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MY WEEKLY PIECES FROM SEP 2005 TO JUNE 2006

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

Something else I did last month in London apart from catch a terrible cold was to find a free morning to go with Yo and have our civil partnership ceremony. OK then…. get married!

Why on earth would you want to do that?” my friend Gerry Salmon asked (thirty years with his wife, three children, four grandchildren). “I mean - I've nothing against gays but all this marriage stuff – it's pathetic – like when Elton had that great big party at Windsor registry office, dressed up in drag with that silly wig”.

“Actually,” I explained, “Elton and his partner went very quietly to Windsor registry office in lounge suits with their two witnesses and half-a-dozen close friends. Everything else you read about the ceremony was made up by the media for people like you. Anyway, how can you be so anti-gay? I saw you letching after that transvestite last time you were in Thailand. If the missus hadn't been with you you'd have shagged her in a jiffy.”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“Well can't you connect the part of you which goes that far towards being gay with something in other people that goes a bit further?”

“Look here,” Gerry argued. “You know I'm not prejudiced. I've got nothing against gays – so long as there's not too many of them around at the same time.”

Away from Gerry, I had my own doubts about this ‘gay marriage' stuff. Thirty years ago I would have told you one of the benefits of being gay was being able to avoid getting married. But many things have happened since then. For one, I've been living with Yo for sixteen years and have grown old enough to think about what should happen to my estate when I die. If, at my death, we were to be ‘just friends', Yo would have to pay death duties on our house before he could continue to live in it. If we happened to be on holiday in America and one of us got sick or injured, the chances are the other one would not be allowed into the hospital to visit him. In most parts of the world, sanity reins; in America sanity in these matters has long become a thing of the past. Any gay couple traveling there would do well to travel with a photocopy of the certificate given them at their British civil partnership ceremony.

British civil partnerships for gays are effectively marriages. Every right that comes with marriage comes to gay couples with a civil partnership. In fact, the British government chose to call them civil partnerships not because they were different from marriage but precisely because they were exactly the same. Had they called them marriages the bill would not have passed through the House of Lords.

Still I felt very wary about doing it. There's something about the state interfering in my life which I find intolerable. It reminds me strongly of being a child and the way adults always wanted to check on what I was doing or thinking. The idea that we were promising each other something at the moment we stood in front of the registrar rankled. It simply wasn't true.

When the registrar read out the list of things to which we agreed and asked us to say “I do” (or as we chose instead, “I agree”), that was not the moment the agreement was made. What the State thought we were agreeing to under their auspices had been agreed between us many years before and had long been substantiated by the way we live our lives together. I simply couldn't enjoy the feeling that the State was muscling in on something so personal and intimate. Still – the benefits outweighed the intrusion and I smiled, and assented, and signed the book.

Several gay friends who'd already had their own ceremonies said I would find it more moving than I had thought. I didn't. It felt no different from renewing my driving license or checking in with Thai immigration authorities every three months. But it does feel great to know I can now pop off whenever I like without having to worry that some damn fool lawyer has made a cock-up of my will.

The more cynical amongst my ex-pat friends in Thailand tell me, from now on I should watch out for soap on the stairs. Never mind, the new house we're building is a bungalow.

RELATED LINKS

"Gay marriage is an eclipse of God" (pious crap from the Pope)

A quick guide to registering civil parnerships in Britain

Wikipedia on state of same-sex marriage in the USA

No gay marriage.com (welcome to Bigotland)

Wikipedia on marriage and its history

Tiffany - Thai transvestite show

The Ratzinger Record

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Sunday, June 11th, 2006

Last month in London it rained every day and the temperature was about right for winter pond life. Sure enough, in due course I caught a cold, and it was a real stonker. After a week it went down to my lungs and I started coughing up green bits. When I woke up one night unable to swallow it was time to call the doctor.

These days MDs in England require you to make an appointment and wait a couple of days, so by the time I got to see my doctor I'd thrown off the worst effects of my cold. All that was left was to go along and have a nice chat with him. And why not? I hadn't seen him for a couple of years and he's a pleasant enough chap.

For old time's sake he decided to run a few checks on me – cardiogram, blood tests, that sort of stuff. When he'd finished he stood me on the scales which immediately whizzed round to 18 stone as I could have told him they would.

“You're too heavy,” he said. “You need to lose some weight. You've got bad cholesterol, bad gout and swollen ankles. Lose four stone and they'll all get better.”

Then he gave me a bill for £380.

It's no secret I'm too heavy. Each morning when I pass in front of the bathroom mirror I'm confronted by the jelly monster. If you see a reflection like that every day you don't need an posh English doctor to tell you you're fat, my doctor in Thailand has been telling me the same thing for years. But the trouble is my Thai doctor only charges me four quid and at that price his advice doesn't seem too important. For £380, though, it feels like something worth listening to.

Three days later I got back to Thailand and my bad throat came back again. Doctor Four-Quid put me on antibiotics and told me not to drink alcohol for a week, which seemed like a suitable cue for starting my mega diet.

I haven't tried it since the 80s, but I remember it worked well then. It consists mainly of eating celery, an ounce of which provides just 2 calories yet requires the body to use 5 calories to digest it, a win-win situation. On the first evening I set about making a sort of celery cacciatore (sauté onions with garlic, add seasoning and peeled tomatoes and a little white wine, allow it to meld for fifteen minutes then add chopped celery). Once finished, the trick is to pretend your eating lombata di capretto in Ceconni's, or better still at Savini in Milan - sip your bottled water as if it's Pinot Grigio and with a bit of luck you'll be full enough afterwards that, providing you leap instantly into bed, you'll get to sleep before you feel hungry again.

The problem was, not having gone to sleep sober for the last two hundred years, I'd completely forgotten how difficult it is to nod off when you're not drunk. No matter how tired you are, instead of going to sleep the minute your head hits the pillow you find yourself thinking about things.

To begin with they were quite nice things – the new house we're building, which is beginning to look a treat – the wonderful way Brothermandude played at the Café de Paris last week - the young man at the supermarket who smiles so nicely when he carries my groceries to the car. But after a while I ran out of nice things and had to resort to other things, niggling things - the swimming pool lights which have been fixed three times but still refuse to work - my argument with the local garage who scratched the car while they were servicing it - and the phone bill that includes calls to Kuwait and Mecca that I never made.

After a while I realized sleep was going to be impossible and it was only then that I remembered I'd forgotten to weigh myself before I went to bed. I put on the light, went to the bathroom and stood on the scales.

Brilliant!! I'd lost twenty-five grams, though I couldn't for the life of me think how much that came to in proper British weight. Perhaps working it out would finally put me to sleep. I jumped excitedly back into bed, turned out the light and started calculating. By the time I'd realized twenty-five grams was half a pound I was so wide awake it felt like morning - half a pound weight loss from one meal of celery; that was amazing, I needed to celebrate. So I went to the kitchen, poured myself a celebratory brandy and found a couple of chocolate cookies to go with it.

I was just about to eat them when Yo came home. I heard him opening the front door and just had time sling the cookies in the waste bin and the brandy down the drain, then rush back to bed.

A few moments later he came into the bedroom. “How's your diet going,” he asked.

“Shhh,” I hissed grumpily. “I'm trying to get to sleep.” So he got into bed, put out the light and within seconds was snoring like a warthog.

When I'm full of booze I'm completely unaware of Yo's appalling night noises but when I'm sober they're unbearable. Eventually I turned on the bedside light and read a book till morning.

That was two nights ago, and last night was much the same. For lunch today I had sautéed broccoli, for dinner there's an ounce of fish. The good news is I've lost another half pound, though maybe it's not such good news after all – for even if my weight continues go down at the same rate it will mean four more months of celery and snoring.

All because of the awful English weather.

RELATED LINKS

Best brandy

Cecconis.co.uk

About British weather

Wikipedia about celery

Savini restuarant, Milan

Wikipedia about snoring

Really good chocolate chip cookies

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Sunday, June 4th, 2006

Back in Thailand after three weeks in London, it was a joy to browse through the local papers over breakfast and see oodles of political incorrectness. Newspapers in Thailand love it. Writing in Thai, respected and serious columnists call Koreans ‘pickle-eaters', Chinese ‘floor-spitters', Americans ‘burger-belchers' and Australians ‘kanagaroo johnnies'. I can't think of the last time a British newspaper dared to call a French man a frog or an Italian a wop. But when President Mugabe visited Thailand last year no-one cared that a prominent journalist referred to him as coming from the land of stinky-armpits.

