Making It Up as I Go Along

by Marian Keyes

  Even though they’re works of art and indeed architecture, I felt guilty about buying them (oh, why break the habits of a lifetime?), because I was after getting a pair of FitFlops. Are you familiar with same? They’ve a funny-shaped sole so that you exercise your legs and bum while you’re walking, and I walked down to the cinema in them the first night I had them, to see the Eric Cantona film (God, I love him), and the next morning I could hardly get out of bed, my leg muscles were so exercised. Could I justify a pair of Jan Jensen sandals as well as my FitFlops? Well … I decided that they fulfilled two very different roles in my life.

  mariankeyes.com, June 2009.

  Laos

  I went away with Himself to Laos (although it was reported in the papers as Lagos, with an earnest line, ‘Keyes has travelled to Africa in the past for charitable reasons’). But no, it was LAOS I went to. Laos is in Asia; it borders Vietnam, China, Burma and Cambodia and has Thailand on the other side of the Mekong.

  Before I went, people kept asking, ‘Why Laos? For the love of God, what’s wrong with the Maldives?’ And I had no answer for them. Except the nasty suspicion that if I was confined to a place with nothing to do but sunbathe and get scuttered (neither of which I do), the unbearable feelings that live in my solar plexus might get out of control altogether.

  So off to Laos we went, with the roof of our house removed and the whole place covered with scaffolding and walkways, like it was a prison, and every single thing, every SINGLE thing, covered in dust: the knives and forks in our drawers, the cotton buds in their box, the teeth in the very back of my mouth.

  I must say though, they are really nice builders – not like the old days of the Celtic Tiger when they didn’t give a shite, when they just knocked lumps out of your 100-year-old mouldings with their ladders and chortled and said, ‘Sure, it was fecking ancient, wha’?’

  RIGHT! So Laos. We’ll never get there with all the asides I’m doing. Okay, long journey, via Heathrow, Bangkok and finally Luang Prabang, the old royal capital of Laos. And it was fecking ROASTING. I’m breaking out in a sweat even thinking about it. Humid like you wouldn’t believe. Instantly my fair frizzed up like I was Krusty the Clown.

  Luang Prabang (furthermore known as LP) is after winning city of the year two years in a row in Himself’s Wanderlust magazine. It’s on the Mekong and is very pretty and riddled with temples with Buddhas and we were made to tour them. (My personal temple limit is thirty-one; after that, I start becoming short-tempered, even disrespectful.)

  There are almost no cars but millions of motorbikes and tuk-tuks and many new fancy French-fusion restaurants. But almost no shops; everything is sold from stalls or huts or at the market. A very innocent sort of place. Even at the crafts market, no one would be shouting, ‘Over here, pretty lady! I have good price for you!’ You’d look at their stuff and they’d yawn and you’d wander on and it’s a wonder anything gets sold at all. No entrepreneurial spirit. Lord Sugar would give them a right scolding.

  We were there three nights, and every night the whole city (ah, it’s not really a city, it’s more like Dún Laoghaire) plunged into darkness as the power failed – we were enchanted by this. Himself got to wear his head torch, which he was THRILLED by.

  The next day we went ‘up country’ with a guide and a driver, and it really did feel like uncharted territory. The alarmingly narrow roads were on top of mountains with sheer drops of hundreds of feet, sometimes on both sides.

  We stopped at a hillside H’mong village and the guide was insistent that we call in and visit some poor locals in their humble homes, and I was equally insistent that we were NOT going to call in, because I’ve done that sort of stuff in the past and I come out hating myself and I’m fairly sure the visited ones hate me back. I feel voyeuristic and exploitative and embarrassed to be invading their privacy, and also I hate making small talk, which is fecking obligatory – you have to ask about their goat and how often they milk it, and you have to pretend to laugh when the rooster makes a huge big screechy noise at the sight of you.

  Nor do the villagers have any interest in me. One time in Thailand, I tried starting a conversation with a woman, about how my granny boiled water over an open fire in exactly the same way that she was doing, and she just stared at me with, ‘What the fuck do I care?’ eyes.

