Ciao

                                                                                                                    (c) Barney Wilczak

Over in Sri Lanka, the roaming dogs and monkeys aren't always fighting. Sometimes they make peace instead. Perhaps the humans who live amongst them - Sinhalese Buddhists, Hindu Tamils and Muslims could have avoided thirty years of bitterness and bloodshed if they had learnt much earlier that it is talking that ends conflict - not bullets or machetes, mobs or martial law. Yesterday a Buddhist mob burnt down a Muslim clothing warehouse in Colombo and a couple of weeks ago a similar mob protested vehemently about the sale of halal meat in Sri Lanka. If war breaks out again over the next two weeks - don't blame me or Shirley. We didn't start it.

I will try to blog again while I am over there but I am not taking my laptop so it will probably need to be from an internet cafe - assuming there are no warring monkeys or growling dogs on the premises. As they say in Italy - but not in Sri Lanka - ciao!

Officialdom

Three and a half hours - that's how long I spent at the Department of Immigration this morning. It is a huge modern building on the northern outskirts of Bangkok - miles from anywhere. I was there for two reasons. Firstly, I had to extend my work visa because my teaching contract was recently extended from the end of March to May 3rd and secondly I needed to acquire a re-entry visa because I am leaving the country on Saturday for just over two weeks. This flag will tell you where I am bound...and it is there that I will meet up with Shirley who has a week off work:-

And of course, as if you didn't know! It is the flag of Sri Lanka - or as I still prefer to call it - Ceylon. There was political mischief behind the changing of the teardrop country's name.

So anyway, I have got my first supermarket deli ticket and I am sitting in the waiting area adjacent to the many "N" booths. A robotic female voice with a Thai accent chants the evolving appointments - "Tick-et-num-ber Twoah Threeah Zero, Counter (dramatic pause) fourtEEN (Rising to a robotic crescendo)". The appointments are also listed in red digital displays but the "N" section's lady robot's increasingly irritating voice is in competition with the lady robots from the other sections. Their soulless voices are identical and they interlace like spindly fingers.

When you finally get into a glass booth to see an immigration official in an immaculate army-type uniform, she or he goes mad with the old rubber stamps before sending you out to wait for another half hour - only then being allowed to pick up the amended passport. At least today I didn't encounter the cheeky female official who laughed at me in 2011 and said I looked like Colonel Sanders..."Oh yes dear, I'm a finger-lickin dead ringer for Mr KFC!" (Not!)

There are hundreds of other perplexed aliens in the Palace of Bureaucracy - maids from the Philippines, construction workers from Burma (not Myanmar), Welsh chicken farmers, Cambodians, Indians, beachcombing hippies from California and Canton GA and other farang (foreign) international teachers like me with school bureaucrats in tow. I was with the delectable Khun Lek who - in spite of only knowing a dozen English words - is my school's visa liaison officer for foreign staff. But I will give Lek her due today. She managed to bully or charm the officials into giving me my re-entry visa just before the shutters went down for an hour's lunch break. Well, what does it matter if hundreds of visitors have had to traipse out to the suburbs in taxis, waiting in snarled traffic jams, missing hours of work? What really matters is that the army of officials can have their noodles and their Tom Yum soup, their "Daddy Do-nuts" and their Colonel Sanders specials. Let the buggers wait.

So with passport sorted and reservation sheets now printed, I am just about ready for Ceylon where apparently foaming, rabid dogs often fight with equally bad-tempered monkeys. Nice.

Films

Since suffering the abyssmal "21 and Over", I have visited my local Major Cineplex Cinema twice. The environment is super clean, the staff plentiful and efficient in their smart uniforms, the seat tickets are much cheaper than in England. The quality of sound is top notch. You sit there in the chill, munching cheap popcorn, remembering to stand for "The King's Song" which always precedes the main feature.

The two films I saw recently were "Django Unchained" and "Olympus Has Fallen". Thankfully, I enjoyed them both but regarding the former movie, I wonder if I am alone in thinking that Leonardo DiCaprio lacks the gravitas, the charisma and the simple stage presence to convincingly pull off domineering alpha male roles. He was fine as young fortune seeker Jack Dawson in "Titanic" - the role seemed perfect for him but in "Gangs of New York" he seemed unable to fill the boots of tough gangleader Amsterdam Vallon. It was cringeworthy and so it was in Tarantino's new film - DiCaprio seemed too boyish, too lightweight for the role of the powerful and slightly psychotic plantation owner Calvin J. Candie.

It was a very clever film - lots of humour, lots of spurting blood, lots of back references for ardent film buffs and lots of simple playfulness - deliberately toying with the spaghetti western genre. Tarantino, the director, and his team must have had a ball.