The one nationality which escapes all this is the English. For some reason the Thais overlook all the bad characteristics of package-tour drunks and girl-lusting yobbos and refer to the English as ‘phoo dee', which while it translates literally as ‘good people' actually means ‘classy people'.

“Why?” I've asked Thais many times.

“Because that's how we see you,” they tell me. “The English are the best behaved of all the foreigners who come here.”

I've seen plenty who aren't! Sometimes, with sufficient over-indulgence of wine and brandy, that might even include me. It's incredibly difficult, once suitably filled with alcohol, for an Englishman abroad to be indifferent to bad service or lousy food or a wrongly inflated bill. And if you ever hear me protesting in Thailand that's what it's likely to be about - the bill has come to twice what the menu said it ought to - the ‘selection of fine cheeses' to finish off the meal turned out to be some ancient cheddar and Danish blue kept rotting in the fridge for three months – or the wine by the glass came out of a bottle opened a week ago last Tuesday. But while, in the case of restaurants, we're talking about the genteel grumbles of a classy English poofter like me, for real loudmouths you need to visit girlie-bars and listen to beer swilling football fans over here for a week of cheap fucking.

It's surprising how quickly these visitors forget how little everything is costing them. A beer in a pleasant outside bar costs less than a pound, but if the bar over the road charges sixty pence and the one they're sitting at costs seventy pence that alone will be enough to trigger belligerence. Worse still is when they discover that the pretty bar-girl they're chatting up has subtley wooed them away from cheap Heineken and got them onto imported Japanese beers at three quid each. The bill still only comes to forty pounds but it's a lot more than the four quid they paid last night. Foul-mouthed abuse is just the start of it. If they take the bar-girl to their hotel and find she's a ‘banana surprise' it might require the police to calm things down.

Yet Thais continue to refer to the English as ‘classy people'. It's as if they simply don't see us when we're behaving badly. Or perhaps they don't see anyone in that light. Thai society is without doubt the most tolerant in the world, but the tolerant surface of compromise and smiles actually covers a sinister underbelly.

This morning I drove into town. Coming round a corner a girl was standing in the middle of the road. I swerved to avoid her and stopped, almost touching a parked Toyota. At once the owner was with me.

“You broke one of my rear lights,” he insisted.

My car was close to the man's car but had never made contact with it. Nevertheless one of his rear lights was broken.

“You'll have to pay to repair it,” he muttered menacingly, and glowered at me through the window.

I got out of the car to take a closer look. “I didn't break it,” I said.

“Yes you did – look!” The man pointed to the broken plastic. “It's going to cost 2740 baht to fix. You can check the price at the shop. Now give me the money.”

A policeman arrived and a small crowd began to gather.

“It seems strange," I told the policeman, "that he should know exactly the price a new one will cost. Perhaps it got broken some time ago and he was waiting for a bit of luck."

In Thailand people are killed everyway day as a result of arguments that start like this. Sometimes it happens there and then; more often a little later – usually by a third party who is paid as little as £50. The papers are full of these stories - a policeman shot and killed for accidentally standing on a colleague's toe in a discotheque - a man knifed to death for flashing an admiring glance at a friend's fiancé - a driver machine-gunned for overtaking a flashy car and giving a cocky wave.

Although I knew all this, circumstances overcame caution. "If it was me who broke his light," I asked the policeman, "where's the broken plastic on the ground?”

There wasn't any of course and the man looked at me menacingly, ready to kill. Normally, foreigners, unable to speak Thai, would not be able to say what I'd said, and that's just as well. By plunging in and speaking Thai, I'd effectively called this man a liar in front of a small crowd of people. In Thai eyes that was a worse offence than breaking his rear light.

The policeman, recognising that our positions were now entrenched, turned to the owner of the Toyota . "We need to find a compromise. Perhaps you could find a cheaper light."

The man considered for a moment and agreed. "Maybe I could get one for 1500 baht."

"There you are," the policeman told me. "Give him 2000 baht and it's solved."

"Why 2000 baht?" I asked.

"500 for me," the policeman explained. "Talking to you has made me thirsty. I need a drink."

And there we were! A thoroughly Thai compromise. The policeman smiled, the owner of the Toyota smiled, and since it would have been bad-mannered for me not to do so, I did too.

“Where do you come from?” the policeman asked.

When I told him he immediately said “phoo dee", as if my Englishness had been the reason for me to pay up rather than the threat of being gunned down later in the day.

I handed the man 2000 baht and he gave 500 to the policeman. The policeman turned and gave me a wah - palms touching, fingertips to the nose – a masterpiece of well-mannered politeness - and the owner of the Toyota followed suit. A moment earlier I'd felt I was being defrauded out of 2000 baht, now I was in a circle of respect and politeness. It almost made me forget I hadn't broken the man's rear light at all.

So that was that, the whole thing solved for forty quid, less than the cost of getting someone killed. It's this sort of unexpected occurrence that makes Thailand so intriguing - delight and frustration in equal proportions.

It's good to be back.

RELATED LINKS

Thai blogs

Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand

A Thai teenager in trouble with the police

Police force can't live without taking bribes

Thailand's complete lack of political correctness

Corruption and governance in the New Thailand

'Mango Sauce' - Taking a prurient interest in Farang life in Thailand

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Sunday, May 28th, 2006

Sometimes it beats me how so many people can have so much to say. Open any of the world's top newspapers any day of the week and there are half a dozen highly paid journalists sounding off about something - Simon Jenkins in the Times, David Aaronovitch in the Guardian, Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph, Bob Herbert and a dozen others in the New York Times; not to mention the Washington Post, the Times of India, Le Figaro, the Globe and Mail and another couple of thousand other papers around the world - and all this on just one single day, thousands of forceful well-argued opinions with more to come tomorrow and more the day after that.

Finding things week in week out on which to express a controversial opinion seems a pretty tough job. I know all too well the three or four things in my own life that get me agitated. To have to add a new one to the list each week would be mind-numbing.

This was confirmed to me when I spent a couple of hours last month chatting with Julie Burchill. For many years Julie has been Britain 's opinionist par excellence. Not only is she commonsensical and down-to-earth, she has the good sense never to be fair or well-balanced. In the period of her life when she was taking cocaine, she argued that drugs were essential to a healthy intellect and anyone who didn't take them was an idiot. When she lived in London anyone who lived anywhere else was a halfwit. Now she lives in Brighton anyone who's still in London is brain dead.

You'd have thought someone like Julie would be happy to earn her lifelong income from expressing opinions. But in the end she couldn't stand it. A few weeks before our chat she'd suddenly realized her house in Brighton was worth enough that, if she sold it, she would never have to express an opinion again. So she did. She bought a flat for a quarter of the proceeds, invested the rest and handed in her notice to The Times. ‘What a relief,' she told me, ‘to be able to read newspapers without having to scour them every day for something I could profoundly disagree with.'

If Julie's story is the norm it means that behind all this opinionising in our daily newspapers there is nothing more than the need for a pay cheque. Most of these opinionists are clever enough to know their rants will do nothing to change the world. Politicians will continue to be corrupt, religionists to preach intolerance, racists to racialise, pacifists to pacify, England to lose test matches, Americans to talk loudly in restaurants, and Ken Livingstone to say daft things. Not to mention all the other events that make life interesting – wars, terrorist acts, sex scandals, earthquakes and tsunamis. Which brings me to the most popular subject on which opinionists like to opinionate - saving the planet.

The ecological state of the world seems to be every opinion maker's number one fallback. In no time at all they can knock up a thousand words on why we (or politicians, or scientists, or multinational corporations) should be doing more to save the planet, yet the reality is all too clear. People who say they want to save the planet aren't really interested in the planet as such; they're interested in the continuance of human life.

For my part the planet isn't something I get too excited about. I reckon it's doing fine. I admit, left to its own devices, it might eventually turn into a lump of ice or a whiff of gas (and bang go all of us), but as someone who likes to read a book without wishing to change the storyline I'm reasonably happy with that.

Which brings me to the one thing that happened last week that really should have got me writing a Burchill-like tirade. I was sitting in Le Suquet, an excellent fish restaurant in Kensington, eating a dozen fine claires, when the person at the next table lit up a cigarette and blew smoke all over my food.

It's extraordinary that this sort of thing can still happen in London. I may not care much what happens to the planet – but blowing smoke on my oysters……

RELATED LINKS

About Le Suquet

History of oysters

Wikipedia on Ken Livingstone

The Julie Burchill random recycler

Pieces by Simon Jenkins for The Times

David Aaronovitch argues in favour of ID cards

Janet Daley - British should learn to be like Americans

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Sunday, May 21st, 2006

Arriving in London last week, it was straight from the airport to a TV interview for a new pop programme. I do lots of these things – I Love the 80s. I love the 70s, Hall of Fame, Battle of the Rockstars, all that sort of stuff.