  I’m perfectly happy to give the money so that I DON’T have to visit the villagers.

  After about eight hours we arrived in a biggish city called Phonsavan – a lively place, full of markets, where business was brisk in galvanized buckets and nylon knickers and live bats (I swear to God, I’m still not right after seeing them).

  And then! Something incredible happened! I saw a box of BB cream. ASIAN BB cream – i.e. the best, most authentic BB cream. Up to now, I’ve been riding the BB cream bandwagon with my Estée Lauder version, which I find HIGHLY satisfactory and looks lovely on my skin, but on Twitter everyone’s been saying, ‘The best BB creams are the Asian ones,’ and there I was, looking at one!

  I flung myself on it, extracting it from between the bats and the buckets, and this shrewd stallholder looked me up and down and eventually decided I could afford £2.50. Clearly she thought she was robbing me blind, whereas I was overjoyed and my guide was beyond baffled. BAFFLED. ‘What does it do?’ he asked (as everyone does), and I said, ‘I don’t really know, but you have to have it if you care about beauty products. The BB stands for “blemish balm” and every self-respecting make-up bag has one and … look! I don’t really know! But it’s a good thing and I need it!’

  Then it dawned on me that there would be other people who’d be interested in owning an authentic Asian BB cream, so I set myself a little project that every town I visited I would trawl the stalls looking for them. (See, they don’t have chemists, like in the ‘developed world’. Their stalls are more like jumble sales, where Lux soap is next to a bowl of crickets and beside a huge big pile of Valium, which you can buy like pick’n’mix – much as I wanted to, I desisted. I’m bad enough.)

  That night we stayed in a hotel that was jam-packed with all these shouty Toor of Dooty men, who looked like they were still fighting the Vietnam War. Buzz cuts and camouflage and other pieces of tomfoolery. Finally it dawned on us that they were landmine disposal people – Laos is the most bombed country in the world. During the Vietnam War, more bombs were dropped by the US forces on Laos (even though they weren’t at war with them) than were dropped on all of Europe during the Second World War. Often the bombs were dropped because the US planes hadn’t been able to get to their targets in Hanoi and they didn’t feel like flying back to their base in Thailand with all their goodies, so they just fecked them over Laos, like Laos was a big rubbish bin.

  To this day, vast parts of arable land in Laos are unusable because they’ve got bombs buried in it, so these kindly Toor of Dooty lads were off to do some bomb clearance. After an extremely strange tay in which nearly everything on the menu wasn’t available, we retired to our room, where the electricity promptly failed. Out with Himself’s head torch!

  The next day we went to the Plain of Jars, which again, like the BB creams, I’m at a loss as how to explain. It’s a massive area, covered with … well … jars. Big stone jars. Up to three metres high. Some say they might have been burial urns, others say they were for storing … well … jar. But nobody knows. Nevertheless, it’s very atmospheric, especially if you go to Sites 2 and 3, where we saw no one.

  That’s the thing about Laos, it really does seem to be untouched and uncorrupted and the people seem very innocent.

  That night we stayed in a very basic place �
� no electricity – like, officially no electricity, unlike the other places, which had electricity for some of the time. And the rooms were little wooden huts and there were windows but they had no glass in them, and we were right beside the river, which was some tributary of the Mekong. And, in general, I’m not a person who’s comfortable with ‘basic’ – mostly because I’m afeerd of everything, and specifically beasts, to wit, spiders, animals and that sort of thing.

  But God only knows what got into me, because I was very happy. We sat outside on wooden benches and drank mango smoothies (well, I did; Himself had Laos beer) and admired the river, and when we went to bed there was a mosquito net over us, which I decided would protect me from all predators. Just before I went to sleep, I put my anti-mad tablets out on the bedside yoke for easy access in the morning.

  And when I awoke, after a lovely slumber, weren’t they all ett?! Yes! My anti-mad tablets! By insects or small beasts unknown! Who must have been going around in TOP form all day.

