Water and Weird Words!

Oh for a private joint on that long journey!

Clean environment. Clean Arse!

Koh Chang... the joy of Songkhran.

Big farang... pipsy bucket.

Motorcycles are fair game as targets...

... and only rarely get away unsoaked.


Since breaking my jaw, I’ve spent quite a lot of time recuperating on blue inter-city buses.

I couldn’t stray far from the hospital in Bangkok but we decided to go to the lovely island of Koh Chang to escape the water festival at Songkhran, the Thai new year. Being stuck in the city for five days constantly getting soaked wouldn’t be much fun and it made much more sense to get soaked at the beach.

From door to door it was about an eight hour trip, including taxi, bus, truck, ferry and finally a pickup to Jinda Resort on White Sands Beach. Twice we’ve had to go back home to our Surin village for a few days before returning to Bangkok to have the metalwork taken out of my mouth and for root canal treatment of my battered teeth. That’s a good nine hours door to door, all of which totals about fifty hours on blue and other buses.

Meanwhile with my jaw sewn closed I’ve been unable to eat anything other than liquids and it hasn’t been easy. If only the ‘Private Joint Buses’ of the BMTA, the Bangkok Mass Transit Association (??) really allowed you a little something to help you relax along the way

In out hut on the island we had a very entertaining shower room.

Bathrooms in England sometimes have carpets but Asian loos are always awash with water. This one had a large concrete water tank, empty except for some litter and frog. Next to the WC was a small ceramic sink for post-evacuation cleaning purposes and of course a shower. This was at the highest point of the room so that every time someone showers the whole place floods and your feet are always wet whenever you go inside. People call it ‘the wet room’ and for good reason.

The most entertaining bit though was the sign on the wall.

In most beach huts the latrine drains into a sump in the ground, so they ask you to put used tissue paper in a basket by the loo. Flushing it down the WC blocks the plumbing and fills up the sump which then has to be pumped out.

Westerners need to be told the rules and the sign on the wall had a picture of the special hose used for anal ablutions, together with the following words.

“This device is use for wash your behind when finish on toilet, and paper to dry for water. “Clean environment.”

So nicely put. Clean environment, clean posterior!

And talking of loo signs, our Bangkok bus pulled into the same new inter-city mega-loo this blog reported on some months ago… the one offering a choice of three different sit-down stalls with a huge sign saying, “Pregnancy. Deformed. Senility”.

Somebody must have seen this blog because it’s been changed and now it says “Pregnancy. Disability. Senior Citizen”. Shame really as I much prefer the original!

The best shower though was during the Songkhran festival. On Koh Chang as everywhere they were throwing water in the streets and no quarter was given for the grey haired, for cameras or for motorbikes. The roads become wet and greasy and when water is thrown full in the face of a passing motorcyclist, there are bound to be accidents.

It’s all good clean fun and there were plenty of farang holiday makers joining in. Frankly though I was relieved when it was all over and the horizontal rain came to an end for another year.

Blue buses too are a memory and instead it’s been twelve hours on an EVA Air flight to London. Now we’re in Petersfield, Hampshire, and Cat’s just emptying the dish washer so I’d better stop and go to help.

Yesterday I bought yet another liquidizer and I have to take paracetamol before eating so I’m not out of the woods quite yet.

Ever tried liquidized muesli? It’s not as bad as you’d think!

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog May 2009

My Jaw Meets Jesse Jackson

It says, "Peace. Jesse Jackson"

My mop handle and Nan's golliwog.

Stuff what's been in my mouth for the last nine weeks.


Some Jaw-Stopping Name-Dropping

“You must be tired tonight. It’s your third presentation today,” I hissed through gritted teeth last week to the Reverend Jesse Jackson in Bangkok. “And I’m so sorry I’m treating you like a pop star.”

“No I’m just fine,” he replied. “Not tired at all, really”.

Jesse Jackson was at the FCCT in Bangkok, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, giving us his third presentation of the day and he was about to start his talk.

So recognizable as he strode into the crowded room, pressing the flesh with all around him, he was tall, physically impressive and looking remarkably good for his years, though he must surely have been very tired indeed.