There are two good reasons why I do these programmes - firstly, it proves I'm still alive - secondly, it pays for a few extra dinners and bottles of wine.

This time it was ‘Battle of the Popstars' – a three hour programme during which a dozen or so well-known popstars will get voted down to a final three, and then to a winner. The lady producer seemed to have decided I should be the industry's gay spokesman and nearly every question was pointed in that direction. “What do you think about Westlife's Mark coming out?” was the first thing she asked.

It didn't seem worth explaining that I'd never heard of Mark leave alone his ‘coming out'. All I know about Westlife is that they're a stiff looking boy band who wear clothes that make them look manikins in the window at Aquascutum. My ignorance of the group's more intimate details didn't seem worth going into, so I simply told the producer that if this chap Mark had come out it seemed like a sensible thing to have done.

“But please could you put it this way…” she asked; then gave me the soundbite they were hoping to get. Since it didn't seem to clash with my general view of life I gave her what she wanted.

I was meant to have recorded this programme six weeks ago but couldn't because I was abroad. The programme is now almost finished and the producer knows exactly what she's missing. “We'd like you to say that Boy George's emergence as a star in the eighties helped other young gays come out,” she said.

“I'm not sure I agree with that. It might even be the opposite. Boy George was so outrageous that a lot of young gays were turned off by him. They didn't want to say they were gay for fear of being lumped together with him.”

“That's not what we wanted from you on that one,” she told me, so I tried a different tack, “Well how about this then… Boy George probably helped a lot of effeminate young gays realise they could be proud of what they were and should have no fear of being themselves.”

She seemed happy with that so we moved on to Elton. “Could you please say that Elton's video with drag-queen Rupaul for his remake of Don't Go Breaking My Heart was a further instance of the music industry helping young gays gain confidence in themselves.”

Although I'd heard the Elton-Rupaul duet I'd never seen the video so I didn't feel qualified to answer. The producer and I fenced around a bit until I found something that satisfied her. Elton had once told George Michael that at the beginning of the eighties he'd deliberately lowered his voice (he'd decided it was unbecoming for a person of his age to sing in such a high timbre), so I told her, “The beauty of singing with Rupaul was that Elton could have a female person to duet with yet still be able to lower the key to his new manly voice.”

Then we reached the inevitable questions about George Michael. More fencing and more compromise.

If all this sounds tedious and annoying, it wasn't. Instead of the usual hour of meandering questions with the editor later having to search for the juicy bits, this had only taken fifteen minutes. All in all, I liked the efficiency and I wondered why the programme-makers didn't make their interviews even more efficient. Why not script the whole show, print up the list of required answers and send them out to a few dozen industry names. People could choose which answers they would be prepared to give and the filming could be done in just a few minutes per person. In fact, with modern technology perhaps it would be possible to create the whole thing digitally from a still photo.

Next time I must remember to suggest it.

RELATED LINKS

Mark of Westlife comes out

George Michael website

Aquascutum website

Boy George website

Wikipedia on Rupaul

Elton John website

Westlife website

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Sunday, May 14th, 2006

Jazz versus rock has long been a debate. I often hear people complain that so much time in a live jazz performance is taken up by waffle, going nowhere. And it's true. A live jazz performance is often like a séance, the group dithering around, trying this and that, improvising experimentally, looking for that magic moment.

When that moment arrives the band starts to swing. Swing is nothing to do with power or drive or musical aggression, it's to do with cresting a wave. Swing, when it clicks into place, is as if the entire band have lifted themselves simultaneously, miraculously, onto a huge rollercoaster of a Hawaiian wave. The trick is then to stay abreast of it, balancing on the crest as it pounds towards shore. The musicians are not in control of the power that drives them, it takes them over. All they can hope to do is keep their balance atop of it as it surges forwards, giving them and the listeners the most glorious lift-off. To be part of an audience when an artist pulls of this supreme trick is the reason for tolerating all of live jazz's dithering moments. To have been there when Oscar Peterson or Errol Garner or Miles or Dizzy or Charlie Parker actually ‘did it' was worth every second of pre-magic-moment waffle.

Rock music takes a different approach, as does most rhythm & blues and big band music. This is commercial music with an audience sitting waiting. The audience want something dramatic to be delivered and aren't prepared to wait around while the band experiment. Rock musicians don't have the luxury of paddling around in deep water waiting for a miracle wave that will project the forwards; they have to create their own momentum. Instead of searching for swing, rock bands pound ahead regardless - aggressively pressing forward with the song and its accompanying riffs.

For the most part rock adopts a different rhythmic form from jazz, the four beats of the bar being broken into even-sized portions while Jazz's ‘dotted' rhythm breaks them up unevenly. A rock band won't fall of its Hawaiian wave because it's not on one; a rock band's forward flow is more like being aboard a speeding bus, the band knows what the route is and there'll be no surprise twists and turns. While the jazz audience revels in the unexpected, the rock audience is usually waiting for the familiar. Jazz, when it swings, lifts up the mind like pot or E or acid and takes it somewhere unknown. Rock is like amphetamine, focusing the mind on simply surging forward. Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Guns and Roses, U2, Radiohead – all of them have delivered great music, but all of them turn their backs on swing in favour of adrenaline-fired rock.

In sexual terms, great moments of rock are like hard fucking. Great moments of jazz are like flying on a kiss.

RELATED LINKS

Wikepedia on Dizzy Gillespie

Oscar Peterson website

Wikipedia on rock music

Charlie Parker website

Led Zeppelin website

Wikipedia on jazz

U2 website

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Sunday, May 7th, 2006

Last Sunday Yo and I had lunch with an elephant. It wasn't what we'd planned - we meant to have lunch with Yo's grandpa, but the elephant rather took over.

For the last few weeks Yo's grandpa has been staying with his auntie in a small town just outside Rayong, a seaside city about forty minutes from where we live in Pattaya.

Rayong isn't a touristy city, it's the central base for the Thai navy and is also the centre of the Thai motor industry. Our plan was to take Yo's auntie and her youngest child together with Yo's grandpa to a beach restaurant. I should point out, we're not talking about white table cloths and Martini umbrellas. Rayong is totally Thai. Restaurants on the beach consist of plastic tables and chairs on the sand underneath large thatched umbrellas just a few feet from where the waves wash up. The cooking is done at the side of the beach road - flamed barbecues and smoke filled woks. The end result is seafood of unsurpassable freshness - mostly fish and crustacea.

There were five of us for lunch - Yo, me, his grandpa, his auntie and her one-year-old boy. For that many people we ordered far too much food - rock lobster with garlic sauce, fresh oysters with chili dip, crab sautéed with curry paste, prawn fried rice and a fried fish with ‘three-flavoured' sauce.

“The largest fish you've got,” I told the waiter, (because all too often they bring some tiny little red snapper with hardly enough meat for one).

Then the elephant appeared.

I first saw it some way off, lumbering towards us along the sand as the food was being delivered. At the time I was chatting to Yo's grandpa. He's a charming chap of seventy-eight who spent his twenties and thirties as a performer with a 'likae' troop.

'Likae' is traveling theatre. Largely dying out these days, it was once the only entertainment rural Thai towns and villages ever got. Somewhere between a British repertory group and a circus, the troupe would come into town for one or two nights, set up their stage in the town square and perform well known plays with lots of familiar jokes and bawdiness.

Yo's grandpa was the troupe's comedian. Anything funny - be it telling a joke, singing a comic song or falling off the stage and showing his behind. He hasn't done it for forty years but he still has the broadest smile and continuously spread across his face. Over lunch we ate our way through the mountain of food we'd ordered while he told us a few of the funny things he used to do. It was at the end of one of these stories, with Yo grinning broadly and me laughing loudly, that the elephant lumbered up. It was just a baby, exceptionally cute, waving its head from side to side like an Indian shopkeeper making an apology.

Since we were busy eating, its minders would normally have led it on past, but when the baby elephant heard my loud laugh, and saw Yo's big smile and his grandpa's great grin, it stopped, right in front of our table, and started pawing the sand with its foot like a petulant child.

