by Alex Gunn
Equipped with all this lot you can set up home anywhere in the world.
Best of luck.
Chapter 4
A Home So MASSIVE
We all woke up a little groggy on our first day in our proper new home, especially our youngest. The powerful intoxicating Red Cock hits the youngest the hardest. Still, he seemed to enjoy it at the time whilst playing Five Finger Fillet with a hunting knife.
Well, a slight exaggeration. He didn’t really drink Red Cock but he did sniff it with his little pink button nose and announce that it smelled disgusting and made his little eyes water. Mind you it made my little eyes water too and, just so you know, he doesn’t have a hunting knife, yet.
Feeling a little fragile, as I actually had been drinking Red Cock, I stood in one of our two enormous kitchens and thought of my Grandfather, which on reflection was a strange series of events.
Having lied about his age he fought through the second world war surviving torpedo blasts, shipwrecks and received a bravery medal for crawling through barbed wire under sniper fire to drag back a half dead officer. He was the most self-assured and fearless man in the world. He died when I was eleven but I remember everything about him. He had hard strong hands, and forearms forever brown like mahogany with a navy tattoo of an anchor on his left arm, but most of all I remember his quiet, thoughtful, self-assured manner.
It was the kind of manner that would be perfect for carving out a new life in a strange country; calm, confident and self-reliant. Genetically I must be a throwback to some distant unknown ancestor, notable only for his conformity and childish sense of humour who almost certainly never ventured outside the village, or flew over the hedge, let alone fight battles around the world.
To give you an idea of what I mean, while the kettle’s boiling, I remember one day during the school summer holidays when my grandparents took me and my sister to the museums in London. Before the advent of computers this is the kind of thing people did. We flew around the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum and spent the afternoon in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which my Grandfather loved. He showed me important things in a quiet and considered way. He was especially interested in a sketch book which belonged to Turner, the famous nineteenth century landscape painter, and showed me how even a great artist had to practice drawing basic things like hands and clouds. He also tried to teach me how to read the Latin inscriptions on the back of coins displayed in row after row of display cases.
At the end of the day we walked down to South Kensington tube station to catch the train home. Standing next to us on the eastbound platform was a group of rowdy older lads with shaved heads, big boots and loud voices. The longer we waited the rowdier they became and the closer I and my sister pressed into my Nan.
Being the 1970s I guess there may have been some kind of train strike. We waited and waited and then suddenly one of the lads got another one of his mates into a head lock with much shouting and swearing. Unbelievably, and it is unbelievable in this day and age, my Grandad, not a big man, in his late sixties and unknown to me, with a serious heart condition, squared up to the massive thug of a ringleader and said in a calm clear voice “how dare you use language like that in front of women and children.” The ringleader snapped back something that I couldn’t quite hear, and without warning and as quick as a flash my Grandad punched him hard and fast round the side of the head causing him to stagger sideways, dazed, bleeding and holding his jaw. With perfect, almost comic timing, my Nan said “shall we take the bus” and we all left quickly.
As the little ingenious travel kettle boiled away I was thinking of this, not because I was about to punch a skinhead, but because the second kitchen of the house strongly reminded me of my Grandfather’s car port.
At some point before I was born, when DIY was all the rage, and Britain was stuffed full of quiet hard men, who had fought through wars and witnessed atrocities that you and I can barely imagine, they evidently occupied their time building car ports and the like. By the 1970s England was brimming full of car ports, sheds, workshops and goodness knows what other massive DIY building projects this generation had quietly taken on
My Grandfather’s car port fascinated me. It fascinated me because it was such a big thing to make by yourself and also because it had a lurid bright green plastic roof, just like the kitchen I was currently standing in.
Apparently it’s quite normal for big modern Thai houses to have two kitchens; a modern, well equipped “western kitchen” to cook modern, well equipped, western food, and a traditional Thai kitchen out the back under a 1960s car port for the times when you feel like stirring up some searingly hot, eye watering traditional Thai food. Both of these kitchens were enormous.
The house that I had rented, was, I realized, massive, not just by Thai standards but by any standards. It was also surrounded by houses some of which were even bigger. It not only had two kitchens but five toilets, four bathrooms and a variety of very big empty rooms leading off the main central living area. Despite the overall enormous size it curiously only had the bulk standard three upstairs bedrooms. It was a though the architect had only been trained to design Primary Schools, hospitals and town halls and he was having a bash at a normal house as an experiment.
There was also something vaguely 1970s about it which I liked very much. In the living room there was a built in bookcase with smoked glass doors that sat next to a massive white L shaped fake leather sofa. Upstairs in the main bedroom there was an elaborate built in mirror and dressing table arrangement, with a large wooden down lit panel that was actually a sliding door into a massive en suite bathroom.
