I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.

I really don’t – but I guess it will come across a little that way.

I don’t win things. I know that everybody says exactly that but I really don’t. Okay, I won $754 the first time I played Lotto. What a killer game thought I – and I spent several thousand dollars over the next few years trying to do it again before I stopped, and made what I thought would be a difficult-to-comply-with resolution to thereafter avoid the weekly what-if flutter.

It wasn’t and I don’t. Mostly.

Nobody I know really wins Lotto. People in rural towns win it. Not urban wastrels like myself – people who’d be as likely to blow it in a year or two on irrational artistic black-holes, or funding hopelessly wonderful but always marginal records, as I’ve tended to do in years past when I have a sudden wad of cash. Other people buy houses, I give the money to recording studios in what must be the most fiscally foolhardy action possible in a nation of where a gold record is unlikely to cover the cost of the giveaway T-shirts let alone anything more substantial.

Then my uncle won first prize in Lotto, but sadly only as a part of large consortium. This, it occurred quickly to me, meant he had expended his – and you may argue the whole family’s – random-chanceness on about enough to make an only just measurable dent in his annual – not excessive – outgoings.

This week however both Brigid and I won. My wife makes me feel like a winner everyday, but what I’m trying to say is that is, we both won a prize.

And from the same magazine -  Bangkok 101, easily the best visitor aimed magazine in this town – and, really more importantly, only one of two that doesn’t seem to crawl around Patpong or Soi Cowboy’s gutters, cater to overweight Irish pub dwellers, or, and I don’t know which is worse, project some sort of post Raj expat lifestyle complete with Polo Ponies, privilege, and columns complaining about everything in, and explaining how ‘they’ should fix large parts of, this supposedly not-like-home pisspot of a city/country. Fuck off. Really.

BKK 101 has, unusually, perhaps uniquely, for English language magazines in SEA, humour, depth and style, and deserves the plug (if you are coming this way…) I’m giving it here.

So yes, two prizes. Quite different.

The first was a riverboat cruise. A moonlit dinner – which they awkwardly pitch as romantic – and boogie set against a moving backdrop of the famed sights on the Chao Phraya River, on one of those monstrous neon and gaud adorned floating restaurant barges that trek up and down the river that defined and still defines this city, every night after dark. A kind of poor-mans inland loveboat.

And of course, normally wild horses…

However, we decided to walk the plank on the Pearl of Siam if only to take the piss, and duly booked, making a mental note not to eat too much of what would doubtlessly be horrendous, reheated, spiceless and Farang-friendly (marginally) Thai food, and thus avoid any chance of food poisoning wrecking the second won prize, a dinner for two at the minimal-fab and normally silly expensive Bed Supperclub.

After a drink at one of the city’s great secrets, Balco, that elusive and almost unique thing: a well priced bar with an an impressive view of said river, we joined the queue of flip flop and tourist market t-shirt wearing Australians, Southern Europeans, Koreans, Chinese and Japanese, and staggered on, wondering repeatedly if perhaps we should’ve stayed in the rooftop bar long enough to miss the gangway being raised.

But we didn’t and here we were, I imagine because we were on a freebie, being gracelessly ushered into the bowels of the big boat, where the windows were only marginally above the water-line, to our table – naturally number 13.

I looked anxiously for life jackets and exits. Having happily noted both I sipped my luminous-pink jelly-like welcome drink. It tasted like the syrup found in those cans of fake cherries which Brigid, who knows these things much more-so than I do, are really olives dyed pink, mixed with some FDA approved solidifying agent and extra sucrose to kill (or create perhaps) the flavour.

The Japanese and Korean tour parties we were sharing our semi-submerged deck with seemed quite impressed as did the smiling evangelical couple from Idaho across the way, in their matching his and hers tan safari outfits.

Brigid thought briefly about a cocktail until I mentioned the local spirits that sell for 150B per litre in the 7/11, and we both settled instead on a Singha.

The boat was still docked when we were invited to eat. We wandered cautiously to the front of the deck, where a throng of our fellow deckdwellers were semi-silently pushing and shoving each other to maximise their own suzerainty over the large platters of salmon sushi and prawns. To my eye there seemed to be enough for all, but the party of elderly Koreans at the front were taking neither chances nor any bullshit from an equally aged grouping of Japanese.

Perhaps the rift ran deeper than the fish.

As I waited for a moment of calm, this caught my eye:

Technology, huh?

I moved on.

The larb-gai – or a rough approximation of it – actually looked ok, so I added some to the side of my plate and then went to the prawn cakes (with plum sauce it said – I could see none at all). I made a point of ensuring that everything I took looked very well cooked – I sidestepped the fishy looking salad – and I sat down and nervously put a small piece of the chicken in my mouth.

It was good. Really quite good.

Brigid pointed to the prawn cakes and nodded. They were even better.

Gosh.

Feeling a little more assured – and hungry – we returned to the buffet and added curries and more. I returned twice and then found the fabulous green sweet sticky rice(-ish) stuff. I was drawn back to that platter twice more.

Then, it’s Thailand  – the food is always at least serviceably good, right? Well not always around Silom, Khao San or Lower Sukhumvit, but this was better than that. It even had above tourist levels of spice in a city where most Western visitors usually order that dish called Pad Thai – with no spice – and think they’ve had Thai food.

Meanwhile we were on our way. We’d left the River City dock without me noticing but I did notice that the mid-western evangelists had managed to score a couple more pink welcome drinks and were getting noticeably louder as the sugar hit. The world over, American tourists, especially those from the vast bits between San Francisco and New York, always involve the whole room in their conversations, whether  intimate in detail or not.

Please, nobody feed these two redbull.

The band, or at least I assumed it was a band – we only had a remote audio feed down in the bowels of the boat – lurched from a creeky take of Feelings to the perhaps a little inappropriate Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, during which the singer paused and said, in a broken mid-Pacific accent:

‘On the left is a temple’

And indeed there was: a very bright big one. Lovely.

‘On the right is a church – it is very old.’

Yep – the Japanese and Korean massive though, seemed more interested in the numerous TVs, which had odd footage of people levitating in India and flaming coffins being tossed into the sea in Taiwan.

We went upstairs.

There we found – on the roof deck – the folks who had obviously paid to be there, unlike us.

The slowly passing shore scene was rather glorious – this river, night and day, is quite something and the various temples, 19th century Portuguese churches and more, were lit and very photogenic. Then, day or night, they are always quite splendid. I forget just how much so until I see them again and am as similarly awed as I was the previous 200 times I’ve done so.

That said, the lighting at night adds another spectral dimension.

Some people took lots and lots of photos for Facebook, and rotated quickly back and forth with camcorders producing – you just know –  moving images that cause instant head twisting nausea as you try to follow the them on the single occasion they’ll ever be looked at by anyone.