"Olympus Has Fallen" paints North Korea as some kind of predatory nation from outer space. Their well-trained agents attack The White House, hold The President hostage (thankfully not the truly heroic Barack Obama) and threaten to detonate all of America's nuclear arsenal so that the country itself will become a post-nuclear desert. But hey - surprise, surprise - those pesky North Koreans hadn't counted on the guts and sheer bravery of never-say-die US secret agent Mike Banning played by the Scottish film actor Gerard Butler. Single-handedly, like a latter day Superman, he takes on the might of the dastardly North Koreans and beats them, releasing President Asher and saving the free world. It was unbelievable but well done - a ripping good yarn with as many splattered gallons of blood as in "Django Unchaiuned".

Honeymoon

It appears that my last post went down like a lead balloon with the baying mob that constitutes this blog's exclusive, hard-to-please readership. I guess this post will make a similar kamikaze dive into the oily ocean of dissatisfaction and condemnation...

The English language contains so many lovely words and I was thinking about one of them yesterday afternoon as I swam under the shady mango and palm trees in the little pool next to my apartment - "honeymoon". Honeymoon? What does it really mean? Where did it come from?

This is the first known written reference:-

Hony mone, a term proverbially applied to such as be newly married, which will not fall out at the first, but th'one loveth the other at the beginning exceedingly, the likelihood of their exceadinge love appearing to aswage, ye which time the vulgar people call the hony mone.

Richard Huloet —Abcedarium Anglico-Latinum pro Tyrunculis, 1552

So it was the "vulgar" ordinary people who favoured the term and it contains the sense that marriage is at its sweetest during the first "moon" or month. "The first month after marriage, when there is nothing but tenderness  and pleasure" said Samuel Johnson two centuries later.

The term is closely mirrored in other languages - including French (lune de miel), Portugese (lua de mel) and even the ancient Welsh language where mis mêl may be translated as "honey month". Interestingly, the term is also present in some languages of the Indian sub-continent, including Tamil.

My own honeymoon - back in October 1981 - lasted just one night and one day in the city of Lincoln east of Sheffield. Shirley and I had just bought our first house and were busy investing our time and money in it. We didn't have much opportunity to jet off to Barbados or Venice.

On the Sunday morning after our wedding night, we ambled up to Lincoln Minster (Cathedral) which for  over two hundred years was the tallest building in the entire world. We stopped at the official church souvenir shop in the cobbled square in front of the great church and were most surprised to find the shop door unlocked but with nobody inside - no shop assistants anywhere. It was clear that some silly somebody had forgotten to lock up the day before!

Shirley stood guard in the shop while I hurried over to the great cathedral to find a verger in a black cassock who rushed back to the shop with me. He was immensely relieved that we had reported our discovery and magnanimously declared that we could choose anything we wanted as our reward.

We picked a small framed print of Lincoln with its great minster towering above Brayford Pool and we still have that picture today. It seemed a magical almost propitious beginning to our marriage. I remember the details of that morning stroll so vividly even after thirty two years.

Interesting

Just like the flotsam and jetsam we might find on a beach, so the human memory throws up random relics of times past. Back in 1961, my father bought an unusual 45 disc which for a few weeks he played interminably on our "Dansette" record player. At the time, it seemed so absurd - such daring "alternative" comedy - written by Peter Cook and performed by Kenneth Williams...."if all the Chinamen in the world linked hands".

I had looked for this recording before within the internet's seemingly endless ersatz  library shelves yet it was only this afternoon that I rediscovered it. For me it is imbued with the sense of a more innocent world and reminiscent of a time when I was just a tousle-haired eight year old boy in the bosom of my family, in the heart of rural East Yorkshire. And there was mum and dad and my three brothers and Oscar the cat and we lived in a house without central heating and I played football and climbed trees and cycled for miles and the television had only two channels and they were in black and white. "Crackerjack", "The Black and White Minstrel Show", "Sunday Night at the London Palladium"...No wonder my nose was usually buried in books.

And so I give you Kenneth Williams with "Interesting Facts". Enjoy it or sleep...

Retribution

So incensed was I about the mugging that I decided to take a day off school yesterday and return to Ayutthaya to try to track down the dirty little mugger.

Very close to the place where the robbery took place, I waited in a motorcycle tuk tuk owned by an Indian immigrant called Mr Rashid. We had agreed a price at the railway station. We waited in the hot afternoon sun for ages as I scrutinised every passing motorcyclist and I was starting to give up hope but around five o'clock I saw him - the little scrote with his acne-exploding complexion, just tootling along with my "Berghaus" rucksack on his back! How dare he?