On a tour with the International Peace Foundation’s “Bridges” series and talking on the subject of “building a culture of peace and development in a globalised world”, this was a man who “over the last forty years has played a pivotal role in virtually every movement for empowerment, peace, civil rights, gender equality and economic and social justice’.

What a life! Long before this he should have been totally exhausted by it all.

I just happened to find myself at the table next to him and he was signing autographs on paper napkins. I’ve never demanded an autograph before but this time I did and the only scrap of paper I had on me was a card for my book, “My Thai Girl and I”.

It says, “Peace, Jesse Jackson”, though it’s almost illegible. I know it says that because it really was him and it really is his autograph.

He must have given this talk many times before and he ranged widely across his work with Martin Luther King and told us of the long road that’s been travelled in the United States from lynch mobs and segregation to universal franchise and equal rights, finally culminating in the election of Barack Obama as president.

Born later or in different times might Jackson too, twice a presidential candidate, have reached the highest office? All I know is that it was fascinating to hear so major a figure speak on these issues, who has been at the center of things for so long.

He was of course a charismatic speaker though balanced and level with no histrionics, and nor did he wear his religion on his sleeve. He held my attention throughout a long speech, though he didn’t have the oratorical powers of an Obama. Indeed sometimes his diction was unclear and I couldn’t always catch what he was saying. Nonetheless it was a memorable evening, not least for my realization what a huge vindication the election of the new president is for ‘African Americans’ as he called them.

Obama’s election of course means so many things… that the under-privileged son of a single mother could make it so far, that his startling intelligence did not sink his chances in a society with anti-intellectual tendencies and that at last America has a leader with a broad world view are blessings enough. That he is also half black is just the icing on the cake.

While his predecessor, the grinning puppet of the neocons, represented the worst of America, Obama is his antithesis and represents the best, whether half black or not.

At the end of his talk, Jesse Jackson still had the stamina to answer questions and spoke volubly in the way politicians have that makes you forget the awkward question they’re supposed to be answering. One question seemed to stop him short though.

A young American stood up and asked whether, given the sensitivity with which the issue of racism treated in the US, it is a shock to him that in Asia and in particular Thailand there can sometimes be a total lack of awareness of such issues.

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I get your point,” Jackson replied.

The questioner tried restating his question but all he got was a politician’s answer. Perhaps Jackson had no experience of such a thing in Asia or perhaps he was just being polite, trying to build a culture of peace. In fact he hardly mentioned Thailand throughout and its internal conflicts not at all.

In the US ‘political correctness’ has become so very important. Was it a senator who had to resign because in a speech he used the word ‘niggardly’, no matter that the word bears no relation to the dreaded ‘n-word’?

On Koh Chang recently we had the rare luxury of a television in our wooden hut and I watched a BBC interview with Whoopie Goldberg and she and the black female interviewer came onto the subject of colour prejudice. Goldberg argued strongly for being open about such issues, confronting them head on and not relegating them to the realms of mere political correctness. In this context they discussed the sheer odium of the ‘n-word’ and agreed that it too should be confronted. Ironically neither of them could bring themselves to say the word itself but stuck with calling it ‘the n-word’. With wounds so deep, confrontation goes only so far, it seems.

However, “Black is beautiful!”, the very best of slogans confronts the issue of colour. And it’s the best because it’s proud, unashamed and true. After living for many years in Africa, I know that black skin truly is beautiful so why the euphemism of ‘African American’ which so awkwardly avoids the mention of colour?

Even so, like the questioner, I too am sometimes shocked in Asia by occasional insensitivity on racial issues. I remember once in Hong Kong I called DHL, the courier company, to tell them I thought their advertisement showing that even African natives with spears could receive a parcel was highly offensive. They didn’t begin to understand.