Most people – about 80% – just looked bored, and gazed formlessly into the darkness or at the band. Australians do this a lot. I guess when you have Ayers Rock, The Sydney Opera House and that submarine in a playground half way down the Hume Highway – several hundred miles from the Ocean and in a town which also oddly calls itself the Jazz Capital Of The World – it takes a lot to impress.

In New Zealand we have a wonderful harbour but no man-made constructs at all to get exciting and breathless about, so we tend to be more easily awed by this sort of thing.

The band were perched in a tiny spot at the front of this deck, and were enthusiastically finishing their set with something they said was from the ‘fabulous Manhattan Transfer’. Perhaps it was in another life.

The crowd, however, were mostly grim faced and looked completely disinterested in their surroundings and stony.

At the front a middle aged ocker couple with a teen son – who probably wasn’t consciously trying to emulate Kathy Burke‘s Perry – were having a domestic tussle which had ended in a silent standoff. It was obvious that he – Perry’s dad – simply didn’t want to be there. A reasonable guess may be that he’d wanted to go to Patpong and she’d insisted on the boat.

Or perhaps he came home late from Patpong the night before with lipstick on his privates and had no idea – he said – how it had arrived there.

He tried to hug her. She pushed him away and he skulked off.

The PA farted a couple of times and then burst into life, and the original recording of the always appropriate redneck love song Achy Breaky Heart arrived loudly. Perry and his mum rose and began line dancing in front of us.

‘Tamworth’? Brigid mused.

More temples passed as – oblivious – they shook their butts and rotated in perfect tandem. They’d done this before.

The band returned and announced:

‘It’s time to rock’n'roll’

and banged instantly into All Shook Up. Nobody on the deck moved. The singer, who seemed to be on the last gig of a disappointing career, looked nervously at the crowd and then back at the band. They’d lost the moment. Elvis might satisfy the German tour groups but this lot were having none of it. Killing the musical faux pas without sentiment, she announced happily that the next tune was: Achy Breaky Heart.

Perry and mum were back up in a heartbeat.

As it finished the singer asked, ‘Who likes Lady Gaga?’

Perry and mum didn’t but were quickly replaced by a hot blooded young Latin couple  – doing some well practised moves they’d picked up from some old Enrique Iglesias video.

The rest of the deck seemed unmoved by any of it. They sat.

Next to us stood a happy power drinker. He was ordering and swiftly sculling Singhas in lots of two.

Drowning his package deal depression maybe – or just a pisshead….

As soon as we docked Brigid and I ran to get a cab. There were few – just the normal smattering of you’d-have-to-be-nuts tuk-tuks and the meter-is-broken tourist touts – so we went into the Sheraton, adjacent to the dock, to try and find a kosher one out the front.

I’ve never been to an Indian L’Oreal convention before.

I have now. Swarms of bejewelled Indian hairdressers and overly coiffured sales people with that unique South Asian take on the 60s Roy Orbison cut wandered past.

Then through it came a note perfect chorus of Please Please Me and we saw, in a mostly empty bar, the fab four – or at least a Thai replica of said band, knocking out Lennon-McCartney classics (and a George tune or two).

They took a break and I took a snapshot of John. He was cool. ‘We know all their songs’ he said. ‘Hang around – we do requests’.

We did.

We looked at the bar menu. 350B for a Stella. Fuck me. I decided to order a Ferderbrau, the German styled weissbier made with mixed results – but drinkable – by Singha. It was only 220B, which is only about 220% more than you’d pay for a pint in a non-hotel bar. It came. It was a 200 mil glass. One wonders how The Sheraton can justify a 1200% markup over wholesale. That said, I’ve travelled long enough not to ponder these things too much.

Who the hell drinks in hotel bars. We do I guess, and there was a smattering of other faux-Fab-4 fans ordering as well. One round probably pays the whole band.

The band struck up and asked for requests – the words Revolution Number 9 almost left my lips but instead they formed around Birthday, since it was Brigid’s.

Second verse, same as the first – except it’s not.

Just under twenty hours later we found ourselves walking into Bed Supperclub.

Bed is very famous. With some justification.

There is one in, I think, Florida and, newly, one in Paris I understand. I’d been several times before, the including once to see the former lead singer of Culture Club play a set of cheesy electro-ish house, which, given George’s history, had evoked an inevitable feeling of pathos. Time (Clock of the Heart) indeed.

I loved Culture Club and the way they slotted into both the pop charts and the alternative post punk scenes credibly and so effortlessly. It was sad to see where he’d ended up.

That said, the nightclub side is an amazing venue to see a DJ – the best sightlines on planet earth – from huge continuous wall sofas on a mezzanine – an incredible sound system and a large efficient bar. It works.

The Laurent Garnier gig was one of the best electronic shows I’ve ever seen. Mindblowing.

This, however, was the first time we had eaten in the other half, the all-white restaurant tube which looks like a set from some 60s spaghetti sci-fi movie or Woody Allen’s Sleepers.

As we were ushered to our ‘bed’, the pouting waiter, who looked vaguely ridiculous in his harem pants, as if he too had stolen something from an old set, this time an MC Hammer video complete with one of those ridiculous Kid’n'Play haircuts, said:

‘Tonight is Model night!’

Whoa – and as if on cue, a couple of towering, spindly legged, picture perfect, things sauntered gorgeously in and sat at the far end of the almost endless bed which doubled as a place to eat – albeit at a specially placed table – no bedding down with the hoi polloi for these gals.

‘And later – salsa dancing…’ Hammer continued, albeit with a board sneer obviously directed our way. We rapidly removed the meal voucher from his view.

I ordered a beer, a Paulaner. It was only twice the standard beyond-Bed rate, and we sat down with the menu. Predictably the DJ seemed to be limited, as policy I guess, to a selection of tracks taken from the odious Buddha Bar albums – awful, wispy collections that plague almost all the more ‘fabulous’ restaurants in South East Asia.

Sound sophistication comes in an incredibly overpriced box it seems.

A perfectly formed German couple ¹ in pristine white flowing resort wear, as you do in Asia I understand, arrived with who I assume, from looks, to be the woman’s elderly mother in tow. They said – very, very loudly so we could all hear – that they were thrilled to be back. We were supposed to be impressed. They were regulars.

Arriving with your bemused old mum may have trashed that.

Would you you bring your ancient relative – one who looks like she’d rather be in slippers with Coro Street (as I admit I would’ve been after a couple of hours) –  to a very twee and pretentious joint where one is expected to lounge fabulously on huge white beds and eat messy food balanced awkwardly between your lap and the unstable white thing they’ve designated as a table?

MC Hammer pursed his lips and told us firmly it was time to order. Now. Complying with the instruction and still a little in awe of his overstated and briefly fashionable – about 22 years ago – pants, a look completed this time by a pair of curled-toed Aladdin slippers, we both opted for the three course set menu and took, as our main, the recommended Waygu burger – medium rare.