  So, yes, Laos is a country where the ants will eat your anti-mad tablets, but it’s still a lovely, lovely, lovely place.

  mariankeyes.com, April 2012.

  Antarctica Diary

  Hello, and welcome to MAD! (Marian’s Antarctica diary!) This is a very long ‘piece’ and it’s written in a diary format. I’m just telling you this so as you can ‘pace’ yourself.

  DAY ONE

  Greetings from the Heathrows, where I am a nervous wreck! Yaze! The flight from Dublinland was delayed coming in, and there are only two and a half hours before the flight leaves for Buenos Aires, and I have A VERY REAL fear, founded in FACT and empirical PAST EXPERIENCE, that my suitcases won’t make it to Argentina and I will be in the Antarctics without:

  1) Thermal warm clothing

  2) My anti-mad tablets

  I’m so convinced that this is going to happen that I’ve bought a notebook and a pack of three (3) pens from the WHSmith to draw up a list of all the things I will need when I get to Ushuaia (the world’s most southerly city, and not hot like you might think when you hear the word ‘southerly’, no, not hot at all, but actually very, very cold).

  Those of you who know me will know that on planes my bags fail to turn up more often than they arrive. And any transit through Heathrow almost certainly guarantees that I’ll get on the flight and my luggage won’t, and obviously you’d think I’d have learnt by now and at least brought enough anti-mad tablets in my hand luggage to last a few days, but no, I haven’t learnt, and it makes me wonder if fundamentally I am an optimist when I’d thought all along I was a pessimist, and isn’t life one long process of learning about oneself?

  Himself (for Himself is my travelling companion) asked a British Airways ‘man’ if he could tell us anything about the whereabouts of the bags, and the ‘man’ was helpful! He couldn’t actually be persuaded to say that the bags would make the flight, but he did admit that they’d left Terminal 1 and arrived in Terminal 5.

  (A quick aside on British Airways: I used to call them the World’s Most Supercilious Airline because I felt that they were told in staff training to channel Mary Poppins. ‘Be brisk, dears! Brisk, patronizing, cold, yes, withhold. And DO feel free to pull the passengers up for not having scrubbed their faces properly and polished their shoes. Scold them.’

  You see, I have my reasons for this assessment … *mutters darkly* … once upon a time, on a business-class flight on British Airways, I found that I was seated not next to Himself, but to a smelly man (he may not have actually been smelly, I just say these things), and it was an overnight flight and the overnight chairs are in little pods of two, curled around each other, and it would be like the man and I were sleeping with each other, and Himself was way down the back next to a lady, so I tried to flag down a stewardess and said, ‘Miss, miss, please can I not sleep next to the smelly man and –’ And she planted herself in front of me, tall and bony and with her scarf tied abnormally neatly, and said, ‘Do sit down, dear!’ Then she breezed away briskly to scold a man for taking his shoes off, leaving me feeling foolish and chastised and worried about sleeping with the smelly man (who probably wasn’t smelly at all; like I said, I just say these things).

  But that was all a long time ago! Yes! In another lifetime, and I feel British Airways staff have definitely ‘warmed up’. And anyway, I am not one to hold a grudge, no, that is not my way, except perhaps it is, and if so I shouldn’t be boasting about it.

  So I am still here, waiting to board the plane, and I am anxious, so anxious that I bought myself a Moshi Monsters toothbrush and I flirted with an Alexander Wang bag in the Horrods, in the most delightful ‘shade’ of sort of pale blue-green, and I would have bought it except I knew that I wasn’t in my right mind, and I even said it to Himself: ‘I’d like to buy it but I’m not in my right mind. I’ll give it thirty-six hours and see if I still love it.’ (Actually, I’ve just gone on the Net-a-Porters looking for it, and it’s not there, and I’m wondering if I should run back to the Horrods and buy it. But what would be the point, seeing as I’ve nothing to put in it, seeing as my luggage is ‘lost in transit’, which is quite an apt description of my state of mind.)