In Thailand I find the leading brand of mops, “Black Man” with its logo of a fuzzy black head and the slogan, “Think of Cleanliness, Think Blackman” highly inappropriate. (See www.mop-bm.com). At a houses and homes trade exhibition in Bangkok, I put this to a nice public relations lady on the “Black Man” stand. She knew exactly what I was talking about but said the brand was so well established with loads of goodwill that they couldn’t possibly change it even if it was offensive to a few non-Thais. When exporting mops, however, they used a different brand name, she said.

Do Thais think that different rules apply here, that they’re on a different planet, or do they not care about giving offence? You can buy Negro brand hair dye in the local shops and Darkie toothpaste with its get up of a black minstrel in a top hat only tweaked its name to Darlie a few years ago.

As a child I was reared on stories of the idiot black child Epaminados and collected golliwog stickers off pots of Robertsons’ marmalade, and yes, I think that these post colonial racist assumptions were contagious. Golliwogs in England are now consigned to the past, but not yet in Thailand. In out house, little Nan has a charming Golly attached to her mobile and while it’s pretty harmless and she has no idea what it represents, it does suggest that the point put to Mr Jackson at the FCCT may have some substance to it.

Black faces are great for marketing as they make teeth look so white, even while I was hissing through mine that night nine weeks after breaking my jaw, my mouth still wired tightly closed.

My smashed teeth were turning yellow with plaque so I went to see a dentist in soi 71. As I gazed into her eyes above the white mask as she bent over, examining my mouth, she said to me quietly, “I see you’ve got a fixation.”

“How ever do you know that?” I nearly blurted out, before realizing she was talking about the intramedullary arch bar fixation in my mouth that’s made my life a misery for so many weeks.

“You’ll have to get it taken out before I can do anything useful for you,” she concluded.

So that Sunday I had the metal work taken out of my mouth and it was one of the more horrible experiences of my life, proving perhaps that I’ve had an easy ride so far. It took a three hour operation under anesthetic to put the fixation in and an hour or more without any pain killer to take it out again.

Imagine your worst of all nightmares where your teeth are smashed and falling out, when your mouth’s full of barbed wire and blood and you’re chewing broken glass. It was just like that but worse.

The arch bar across the upper and lower teeth for tying my jaw closed were secured with a tightly twisted wire around almost every tooth and each of these had to be cut with wire cutters. There was a sickening crunch like a tooth being smashed every time a wire was severed and then the broken wire had to be pulled out through the gap between the teeth. It felt as if it was taking pieces of gum and broken tooth with it.

My mouth was full of cut wire and of broken arch bar and spitting out a mouthful of blood and mucus, I realised there were still some bits of wire inside. Yes, it wasn’t much fun.

That was my small torment, but imagine how it must be to have a lynch mob hunting you down. They deliberately smash your face, baying for your blood and then they string you up.

I’ve been lucky in my life and fortunate too to have heard Jesse Jackson speak, a man of stature who has travelled so far in the fight against racism. And all I did at the FCCT was to treat him as just another celebrity and ask for his autograph.


Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog May 2009

Thai Girl. Treasured or Trashed?

I’m pleased to report that my recent book, “MY THAI GIRL AND I” has sold out and been reprinted already and my novel, “THAI GIRL” has just been reprinted for the seventh time.

I also note in the press that Dan Brown’s plodding novel, “The Da Vinci Code” has sold 51 million copies which is more than the total sales of both my two books together.

It’s taken him six years to crank out a new novel whose name I forget and the first print run is said to be five million copies. Unfortunately, because of storage problems in Bangkok my print runs have to be smaller than that.

On 1st April 2009 I posted on my blog at www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com a glowing review of my own new novel, “The Kandinsky Lode”, a work in the same god plod genre as all of Brown’s.

The review describes the story of how Desmond Jones, a suburban accountant in southern England is chosen as God’s intermediary on earth to reveal to mankind that Christ’s second coming has already happened. Desmond learns that God has sent his only son to confer upon us the advanced data processing capacity He uses for judgments at the Pearly Gates.

God’s son on earth at last is revealed as none other than Bill Gates, now in philanthropic mode, and the review of course is an April Fool.