Without uttering a word, Hammer strutted back to the kitchen.

The dishwasher came on. Really, really loudly. It blended badly – nay, drowned out – the ambience of the sub-Yoga beats of the Buddha Bar discs. The gaggle of models sat silently rigid a few metres aware – blank faced and utterly perfect. The waiter took them something that looked like limp lettuce.

Model food.

The food arrived. I have no idea what my starter was – it was that memorable. We ate it and forgot it the moment our plates were cleared.

The mains then appeared, about the same time as the first part of a floorshow began.

Three guys dressed as something – one was in a plastic bag – came out and the words projected on the screen behind informed us all that we were about to see an interpretation of an ancient Brahman legend. The guy in the plastic bag climbed out and handed it to one of the others. He then peered knowingly upwards, as the third picked up his pre-positioned acoustic guitar and began to forcefully strum with implied meaning.

What it implied I’m not sure.

Very slowly, stretching out each syllable so we could savour its meaning, he began to sing:

‘Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try…..’

My gag reflex was automatic. I tried to hide it but that simply meant the reflex mutated into a muted guffaw – and Brigid told me to behave.

He continued at a pace obviously designed to give us the personal mental space to reflect on the profundity:

‘No hell below us / above us only sky…’

I looked at the models – they were still stony faced but had shifted a little – I guessed they had found some meaning in the words, perhaps finding the link between the ancient Brahman legend and Lennon’s turgid third form verse.

I took a bite from the Waygu burger and gagged a second time. As the song faded and the three performers very, very slowly shuffled away, heads down – as the solemnity of their message demanded –  a lump formed in my throat.

It came from the solid congealed knob that was the medium rare Japanese-raised burger pattie, and it quickly became lodged in the back of my mouth and refused for a moment to move. Panicking, I eventually forced it down with more of the expensive German lager.

The thought that the very last thing I was ever going to hear was a tune written by a wildly rich junkie in a mansion in Surrey telling me to give away all my possessions – sung by a man who had just climbed out of a plastic bag, choked fatally by a burger served by a twat who looked like MC Hammer, crossed my mind briefly.

I looked at Brigid and she was having the same, possibly the worst high-end food in Bangkok, moment as I was and struggling to consume the flavourless play-dough textured lump.  And, worse, the pattie was an odd colour. What was it? Who knows? We gave up.

The Germans next to us seemed all good though. Happily, they’d found meaning in the show and were still clapping furiously. Across the way another European couple – English we thought – had set up a video camera on a stand and were capturing the whole evening. I wondered how the neighbours and family in Scunthorpe would deal with a two hour movie that included two New Zealanders in the background clasping at their throats and throwing down German lager in an attempt to gather another breath.

Or would it, as with almost every video shot on holiday anywhere, simply languish in a box for a few years, or on a hard drive, unwatched and forgotten until eventually dumped.

Forget was what I wanted to do with the rest of the meal. However, Hammer insisted we have the pudding. I opted for one of those chocolate thingys with the hot melted middle bit that just about everyone everywhere did in the mid ’00s. Brigid chose the sticky rice and mango. This is Thailand – even the soi dogs can knock up a passable rendition of the national dessert if pushed.

Really, we should have left when we could. The actors returned dressed as monkeys and then began to belch squawky noises to sub-Hendrix electric guitar riffs – very Thai. Not.

You really forget what people will do to entertain tourists.

And the pudding arrived. My dry brown furry lump had a slightly softer brown lump in the middle and Brigid’s was an impregnable block of seemingly long-coagulated white and orange, parts of which perhaps used to be rice in a former life.

MC Hammer tossed a customer comments questionnaire onto our table. We really couldn’t find words. ‘Unique’ was the only word we could find.

I looked – the models seemed to be enjoying the faux-Hendrix. They were hot for the impending salsa.

We left.

Briefly, we mentioned to each other that the food on the Riverboat, which we had dreaded, was in another league.

We worked hard to find words to best describe Bed and only came up with the obvious ones: twee, facile, insubstantial, overpriced, tacky and so on. Brigid perhaps caught it best when she said it felt like the sort of joint a hairdresser would open.

Then again, some of my best friends are hairdressers….

Would I go again? Bed, uh, no. At least not to eat – it was awful beyond awful on every level. The Loveboat, maybe not because I’ve done it now, but there are worst ways to spend $40 on fairly reasonable food, take in one of the world’s great rivers – quite gob-smacking at night – tempered by some voyeuristic humour.

And, hell, it was almost free. I am ungrateful.

In the 24 months I’ve lived Bangkok I’ve had to deal with two national – I guess this is the most appropriate word – catastrophes, although in both, to date, I’ve not suffered physically.

The first, in the earlier half of 2010, was the initially mostly peaceful occupation of several central parts of the city by 50,000+ Red Shirt supporters, followed by descent into the armed confrontation, fires and horrible bloodshed that shook us all at time. It was geographically near to us, although not that close in such a huge city, and despite the garbage in the foreign media at no time did we feel at all unsafe – however it was still happening in my city, in places I know well and regard as home, places I visit and pass through all the time. And, yes it was emotionally harrowing and exhausting.

I, like many who were lucky enough not to have been in the direct line of fire, perhaps didn’t realise quite how much so until a few weeks afterwards – having told our families and friends all was fine all the way through.

I blogged about it here and here.

And now, beginning some 14 months after the fires, we have these floods – variously touted here as the worst in 50 years, and the worst ever.

Whichever it is, and without making any wider claims about climate change, there is no doubt these are annually getting fiercer and more regular.

It’s an odd stalemate at the moment. The waters seem stalled at the fast flowing and capacity filled Klong Bang Sue (pronounced Baang Seu for the benefit of the waggish) with only a few dribbles – in relative terms – finding their way a few metres south towards the expanses and towers of central Din Daeng, and heavily built up north of Victory Monument zones that mostly signify the start of the inner Bangkok ‘burbs.

As with almost every natural catastrophic event (or, really, any event) of the last 36 months or more, social media has driven the reporting and news flow. In both instances here the traditional news reportage and the the outlets for that – TV, newspaper, radio – have been left behind scurrying around to add quickly dated past data to their increasingly irrelevant online, paper, and – with one exception in Thailand this time – broadcast outlets.

What has really hit me this time is the way the social conversations have mutated too, in just over a year. Profoundly – both structurally and in content.

Twitter has increasing usurped Facebook, despite the fact that in Bangkok alone some 8 million plus people have FB accounts and this time around little of importance – at least in the English language which of course is a major proviso in Thailand but it can be perhaps judged by how much activity is on twitter in Thai and by the fact that any site of any note in the Thai language sector is being either dual-languaged, or linked to in the English discourse – seems to be on Zuckerberg’s monster aside from private chat and the usual barrage of phone images.