Just at that moment the waiter brought the fish. I'd asked for the biggest and expected enough for four or five. What we got was something the size of a small shark - all of three feet long, beautifully battered and fried, with a large head and sad reproachful eyes. We were already satiated and had completely forgotten we'd ordered it. For it to arrive at this late stage of the meal and be so utterly huge was ridiculous. And we all burst into laughter.

The elephant took to this enormously. It shook its head vigorously and turned its eyes from mine to Yo's to his grandpa's. Then suddenly, totally unexpectedly, sat down.

I'd never seen an elephant sit before except in a circus. I'd always presumed it wasn't a natural position for an elephant, not really comfortable, but this was obviously not the case. The elephant was clearly as comfortable as could be and had no intention of moving. It liked our laughter and intended to stay for more, which made us laugh even louder. This in turn made the elephant join in, waving its trunk and making a noise that imitated our laughing quite closely. Its minders, fearful I was about to complain, urged it to get up and move on.

“Let it stay,” I told them, and with all that fish to get through suggested they join us.

I gave the waiter some money and asked him to run up the road to buy cheap bananas for the elephant. I hadn't realized how cheap they would be. He came back with twenty kilos and plonked them down in front of it leaving the minders looking most upset. “We could have sold you those”, they told me, piqued. Still, they got over it and we all ate and chatted happily.

Between noisy munches, the elephant appeared to take a real interest in what we were saying. “I think it's me,” Yo's grandpa said, “I always got on well with animals.”

The elephant's two minders were students who did this part-time on Saturdays and Sundays. One was a veterinary student the other was doing business studies. They were a pleasant couple and I didn't want to get into coflict with them over the exploitation of Thailand's elephants, so I just listened. "We pay a thousand baht to rent the elephant for the weekend," they told me, "and usually we can make a profit of three thousand baht from the food we sell to people who want to feed it."

The man they rented it from was an 'elephant entrepreneur'. He had about thirty of them. "All babies, poached from jungles in the north or sold through the back door of private zoos".

When they weren't being taken out by their minders these elephants usually weren't fed much. "Underfeeding keeps them small," the minders told me, "It makes them more attractive to the public."

The baby elephant who lunched with us was called Boon. By the time it had eaten all the bananas it was no longer hungry so I gave the students two thousand baht to compensate for their loss of business.

This may sound like a strange day out, but for Thailand it all seemed pretty normal.

RELATED LINKS

Thai fish recipes

About 'likae' theatre

Baby elephants not fit for shows

The unemployed elephants of Thailand

Everything there is to know about Thai food

Thai elephants play musical instruments in a band

The elephant situation in Thailand - a plea for help

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Sunday, Apr 30th, 2006

Last Monday's Bangkok Post had a close-up picture of a 13 year old Moslem boy being circumcised, his face twisted with pain. There was no anesthetic and the circumcisor was not even a trained nurse. Under the photo was a short piece in which the boy told a reporter how frightened he was and how much he would prefer not to have it done.

Admittedly this was Thailand not Britain, but every Jewish and Moslem boy in Britain suffers much the same fate and it puzzles me. How is it that in Britain fox-hunting gets people worked up while cutting bits off boys' knobs doesn't? Why aren't the adults who do this prosecuted? Religion is the obvious answer, but not a complete one, because, if a parent were to cut a boy's arm with a razor and let blood, claiming it was being doing in the name of religion, the child would be out of their hands and into care in a flash.

Circumcision is power-mongering – no different from taking a red hot branding iron and burning the name of religion into the flesh of the boy's bare buttocks. It both brands the child and warns him of religion's power to interfere in his life. But circumcision, as we all know, is only the visible tip of the iceberg - worse still is what religionists try to shove into children's brains. The Pope objected to Harry Potter books because, he said, they might stimulate children to think about good and evil in a way which didn't follow Christian teaching. Children thinking for themselves, of course, would be a disaster for religious dogma.

Whether it's Christianity, Islam or Judaism, it's all the same sludge. It clogs up young brains like saturated fat in old people's arteries and eventually leads to a brain attack. Christians have been a bit smug this year, looking on in a superior way as their fellow Islamic religionists suffered multiple brain attacks and ran around threatening to kill cartoonists. Forty years ago I remember Christian mobs doing much the same thing. John Lennon told a reporter the Beatles were bigger than Jesus and the next day religionist thugs flocked into the streets of southern US cities threatening to kill any Beatle who dared come to town. Not surprisingly the Beatles were scared. They never played live again.

Here's a few things that might be a step in the right direction. Secular governments should list religion as a mental disorder. Parents with this disorder should not be allowed to bring up children. Protection should be given to children under existing laws governing mental health. Three new laws need to be passed.

•  Churches and places of worship should be subject to the same licensing laws as pubs and bars and no-one under the age of 18 should be allowed into them.

•  The age of consent for entering into any religious ceremony should be 18 and a ban should be imposed on all christenings, baptisms, faith related circumcisions and religious initiation rites for anyone under that age.

•  Anyone attempting to convert a person under 18 to a religious belief should be prosecuted and put on the religious offenders register.

RELATED LINKS

Foreskin restoration

History of circumcision

Religion and brain damage

Circumcision as a memeplex

Can circumcision cause brain damage?

Thought contagion - how belief spreads through society

Religious belief causes higher murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide

Sunday, Apr 23rd, 2006

Lunch on Sunday, whether in summer by the river, or winter at a packed local restaurant, has a style and feel to it all of its own. Strange that a mere day of the week should have such an influence on the feel of a meal. Yet even now, living by the sea in a tropical climate, I find Sunday presents options for midday eating that are distinctly different from any other day. Mainly, I suppose, it's because normal life doesn't have to resume at 2pm but can be postponed till the next morning.

Today, for instance, Yo and I drove ten miles down the coast to a small fishing village where a dilapidated restaurant sits on stilts above the sea and attracts a Sunday crowd of film and television personalities from Bangkok. They come in hordes to eat fresh lobster and crab and shellfish, driven there by chauffeurs in S-type Mercs, bringing their own wine, posh bottles of La Tour and Montrachet. They drink it sitting on plastic chairs at scrubby old tables, but with a miraculous cooling breeze blowing off the surrounding sea.

Another option is Pascals, a classy local joint that provides a voluminous Sunday buffet. A couple of weeks back, proceedings were silenced mid-lunch by some visiting Korean opera singers at the next table who stood up and gave a magical impromptu performance. It reminded me of the restaurants Christopher Hunter used to run in London where this sort of thing happened week after week.

Before the days of Conran and Gordon Ramsay, Christopher was one of London's first great restaurant entrepreneurs. His initial venture was in the sixties, La Popotte in Knightsbridge, just thirty yards from Harrods. This was the number one Sunday lunch venue for the new young music industry – pop stars, groups, managers and songwriters – the Beatles, the Stones, Dusty, Cilla – at one time or another all of them turned up to Christopher's Sunday lunches, which often went on till 6pm.

At the Popotte Christopher was just the manager but by the end of the sixties he'd put together enough money to open his own restaurant, Hunters - a dazzling palace of luxury in Chelsea, with a white Steinway especially constructed for duetting and a display of plants to match Kew Gardens.

Christopher was the consummate charmer. One summer Sunday, when it might have been better to have driven out of town, a crowd of us woke late and arrived at Hunters in the early afternoon. Christopher came to our table and announced he had fresh lobster.

“That would be perfect,” I told him, “but will it be enough? Lobster portions are so small.”

Christopher was so willowy he could stand two feet from your table yet somehow lean forward from the waist with enough flexibility to speak intimately into your ear. Doing this, he whispered, “Sweetheart, don't tell anyone but I'll slip you a double helping.”

He did, and it was delicious. But when the bill came he'd charged double too. Well why not? He'd never said he wouldn't, and anyway, he needed the money.

Chris had a fatal addiction. On Monday mornings, having packed the place out all day Saturday and Sunday, he simply couldn't resist putting his fingers in the till and taking enough money for a few days in Tangier. Although the profit from Hunters was substantial, Christopher's taste for Arab boys matched it pound for pound, and after three years Hunters had to close.

Undaunted, Chris found new backers and opened Friends, a vast wharehouse in Chelsea where Sunday lunch became the restaurant's entire purpose. This allowed Chris to spend five profligate days a week squandering profits in North Africa. Friends was enormous (a disused warehouse), and held a five hundred people. Lunch was roast joints – lamb, beef, pork – the simplest of fare but matched by Chris's extraordinary flair for persuading the likes of Judy Garland or Shirley MacLaine or Danny La Rue or Frankie Howerd to turn up and do a show around four in the afternoon. How he persuaded stars of this magnitude to come I have no idea. He couldn't have been paying them or there'd have been no money left for Morocco on Monday.