On 17 October 2008 in a blog called, ‘Dear John, I’m Confused’ about how often reviews of commercial fiction are utterly ridiculous, I gave some examples from the ‘pseud’s corner’ of quotes on the inside covers of a couple of novels by John Irving and John Grisham.

Like most things where there’s big money sloshing around, the power relationships in publishing are fundamentally corrupt. Reviewers seek to flatter a major author or want to get themselves or their journal quoted and it’s their grovellings that I parody in my spoof review of “The Kandinsky Lode”.

Writing can be a solitary calling and all authors crave feedback. Before the internet it must have been lonely indeed and I’m lucky to have had loads of feedback on both my novel, “Thai Girl” and my new book, “My Thai Girl and I”. They had many reviews in the Bangkok press, mostly positive, but there was sometimes a sub-text I did not always understand.

One reviewer of “Thai Girl” met me for dinner with his photographer, praised the book to the skies and then wrote a review that rubbished it. Happily the magazine’s publisher distanced himself from the review in the next issue and the reviewer no longer had a job, but it alerted me to the strange world of book reviews.

I therefore value more highly the many personal messages I receive, which I always post on the Readers Forum on www.thaigirl2004.com, as these come without any such baggage. Sometimes there are some critical comments but I need these too and they’re all there on the Forum, as well as some positive quotes from the media in the website’s Introduction.

A place I’ve been less well treated has been the members’ forum on www.thaivisa.com. What happens is that somebody asks on the forum what books to read about Thailand, “Thai Girl” gets a mention and then someone else piles in, not with informed criticism but with simple abuse. Things like, “Thai Girl” is the worst novel I’ve ever read,” and “I bet Mr. Hicks has never even been to Koh Pha Ngan”. (Actually the book is set on Koh Samet.)

As their user names are anonymous, they can be as outrageous as they like, but I do wonder why they bother, especially as it’s often clear that they haven’t even read the book. Towards the end of “Thai Girl” there’s a passage where Ben’s backpacker friends slag off Anglo/American foreign policy in Iraq and ridicule the ‘War on Terror” and I wonder if this could have given offence, though even that seems unlikely.

Usually somebody on the forum comes to my rescue and one member, himself an editor and writer, said some very nice things indeed in his post which reassured me on one point.

When I was writing “Thai Girl” I was worried that the plot might be a bit thin. In the story young Englishman, Ben, comes to Thailand and falls for beach masseuse, Fon, has a frustrating time and then flies home again. Nobody gets eaten by sharks or is killed by snakes in a locked Mercedes and there’s not even a tuk tuk chase.

I was thus relieved when my saviour on the forum (after some negative comments about the dialogue) had this to say.

“I read THAI GIRL off the back of a Haruki Murakami book... However, I was quickly drawn into the story and this is where the author's talent really lies: he has a natural gift for narrative. No matter that there's no strong plot… Hicks' raw talent for storytelling keeps the reader turning the pages and this is the prime directive in any kind of writing.

The real heart and soul of this book lies in the character of Fon (the 'Thai girl'). Beautifully observed and drawn, a striking metaphor for Thai culture itself, it is through her that Hicks adeptly explores the central theme of most books of this genre: the difficulty, frustration, pain and, perhaps ultimately, the futility of the foreigner trying to come to terms with the mercurial nature of Thailand. It is to his credit - and I believe displays and reflects the respect he has for this country - that he chose not to use the hackneyed milieu of the Bangkok bar scene as a vehicle to achieve this.”

I was truly grateful to him for so strongly refuting the psychos.

My problem on a public forum like Thaivisa is that I cannot act as my own advocate. If I could, I’d have quoted a brief review posted on www.khaosanroad.com by someone called Anne Merrit. I do not know her from Eve but she’s done what no author can ever do for their own book and that is to sum it up in a few words.

This is what she said about “Thai Girl”, the story of Ben and Fon.

“What comes across as a couple wrapped up in mind games will get you thinking about power games in general, and how gender, age, ethnic and economic differences all factor together. The endlessly complex characters will leave you guessing until the very end. Feminists may find this relationship hard to handle, men who date Thai women may find it instantly relatable. Regardless of your opinions on the falang/Thai romance phenomenon, Hicks’ honest dialogues and relatable themes make this an absorbing read.”