  So anyway, Antarctica! It’s been very funny, people’s reactions, when they’ve heard that I’m going there. They kind of seize up, then an expression – ConfusionJudgementPity – zips across their face and I can see they’re thinking, ‘Is she INSANE? Who would go to Antarctica? When you could go to Lanzarote?’

  Then, after a second, they gather themselves and say, too cheerily, ‘Well! That’ll be … cold! Yes. But you’ll see polar bears?’

  And I say, ‘No, you only get polar bears in the North Pole.’ And they say, ‘You’re actually going to the actual North Pole?’ And I say, ‘No, you thick-arse, didn’t I just tell you I wasn’t?’

  … Listen, I’ve got to go, I’ve to get on the plane. Himself is anxious.

  DAY TWO

  Buenos Aires!

  The flight was fourteen hours long, which I was worried about because I was afeerd I might go a little mad in the confined space, but actually it was GRAND and I slept for most of it and woke up feeling optimistic and that was nice. So we arrived into some sort of strike – after all, this is Argentina and this is their way of showing their gratitude for your visit. The airport was CRAMMERS, hordes and hordes of people milling about the place, queuing to be let out. (It was like when the Irish passport people went on a strange strike, a ‘go-slow’ I suppose you could call it, when they stopped everyone and ‘made talk’ with them for far too long, to hold everyone up, but I always enjoyed the little chat and I felt sure that visitors to our chatty little country would also like it.)

  And so to the luggage belt, where to my EXTREME surprise, both of our suitcases arrived and I was so relieved that I might have shed a little tear. Our run of good luck continued when, queuing for passport control, myself and Himself, we got the most Argentinian-looking of all the passport checkers. FERRY handsome, and frankly so Argentinian-looking he looked like he’d come straight from a polo match and that his horse was crouched down next to him in the booth and assisting him, handing him up the date-stamp and all. Indeed, they are a very attractive crowd, in general, the Argentinians.

  I was in Buenos Aires a long time ago, maybe seven years ago, and these are my memories: hand-made Minstrels and blue metallic shoes. God, it was great!

  But today there is no time for buying beautiful blue metallic shoes: we have to transfer to the domestic airport, which is about an hour’s drive, and I tell you, you’d think you were in Chicago, or Melbourne, or cities of similar ilk. Pros
perous-looking place. Lots of parks and trees and people out jogging, and there was an open-air gym-playground place where a load of buff-looking mens were doing pull-ups with their nippers.

  And now we are in the domestic airport, which is BEJAMMED with people. Also, it is roasting hot and we’ve come from the cold and we’re going to the cold tonight and I feel a little quare, but that could be down to several things, including the ‘quare air’ you breathe on planes and the culture shock and the feeling of being in transit and (temporarily) without a home.

  It’s funny because even though I’m very grateful to be going on this holiday, or indeed any holiday, I always get overwhelmed with a terrible uneasy melancholia before I go away. I was like this even when I was a nipper, I hated leaving home, and it eased off a bit when I was doing a lot of book tours, because I had to keep moving, but it’s back for the last few ‘difficult’ years, and for most of last week I was hoping something would happen so the trip had to be cancelled, but it didn’t and it’ll all be grand.

  Mind you, you’d think I wouldn’t keep going to such quare spots – like Laos or the Atacama Desert or – yes – Antarctica. But I’ve just realized that extreme places suit me: because I feel edgy or downright scared all of the time, when I find myself in a place that seems other-worldly or freaky, my feelings are appropriate. It’s the one time when my state of mind chimes with my surroundings and I am ‘right’ with the world. ‘Feeling quare? Well, you should be!’

  This is why I want to never go to Italy again. ‘Oh, the art, the beauty, the cypress trees, the medieval towns, the men, the girls, the beauty, the blue skies, the Tuscan hills, the beauty, the leather bags, the haircuts, the beauty, how could anyone ever feel unhappy here?’ *Coughs apologetically* ‘Sorry, I feel like I’m in hell here. You’ve all been lovely, yes, lovely, but I have to go home now.’