Thailand

A quarter of a century ago I somehow managed to get out of Paris where I had haunted a cheap hotel for months like a ghost trapped between this world and the next. I drove to Italy where I have lived ever since. I had a great contract with a famous publisher to write a biography of Benito Mussolini but had already spent the hefty advance and had yet to write a single word. On arrival in Italy, I did not even have enough money to pay the motorway toll. But the young woman in charge handed me a form to fill in and waved me through with a smile.

Someone somewhere must surely have calculated that Bangkok has more doctors and tailors per capita than anywhere on Earth. These two industries, healthcare and clothing, must account for a prodigious share of tourist revenues, and they both operate on similar principles: make the customer feel pleasant even as the results disappoint. It’s a formidable business model, not least because it persuades thousands of customers that they have scored a bargain and therefore cannot be as disappointed as they actually feel. Deeply gaslit, the customer fervently believes in what he has purchased – even if his new suit would not look amiss on a Jacques Cousteau research boat or his ‘world-class’ surgeon operated on the wrong foot, something that happened to an acquaintance of mine.

 When a friend asked if I wanted anything for Christmas I took a deep breath and replied: ‘Well, maybe I finally need to watch this.’ I handed him a video cassette retrieved from my sister’s attic and he took it to a place that digitises such things. On Christmas Day I nervously plugged in the memory stick. There we were: Carmel and I, aged about seven and nine, bathed in late-1960s sunshine in the garden of our mock-Tudor house in Woodmansterne Road, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey. (I emphasise ‘Surrey’, because in those days Carshaltonions were in Margo Leadbetter-style denial over new local government boundaries that landed them in – shudder – south London.

For 12 years now I have been learning Thai from my maid, Pi Nong, who has been employed in our building for decades. It’s a much misunderstood relationship. Here the maid is an obligatory fixture, integrated into daily life for foreigners and Thais over the age of 45 and over a fairly modest income level. For foreigners the maid is a linguistic go-between, a bridge between two worlds, a portal into a new language. While she is making me dinner she gaily informs me that farangs cannot eat Thai food even though she is making it for me now and that, even more mysteriously, they cannot speak Thai – even though we are speaking it now. Her explanation is that our mouths are different and that we are malevolent.

Lockdown is hurting everyone except the chickens. I have bought them a conservatory because Philippa, a Light Sussex, looks like ancient pants in rain. It is really plastic sheeting to hang under the henhouse; they need it because the rain is horizontal. They stare out like chickens from film noir. I have exhausted local take-aways, and you cannot get fresh hampers here. Someone sent me stock cubes for beef stroganoff in the post, which feels joyless, but everyone is selling condiments — you can lick them, call it lickdown — or chocolates or alcohol, as if for a loveless Valentine’s Day. What do I seek? Thai food.

Three years ago I sat down to write a novel set in my adopted home city. Placing its claustrophobic action in the near future, I had no trouble imagining my mostly foreign characters haplessly trapped inside a decaying high-rise apartment complex and surrounded by political upheaval. Thailand has endured more military coups since 1945 than any nation on Earth, and I myself have lived through two, in 2006 and 2014, while the violent uprising of 2010 occurred while I was far away in New York. They are peculiar coups by world standards. Two Turkish friends who visited in 2014 were disgusted by the lack of tear gas and fatalities inflicted by air power. ‘You call this a coup?’ they asked.