Not surprisingly, after a few years Friends was closed and replaced by Company – new backers, new address, but basically more of the same. Chris took help for his addiction and swore off Morocco. For a whole year he turned up for work every day, packing them in seven days a week, using his charm to make sure every table ordered champagne. As before he also provided the best cabaret in London. It was there, before she became a famous novelist, that I saw Lynda La Plante doing exquisite stand-up comedy.

Like all recovered junkies, the day came when Chris's self-control exploded. In a matter of weeks, two years profits were thrown to the wind in Tangier. For a month Chris disappeared altogether. When he came back the doors to Company were locked and a bailiff's notice was posted outside.

Yet Chris still pulled the trick off one more time. This time downstairs in the Kings Road. Now there was no cabaret, just Christopher dispensing endless charm to the camp and famous. Sunday was still the big pull of the week, and as before, Monday was till-fingering day.

This time, though, when the restaurant sank, Christopher went with it. His energies finally drained by too many boys and bankruptcies.

RELATED LINKS

Liza Minelli website

Danny La Rue website

Franke Howerd website

Shirley Maclaine website

Wikipedia on Sunday lunch

Lynda La Plante biography

The 'Burroughs' report on Tangier

---

Sunday, Apr 16th, 2006

Before rock ‘n' roll, songs were the medium; records were simply a way of delivering them to the consumer. From rock ‘n' roll onwards, records themselves became the medium. The pop era had begun.

Record companies realised that a penny's worth of vinyl pressed with a hit song could be sold at a profit of ten thousand per cent, one hundred times its real value. In the course of just a few days, a million pennies could be turned into a million pounds. But before this could be done they had to embark on a few tedious chores – they had to find a singer, a song, and a record producer who could turn it into a unique sound.

A hundred years ago, when the recording of music first started, it was its ability to capture magic moments that made it so alluring – fantastic moments of classical performance or jazz improvisation could be captured and delivered to the home as recordings. But from the pop era onwards, recording ceased to be a mode of delivery; it became the art form itself. Recording pop and rock was not the art of capturing magic moments; it was the art of creating them.

Coupled with this was the art of marketing; music and commerce in perfect harmony, the packaging as important as the recordings it contained. A rock or pop album which didn't sell could not be termed an artistic success; commercial success was a defining part of the music's artistry. The work-of-art was the record, in its sleeve, in the shop, actually being sold.

Record companies learnt all this and for forty years executed it perfectly. Between pop and rock, singles and albums, reissues and compilations, record companies had half a century of stunning profits. Billions of albums were sold, all of them pressed from vinyl costing one hundredth of the album's retail selling price. But with downloads and the imminent demise of vinyl records, record companies are feeling fearful about the future. Only at Sony have they understood where things are going.

In a recent executive meeting in LA, I found myself with a group of people listening to a newly completed album. We were not, as we would have been in the past, trying to decide which songs would make the best singles. We were picking out the musical phrases which would make the best ring tones. Currently record companies see ring tones as an additional way of promoting albums, but, with the income they receive from licensing them, it won't be long before the ring tone is seen as the industry's new single. Even more important is that mobile phones will be the most popular way of delivering all other forms of music.

Sony have foreseen this and put themselves in an impregnable position. They are both a record company AND a creator of mobile phone technology. My guess is it won't be long before we see Nokia bidding for Warner, Motorola for Universal and Samsung for EMI.

 

RELATED LINKS

History of vinyl

History of Sony

History of rock and roll

History of recorded music

Forbes Magazine on the economics of ringtones

Q Magazine - 100 Best Record Sleeves - special edition - buy on line

A successful subway musician has some advice for an ailing music industry

Sunday, Apr 9th, 2006

So there are the Rolling Stones, playing in China twenty years after Wham! paved the way for them, and they can't even get a Chinese audience to come and see them. Well it's not surprising really. They're only playing China because the name Shanghai has a good ring to it – good enough to create a profit from a live telecast of ‘The Stones in Shanghai' back in the USA. So in the end, their motives come down to much the same as ours were with Wham!... TV.

Wham! played China in order to get an entire week of once-an-hour coverage on the three US news channels. It worked, and the resulting flood of publicity was enough to take them from being just another Brit pop act to being a ‘stadium' group. Three weeks after they played in Beijing we were booking up a US tour in seventy-thousand-seater venues. It seems weird, though, that twenty years later the name ‘China' still has enough of a ring to get the Stones a weekend of worldwide media coverage. At least with Wham! we got the hype right and played for an audience of Chinese teenagers.

The Stones average ticket price in Shanghai is around US $60. That means an entirely privileged audience – expats and the like. Besides, the Rolling Stones are completely unknown to the Chinese. Young people are more familiar with Linkin' Park or Coldplay, and older ones went through their youth with no Western music at all. What will be really exciting is when China becomes a market worth cracking for Western groups.

Sooner or later young Chinese will latch on to an up-and-coming Western rock or pop group and give it a market in the East before it has one in the West. It happened in Russia forty years ago with a British group called the Arrows, and all over South East Asia ten years ago with a group called Michael Learns To Rock. It's a weird phenomenon for a new group to find themselves a huge act somewhere in the East and absolutely nothing when they get back home again. Once China manages to do that for a Western act it will have come of age as a music market. Meanwhile, I suppose it's telling the world it's now open for pretty much anything.

Watching the Rolling Stones play reminded me that only last year Shanghai opened a world-class Formula One race track. In racing terms, the Stones are the equivalent of some dreadful stock car event - lumbering old wrecks with their doors hanging off, lolloping round the course crashing into each other and barely able to make it to the finishing line. It's not a great image for the Anglo-American music industry that a bunch of ancient decrepits like the Stones are representing it in the world's largest emerging market. But I suppose it's the truth. Just as the Stones look like a load of battered car wrecks, so does the Western music industry look to be in terminal decline.

Perhaps, even for pointers on business, the West might start looking to China to see how things could be done better.

RELATED LINKS

Yahoo news - the Stones in Shanghai

'I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch' - Buy on Line

Information on rock and pop music in China today

About Wham! (from 'I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch')

About The Rolling Stones (from 'Black Vinyl White Powder')

What people said about 'I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch'

Interview with me for Agence Presse re taking Wham! to China

Sunday, Apr 2nd, 2006

It was an idea I had many years ago, a sort of reverse version of Alistair Cooke's ‘Letter from America '… ‘PHONE CALL TO THE USA'.

Not by an urbane Englishman living in New York writing home to his fellow countrymen with an explanation of America's foibles, but a fifteen minute chat to an American audience from a gay, God-hating, globe-trotting, over-indulging, wine-aholic, opinionated, gossipy, cantankerous British pop manager.

The advantages of making a radio programme this way would mean I would not have to change my life in any way whatsoever other than the need to find fifteen minutes a week to record myself and perhaps another five to post, wire, or email the result to whoever in America would broadcast it.

As time went by offers started to crop up but I was profoundly lazy about chasing them up because I'd realised that to talk for fifteen minutes would mean preparing three thousand words to read from. And writing three thousand words each week was going to take a lot longer than fifteen minutes – it might well take as long as fifteen hours, which, with all the travel, socializing, eating, drinking, partying and pulling that had to be fitted into my life, simply didn't seem a practicable amount of extra time to be found. But out of the blue came Larry Flick.

Larry Flick has a daily morning show on that new phenomenon of American broadcasting, satellite radio. For some reason, American courts, or government, or powers-that-be, have for the moment decided that what comes into your homes via satellite radio is free of governmental controls and censorship. To receive satellite radio you buy a special radio and pay an annual subscription and initially it was thought this would be a slow growth situation. Then Sirius, one of the two corporations who plunged into this new form of radio, managed to seduce Howard Stern away from terrestrial radio.

Howard Stern is someone who likes to call a spade a spade – or rather, what he likes best is to call a penis a dick, a rectum an asshole, a vagina a cunt, and the President of the United States all three of those things. On Sirius radio he can; and the end result has been 3 million new subscribers.

But three months have passed and Sirius are beginning to worry Howard Stern might eventually run out of outrageous things to say. Looking for new ideas, Larry Flick had the idea to get hold of that gay, god-hating, globe-trotting, over-indulging, wine-aholic, opinionated, gossipy, cantankerous British pop manager I mentioned earlier, and ask him to contribute fifteen minutes a week to his own daily show on Sirius's 'Q' channel.