"Follow that motorbike!" I instructed Mr Rashid.

We followed the sad excuse for a human being through a series of small settlements. Mr Rashid kept a suitable distance between us and then we watched while the unsuspecting robber turned into a dusty gateway. Rashid parked the tuk tuk and I tiptoed towards the property that the odorous rapscallion had entered. It was ramshackle but had a whopping satellite dish secured to the shady bodhi tree in the yard.

Surprisingly, the brown dog on the verandah just kept sleeping so I was able to creep up to the open window whence I peered in. Damnable villain! He was wearing my bush hat from Akaroa in New Zealand and my very cool sunglasses from Phnomh Penh, Cambodia. The treasured camera was on the rickety old dresser under a picture of King Rama IX and my copy of "Dreams From My Father" by Barack Obama had just been chucked down on the floor.

I knocked on the door and I could hear the scrote stumbling towards it. He saw me standing there and probably had no idea who I was. I snarled quietly, "Prepare to meet thy maker!' before grabbing him round the throat with my right hand. Adrenalin was pumping through me. I lifted him off the floor and wrestled him out to the bodhi tree  where I tied him up with some rusty old chain that I found in a heap near the gateway.

He was screaming something in Thai and the brown dog had started barking but I felt no sense of mercy. I dragged his Honda motorcycle into the middle of the yard before setting fire to it with the robber's own lighter. There was an explosion that must have been heard through the entire neighbourhood. 

Then I went into the ramshackle dwelling, finding some old rechargeable electric hair clippers in the cupboard. I brought them back outside and proceeded to give the scrote a haircut. I shaved it all off and the top of his left ear too. It wasn't my fault that those rusty clippers had seen better days. I yanked down the satellite dish and bent it double. Crimson blood ran down the side of his face in rivulets and he was screaming hysterically. I pummeled him in the diaphragm a couple of times as if I was belting a punchbag in a gym before grabbing the stolen booty and jumping back into Mr Rashid's tuk tuk...

And then I woke up. It was all just a delicious dream...

Mugged

I never really thought about the derivation of the term "mugged" until Saturday when all of a sudden I felt like a complete mug. I was cycling north of the ancient town of Ayutthaya, heading for a hotel that has a small aqua park. It was two o' clock in the afternoon and I was on a main road heading out to the countryside. Suddenly there's a motorcyclist next to me with his "Maid Marion" on the back. He grabs the little rucksack from my front basket and speeds off. It took less than a second and I didn't have time to react. Hindsight tells me I should have turned my bicycle wheel into the motorbike knocking both of the villains off and it also tells me I should have done what I usually do - hook the backpack straps around the handlebars.

He took my faithful "Berghaus" bag that has been my companion on many's the journey - walking or travelling abroad. I had only just washed and dried it for the first time in its life and it was looking rather dandy. He also stole "Dream from my Father" by the erudite and admirable leader of the free world - Barack Obama. This book was given to me by Denise before she returned to England with Baby Alexa and the bamboo bookmark was from Vietnam and given to me by my daughter. There were also some umopened "Kleenex" tissues that Shirley gave to me about three years ago - "They might come in handy", my Rupert the Bear swimming shorts, my Cambodian sunglasses, a towel from my little hotel in Ayutthaya - it had blue fishes on, my Nivea sunspray, my bush hat from New Zealand ( a hat that actually fitted my huge bonce!) and... and... this is the hard part - my lovely Digital SLR Nikon camera. Oh woe is me!

What the little scumbag didn't take was my wallet that for some reason I had left in the pocket of my shorts and my passport which was back in Bangkok. He also didn't bash me or stab me and I am well aware that this little episode is as nothing compared with the troubles that some people in the world are experiencing even as I type this account.

Afterwards, the sympathetically angry owner of my guesthouse kindly drove me to The Tourist Police station where I handwrote a statement and then with painful slowlness the duty officer handwrote her report. Then I was taken to the central police station where the process was repeated with not a computer in sight. It was like a two and a half hour extra punishment on top of the mugging but I survived it.

This is only the second time in my life that I have been mugged. I am usually so wary, so guarded and I guess I just didn't foresee such an event happening on a fairly busy country road in the middle of the day. But I am not to blame - not really - who is to blame is the selfish, nasty, ugly, stinking bastard on the motorbike. I hope he enjoys the rest of "Dreams from my Father". I was up to page 100 and looking forward to the rest. And I hope he enjoys looking at my many photos of Thailand before he sells the camera for a song. I shall see him at the pearly gates and he will not get in! No way!