So, yes Twitter is it, and Twitter is being continually linked to at least a dozen semi-live Google maps including the very useful one on the Bangkok Metro Administration flood site (in Thai, but with Google translator that’s no barrier) which also links to a range of other data such including the hugely important live klong (canal) levels feed, and the definitive one from a retired French army topographer, @thaikamala, and updated every hour or so.

They all show an almost stagnant frontline (and stagnant it will be as the water recedes – yeekk) over the past few days despite the endless naysayers preaching and praying for oblivion and ‘equal pain’ for the city south.

And that is where, too, Twitter has changed.

In 2010 it made sense to follow several key people, most especially a few key reporters and adventurous, brave (read: often insane) freelancers. They fired a constant string of instant news reports in less than 140 characters which provided a continuous news and information stream often 24 hours ahead the printed mediums, which seemed to remain largely oblivious of the paradigm shift.

The printed medium is still as irrelevant as it was in 2010 this time around but the information flow driving twitter no longer comes from the people who may work for, or have some connection to a traditional MSM base.

I’m no longer following a list, but, instead, dependent on a hash tag. Tags are nothing new, we all use them daily – to search and follow or create trends. And yep, I used tags to narrow or search last time around, but this was complicated by the fact that there was no defined single tag and thus we had a confusion of #s which seem to multiply almost daily.

The story has changed this: in 2010 the story was driven by key players and decision makers and localised in a series of key locations, thus reporters and newsfolk had access that the rest could not hope to have and the role of the mass twitterati was to just fire crowd-sourced tweets of happening events as they transpired, alongside the inevitable raft of opinions, theory and asides.

2011 is completely different beast. We have a huge mass of almost uncontrollable water, many billions of litres, bearing down on one of the most populated urban areas on the planet.

The government, both local and national, have – for a variety of reasons – for all their mixed efforts, time and time again been cast aside by the brutal force of a sodden mother nature as it moves down towards the sea, following the paths of least resistance.

Repeatedly, over and over, government has made promises to both Thailand and to the global industries and stock markets – causing global economic turmoil that will go deep into 2012 – that it hasn’t been able to keep.

These have come back to bite a young government - perhaps unfairly, but bite badly it does, and the political endgame is going to play out long after the flood have gone.

This means, however, that many of the decisions and much of the public momentum, aside from evacuations and the final semi-successful massive barrier, coupled with pumps, laid across the north of central and east Bangkok, have been largely stripped out of the hands and headquarters of officialdom.

The story, instead has come from people in the front line, both in the floods and awaiting the water. All fifteen million or so of us.

And that’s taken the essential twitter source away from those lists of insiders to the much wider world defined by the tags #thaiflood, in Thai, and #thaifloodeng, for we English speakers.

Both tags also seemed to have established themselves in twitterstan without decision or formal protocol and then were organically adopted. Nobody decided – officially that is – that these tags were to become the conversation pit and news zone for the floods. They simply did and they’ve become all pervasive.

They’ve become communities. Naturally #thaiflood is somewhere I rarely go for obvious reasons, but #thaifloodeng has been running in my saved tags almost continuously for the last three weeks at least.

I like it, find it invaluable – and I hate it.

The regular subscribers and tweeters (of which I’m not one – I lurk, absorb and derive information – expatria the world over terrifies me mostly) have obviously personalities – some positive, some negative and all developing as the days and weeks pass.

There are the angry folk – many pissed off that they’re having to deal with up to two metres of water outside or downstairs. You feel their pain but there are a few – more than a few – who are keen to see anyone who hasn’t had to suffer, most especially those of us in the parts of Bangkok which remain dry, despite the fairly obvious fact that trashing the central infrastructure of the nation and the capital not going to reduce their pain, nor is it going to be helpful as the nation recovers from the personal and economic pain that these things cause.

There are the stir crazy, stuck in a increasingly skanky watery world that seems to have no near end. Rationality seems to have become more and more, as the days become weeks, subsumed by anger and irrationality. Some have become progressively worse, lashing out at others they see as more fortunate, as time passes. It hurts to watch.

There are a few who are just plain nasty – they hate Thailand, they hate Asia, they hate everything. Mostly they just pollute the forums of Thai Visa but this seems to have offered another vehicle for their odiousness. Their profiles are mostly anonymous.

Then there is the woman who writes a reasonably good food blog, albeit on the conservative side. Her earlier tweets were helpful and positive, although the aforementioned nasties jumped on her and accused her of trying to push traffic to her blog, to which the obvious response was, yes, so what…

Sadly as the waters surrounded her place, she increasingly slipped into the mode of the angry folk, clamouring to see the whole universe swamped with a metre of water and to hell with it. They deserve it too.

A shame.

There are endless keyboard pundits.  Opinions, conspiracies, counter opinions, some of interest, some less so, some cautiously expressed, some less so. Uninformed – mostly – armchair pundits espouse theories on water flows/physics/religion/politics/grand plans/climatology/water barriers/chemistry and just about anything else.

Filtering the disinformation and noise from anything more worthwhile has, or at least is until you quickly work out who’s who, become a time consuming skill.

YuroFukurou’s user-friendly blocking filters are working overtime.

This group has a large noisy sub-group: those who endlessly mock the current Prime Minister and her government – because we know that they would’ve done so very much better….

Blaming a government who were only just being sworn in as the waters forced their way south seems to be de rigour for many, echoing the litany of vitriolic columns in the strongly anti-incumbent daily rag The Nation.

*to clarify – and cover my butt here: I’m not taking a pro or anti anyone stance  - I view Thai politics as an interested but confused non-partisan observer*

And there are, by a margin, the plain helpful (lest I be accused of broadsiding all the, literally, thousands who have posted to the tag) including a small group of dedicated amateurs (or not quite so amateur – thinking of the tireless work of Richard Barrow, a travel blogger, who has literally cycled his way around the city tweeting reports daily as he goes) who have posted and reported news in a fairly dedicated way and given us the daily stories – crucial as the water seemed unstoppable – that much of the city was depending on.

An extraordinarily moving series of tweets today told the story of a muslim family who’s two year old had just drowned. They were unable to bury the toddler within 24 hours as required as the cemetery was underwater.

Given the flow, dominance, preciseness and immediacy of news online from non-traditional sources it’s less than surprising that – English language at least, the two daily papers have, after a brief attempt early on, settled in an almost numbed minimalist reporting phase, offering little more than reiterations of press releases and recounting the opinions cast elsewhere by informed others. The Nation has moved its primary focus back to to its ongoing semi-obsessive agenda of criticising the new government whatever it does, including this week relentless attacks on Yingluck for planning attendance at the long scheduled APEC Conference, and then – a day later – for cancelling the trip (Hillary is coming to her instead), whilst The Bangkok Post seems to have more or less given up full stop, reverting to the stock market and the odd travel story and restaurant review.