I particularly value criticism of this sort as it’s specific and has no agenda, unlike a few media reviewers and forum critics of the abusive kind. She puts it so well and I couldn’t ask for anything nicer that this, so I’d love to know who she is.


“Thai Girl” was described in a glossy magazine as, “one of the top selling English language novels ever published in Thailand”. I can thus dismiss the psycho critics and my fear that the plot might be a bit thin has long disappeared.

I know he got there first, but it’s reassuring too that William Shakespeare got good reviews for his earlier version of the story.

For that’s pretty much what “Thai Girl” is… a tropical “Romeo and Juliet” without the coffins.


Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog April 2009

My Google Gurgled... Why??

Every blogger wants their stuff to be read and that means maximising visits to the site.

My blog has more than 200 articles posted on it and you folks out there do seem to enjoy it. But suddenly the river of hits referred by Google searches has dropped to a gurgle. Why could this be?

I used to get lots of hits from Yahoo too but these suddenly fell away to a trickle and then last week my Google hits as good as stopped. Previously I was getting a total of 200 hits a day but that has now halved.

Previously if I did an appropriate Google search, my Blogspot would appear very high up but now it only does if the search is vey specific.

Can anyone tell my why this might be and if there's anything I can do about it?

Other bloggers have lots of little icons all over their blogs, I guess to maximise traffic but I have no idea what I should do to this end. Again I need help!

I track the referrals on my magic 'sitemeter' and it could be that it is simply failing to record referrals that are actually being received... though I think that's unlikely.

To me it's a mysterious world so can anyone enlighten me, please?

Thanks,

Andrew.

Thai Girls' Forked Finger Photos

Why always the vee-sign for the photo? To do with the Bunny Club?

Now there's even someone else trying to get in on the act!

This time there's only one finger between them.

But the men get in on the act too with a whole handful,

And they start young... this is Nan and her friend at school.


Some things in Thailand I’ll never understand.

Like whenever you point a camera at a ‘Thai girl’ she’ll flash you a smile to live for, pose coquettishly and give you a diagonal vee-sign, palm out and fingers forked. I have no idea why and, I guess, neither do they.

Is it ‘V for victory’ or ‘Y’ for up-yours? Or even a saucy suggestion of the Bunny Club logo? I have no idea.

It’s just the fashion, says Cat, but sometimes if I ask them not to do it they just look offended, so I’ve given up trying to get a sensible photo.

All I know is that when Cat comes home from college with shots of her friends, local farmers’ daughters uniform in short black skirts and tight white blouses, displaying perfect teeth and the usual forked fingers in the photo, who am I to complain. And while I’m not admitting to the well known Thai obsession with school girls in uniforms, I certainly don’t object when they drop by to do their homework with Cat.

So yes, Cat’s been studying again.

When I first met her six years ago she was half way through a dismal external degree in Political Science at Ramkamhaeng University and it was I who disrupted her progress. She wasn’t enjoying the indigestible diet of rote learning but ever since has regretted not getting a handle to her name. Now the wrong side of thirty, poor thing, she recently looked around for a better opportunity and soon found a new two year course in Computer Graphics on offer at a local vocational college.

Unfortunately, having registered for the new term, the strict para-miltary regime came as a bit of a shock to her. Seven thirty in the morning you’re on parade for an assembly and roll call and if you’re late you have to run round the field or clean the toilets. Not fun!

You have to stay in school all day and take part in compulsory sports and sometimes Cat’s classes (when she’s lucky enough to get any) didn’t start until evening after a ten hour wait. What with a half hour ride on the Honda each way, our personal life has been suffering as she’s never at home. Then when she has to get up at four in the morning to do homework for one of her many subsidiary subjects, I’m not well pleased.

For accounting she has to grasp terms like ‘owner’s equity’ and for office management she has lists of office equipment to learn like ‘duplicator’ and ‘facsimile’ (but not ‘scanner’). At least she’s been a top scorer in her tests in English language which is encouraging.

