Number 1 in an Occasional Series...

Click image to enlarge catchphrase...

(Ps - Number 1 James)

A conversation (A play from Singapore)

1.

PAN SHOT THROUGH WINDOW to INT. HOTEL ROOM IN THAILAND - NIGHT. Outside it is just starting to rain. A couple, Max and Beatrix are discussing their holiday plans. She is flicking through some travel magazines. He is getting ready to go out.

BEATRIX
What's that temple called? Anchor something?

MAX
Wat

BEATRIX
You know, the one in Cambodia. Anchor?

MAX
Wat

BEATRIX
FRUSTRATION STARTS TO RISE IN HER VOICE

The temple. In Cambodia. ANCHOR SOMETHING!

MAX
Wat

BEATRIX
NOW EXASPERATED, SPEAKING AS IF TO A CHILD

What is the name of the temple in Cambodia that is called Anchor
something?

MAX
SHOWING EXTREME PATIENCE

Angkor Wat

BEATRIX
The temple....

REALISATION DAWNS

Ohhhhhhhhh

***The End***

If you're bored of this try...

Viceland. I've been reading it for a while. You can choose which country you want to keep pace with. The UK might be a good start, but there is stuff from all over. Quality is variable but Viceland extends 'being mean is funny' to an art form. Check out 'Do's and Don'ts' for example.

It's good to talk

Got back from the gym where I witnessed an amazing sight. A guy was having a personal training session. Nothing unusual about that. He was on the seated chest press machine. For all you gym-o-phobes here is a picture of said machine. However for the duration of his exercise set he was speaking on his cellphone with one had and 'exercising' with the other. The Personal Trainer was evening out the exercise by pulling the other handle for him. Then she made him switch the hand he was using for the call, and do the other arm. After this she paced around in a frustrated manner in small circles looking daggers at the ground, gave up after a while and made him repeat the set, again one arm at a time. They then left that machine and went off round the corner with him still yakking on his cellphone. I don't know what happened after that, but I saw his body swinging from the cable cross over, hanging by a skipping rope.

Musings on Muse

We went to see Muse last week at Fort Canning Park. Now I wouldn't normally have bothered
with Muse in the UK but there seems to be a dearth or 'well known' rock n roll acts making their way out here so I thought it would be good to support it. Well the other 'big names' hitting these shores are El Divo and Cliff Richard (I assume before Wimbledon starts and he's required to entertain Centre Court).


The performance itself wasn't bad at all, although I suspect it would have been the same if there had been 10 or 100,000 people there (and those going to see them at Wembley will be able to test that theory out - at least we could see them in detail with only 6,000 people there). There was very little crowd connection apart from one or two 'hello Singapores' through the set. The gig was also lacking a support act, just a DJ which at $110 a ticket seemed pretty mean spirited, especially as Singapore has a thriving indie scene any one of whom would have bitten their mothers arms off to play for free. And of course, there weren't enough toilets. At this point I have to plug Bone Table (from Hong Kong) who Tom Kitten describes as sort of like the bastard son of Thurston Moore and Nico.

One plus of the gig was that even Beatrice was one of the taller people at the concert and as for me well, I had a virtually unrestricted view of the gig. I say 'virtually', because it was hard to see around the sea of cameraphones being held up constantly. Now I've seen this in the UK, but never on this scale. It became easier to watch the gig on one of the phones around me and select a view from the field of little TV monitors.

The other thing that was unique to Singapore was the heat effect that can be generated by 6,000 cramming themselves together when it's already in the mid 30's. You think the global weather meltdown you're experiencing in Europe is due to El Nino? Think again. As we know, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo it causes 10 acres of rainforest to spontaneously combust what the effect of 6,000 sweaty Muse fans waving cameraphones can do. Of course, the time honoured tradition to cool off the audience is for other audience members to hurl their drinks across the crowd, spilling them as they go. Which is great, except in Singapore, everything is served with ice cubes in it. I'd imagine that the effect is like 'ahhhh relief' followed by 'ouch, ouch, ouch' as the cubes land. Well they looked pretty from behind anyway.

Final reminder, we're hoping to make it back for Glastonbury, so if you want to see us this year UK side, get your wellies in now while the price is still low.

Turkey after all

Slightly delayed by lack of photo editing, but some click here to see some edited pictures from our trip to Thailand over Xmas and NY.