The evening on-line flurry of news updates (written I assume as they prepare the next day’s print edition) attempting to catch up on a day which they’ve mostly missed seen somehow sad and only underline how much they’ve abdicated – unwillingly or even unknowingly as is the way with most daily press worldwide – their news role to the amateurs.

Instead, the nightly PBS broadcasts (in both Thai and English) featuring Dr. Seri Suparathit of Rangsit University Centre on Climate Change and Disaster, a easy, well spoken well regarded Asian expert on natural disasters (the Japanese involved him post-Tsunami) have become a national must watch and the professor has become the first superstar of the floods – his words are eagerly and instantly dissected by twitter & talk radio.

“He is the ONLY one I trust” wrote one tweeter on #thaifloodeng – undoubtably helped by the fact that he seems to have more of a predictive understanding of the day to day progress of the waters than anyone the government agencies seem able to produce.

There’ll soon be Seri T shirts in the markets if they’re not there already.

The pictures on this page were taken yesterday at Lad Prao Junction, Chatuchak Park, Bang Sue Klong at both Ratchada and just south of Chatuchak.

This is quite surreal.

Thirty or so kilometres north of here whole suburbs are underwater, as are universities and industrial estates full of all sorts of plants including some one the most high-tech digital manufacturers on the planet. And yet none of that technology and know-how has prevented billions of litres of water stripping the lives away from at least 3 million people and destroying some 600,000 homes in the provinces above and to the side of the gigantic urban sprawl that is Bangkok.

Further south, in the still dry inner city (a huge area itself, some 1500 square kilometres) its 9 million inhabitants (the metropolitan area is 15 million – not all that is flooded by any means, with estimates ranging from 5 to 15% awash as of today) wait to see if or when the boom is going to drop.

I’ve not lived in a city under siege before.

That said, in the past five years we’ve been through several earthquakes, a volcano erupting, a typhoon, two terrorist bombings, a city aflame with open urban warfare and now a cataclysmic flood.

How many lives do I have left?

Of course, in this case I have no real right to even think such things. I’m privileged. Hundreds of thousands are homeless, out of a job – at least temporarily – or have lost family.

And there are, perhaps, hundreds of farmed crocs loose in the waters just to add to the misery and threat. Nobody really knows how many. One is too many.

And then there are snakes.

In the dry bits of Bangkok (so far – as I write the heavens have just exploded with thunder and lightening and torrents are now coming down) the unrealness of this all is quite dazing. But at least we are dry, or as dry as we often are.

Trying to get my head around at least a small part of this, I went for a couple of extended walks around the central city earlier in the week – around the malls, down to the river, and – mistakenly – through the sleaze pit area around Soi Nana, a place I’ve, to now, completely avoided in the years I’ve been here.

I wish I hadn’t gone – to Nana that is – as the horrible old men with their newly acquired 18 year old ‘girlfriends’ were expressing their mutually advantageous but dispirit attractions – true love – everywhere, oblivious I guess to anything beyond the coming moments.

I imagine when you’ve reached a place where you see nothing wrong with taking some young country girl a quarter or more your age, doing it primarily for the bucks, back to meet your kids as their new ‘mother’, then your world is pretty odd anyway. It makes me barf.

Onwards.

Down by the Sathorn Central pier which I’ve used countless times, the river was high – so high it completely covered the normally exposed bridge supports and was noticablely vicious. Only the tourists were foolishly waiting for the clearly almost impossible to manoeuvre cross-river ferries which seemed to be trusting prayers and luck to make it across.

There was water on the footpath and sandbags. It had recently flooded.

At the interesection of Ratchaprasong and Rama 1 – which only 15 months earlier had seen pitched battles and department stores aflame – luxury goods stores already had sandbags, and workers building these higher as I watched.

The proximity of the crucial San Saep Canal, which feeds directly into the Chao Praya (and rather unfortunately flows some 500 metres from our front door too), was obviously something that weighed, as was the recent recovery and re-openings from the damage of 2010.

Across the canal, outside the twin multi-story fashion Platinum fashion malls and the IT floors of Plantip Plaza it seemed as tourist busy as ever. There were hustlers, taxis, tuk-tuks and shoppers everywhere, stepping over and making some use of the omni-present sandbags.

Miss Canon Camera – on stage as part of the Digital Camera Expo 2011 – chose me to sing a song to – trying to insist I join her on her plastic be-flowered podium behind the table with the white plastic bunny on it.

I demurred and stepped outside again, ignoring her fading pleas…

I watched a classic Krung Thep scam taking place.

I tried to warn her from a distance – with loud hand gestures – but she was disinterested in what must have looked like some bizarre farang waving very oddly. Instead, she opted to take the advice being given by the well dressed man – sketching directions on her map as is the way – and was last seen heading off into Pratunum’s mazed alleys in a tuk-tuk.

 

 

I briefly wondered what that would cost her but let it go – I tried, and it happens daily after all, water or no water.

Back over the bridge, outside Central World and Isetan it was even more surreal. I wandered unprepared into thousands of well-heeled Bangkokians celebrating what was being called the Bangkok Fun Fest – joyously hosted by a radio station.

There were celebrities everywhere – being chased by camera crews and autograph hunters – and a female singer who, if the screams provided a rough indicator, was a huge pop star.

Every time she spoke between songs her voice was drowned in the wails, and kids looked suitably distraught as she flashed across the big screens.

Twenty or so kilometres north of the Bangkok Fun Fest, people – families and children included – were scrambling to save their worlds and their lives. Nowhere in the Central World festivities did I see a collection or donation facility.

Maybe I missed it. I hope so.

Nor did I see any indication or awareness of irony as the rich kids of the city took photos of each other on their iPads and Tabs and consumed the many flavours of gelato and bountiful designer foods on offer. ¹

A couple of days later we were taking off on our long scheduled few days to Hanoi.

Flying north east out of Suvarmabhumi you see the vast blue spread of water blanketing almost endlessly the bordering provinces, with towns, cities, commerce, universities & schools, their massive industrial parks (wanna buy a new Toyota in the USA – you may have to wait) and rice crops (these floods have knocked just under 10% of this year’s annual global rice trade for six, trashing 1.6 million hectares of fertile productive land).

All the satellite imagery, Google and Nostra maps in the world can’t prepare you for this.

It went on for at least 15 minutes more or less like this. There are people down there…..

Seven days later, the city has sobered noticeably. The traffic is sparse, the footpaths empty and many smaller businesses are securely boarded up. The rich kids have likely fled, leaving the city in droves with their parents – down to the holiday home in Hua Hin or Pattaya; the corporates and the embassies have also jumped ship as the waters supposedly rush in.

Except they haven’t. Yet.