The best thing, though, about the house were the lights. I have honestly never seen such an untamed, reckless and pointless use of electricity. There were an incredible one hundred and twenty two light fittings in the house, not including free standing lamps. There were twenty six chrome rimmed recessed ceiling lights in our bedroom alone. If you turned them all on at once it was like sleeping in a hospital operating theatre. It was a festival of modern lighting technology. It was as if groups of drunken interior lighting designers were trying to outdo each other at a boozy trade fair and our house had been used as the model home. There were up lights, and down lights, spot lights, micro spot lights and concealed lights and a huge modern chandelier in the living area made from frosted plastic and twisted bits of chrome. It was all fantastic and gave life a wonderful surreal quality.
Me and the children played a great, if somewhat un-environmentally friendly game where we would turn on all the lights and rush outside to see the whole thing ablaze like an oil rig in a dark ocean. After staring at it for a while, as though it were a firework display we’d rush out to the electricity box that was nailed to a lamp post in the street and see how fast the electric meter wheel was spinning. We played this game only a few times before the full horror of our financial situation took grip of my soul.
When the kettle boiled I made the tea in Thunderbird 2 and Thunderbird 3 mugs and took them upstairs. I pulled the curtain back in our huge bedroom and sitting on the tangle of telephone wires just outside the window was a fantastic flock of Green Bee Eaters. These are beautiful birds, brightly coloured, graceful and just very exotic looking.
After years of only seeing birds like this in books, on TV and in zoos this was my first proper face to face encounter with tropical wild life. I was a little stunned and just stood, mesmerized by the sight of them. This wasn’t a TV documentary with David Attenborough’s cultured voice in the background, this was the real thing, and just outside our house. I watched them for a while shooting off into the air, completing incredible acrobatics in order to catch a fly or indeed a bee, before returning to exactly the same spot. They really are lovely birds and, if I was ever commissioned by an eccentric millionaire to create the world’s first bird circus, they would be the star act.
I took the children their milky tea, as my Dad had
made for me when I was their age, and rather alarmingly they sprang out of bed without any bleariness. For ten minutes there was much thundering up and down the stairs and trying out and flushing of all the different toilets, while I stared at the Green Bee Eaters day dreaming about whether there had ever been such a thing as a bird circus, and if there had been, and it was extravagantly funded by a bird loving millionaire, what other birds would be suitable (all serious suggestions will be responded to).
Teddy, our youngest son ran into the bedroom. “What kind of house is this” he asked accusingly, “why has it got five toilets?” He did have a good point. In an attempt to compare it with something he could relate to I said that it was the kind of house that a third division footballer might live in (we still talk in terms of the old divisions).
My wife eyed me curiously as if to say “now what are you talking about?” It was the flashyness of everything, the chrome plated light fittings and endless dimmer switches which made me think of footballers. Third division because first division footballers nowadays earn unbelievable sums of money and live in houses the size of a large town. I recently watched some TV programme where David Beckham was being interviewed at home. They showed an aerial picture of his house which was so big it looked like several holiday resorts built on the same enormous plot. I guessed that second division players would not live in houses as big as first division players, but they would still be pretty big, bigger than our house. So, third division felt about right.
“What third division footballer” he asked suspiciously, half wondering whether we were sharing it. “Oh I don’t know… Freddie Eastwood” I blurted. There aren’t many third division footballers names on the tip of my tongue but Freddie Eastwood will forever be remembered as the Southend United FC player who knocked Manchester United out of the League Cup with a 30 yard screamer of a goal. It brought the town to a fairy tale like standstill for days and elevated Freddie to legendary hero status.
The irony is that he is also famously a Romani and lives in a caravan off the main road from London to Southend where he can be seen to this very day exercising horses.
Satisfied that they would not have to share the house with anyone, not even a third division footballer and his family, our children roamed about the house, with much flushing of toilets, and explored the garden. By lunch time they had discovered and poked a huge sleeping moth and screamed when they found a big black shiny scorpion under a flower pot.
The moth was nearly as enormous as David Beckham’s house. It was suspended upside down under a leaf. It was so big that at first I just couldn’t work out what it was. I was looking right at it but my brain was not registering anything. Was it a bird, a toy, a butterfly? I just stared blankly at it wondering what to do until my wife took a photo of it and looked it up on the internet. “The Atlas Moth is the largest moth in the world, so called as it’s markings resemble a map of the world”, well kind of as long as you live on a planet that looks like a great big squiggle. It really was an impressive size; I would say it was roughly the size of a fat man’s head.
By this time I couldn’t put off going around to the club house any longer. In order to gain access to the swimming pool and a rather sad, lonely room with a few knackered exercise machines in it called “The Fitness Room,” I had to pay money at something called the Club House Office. I took my new company cheque book with me that I had just received from the bank, and strolled around the corner on the lookout for Green Bee Eaters, Atlas Moths, scorpions and third division footballers.
The Club House is an odd affair. Like a lot of the houses designed for the wealthy Thai and western market, it’s built on an unnecessarily massive scale with ornate pillars and needlessly imposing entranceways. Also like The Fitness Room it has suffered from neglect and feels quite lonely and sad. It’s as if it was the focal point of a long forgotten but powerful civilization (who also happened to have a job lot of concrete) and served some other important function like a central court house, parliament assembly building or reception hall for aliens from a distant but friendly planet. It’s got the feel of the ancient Greeks meet The Aztecs meet the Beckhams.