I remember a Samui hotel advertising for a ‘beach boy’ which demanded only graduate applicants, so in contrast the idea of teaching vocational subjects rather than force feeding useless academic subjects at so called ‘degree’ level makes absolute sense. Cat’s college has an impressive range of vocational courses for jobs from electricians to banking and accounting and its garden campus is large and beautifully kept and the buildings are modern and impressive. With its students turning up on time, immaculately turned out in their smart uniforms, it all looks very good indeed. And of course in Thailand that’s what matters most.

Thai schools such as this one love to hold big public events like sports festivals which can last for days on end. They seem to define the corporate spirit of the school and also give a good excuse to get out of boring classes for a few days. Anyway, Cat told me her college was staging a big ‘English day’ and that all its thousands of students were to take part. I was invited and was sure to be dragged in somehow.

On the day we were politely asked to wait in a VIP board room and were eventually ushered into the vast assembly hall where the multitude were sitting on the floor, boys to the left and girls to the right. The Principal had been held up in Surin so, as hostage to fortune, I was called on to cut the ribbon and read an address in English. This I did, doing a quick edit as I read it.

Then came a programme of displays and events, segregated into male or female performers, including group songs in English and a learned oration on the subject of global warming. This I recognised as a brief homily that I’d knocked off on my laptop at Cat’s request just before she went off to school one morning on her motorbike.

It’s good to make oneself useful like this!

Then the third sex came on stage. It was the school’s ladyboys and they brought the house down. Cross-dressed in flouncy dresses and livid make-up, as they came prancing up the aisle they almost raised the roof. And of all the singing and dancing, theirs was by far the best.

Yes, it is good to be useful but, as I feared, much more was to be demanded of me. I’ve never sung in front of an audience of thousands before but I knew that karaoke can sometimes be compulsory. The Thais don’t have a clear word for ‘no’, so I had to fall back on singing ‘Get Back”, one of my favourite Beatles songs.

“Jojo was a man who thought he was a woman,
But she was another man.
Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.
Get back Jojo!”

It’s a catchy and repetitive song that goes down well with Thais, even though they don’t know it. Never mind that it’s about a rent boy who goes off to the bright light to make a fast buck. Ladyboys are tolerated around here!

So all in all it was an impressive event and good fun, never mind if only a little English was learned. It added to the lustre of the college and it justified an article in their quarterly glossy PR magazine, replete with a prestigious picture of a farang cutting the ribbon to open the event that Cat brought home a few weeks later.

That was some time ago now, since when Cat has been struggling with the strict ethos of the regime and with the fact that they don’t seem to have the money to pay for enough teachers of computer graphics.

Given the pressures on our personal life, you may well guess the outcome of this, Cat’s latest attempt to earn herself a certificate. I didn’t want to influence her in her decision, saying that if she was still learning useful stuff about computing she should persist, but no, she said, she only wanted the certificate.

I’m now tempted to go off at a tangent about Thai education, my ignorance never inhibiting a good rant. But I’ll stick to saying that it doesn’t have a good reputation and that foreign teachers here seem to say that Thai schools generally fail to teach relevant transferable skills, problem solving, analysis or creative thinking, which is a serious failing in this changing world.

For me it’s all encapsulated by the popularity of multiple choice question in Thai university tests. I’ve seen examples in English and they were nonsensical, many having more than one possible answer. Any test based on such questions would be a lottery, but then the Thais love lotteries!

A farang friend who’s in the teaching business here recently put to me the following multiple choice question, allegedly taken from a test on English idiom. It reads as follows.

“Choose the answer that correctly completes the following sentence.
‘One swallow doesn’t make…
1. a decent meal.
2. a summer, or
3. a porn star.”

I really don’t understand it and am still unsure which is the correct answer, so please let me know what you think, giving reasons.


Andrew Hicks The Thai Girl Blog April 2009

A New Bestseller By Andrew Hicks

A Fulani axe, the murder weapon.


BOOK REVIEW

“THE KANDINSKY LODE” by Andrew Hicks

Review by Dustin Caldwell embargoed for publication, 1st April 2009.