We started off by arriving in Patong in Phuket province. Patong is really the Costa del Thailand, it's brash and touristy and the primary business is prostitution and vacationing, often combined. The girls are centred on 'beer bars' often little more that a set of stools round a bar, often 30 or 40 crammed into a tiny side street, though some are monolithic themed affairs with many phallic statues adorning their facades and interior.

However much you try not to let it, you can't help but shudder at the, and let's be quite frank here, guys who even their mother might have trouble loving for their appearance pawing at the Thai girls who are quite content to put up with it in the name of revenue.

The main reason for going to Thailand was to catch some diving at the Similan Islands and avoid Xmas. We'd scoured the Internet to find a boat departing on the 24th December, with West Coast Divers. We transferred up to the boat the next day with tour leader Milton (about the most laid back person you might ever meet) and the majority of the rest of the group. The boat isn't the most luxurious that I'd ever been on, but as we were the last to book, we got the worst cabins, below deck, by the engine room, and so small that you actually had no floor space, just 2 single bunks, slightly staggered. Beatrice threw an epic strop, but there was no way of changing them and we had to deal with it. Liveaboards in the area are generally quite small, but the team on board were pretty clued up and the cooks managed to produce an amazing variety and quantity of food from the tiny kitchen, including a full roast turkey and works on Xmas day itself. For my part, I'd smuggled a small Xmas tree from Singapore in my rucksack, which we zip tied to one of the tables on the main deck. You can see Mod, our dive guide looking at it in awe and wonder on the pics.

The diving ranged from downright excellent (Richeliu Rock) to a bit average in places. Certainly overall I'd expected a lot more from the Similans based on their reputation. We also had to endure some supposedly qualified (50+ dives) divers highly overweighted and kicking the crap out of the reef. To be fair the dive guides did their best to keep them away from the reef after dive 1, and they always ended up finishing 15 minutes before the rest of our group due to air consumption. We saw a lot of boats at any one site, so you can imagine the impact this has to be having on the reef. Sigh.

Anyway, lots of marine life, we had one dive spending a lot of time with a huge Manta ray, sadly my camera had fogged and all the video looks like London on a foggy February day. Ditto the pics. We also got to see a few seahorses, which Bea was very excited about and my favourites, octopus and cuttlefish kept popping up from time to time. If you really like fish pics (and I guess there are a few divers reading), there is a second album on Fotki.

The pic of the turtle and the Angel fish represented an amazing standoff between the two, as the Angel fish pestered the turtle as it broke up the coral in order to get some food of its own.

The second half of our stay was at Kata Beach. Lonely Planet had sent us there as it was full of 'bohemian, young travellers'. Whoever researched the guide wants to do more checking, as it seemed to be exclusively full of Scandanavian families, who all went to bed at about 10pm. We casted around the resort trying to find somewhere with a bit of atmosphere but with limited luck. Initially we walked around, but soon decided to hire a scooter to get around. There is a nice picture of me on the scooter with my 'purple helmet'. Just gay enough Mr Brown...

If you ever go to Kata, I can thorougly recommend a trip to the Dino Park Mini golf. It's both educational AND fun. It's like info-tainment. I also got to ride on a Ankylosaurus and you can't say that about every holiday. Bea also won the round by 2 strokes, but then she did used to play golf seriously. Or so I tell myself. Hole 17 was fiendishly hard.

Did a spot more diving, this time with Sea Bees. The guide they gave us was certafiably useless and pretty much wrecked the dives we did. He couldn't tell one end of a wreck from the other (literally) and basically disregared all agreed plans when in the water. Beatrice was super unhappy again, but she has always belived that the guide knows everything. We've made up a new sign for underwater that represents 'this guy is an idiot, let's do our own thing'.

We'd found the one decent bar in the area, called Nakonnai, an odd place with an art gallery as part of the bar and a house band who just loved playing music. We were tempted to go there for NYE but we'd been diving and someone had told us about a decent club in Patong that wasn't totally rammed with hookers and played decent music so we decided to give that a go. Owing to a miscommunication between myself and Beatrice we ended up with about 1000 BHT left to last us the whole night and get us back to Kata. We bought some cheap beers from the 7-11 and walked around the town which as it was NY had attracted a lot of people out and it diluted the bawdy atmosphere somewhat making it quite enjoyable. For me the highlight was going to the beach where people were selling fire ballons and setting them all adrift until there were hundreds of them. Firecrackers were being set off and rockets, and vendors were selling silly string so you could spray the surrounding area with CFCs and toxic chemicals. Of course we couldn't afford any of this, and we had to leave the beach before mid-night to get into the club which would have cost us 500 BHT each otherwise afterwards... Even so, we still had to share beers, though we did come out with enough to buy our own fire balloon and get a taxi home and the net result was not having a hangover the next day.