I walked up the huge flight of steps, similar in construction to those outside The White House or St Paul’s Cathedral and into the enormous cavern like chamber that is the mighty and imposing Club House Office.
I’m not sure what I was expecting but I was really quite thrown by what I walked into. I suppose I thought there would be some bustle of self important activity befitting such monumental grand surroundings, but contrary to this, the room was almost empty. In the far left hand corner was a single desk, a filing cabinet, a rather incongruous electric blue plastic sofa and a young Thai women sitting behind the desk staring out of the window, lost deep in her own thoughts.
I paused in the doorway. It could have been a scene from some kind of South East Asian modern day remake of Thomas Hardy’s, Tess of The D’Urbervilles (if you can imagine such a thing); a drama that would highlight the contrast between the vastness of the surroundings and the vulnerability and smallness of mankind, or a Thai receptionist at least.
I didn’t know whether to creep back out without being seen or somehow announce my presence. I didn’t have to do either as the women looked up with a start. I approached the desk, which given the huge dimensions of the room took some seconds, adding to the theatricality of the event. I hovered uncomfortably the other side of the desk and asked if I could speak English. The women nodded, so I explained that I had just moved in around the corner and would like to join “the club” allowing me and my family unlimited use of the swimming pool, and join in neglecting the neglected The Fitness Room.
She stared at me. I stared back. It was silent in the huge room. Seconds past without words or gestures. I explained again but using as few basic words as I could and got out my cheque book from my pocket. She visibly recoiled and looked shocked.
The next bit goes down in my top ten surreal moments, of which there are quite a few contained within these pages. Without any word, or gesture, and without looking at me, she took some keys out of the desk drawer, crossed the room without looking back, disappeared down the unnecessarily huge flight of steps, got onto a motor scooter and drove off. I stood there and listened as the sound of the engine disappeared into the distance; until there was complete silence.
Now what? I was left standing alone in this huge room holding my cheque book. I didn’t know whether to wait or run. Perhaps she had gone to get help, or the police or just gone home. Or perhaps she wasn’t supposed to be there at all.
It suddenly changed from Thomas Hardy to one of those odd, rather sinister black and white French 1950s suspense movies where nobody speaks and everything is implied. What did her silent departure from the office mean? Was I guilty of something or not? I became increasingly uncomfortable loitering in this empty office and wondered if I was somehow being set up. Would I be framed for the Club House Murders, and spend the rest of my life in Thai jail saying “but I didn’t do it” and lawyers with black and white 1950s French accents saying “you expect us to believe that she just walked out.” With all this playing on my mind I tried to act as natural as I could and sat down on the electric blue sofa and then stood up again quickly. I wondered what I would do if someone else came into the office. My Grandfather would have known what to do.
After at least five minutes, probably more, I drifted out of the office and walked back home and thought that I’d try again tomorrow.
To this day I have never seen the same women in either the club house or indeed anywhere around the community. When I went back the following day, there was a completely different women and a friendly young guy who is some kind of maintenance worker, although I have never seen him do anything. I paid the money, no problem, and received four lovely little plastic cards with pictures of the enormous club house on them.
We were now officially part of “The Club”.
Chapter 5
Starting The Business
Thailand, especially Chiang Mai is known for its many festivals.
It feels like every other week there is a major festival of some sort, either religious or cultural. As there is such a wonderful mix of cultures in Chiang Mai hardly a week goes by without some major celebratory disruption. Everything is celebrated by everyone; Chinese New Year, Thai New Year, Western New Year, Christmas, Easter, Valentines Day as well as 2 religious Buddhist days per month. This doesn’t even include all the non religious festivals like the Firework Festival, Lantern Festivals, Rocket Festivals, Flower Festivals, numerous Dance Festivals, Music Festivals, Food Festivals, Vegetable Carving Competitions, Fashion Shows and goodness knows what else.
However, all of this is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared with the ongoing festival that involves all of us non-nationals on a regular basis; The Festival of Photocopying. Nothing can prepare you for the onslaught of photocopying in Thailand. Like taking photos and selfies, photocopying is indulged in with great relish. Wherever you go in Chiang Mai you will find shrines to this noble art housing at least three huge old photocopiers. In Thailand they say that you are never more than five meters away from a photocopier (or is it a rat). The first person to set up the Chiang Mai Museum of Photocopying will make a fortune. It’s no exaggeration to say that photocopying isn’t something you just do here, it’s a way of life.
Central to our master plan was starting a small business that would hopefully fund our new life. And as these early days went past this activity along with the increasing amount of photocopying began to take on a life of its own. In fact when you get over the initial shock of the shear volume of photocopying there is something reassuring about having loads of copies of everything and countersigning them, it kind of reminds you who you are, and thrusts a sense of importance on an otherwise completely meaningless activity. I like it, although at first it did feel weird counter signing copies of my countersigned copy of my passport. Now I get down to it with a flourish, like a celebrity footballer signing autographs after the match. If you move to Chiang Mai I promise you’ll feel famous in no time, especially if you start a small business under the guidance of my attorney.