Andrew Hicks’ new book, “THE KANDINSKY LODE” is notable for reaching far beyond the literary range of “Thai Girl”, his first bestselling novel and “My Thai Girl and I”, a romantic confection of life in rural Thailand.

In a virtuoso exhibition of versatility, “The Kandinsky Lode” weaves a compelling narrative at many multi-textured levels which both entertains and informs. Themes of early Christianity are explored throughout, including the key proposition that myth and religion are inseparable as a conservative continuum and that Emperor Constantine’s ‘acquisition’ of Christianity led to the dominance of a highly assertive religio-political hierarchy.

In Hicks’ story, Desmond Jones, an accountant, lives with his wife Molly in their suburban house in Surbiton in the south of England. One day Des is disturbed to find their lodger, Augustus Dernit, dead in his room, empaled on his computer table by an antique Fulani axe. Nothing has been stolen except an ordinary Toshiba laptop.

The discovery leads Des into a terrifying quest for the hidden secrets of the ancient church during which he comes to fear for his sanity and for his very life. Gussie, as Dernit was known, had managed in his dying breath to leave some vital clues. Des pursues these with an accountant’s zeal, following many blind trails, but revealing truths that no ordinary accountant could ever imagine.

He learns that Gussie had been receiving a series of pop-ups on his computer screen, apparently from an extra-terrestial source. One that popped up just before his murder which he wrote in blood across his desk reads, ‘Iti sapis potanda bigo ne!’

After much research among Gnostic archives, Des discovers this loosely to mean, ‘That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!’ Could these words, he speculates, be attributed to the Virgin Mary herself?

Pursuing his search for the ‘Divine Toshiba’, the key to the mystery, Des is intrigued by repeated numerical references in Christian writings… the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins and the Thirty Nine Articles to name but a few. Could God himself be an accountant who has made Desmond in his own image with a special role to play on earth?

And how, he asks, could Saint Peter on Judgment Day have sufficient data processing capacity to call up spread sheets of sins and good works without causing unacceptable queues at the Pearly Gates?

Then Des himself starts getting celestial emails from above. Extraordinarily, he seems to have replaced Gussie as God’s chosen intermediary on earth. These divine messages tell him that Jesus had a twin brother, named Judas Thomas, who was brought to France by Joseph of Arithmetea (sic) accompanied by Maximinus, one of the seventy two disciples who later became the first bishop of Aix. Des again is fascinated by the numerical references… even the name Aix contains the Roman numeral nine.

The emails continue, leading him to an obscure symbologist, Joseph Kandinski who is obsessed with finding the modern equivalent of the lode stone and the art of alchemy. Could the answer be the silicon chip, the modern source of fabulous wealth? Then the messages start referring obliquely to the Second Coming of Christ, to the multiple filial phantasm and the sacred messianic emanation.

From their joint researches they soon discover that the second coming is not in the person of Christ himself but of his resurrected twin, Judas Thomas who remarkably is already present upon earth. He has come, it seems, not as an evangelistic Christ-man figure but in the guise of a wealthy computer entrepreneur and philanthropist. His role is to give to mankind the benefit of God’s enhanced IT expertise, thus throwing new light on the expression, ‘Jesus Saves’.

Des learns that God runs MSDOS (Messianic Saviour Divine Operating System) for decision-making on Judgment Day, uses the Pearly Gates database and for word processing, God’s Word and Good Works. Could these divine software prototypes have new applications for mankind, thus indicating the worldly identity of the second son of God, already here on earth.

“The Kandinsky Lode” is thus an assured piece of fiction which seamlessly knits together the past and present and is as much an ingenious and blazingly good yarn as it is an exceptional piece of scholarship. Profoundly erudite, it is an intricate and intensely pleasurable read in which the writer has far excelled his novel, “Thai Girl”, his strangely successful first offering.

Not yet available at Asia Books, Bookazine and other good bookshops.

Sleepless in Bangkok

Bangkok isn't all temples and glittering spires.