And the word increasingly and cautiously out there is that much of Bangkok may have dodged the bullet – at least the parts beyond the sodden fringes. And even there the parts underwater are less than universal. This is a town, as vast and sprawling as it is ², where 30cm of water in a street – what would considered a flood most elsewhere – is a weekly event in many parts during the wet season.

Jumping ship -especially for those whom such flooding is little more than an inconvenience (and lets face it, living on the third floor of a condo or higher it’s going to be little more than that unless you have kids and/or elderly to think of) – and leaving those who simply can’t leave to face the worst of it somehow seems wrong.

Brigid and I, in Hanoi yesterday, talked the pros and cons over before deciding on our return today. It is home after all.

Somehow it seemed like the right thing to do.

 

I hate having to do this (especially given that I’ve been so slack in my blogging herein in recent weeks / months and that I’ve just been told off elsewhere – lightheartedly – for not being patriotic enough online) but fuck it, someone has to, or should.

In case you missed it, big news in South East Asia – that bit of the world just north-west of the Gold Coast if you are confused – floods of a semi-biblical nature (and they probably are of a similar magnitude to those which inspired a scribe to write in ancient times blissfully unaware in his misplaced bronze age faith that it would expand idiotically over the years) are overwhelming and trashing large parts of the region, killing to date some 700+ people.

In Thailand the death toll has hit 315 today, over 14,000 factories are underwater including huge Honda and Toyota plants, and a Western Digital complex which produces 25% of the world’s hard drives.

Some 600,000 people are unable to work and vastly more have lost their homes, livestock and worlds.

It’s horrendous and unimaginable.

To put it in terms that many in the west may understand: the cost of a computer (and rice) will likely rise.

Many New Zealanders live in the region, but just as importantly many people who live, work and have emigrated to New Zealand are from here and have families. I can’t begin to comprehend how worried – distraught – they must be. And anxious for updated news.

So, I thought I’d do, what I’ve done before, and check the NZ media. I’m aware from family and friends that both the main TV networks and the paid OZ based networks are covering this.

Stuff has a comprehensive AP sourced story with added Reuters video. It was up to date and also featured on the home page.

And so to the New Zealand Herald – the newspaper (and I use the word cautiously) that sees itself as the newspaper of record in the country.

Nothing on the front page. Lots of rugby. A story about a woman who was fired for taking a bus to work or not taking a bus to work or something. A couple of crime stories, a bubble from the aways foolish Garth George who would have trouble getting a letter to the editor printed most elsewhere, and an important – although not as important as the rugby day to day in the Herald – story about the awful Rena disaster.

I went to the world page. Nothing – although a featured story told me that ‘Police bust an elaborate scam involving a private eye, former showgirls and corrupt officers’ in LA.

News.

I went to the Asia sub-section. These were the top stories:

At number five there was a story about the South East Asian floods, with reference to Thailand. It was this. It is four days out of date in a story which is fluidly (sorry..) changing hourly.

And frankly it’s disgraceful and appalling.

As a newspaper the New Zealand Herald has become almost worthless, so much so that my father has now cancelled a subscription active since the 1930s. And he’s neither a liberal or a radically right wing person. ‘None of our friends get the paper anymore – there’s nothing in it’ he told me. My sister also no longer subscribes and told me the same.

Perhaps they are not average and perhaps most of the target demographic enjoy news subsumed by rugby, crime and endless facile travel columns about Tuscany and the like. Or worthless ’opinion’ pieces by the likes of George, Paul Holmes, Deborah Coddington and Kere Woodham.

I suspect not in the long term, and The New Zealand Herald looks like a flagbearer for the decline of the newspaper industry from here.

In case anyone did want news from the floods, these two maps, both sourced from The Bangkok Post might be both shocking and instructive. The site itself has news and I’d recommend The Nation (they are the two major English language papers) and – for more detailed stuff either the facebook page ThaiFlood Eng or the twitter tag #thaifloodeng -rt (the last bit cuts out the endless retweets).

TAN has a 24hr live TV feed in English and there are several 24hr online Thai language channels including TNN.

Or, hell, just go to any online news source of any substance worldwide – they’re all on to it – just not The New Zealand Herald.

Going back to New Zealand I’ve worked out that one word scares the bejesus out of my compatriots more than any other.

I can mumble on about political insurrection, about corruption, about insane traffic the likes of which Auckland never sees – nobody believes that one – and a thousand other things, but none matches that one word: snake.

New Zealanders hate snakes. New Zealanders are terrified of snakes. New Zealanders are fascinated by snakes.

When I returned to Auckland shortly after the second Bali bombings – 20 or so poor souls ripped to pieces – I was at a party and was asked what Bali was like as a place to live. I began to explain that the bombings, as awful as they were, did not necessarily make the place more dangerous than New Zealand (the driving does that – but that’s another story) day to day. I was cut off mid sentence by an anxious woman:

‘But, don’t you have snakes?’

‘Yes,’ someone else said, ‘what about the snakes?’

I looked around – everyone was nodding with some sort of wide-eyed fearful curiosity.

Snakes.

I understand. We don’t have snakes in New Zealand – aside from property developers and politicians – and they both terrify and fascinate the – awful two words – average kiwi. Indeed, in New Zealand, the idea that any wild beast – aside from a shark, and that is very, very rare – can seriously hurt, let alone kill, is quite alien.

When I first went to Bali, many years back now, I asked – also anxiously – if there were many snakes on the island. ‘Not many – no poisonous snakes.’ I was reassured with a smile by the local guide as we rattled along the seemingly more dangerous quarries they call roads.

It was, of course, a complete lie. Brazen. But one they tell all tourists.

The island is full of deadly snakes – from the thin, quite beautiful, green things that hang from trees to the aggressive cobras  – some of which spit in your face from a distance – which seem to be more common than any other reptile you encounter aside from the ubiquitous small lizards that are everywhere.

Indeed, I encountered many, many snakes over the years I was there and only one, a huge python up in hills – you could have your photo taken with it for a price – do I think was unable to inject my body with lethal toxins at whim.

Whilst still on holiday, one of those green harmless vipers slithered into the pool at the hotel in Sanur and swam over Bella – who was but 7 at the time – resting briefly on her shoulder. She was mostly oblivious, I screamed and dragged her from the pool. The pool boy took a large stick and killed it.

Why, I thought, if the thing is so harmless, do we need to kill it?

A couple of weeks after we moved there, a friend told us a story of a person in bed – watching telly – when the roof fell in and a family of vipers landed on the bed in front of her. She saved herself by tossing the sheet over the nest and running screaming.

Ah – so there are deadly snakes on paradise isle…..

Despite my kiwi-instinctive horror at all things long and slithery, I quickly got over it. You have to – you encounter the bloody things everywhere. Brigid almost stood on a cobra by the front door. It slid away, into a hole under the new garage floor. The gardener and the driver quickly mixed some instant concrete and cemented the thing in to its new tomb.