The rest of the trip we spent having massages and spa treatments, going to the beach outside all the nice hotels and sneaking in to use their pools and sunloungers until sadly it was time to take the scooter back and go to the airport. Luckliy we'd bought Borat on pirate DVD for £1.05 to watch on the plane, so it wasn't all so bad. Jagsamesh!

You can see a movie from the beach here. It's magical. Better than attack ships on fire off the shores of Orion.

If you're bored of this...

Why not take a look at Wikitravel and never buy another guidebook again? Well, as soon as the rest of the world gets WiFi coast to coast. Or SatFi. Or Skynet. Anyway, you can now while away the hours choosing where to go next.

All clear, no sharks.

No cancer. And the laser was actually in lieu of a scalpel. KIDS - next time you go for surgery, ask 'where is your frickin' laser, what is this, the stone age, are you gonna hack me to death with some sort of primitive metallic cutting device?' Apparently they've been using them over here for 1o years. Next time you see your doctor ask 'where is your laser?'. If he hasn't got one, chances are he's a quack and you should bolt and run. The same applies if his laser is attached to any sharks.

Another day, another scar

I'm currently recovering at home from a bit of minor surgery, having had a lipoma (fatty tumor) removed from my back yesterday. It's one of those things that because it's on my back I promptly used to forget about until I saw my friend Inecke, who would then scold me about not having had it checked out. This went on for a while, but it wasn't 'til I was in Thailand over Xmas and having daily massages that it kept being pushed to the front of my mind (or rather my chest cavity through over exuberant massage).

Amazingly in the papers, Singaporeans have been moaning about the state of their health service, having in some cases to wait for up to an hour at a walk in clinic to be seen. Now anyone who has been to A&E in the UK lately will know how laughable this is. It transpires that selfish doctors here actually spend time with their patients to find out what it wrong with them. In one case, peoples appointments were delayed by an hour due to a cardiac arrest and subsequent stabilisation. And people still complained.

Now I went through the private health service. Above several shopping malls are literally floors and floors of private clinics like a beehive of medical practise - everything from cardiology to plastic surgery. Imagine nipping into Paragon for some new Chanel, finding the last pencil skirt in the sale, and it being a little too small. No problem, just buy that skirt and nip upstairs for some lipo...

Joking aside, I had an appointment with a GP Monday morning, who referred me to a dermatologist in the same building and I got an appointment in the next 10 minutes, who then referred me to a surgeon. I could in theory have had the procedure the same day, except for a mistake on the name of my insurance group so I had to wait til 4pm the same day to be seen in another clinic. The most painful bit (well nearly) was dealing with the call centre who administer the scheme, who have thoughtfully limited being on hold to 10 minutes 'for your convinience' then cut you off. And it's actually 5 mins, cos I timed it. Into surgery on Wednesday (the clinic has a mini theatre attached). Seriously, even Bupa would struggle to compete. Oddly though, both my GP and surgery appointment were in clinics that were predominately plastic surgery, so I was lucky that I didn't come out with a 36DD cup as well. Who knows, maybe the lipoma gets turned into an all natural enhancement package?

It also transpires that I seem to have a bad reaction to local anaesthetic, which I'd experienced before when I had my last tattoo. At the time I'd put it down to having my lower spinal area perforated, but it seems that whatever is in the cream they use is also in the local they gave me. Anyway, it's like a rather nasty trip, not helped by waking up and seeing two totally unfamiliar Asian faces staring down at me in a room that I didn't recognise. And like last time, it happened twice before my body adjusted. Not nice. Understandably, they were reluctant to give me any more anaesthesia even when the procedure went into 'un-numbed' territory. They also used some 'frickin laser beams' on me and ouch they hurt (and people DON'T smell like pork when they're cooked which dispels a popular conception).

Anyway, hopefully alright now, lab tests pending etc.