The beauty of Larry's idea is its lazy simplicity. I don't have to prepare a thing. Larry prompts me with questions, all I have to do is accept his prompts and go chattering into action. Radio isn't like TV - gaps and pauses can't be covered by hand gestures or frowns and smiles - in radio even the smallest silences are forbidden territory, as are ‘ums' and ‘errs'. Which is fine. Because as everyone who has ever filled me up with drink at dinner knows, the problem isn't starting me off; it's trying to make me stop.

But Sirius being Sirius, and Howard Stern having set the tone, Larry is after more than a few tips on pop management and a list of my favourite records – he's after dirt – the who's who of music-business scandal - who did what to whom, and when, and why, and what did they get paid? In fact, what he wants is pretty much what I give forth with towards the end of most evenings when I'm full of good food and wine. But since I wouldn't dare do a radio show, even on Sirius, with a sip of wine upon my lips, Larry is going to have to be my alcohol. His task is to lull me into that careless delightful world of after dinner indiscretion. And I'm sure he will.

Larry's simpatico voice and charming phraseology makes him a master of gossip extraction - he has the sort of teasing tongue that could persuade a vicar to tell a dirty joke or a headmistress to take off her knickers and wave them during school assembly. In short, he's a master at coaxing out stories that might be best left untold.

The programme is going to be bit of a contest. I want to hold on to some of the best things for a future book or two. Moreover I don't want to leave my house each morning and have to look both ways in case some hired head-stompers are lying in wait for me. On the other hand, I realize that Larry is interested in getting the best and most salacious tit-bits for his audience. Somewhere between our two positions lies the show he will get.

Actually, it's just what I was looking for. I can chatter about whatever I choose; I can be opinionated, gossipy, dodgy, bitchy or even downright dangerous. And if a wrong word slips out now and again, what the hell, this is satellite radio and verbal mishaps are what the subscribers pay for.

A mere fifteen minutes a week without preparation. What laziness. What a gift. What a fairy godmother you are Mr Larry!

RELATED LINKS

Sirius.com

About Lary Flick

Howard Stern.com

About Sirius's 'Q'channel

About satellite radio receivers

Howard Stern links and best moments

BBC archives - Alistair Cooke, 1999-2004

Sunday, Mar 26th, 2006

In America last week, after a little contretemps with US immigration officers (now branded with armbands declaring themselves part of ‘Homeland Security' with that awful thirties Germanesque ring about it), I was left thinking how strange it is that the USA is the only country whose national identity is based on a belief in what it stands for rather than the common background of its people. Freedom of speech and expression is a religion even between Americans who hate each other's views. And when you see American soldiers going off to Iraq it's always with the proviso (not just from the President but from everyone across the political spectrum) that they are going to ‘spread our values'. Which is pretty much what religious crusading has always been about, coupled of course with ‘securing markets', so that the crusading nation has enough money to keep up its lifestyle back home, thus providing a billboard for the values it wishes to spread.

That 98% of white America claims to be Christian while in Europe the figure is around 30% becomes more understandable when you realize that Americans are already believers anyway – believers in ‘being American'. It's this which so easily allows them to welcome strangers into their culture, for it isn't a culture as Europeans know it, of language and manners, but simply of assent. America is a church - ‘being American' is a religion - to become American the newcomer simply needs to convert.

This explains why Americans, anywhere in the world, whether soldiers or tourists or businessmen, are always so intrusive. It's because they are missionaries, full of righteousness and zeal about who they are. The European and Asian tradition has been to travel more unobtrusively. (OK, I know the exceptions – busloads of beer drinking Germans, football supporting Brits, floor-spitting Chinese, but, hey!– don't mess up my argument.)

Nowadays, as Europe becomes less religious it becomes increasingly difficult for its inhabitants to continue to believe in America. But, if America is a ‘religion', what is France, or Britain, or Germany?

France, with a language which always ends in phrases with an upwards inflection, seems to be a question. While Italy, undoubtedly, is a family lunch, with babies crying, cousins flirting and relatives arguing.

Germany is a mechanical noise – efficient but un-pretty, like its language. Japan is a huge bath-house to which foreigners aren't admitted. Holland is a slice of clean flavourless cheese; Andorra, an unreachable itch in the middle of your back; China, a loan shop; Thailand, a wet dream; and Australia, a gloriously rude fart.

England is still what it always has been - a big whinge.

RELATED LINKS

Attention all citizens living in God's country without his permission - a special invitation from the Department of Faith to become a real American

www.fart.fm - why Australia needs a new enery policy

On American morals, by GK Chesterton

Mind your manners when in Germany

The meaning of American citizenship

How to tell if you're French

The Italians, by AA Gill

Sunday, Mar 19th, 2006

I forgot my damned visa.

What an embarrassment. I was meant to be giving a talk in Shanghai to a hundred or so people on the subject of ‘How I Got Wham Into China'. Then, just 12 hours before I was meant to be flying, sitting at the bar of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club, I suddenly remembered I'd forgotten my visa.

I got it the next morning but by the time it was safely in my passport and I'd got myself to the airport it was 4pm, exactly the time I was meant to stand up and start talking at ‘M on the Bund'.

This was last Sunday, and I finally arrived in Shanghai around 7.30pm. I went straight to the venue, passing through Pudong, the new area of the city, gaudy and giddy.

Shanghai annually devours 80% of the world's output of cement. The city is a maze of skyscrapers, crazily designed glass and steel, some going up crooked instead of straight, some twisting around in the middle - anything clever that an architect can think of. Below them, the streets are neon madness, yet Shanghai has bad electricity shortages. On the outside, the skyscrapers are dazzlingly lit, looking like some sort of static firework display, inside, the power is cut, the heating is turned off and fifty story hotels operate with just one lift.

‘M on the Bund' is Shanghai's best European restaurant, and the event is the Shanghai literary festival. The woman behind the festival is Michelle Garnaut, who owns the restaurant and gives it over to seminars during the day.

When I arrive it's already 8.30 and literary events are over for the day. The restaurant is buzzing, with Michelle standing at the entrance greeting customers. I introduce myself and hang my head in shame. She leads me to the bar where a dozen or so people have stoically hung on waiting for me to arrive. They're an odd bunch, a professor from Oxford University, a Brit called Paul who runs an expats club, another Brit called Paul who has a local PR company, a couple in education who live in New Zealand, and a few assorted Americans and Aussies. They've been waiting five hours and deserve some entertainment so I give them the low-down on lecture tours in American colleges.

“You're met at the airport by a couple of blue-rinse grannies well into their sixties (honorary secretaries of the college speaking club), who drive you to your hotel. They're tiny, these two, the one driving can't see over the top of the steering wheel, and suddenly she'll turn and say, ‘I fucked Jeff Beck, you know. It was when the group were in Chicago.' These two old crones were teenage groupies when I toured America with the Yardbirds in the Sixties. Now they're respectable grandmothers. The driver nods towards her friend. ‘Annie went with Jimmy Page - sucked his little dickie.' Annie nods and grins, 'Bit disappointing sizewise.' She suddenly gives me a ferocious grope. 'For God's sake,' I shout, 'I'm gay'. The two grannies cackle with glee, 'Oh we love gays', then grope again. And then you're taken home to meet the grandchildren and eat bran muffins, all respectable and normal. This happens day after day, city after city."

The crowd in the bar are laughing now. These twelve people, at least, have forgiven me for not arriving earlier. Michelle comes to take us to the dinner-table. I order Moroccan soup followed by roast pork with crackling. Michelle seems intent on getting me as pissed as possible - each sip of my wine is a summons to the wine waiter to top up my glass. And he's exceptionally pretty. Michelle winks down the table to me, I sip more frequently. Clever woman.

Next to me is an Englishman who writes children's books. “How long do they take to write?” I ask.

“Sometimes just a day,” he confesses. “Children's books have more pictures, less pages and the print is bigger.”

He's currently number one on the Children's Book best seller list, so he's doing well. “I write about ten a year,” he explains.

I sip my wine. The waiter appears. It's like rubbing a magic lamp and getting a pretty genie. I've only been in Shanghai three hours and I'm pissed already.

Opposite me, becoming blurred, is the couple who live in New Zealand, both Brits, and both charming. She runs a website selling CDs, books & games shop; he arranges seminars and educational exchanges between New Zealand and South East Asian. “Malaysia 's my favourite place,” he tells me, but doesn't explain why. Or maybe he does and I can't remember. I'm distracted by the wine-genie.

The children's author leaves to watch a rugby match on TV and the New Zealand couple say it's bedtime. Surprisingly it turns out to be well after midnight. I thought I'd only been there ten minutes.

