Whatever; it will no doubt ‘cost’ me.
2006 will, of course, bring the building of the long heralded ‘Road’. This promises to be a saga. We are not sure whether we would even want to be there while it is building. But I guess we will So I am going to ‘the sandy house’ to meet the road contractors. I am not convinced this is 100% necessary but in the light of experience better to let them know you are watching! Have tried to get a ‘conservation architect’, whatever that is, to come too; but having sent them a whole load of schedules etc. they are too idle to reply. Well it was the week before Christmas.
Why is it impossible to find builders/architects etc? Reading Levitt’s Freakonomics over Christmas and his explanations of why Hookers earn more than Architects I probably found the answer to that.
I suppose it is already amazing that Sarn has been there, undisturbed, for the 40 years or so we have had it. One of its great attractions was that it was so bosky, so hidden and no-one interested in it. The worst thing that has happened, far worse than the road in itself, is the sudden ‘interest’ in it as a house, a property, a museum, the dwelling of ‘famous’ people. Please would you all just go away!? But I fear this will not happen. So it will be dragged into the encircling tentacles of conserved places. All bulldozed and reconstructed with disabled access, walks, dog loos and signage.
K continues amazed, too, we have been together for 6 years; well I am fairly amazed too! What a lot of amazement. But it has been an unusual time. I believe it is the doing of the magic child. There are those who agree and those who regard me as dotty, well dottier than ever! Quick, quick. I was reminded by A into thinking about years past. How many people I still know and talk or write to from 40 years ago! She asked me what happened to EH, the soda heiress, I don’t know about that. Went off to SOAS and then where? Married a Lebanese gent at some stage, but I think that did not last. Somewhere I have a whole bundle of her letters written in outsize writing on A1 paper. Such are the instructional results of Benenden.
A says she is freezing in Perthshire. Well! That is a good reason for me for avoiding Wales. Whatever these fading years bring I do not want to be freezing in the UK, even for E’s sake. I am sure we can do better. RS and MEE of course lived in that house, Sarn I mean, with the temperature inside at 33F and outside at 32F. With RS railing on about:
‘Love in a cottage on bread and a crust/ is, God help us, ashes, dust.’ Quite.
So the year promises architectural dreams
Not often you get the chance to build a new house, literally from scratch. No preconceptions, no stylistic or other constraints. Just money of course. I would like to build a state of the art eco-house. With everything working! Not sure you can do this in LOS. Only eco house I saw here incredibly ugly and expensive.
So we will probably end up with a 21C concrete and glass thing. At least, unless we get it wrong, the space will optimally arranged. We will have a kitchen to live in, workrooms, a bathroom to die for and terraces and open air rooms; E will have her own space; and at a cost of 30K! What would that cost in Europe? 4 times? Probably more!
What are the nicest houses I have been in?
Probably the Merricks’ Beach House at Pett Level, just a huge room and kitchen with panoramic views of the English Channel and small bedrooms underneath; the whole thing on stilts ..like a Thai House!!
The Blue House in Phuket, just one room and a huge covered terrace gazing out over the foliage and the Andaman Sea. If it had been permanent one would have spent a bit of money on a kitchen…no more. So many houses gathering their charm and viability from location.
Sarn. A hopeless house of small dark rooms and odd levels but made nearly priceless by its location.
PT’s house near Bedford: a huge hexagonal living space with a corridor round it and bedrooms off..most odd in that part of the world.
A’s beautiful long room and angled kitchen.
I don’ t think I was ever in an old house I wanted to live in. Charming from the outside, but useless for living inside. Look at the houses we have lived in. Manafon. Beautiful place, freezing house. Eglwys Fach, horrible little villa, Aberdaron, again a beautiful place but really just 2 up 2 down, Sarn!, Middle Barton.. useless collection of rooms, Whitebrook, 2 up one down and no sun all winter stuck on the edge of a hill, Kew, nasty little end of terrace with no room to move-now presumably £600K
Liked the T house near Hastings..rambling on slightly different levels.
All I want is a large drawing room, a large kitchen..that was the failing of PT’s house but the she did not want to cook! Some small rooms to work in..computers, offices, libraries, studios, A big bathroom with plants and spas, a bedroom with a balcony, some open spaces upstairs for the breeze and downstairs the same..well I have already ruled out cold climates!
And for E?
Well we will stick with the little school here for a while, go to ‘my sandy house’ for the summer, come back, and then eventually move to Chiang Mai. It seems the best solution. We ruled out BKK for its pollution. No place for a 4 year old. CNX is not much better but we have got away from it to the East. I looked long at Phuket; after all I love the sea; but I could not see how we were all going to manage there. No roots, nothing. One good school but then what? Probably a good idea for property speculation. Too many foreigners in too small a space. You tend to forget how small Phuket is about 50 x 30 kilometres. Look at the size of Corsica, by comparison. And the whole Eastern seaboard a swamp. Just the beaches from Nai Yang to Nai Harn. Woud have to live in Phuket Town. Anywhere decent by the sea, just ageing oldies in expensive apartments, large Islam population and charabancs full of Taiwanese tourists. No thanks. Samui small, too, and a rat race of speculation. No schools. I think neither of us are interested in living in a holiday resort! Just go for fun and sea and sand like normal holidays.
At least CNX is only 35 minutes on the plane or 3 hours drive from Sawankhalok. And outside the city acres of mountains and waterfalls, valleys and forests. Might even manage to get into that valley I found above SanKhampaeng! Got to be better.?! I hope so. Though plenty of tourists there is enough room to avoid them.
It is really a matter of ‘facilities’. If I want E to play the piano, go swimming and to gymnastics, have a crowd to grow up with, hang out with…That was why we were looking at France and then Spain. If pressed I would probably still go for that; certainly if I was alone; but I am very keen not to take away her other half. I meet half kids who can’t speak a European Language and half kids who can’t speak Thai. Its crazy.
So we have to find an infant school and a further school-at least that seems to exist. There is a very clear philosophy, however misguided!
Must live and learn with Thai kids of all income levels. Once you have learnt to deal with that we can move on to a place where, though the children may come from all over the world and be rich you can learn what is needed to pass the exams go to University and on into the world. That is not going to happen via Thai secondary school nor a Thai University! It will cost; so the padlocks are on the coffers already. If it happens here! In Europe? Well as always where? That I like Galicia and the Peloponnese is hardly any reason to go and live there. Though I should think nothing wrong with life in Vigo. As I have reflected on our European adventures it looked like the best of all the places we went to. Sure a bit far from anywhere, but better than Wales, Brittany, Galway by a long shot. Probably a lot better than Sicily and Venice too. I speak English, Spanish Chinese and Thai. I can read music and write XHTML and C. I am confident, pretty and have plenty of friends. That would do! Well, no doubt, until it comes to boys.
01/01/06