For all I know it’s still there. The staff, however, were terrified that they had offended or killed a god and stepped clear of the space thereafter.

We killed a snake – another cobra – in the garden, after the dachshund had chased it into a corner. They both sat their taunting each other before the gardener swooped with a stick.

It was put outside in the trash. The old Chinese guy who owned the benkel sepeda motor (motorbike repair shop) across the road came over, took it out of the bin, cut the head off with a knife and ate the snake raw on the spot.

The dachshund, not having learned anything much – as is her way in life – cornered another cobra. It spat in her eye and she ran to us, yelping in extreme pain. She survived but still, years later, has a blue glow in that eye.

The same dog, with the more streetwise Bali dog as backup, tried, in front of me, outside by my office, to herd a light brown cobra – one dog coming from the back, one from the front. In retrospect – which came a few seconds later – stupidly I ran over and grabbed both by their necks and threw them into the house. The snake headed into the garden.

It wasn’t uncommon, sitting in the office which had no walls and folliage around, to watch a brown or green snake slide past on the wall or grass. I was almost expert at working out what brand it was, but always conscious of the fact that there was/is no snakebite antidote to speak of on Bali – since there were no nasties on the island.

And so on.

We moved to Bangkok.

There are no snakes in Bangkok we were told when we arrived.

Sure.

 

I fear this post will only be of interest to myself.

In it I attempt to cleanse myself of yellow and red. To exorcise the demons of the most incompetent courier company it’s been my displeasure to instruct.

So if watching self-flagellation is not your thing it may pay to close the tab now.

<begin>I see DHL vans. I find myself wondering – sometimes mumbling quietly to myself as my palms go moist and I get an odd cramp in my left calf – what’s inside. I ask myself will any of it find its way to its intended home. How much of it will end up going around and around in an endless circle, recorded – perhaps, very much perhaps – by some cyber tracking system which nobody at DHL seems able to make sense of or, worse, cares about. And if anyone asks where their packet is will DHL, despite any evidence to contrary and any past communication, simply deny its existence.

I’ve been there. All of it. It was like a dodgem ride – going around in circles, forever dodging blows – but one that it seemed, and may still be, impossible to get off.

The journey started in early 2005 in Auckland. I had been approached by a representative of the global courier, whom I’ll call Justine. She had a nice smile and seemed like she knew her stuff. Lots of fancy red and yellow bits of paper – glossy ones.

Did I want to open an account? Maybe. There was one service I needed. We were about to move to Bali but had huge volumes of mail arriving in our PO box in Auckland. Could DHL empty our mail box once a month and sent the contents up to us?

‘I’ll check’ said Justine.

Twenty four hours later she rang to say ‘Sure’.

And they did. Smoothly. At least until Justine left the job and was shifted elsewhere in the organisation a year or two later. She had proved to be helpful and efficient. All the things promised on those bits of glossy paper.

Then the first problem: the invoices seemed to jump. I began to check the weight and noted that the weight on the invoice was often twice the actual physical weight when it arrived. I questioned it. I was told, very curtly, that they were ‘approximating the weight’. Really? You aren’t accurately weighing these things. No – our scales are not accurate so we guess. They sent through copies of the weight as documented in Auckland. Our invoices were still almost a kilo or so more than the paperwork they provided.

I rang Justine and, despite the fact that she was no longer our point person, she looked into it. Without a word from anyone, a credit of close to $400 was applied to our account and the weights dropped. I guess they found some accurate scales in the building.

As Brigid pointed out, most of the DHL billing was done to large companies who never question. We did.

Benefit of doubt time – it was a mistake. We moved on.

Justine then left the company.

And the deliveries stopped.

I rang Auckland. I spoke to a woman there who told me ‘we don’t do that sort of thing – we never have’.

‘You’ve done it for us for two years’.

‘No, I don’t think so’.

I wrote a letter. Somebody with a nice voice from Christchurch rang. She was helpful.

‘I’m looking after the Auckland customers who were handled by Jade’

‘Jade? Who’s Jade? And you are in Christchurch?’

‘She was your account manager. Jade replaced Helen. And yes, it’s not easy.’

‘Who’s Helen?’

This woman from Christchurch, who we will call Christine, said she would look into it.

And she did. She rang back in two days and said it was all resolved.

An invoice arrived by email for a mail shipment. I checked the tracking service online. It said the AWB did not exist. The parcel never arrived, but a final demand from Sydney for the invoice did less than a month later – in the first of the newly renewed mail pickups, which began a month after the missing one.

I emailed the contact address given on the invoice and the final demand. Nobody replied. I emailed again. No response. I called Auckland. I was give an email address for the accounts manager in Sydney – who we will call Roxanne. I contacted her. Pay up she replied. There was no parcel I said. That’s between you and the account manager in Auckland Roxanne said. I have no account manger in Auckland I believe – I have one in Christchurch. Roxanne was very rude.

I rang Christine in Christchurch. She said she would check. A credit note arrived without another word a few days later.

The mail resumed and mostly arrived on time until 2009 when we made the mistake of moving house.

I had been sent a form email telling me that I had a brand new account manager – we will call her Sally. She was in Auckland. I emailed her. She replied quickly that she would ensure the new address was entered. I realised I had made an error with the postal code so I emailed her back. A read receipt but no reply was forthcoming. I sent the email again. Same. And again. Same.

I was in Auckland a week later so I called Sally. It went to voicemail and I left a message. No response. I called back week later. Sally resigned yesterday – you have a new account manager – we will call him Shane. I spoke to Shane and he was pleasant and said that it was no problem. The new address was in the system and it was all go.

I went back to Bali, and moved house. I received an email giving me the tracking number of a mail shipment – to the old address.

I emailed Shane. No reply. Again. No reply. I emailed Christine in Christchurch. She contacted Shane who telephoned me.

‘Why has my mail gone to the old address?’

‘I have no idea. We don’t collect mail. Who is your account manager?’

‘You are, you fuckwit. You did the redirect!’

‘It wasn’t me but I’ll arrange to have this parcel sent to another address. There will be a charge.’

It arrived four days later having toured around Bali in a DHL van for three of those. No invoice – either for the shipment or the extra charge – ever arrived.

Next month it was sent to the old address again. I rang DHL’s help line in NZ after Shane simply refused to reply to repeated emails. The woman said it had been returned to NZ because the address my Auckland office had put on it was wrong. ‘We don’t have an Auckland office – DHL addressed it.’ ‘We don’t do that,’ she staunchly answered – the ‘you are an idiot’ tone in her voice swamped any idea that she was going to help. I asked to be put through to Shane. Nobody of that name worked there she said.