Michelle moves me up the table to join Paul the PR guy, and the Oxford professor and his wife. Paul is tall - horn-rimmed and smartly dressed with a Michael Caine accent. He admits to having had a hint of a homophobia until he read my book I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch. “It was your two exes that cured it”, he explains. “So cute the way they keep popping up throughout the book like a couple of characters from a children's TV show.”

The university professor starts grumbling about racist Britain. “They refuse to treat me as British,” he grumbles.

“But you're not, I point out, you're Indian, and have an Indian accent.”

He seems offended by this simple observation and I try to ameliorate his pique by explaining how much I enjoy living in Thailand and not being treated like a Thai. “Being a privileged outsider is better than just being one of the crowd.”

It doesn't work. The professor looks at his watch and leaves for bed. This little exchange has apparently taken two hours for it's now three o'clock. I wonder what else I said that I can't now remember?

While the wine genie ebbs and flows Michelle announces, “We need someone else gay at the table.”

I've no idea why. Did I say something? Never mind - Bruno, the restaurant manager joins us, sitting to my right, perfectly dressed, beautifully spoken and pleasantly bulky, like a bookend. Perhaps that's why Michelle asked him to sit there. Seeing me sway, she realised I would be safer hemmed in by his benign solidness. Now I can continue my flirtation with the genie.

Then suddenly it's all over. It's 5.30am and I'm being transported to my hotel room where there's a power cut. There's no heat. The room is spinning. It has twin beds so I grab both duvets and bury myself under them. In three hours I'll be on a plane to Los Angeles where I've got a business meeting later in the day.

Tiring work, these literary festivals.

RELATED LINKS

Lonely Planet on Shanghai

Frommers on M on the Bund

Architecture in modern Shanghai

About the Shanghai Literary Festival

Website of M on the Bund's architects

www.realgroovy.co.nz - CDs, books, games

Kunal Basu, fellow in strategic marketing, Templeton College, Oxford University

Sunday, Mar 12th, 2006

Last week I was in Hong Kong for the International Literary Festival. I've never been to a literary festival before so I thought I should try one. It's a strange set up. I'm used to music business events – the Grammy Awards, or the Brits, that sort of thing. Or the other type of music-business get together, like Midem, which takes place in Cannes each January, where thousands of music business executives from all over the world turn up to guzzle escargots and carre d'agneau and sit on luxury yachts in the afternoon sun getting wildly drunk on local wine. Then there are the music festivals where four or five of the worlds top artists come together for a half-million dollars apiece to play for 200,000 people in the rain in Glastonbury.

What simply doesn't exist in the music business is an event where famous pop stars and rock stars get together to talk about their work, telling each other how best to belt out a good chorus or wiggle a sexy buttock during a guitar solo, which in a literary way is what's going on at this strange festival I'm attending.

The participants are all authors, and every hour there's a little seminar or talk at which they discuss the literary equivalent of chorus-belting or buttock-wiggling – such things as, ‘how to make fact read like fiction', or ‘how to make fiction read like fact', or ‘how to give rural life in China a prescient story line within a Western literary framework.' That I, too, was supposed to be giving one of these erudite talks was a trifle daunting.

To say I'm no stranger to Hong Kong is putting it mildly. In 1969 when the British government increased the tax rate to 84%, like most people in show business I got up and left. I formed a company in Hong Kong, where the maximum tax rate was 15%, and then set about rolling around the world doing odd bits of business wherever they cropped up.

At that time Hong Kong was going through a most innovative period. A bright spark called Steve Beaver realised he could get licenses from major record companies all over the world to release hit songs in Hong Kong for very little money. In Hong Kong the market for English language pop was tiny, so if he wanted to issue an album featuring current top ten hits from England or America, a fee of a few pounds per song was sufficient. Record companies all over the world fell for this and as a result, for almost no investment at all, Steve Beaver put together the world's first compilation album featuring only top ten songs. Nowadays, compilation records are commonplace, but in the mid-seventies it was quite revolutionary. For Steve and the record company he workled for, what made it work particularly well, was that the records weren't just sold in Hong Kong but all over Asia, and then to the rest of the world too. In no time at all, Steve had made a small fortune, and as time went on an even larger one. And finally, of course, pop compilations albums became the standard all over the world.

There was another smart entrepreneur in Hong Kong at the time, an Austrian man who had the idea of recording Eastern European symphony orchestras playing well-known classics. He made the recordings in an old concert hall in Hong Kong which had rather fine acoustics and he used symphony orchestras from Russia, the Ukraine, Korea, China and Kazakhstan. With this technique he founded a record company which became the world's largest independent seller of classical music – Nexus Records. It was no rip off - the performances were superb, and so was the recording quality, and the prices were half of what major companies charged. So you see - Hong Kong has two separate claims for being right at the centre of international music-business history.

In the eighties, I was back again, passing through twice a month on my way to Beijing where I was negotiating for Wham! to play a concert in China. It was as a result of writing about that period that I was at last week's literary festival. My book ‘I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch', about taking Wham! to China, was published in Hong Kong last year and I was meant to be talking about it.

Actually I dodged around giving a proper talk. I persuaded a nice local fried of mine – Phil Whelan, a radio DJ and interviewer - to come up on stage and ask me questions, thus completely avoiding the necessity of preparing anything. As a result, instead attending of literary meetings trying to get ideas on how to pitch my talk, I spent three days in Hong Kong doing what I always do best - eating and drinking.

What's amazing about Hong Kong is how the economy, which has always boomed, is booming even more. Apart from an ever-increasing number of skyscrapers and bridges and tunnels, there's an explosion of restaurants. For the locals, being trendy has long been a passion, but whereas it used to be enough to sport an Armani bag or Nike trainers, nowadays it's equally important to be seen eating in trendy Spanish, Italian and Asian-fusion restaurants.

One night I ate in Soho - the restuarant specialised in 'Italian tapas'. Two years ago this area was steep-stepped alleyways leading up and down between warehouses that stored clothes or dried foodstuffs. Now the whole area (and it's huge) has been transformed into a centre for smart restaurants and bars, rather reminiscent of Sitges or Amalfi, but being Hong Kong there's a moving staircase running up and down alongside the stone steps.

Another day I had lunch at the Foreign Correspondents Club. This is the very opposite of the smart new places that are blooming everywhere, it's been virtually unchanged for a hundred years. It's THE place to eat a vindaloo, and I had a lamb one. Although it was distinctly Indian there was a touch of Chinese about it, all the chilis being fresh rather than half of them being dried which is more normal. It was truly sensational, as was the fire round the rim of my bum for the next forty-eight hours.

RELATED LINKS

Website on day to day life in Hong Kong from a Westerners perspective

Top twenty restaurants in Hong Kong

Hong Kong Literary Festival website

A selection of literary quizzes

Hong Kong world fact book

History of Hong Kong

Literary festivals

Sunday, Mar 5th, 2006

I spent last Saturday afternoon in ninety degree sunshine parading round a rural Thai village with a load of dancing drunks. The event was Yo's younger brother entering the monastery. In a week he'll be out again, but from today for seven days he'll be a monk.

It should have been Yo (and it should have been 12 years ago when he reached the age of 21), but he refused. He says it was his dislike of organised religion but I think it was more to do with having his head shaved. Anyway, it was decided by the family that one day Yo would make amends for his refusal by paying for his younger brother to do the same thing. How Yo managed to put it off for 12 years I'll never know – possibly by building his parents a house. But finally the day of reckoning came and he paid up (well actually, he got me to pay half).

I hadn't been to the family home for a while. On the day of the party I flew to nearby Roi-et; Yo had gone ahead by car. The area round Yo's house is truly rural and used to be extremely poor. Now it seems to be going up in the world.

The big news when Yo meets me at the airport is that the empty plot of land next door has been bought by a lawyer who's building a five bedroom house with a swimming-pool. This raises the tone of the neighbourhood even higher than it has already been raised by Yo having a European boyfriend. (By the way, ‘boyfriend' isn't the right word. The Thai word for lovers of all sorts - husbands, wives, fiancées, boy-friends, girl-friends and even people you met last week and have taken a temporary fancy to - is ‘fan' (derived from the English word associated with worshipping film-stars, pop-stars and footballers).

Yo and I arrive to find his mother and a dozen of his aunts sitting on rush matting outside the house preparing food and decorations, the two so intermixed that it's difficult to tell decorative food from edible decoration. Bawdy rural female talk is balanced by bawdy rural male talk emanating from a group of Yo's uncles on the other side of the yard, sloshing back local beer and whiskey. One of them stands up to greet me in a state of such inebriation that falling down is the only possible option, yet somehow he stays upright and, although he's unable to say a single word, manages to raise the whiskey bottle and take another swig. That's what these ceremonies are for – the women gossip, the men get blind drunk.