It's a bizarre mix of brutal concrete and glitzy commercialism...

...but it can be cheap and cheerful and surprisingly human at times.


I always thought that retirement was going to be easy. You just sit around and watch the telly and eat too much food.

Like hell it is! Sometimes it can be horrendous.

We’ve just done the nine hour bus journey from the village to Bangkok and arrived at our grubby room in Sukhumvit Soi 71 at four in the morning. One of the objectives was to arrange reprinting of THAI GIRL and MY THAI GIRL AND I as stocks are low, but the first job was to move flats, to pack up a horrific accumulation of six years of stuff and move to our new place in Sukhumvit Soi 97.

A very tolerant taxi driver stowed a mountain of bags and we went and paid the deposit, signed the agreement and got the keys to our new room on the eighth floor of the nicely named ‘Romance Mansion’. Built I think as a hotel, it’s all very decent with polished granite corridors and everything as neat and clean as the old place was disgusting.

While I was to go back to the hospital the next day, Cat faced the major job of hiring a pickup and transporting the rest of our furniture, boxes and a small stock of books to Soi 97. I won’t bore you with details but having several family members in attendance as always, there were now five of us living in a room full of boxes (this is Thailand and that’s normal!) but yes, it’s been challenging.

Then we went to Tesco which is close by and bought a new TV which supplied Cat with her principle necessity in life and slowly we began to sort things out.

We also bought a new blender/liquidizer which is still my main necessity in life. Sadly when I went to the hospital to have the wiring in my broken jaw removed, things didn’t work out. On releasing the rubber ties which keep my jaw firmly closed, my mouth opened for the first time in a month but my jaw sagged sideways and my teeth wouldn’t meet or bite properly. The jaw seemed to be displaced just as it was after the accident.

Unlike me, the surgeon didn’t seem to be too alarmed and told me the bindings would have to be on for at least another two weeks so we are now staying in Bangkok until I go back to see him again. This was quite a shock and a big set back as I thought it should now be healed, but I shall lower my expectations and be prepared for the long haul.

Having one’s jaw broken and being unable to eat or speak is nothing though to the ghastly trauma of applying for a British tourist visa.

I very much want to take Cat with me to see family in England this summer. Back in the village I’d spent the best part of a week scanning the three different websites that contain the necessary info on applying for visas, putting together and copying the papers and filling in the application form. Having done this four times before and as paperwork should be second nature for a lawyer it should have been easy, but it wasn’t.

For example, there was ambiguity about which application form should be used. I went to the original laws that underly the process and I three times emailed the Embassy help line but got no clear resolution of the problem. So I filled in both forms to cover ourselves. It is all so very, very complex.

While the visa form for the Schengen countries of Europe is just two sides, the British form is like a book and asks ninety three questions such as ‘how much money do you, (the applicant) give to your relatives?’ and ‘are you a terrorist?’.

Anyway, we spent a long and horrible morning submitting the application and maybe I’ll tell the full story later when we’ve waited the estimated fifteen days for our case to be processed.

Right now my point is that here am I, a sixty two year old law abiding, tax paying citizen married to my Thai wife of six years who is not a terrorist desperately wanting to be able to take her to see family and friends in England and I’m as anxious as hell. We've been there together three times before and she didn't overstay but nothing is ever open and shut. The Embassy can make us wait weeks for an interview if they have any queries and they have an absolute discretion to refuse the visa… and it’ll be all my fault for getting the papers wrong.

Our flights are booked, the timing arranged with the folks back home but it could all get totally screwed up. I can tell you that I have not slept well for the last couple of weeks because of this and what with trying not to die of starvation because I cannot open my mouth it has been a busy and difficult time.

Do I by law have a universal human right to family life?

In theory I do but I can tell you it ain’t easy to assert it. Retirement abroad can at times be challenging.

On the other hand, if I were alone and retired in England there wouldn’t be three noisy young females sleeping in my bedroom at night keeping me awake and I’d bored out of my mind.

At least living here with Cat there’s never a dull moment.

Copyright: Andrew Hicks The ‘Thai Girl’ Blog March 2009