I emailed Christine in Christchurch and Roxanne in Sydney. Roxanne replied and said it would not happen again – she was sorry and not rude this time. The parcel arrived a week or so later, routed via Dubai!

The next month the parcel arrived at our new address.

Then we decided to move again – to Bangkok. Shit.

I emailed Shane, Christine, Roxanne, and the customer service email address on the website with the details and the dates. Roxanne and somebody else called John replied. Shane was no longer with the company. It seemed that perhaps his fuckwit to helpful ratio was too low for even DHL’s suspect standards.

Roxanne said it was nothing to do with her. She was curt and unhelpful this time. Chur…

John said it was done. New address labels had been printed and it would all go smoothly.

We moved to Bangkok.

The next month the mail went to Bali – back to the old address, not even the more recent new one.

I emailed John. He apologised. ‘Your office in New Zealand must have misaddressed it’.

‘We don’t have an office – you arranged this.’

‘We don’t do this sort of thing – picking up mail from PO boxes – never have.’

I sent him his email from a month earlier.

I had a call from DHL Bangkok. The parcel was now here – who was paying for the journey from Bali to Bangkok? It was $100.

I emailed John. The tracking system said the parcel had been sent to Jakarta. I rang New Zealand and spoke to a woman at the help desk.

‘We don’t empty PO Boxes and forward mail – never have.’

I yelled at her and she put the phone down.

The parcel arrived three days later.

I wrote a letter of complaint to the General Manager of DHL Express (NZ) Ltd. It was sent by mail and faxed to the head office. No reply was ever received.

The next month the mail was sent to Bali. I watched the online routing as it left Singapore, went to Jakarta, to Bali, to Singapore, to Jakarta, to Singapore, to Auckland.

I emailed every address I could find at DHL. I re-sent the fax to the General Manager and to another fax number, adding to it a formal written cancellation of the service. I also mailed the cancellation to Roxanne and John.

I received an email from another person – a senior manager of the company – profusely apologising and saying it would not happen again. I responded that it was too late and I wanted the service stopped.

He replied that it had been stopped forthwith.

I had another letter of demand from dear Roxanne. I replied firmly, explaining that I was not going to pay for non-delivery and rudeness. She was, by return, even ruder, saying that it wasn’t her problem but mine. By return I made it her problem and sent an invoice for my time.

She sent credits and all went quiet. We arranged mail clearance via a third party. It works well.

In November, six months after cancellation, out of the blue, a mail parcel arrived via DHL at our house in Bangkok! In the first week of December I received another tracking email. They had more mail but it was not being delivered because I owed money on the last one……

I sent emails to all the people I had dealt with before. Not one replied, not even the helpful woman with the nice voice in Christchurch.

Brigid arrived in Auckland to clear two containers and rang them. She was told they had no record of the AWB number and that, no, they don’t clear mail boxes. Never have. Can’t help, sorry.

I emailed Roxanne and demanded resolution. Her response was that it wasn’t her problem, she knew nothing of it and anyway, DHL don’t clear mailboxes and never have. This was followed by an email saying that the account had been closed at my request months earlier. Then, within hours, another saying that they had no record of me closing this account – could I provide proof?

I responded with a threat to take it to the police – why were they uplifting mail without authorisation using a key that I had asked to have returned?

Three days later two more parcels – that had been going around DHL neverland for months it seems, without notification to anyone – arrived in Bangkok.

Then silence.

Until last week when I received another email. The mail parcel they had just cleared from our PO Box was out for delivery – in Auckland, not Bangkok or Bali. I knew not what to do. I was numbed by it all and just stared blankly at the email.

I contacted the New Zealand Post Office. They confirmed that DHL – somewhat randomly – were still clearing the box. Some months they would, other months there was no sign. I put a permanent ban on these idiots going near the box and had the lock changed.

We will see. In the interim I’m using parcel post.

Cleansed. </>

 

Once upon a lifetime ago, I bought a record by a trio with the less than wallet extracting name Chunky, Novi & Ernie.

I suspect I was the only person in New Zealand who bought this record. I know that how? Well, WEA had declined to release the record and Direction Records had imported just the single copy. The guy behind the counter said it was weird.

I bought it sound unheard because of the name on the rear – John Cale (as in Produced By).

I took Chunky, Novi & Ernie home and, yes, it was weird. Gothic viola and keyboard driven jaunts through the underbelly of pop, with clear references to the Cale strands of the Velvets and his own early 70s solo work.

I struggled at first and then one day I fell in love with it.

I’ve loved it ever since.

Nobody else has ever heard of it.

Tonight, we went to a party in a pub. I rarely, if ever, got to parties in pubs, but we had the invite and it’s in the street we live in so somewhat reluctantly both Brigid and I did the neighbourly thing and went down for  the free Asahi, Tiger and Grey Goose (not quite getting to the latter, but you try) and found the only free table in the place – in front of the band which, in a pub, is rarely the place I’d put myself voluntarily.

However, this is Bangkok and the unexpected is to be expected. And the unexpected can, more often than not, astound.

So it was tonight. In New Zealand, in a suburban bar in a fairly middle class (not that the phrase means very much in the Thai capital where classes mash so, and so easily) ‘burb I’d expect a pretty awful band turning out clichéd feel-good covers in a workman like way as they do all over first world suburbia.

This, though, is Bangkok and you simply don’t get that¹.

Instead I was pulled back to that wonderful Chunky, Novi & Ernie album by an unnamed duo playing six string acoustic guitar and cello, revisiting, often quite radically, modern and more aged classics in a manner that Cale, in his most baroque moments, would have proudly claimed as his own.

The set ranged from Bill Withers to Bowie (a deeply somber take on The Man Who Sold The World which drew from the much darker original, not the lesser Cobain cover), to the most astoundingly radical rework / rebuild of Radiohead’s Creep which gave it an almost Gershwin-esque aurra

And then there was Careless Whisper – a song, if asked, I would say that I’d happily never hear again – a song that has been beaten mercilessly to near extinction by ever two bit lounge balladeer, easy listening program director and muzak hack over past thirty or so so years.

They did Careless Whisper.

It took a few minutes for the melody to register completely as the cello tugged at and extended the opening bars into something more epic and then I found myself saying, without thinking,  to Brigid ‘I love this song’.

It slipped out. I said it. And I did. Just then.

George Michael’s most offensively three minutes of schlock had become an achingly beautiful melody that, at that very moment, seemed, as performed by the long haired guitarist in the baseball cap, and the leather jacketed punk with a cello, to have become a song worthy of Weil or Styne.

They finished and I gushed. I asked them what they were called.

‘We have no name’

Where do you play?

‘Just bars’

And that was it.

And perhaps it was just a moment, but I’m wishing that my Chunky, Novi & Ernie album wasn’t sitting in a concrete storeroom in Auckland right now.

Then, it is Bangkok.