Midway between these two groups Yo's autistic nephew suddenly emerges from the house and stands peeing into the air. The breeze blows his pee into the faces of Yo's drunken uncles making the women scream with laughter.

Tomorrow is the ordination ceremony and there'll be open house all day but tonight there's a party - friends, relatives and neighbours – two hundred people seated at twenty or so tables. It's a trifle absurd that every impoverished rural family has at some time or other to find almost half the price of the cost of building a house just to give a party for their eldest son to enter the monastery for a week. But religious authorities know these things are made more attractive when a party's attached and there's usually someone around who can pay up. In Yo's case it's him, plus his European ‘fan', and why not? Dinner, beer and whiskey for 200 people, plus the hire of a stage and sound system, the cost of musicians, singers and dancers, and then tomorrow all of it for a second time plus another band to perform while a procession of relatives and friends weaves its way round the village to the temple – all this for less than two thousand pounds.

The party starts at seven in the evening and it's extraordinarily well arranged. It takes place in the space between the two family houses. One is Yo's (where his mother lives, together with his brother and his brother's ‘fan'). The other house is where Yo's brother-in-law and sister live with their two children, one of them the autistic boy with a flair for lively peeing. This bit of backyard between the houses now looks like an open-air night club – twenty large tables set for ten people each, red table cloths, a festive-looking stage, music playing, waiters running around serving food and drink, and more guests arriving by the minute.

Next to the entrance to Yo's little family estate his mother sits in her party best alongside a large gift-wrapped box with a slot into which new arrivals are expected to drop an envelope containing money. It won't be much – maybe just 40 baht (little more than fifty pence), but most of these people are poor, and besides, they have to attend too many of these parties, each one requiring a contribution. This same weekend, for instance, there are three other parties within a radius of sixty yards, all with their own group of party-goers - friends, neighbours, relatives, musicians, singers, dancers and drunken uncles.

The music is now in full swing and appallingly loud. “Why,” I ask, “does it have to be?”

“Thai people gauge enjoyment by volume,” Yo explains. “Ours is the loudest of the three parties, so it must be the best.”

Yo's table is the biggest and the most fun since it includes a glamorous group of transvestites, way prettier than most of the women at the party. It's extraordinary how accepted and liked transvestites are in rural society. I heard the female heads of two families talking. One of them admitted that in their family they didn't have a single transvestite. “A family without a transvestite?” the other one boomed. “What sort of family do you call that?” It could have been two Jewish mothers discussing a family without a lawyer.

The next morning I try to sleep late but at 7am it starts again. A minibus of monks arrives for some team chanting along with sixty or seventy relatives who occupy the party tables from last night and devour a substantial breakfast, the men already starting on whiskey and beer. The monks get barely a dozen relatives to come and join their on their dais. The rest of the visitors sit around chattering, eating and laughing, happy for the religious bits of the ceremony to drone on in the background. The children, even more oblivious to it, run around playing, knocking religious objects off the dais. The chickens and dogs run around with them; a passing buffalo sticks its nose through the front gate then wanders off again.

And thus the day dribbles by. After lunch the young monk's head is shaved and then there's the parade, which brings me back to the bit about cavorting round the village with a load of drunks dancing to an amplified drum-and-banjo band, the amplifiers and loudspeakers pushed along on a trolley by two small boys.

That's a bit unfair, actually, because the women are all sober, and the drunks, even the drunkest ones, are happy and benign without the slightest sign of aggression. But it's tiring. The sun is out, the temperature is in the high eighties, and we're all meant to look animated. For the first half hour everyone is, then the enthusiasm rather fades.

After half-an-hour we're meant to arrive at the temple where we're due to take a rest while the religious ceremony takes place. But today there are too many new entrant monks for them all to be accommodated so that bit's been delayed till later. It means that when we arrive at the temple we have to turn round and dance our way back home again, which is a bit of a strain. By the time the procession gets back to the house the sun has taken its toll. What set out looking like a happy wedding train has arrived back looking distinctly funereal. But water and shade (and more whiskey) quickly revive everybody, and the band plays on.

On Sunday morning, well refreshed, I set off with Yo and his family to watch the last bit of all this - a glimpse at the newly ordained monk in his temple surroundings.

Unlike Islamic or Christian temples, Thai Buddhists put the majority of the decoration on the outside of their temples. Despite looking enormously grand outside, the inside of this one is plain as can be - like a municipal youth club in Wigan or Cleethorpes.

Any time spent with Thais at worship soon convinces you that theirs is not like any other religion. It's as light-hearted and friendly as everything else in Thai life. There's none of that sense of being recruited into God's army – no ‘Onward Christian Soldiers' or ‘Warriors of Islam' - nothing militant, or threatening, or intimidating. While the senior monk chants, the women giggle and chatter and the men pop outside for more whiskey. The final part of the new monk's initiation ceremony requires relatives to tie bits of string round his wrist. There's just enough reverence to indicate respect, but no more. It's more like a family game after Christmas lunch than a religious ceremony - a pleasant community ritual, rather like a Tupperware party. Maybe that's what religion was always meant to be like.

Whoops! I'd better watch out. I seem to be going soft on it.

RELATED LINKS

Transgenderism in the Thai Buddhist Tradition

About Isan, the Northeast of Thailand

Transvestites change the Thai army

Life as a Thai monk (by a Dane)

Patterns of drinking in Thai men

About Thai Buddhism

Thai festivals

Sunday, Feb 26th, 2006

‘Have you ever been raped?'

I was eating lunch with a gaggle of friends last week when one of them asked the question in general around the table.

It reminded me that I had been - on a couple of occasions, actually - but for the purposes of lunch I bought up just one of them.

It was when I was twenty, hitch-hiking in Italy. I was alone with no fixed plan. I'd just got back from two years in North America working as a musician. I'd quit because I'd decided I was gay and didn't fit in, but the moment I got back to London I went potty over a girl. When she made it clear she had no interest in me I decided to head for the continent, to run away and clear my mind. I got together ten pounds and set off for France.

By the time I'd hitch-hiked to Menton on the Italian border I was down to my last fifteen shillings and still had no clear idea of what I should be doing with myself. In the absence of any clear pointers I carried on.

Later that day I was standing on the main road from Genoa to Pisa feeling exceptionally hungry when a small Fiat stopped for me. A pleasant Italian man, around forty perhaps, explained he was heading for the next small town. He didn't speak English so we got by in poor French, mine poorer than his. He explained he was the owner of a small factory and rather well-known in the small town we'd just left. He didn't have a current girl-friend so once a month he went to the next town to have sex with a girl from the local brothel.

His story made me strangely nervous and as we approached the next town he asked if I'd like to join him. If I did, he would pay for a girl for me.

I couldn't pretend sex hadn't been on my mind for the last few months, even so, sex with a prostitute sounded pretty adventurous. But one of my golden rules was to experience everything, so I went along with it.

In the event it turned out rather different from what he'd described. The brothel, which I was quite excited to see since it would be my first, turned out to be nothing more than an ordinary Italian cafe with rooms for rent and a few dingy women lounging round a juke box. The man paid some money to the manager then took me upstairs where we both had separate rooms. He told me he'd only booked one girl but we could share her.

Ten minutes later he knocked on my door and said he was ready. When I went to his room there appeared at first glance to be a large white sack on his bed. It could have been a heap of peeled potatoes but in the event it turned out to be a naked old whore.

‘You go first,' he said

Being somewhat naïve I thought perhaps if I undressed and climbed on it might all work out. But it didn't. I clambered aboard and she instantly hugged me in a grip of iron – she must have been a lady wrestler. While I lay there crushed and out of breath the Italian man jumped up behind and rammed himself home, a bullseye in one with no cream or spit to help.

Fuck me, did it ever hurt!

Ten minutes later I was back in my room in great pain. I checked things out in the loo and found there was a fair amount of blood. After a painful rinse I limped back to the bed and lay down. The Italian man popped in to say my room was paid for and so was an evening meal and breakfast in the morning. Then he left.

For a while I lay on the bed and moaned, but despite the dreadful throbbing in my bum, hunger became an even greater pain. I hadn't eaten all day and had scarcely any money left, so I showered and gingerly dressed myself, then hobbled downstairs to the dining room.

Later it occurre