The Terror ... The Terror ...

So there’s this terror that torments me every morning – a human being with no awareness of (nor interest in) its impact on other human beings i.e. me.

The Terror is of indeterminate nationality with passable English delivered in an accent that could be Latvian, Peruvian, Icelandic, any. But the instrument of torment is not the accent - it’s The Voice.

Rough, rasping, raucous, and loud. Oh so loud. Eardrum-damagingly loud. Brain cancer-inducingly loud.

The Terror suffers from a sickness the name of which I cannot trace on Google though there must be one: uncontrollable engagement in one-way vacuousness with anyone and everyone.

The Terror, owner of The Voice, has of late frequented the pleasant café where for years I have taken breakfast. At a favourite small table I (used to) enjoy plates of Cambodian fresh fruit, creamy yoghurt and aromatic coffee while running through the day’s early business on my laptop – quietly supping and sipping and tapping, undisturbed by the world’s tensions and crises.

Until The Terror arrived. Until it descended on my café, shattering my unobtrusive pleasures with The Voice.

Not that The Terror has yet tried to engage me in its vacuous raucousness. It must sense from my body language that I am not for engaging. But any hovering waitress, any unwitting customer settling at an adjacent table or as many as three removed, any hopeful motordop, passing news vendor, shoeshiner, beggar or vagabond is fair game for an outpouring of The Terror’s Voice. .

Not that they are likely to view The Terror in my terms. They are temporary recipients. I am a prisoner, unless I change venue.

Which I may have to do. How could I fail to overhear The Terror, outside left of the café door engaging a hapless customer outside right, declaring this to be its favourite Phnom Penh spot where it intends to while away its spare hours - and that it is currently without any form of occupation or employment?

***

Mon Dieu! L'Euro Est Merde!

So there are these 12 distinguished French economists who recently wrote a letter to Le Monde:

'The single currency is condemned to an uncontrollable explosion sooner or later. The obstinate determination of governments to take us by forced march deeper into the euro impasse can only lead to the general aggravation of the economic situation in Europe.'

The gist called for an orderly return to national currencies.

I’ve never been an economist though I managed to scrape an indifferent economics degree at uni.

However, back in the 90s, when the euro was doubtless a bright twinkle in the eyes of the Magnificent 12, it was always a steaming stinking black hole in mine.

I have no blog to prove that assertion, no learned thesis or even a published Letter-To-An-Editor. Nonetheless it’s true.

So what’s to be learned from this little rant? Great intelligence is not synonymous with common sense?

***

1,001 Euros? A Fair Cop, Guv

So there’s this financial crisis - more precarious by the day.

An indicator:
under Italy’s new ‘technocratic’ government, it is now illegal – ILLEGAL - to participate in cash transactions of over 1,000 euros. This may soon be cut to 300 euros.

In December 2001, Romano Prodi (then EU Commission President, now working hand-in-hand with Italy’s ‘technocratic’ Prime Minister, Mario Monti) said:
I am sure the euro will oblige us to introduce a new set of economic policy instruments. It is politically impossible to propose that now. But some day there will be a crisis and new instruments will be created.

Thus we were all well warned. All except for David Cameron who famously put the lid on Tories ‘banging on about Europe’.

So what’s your blogger doing about it, as new ‘instruments’ are created and entwined round our throats (sorry, piggy banks)?

He’s gone to live in Cambodia and has just donated 1,001 euros (in cash) to the UKIP.

***

Hang on! I'm an Ignoramus!

So there’s this degree I've got - a B.A. in 'Economics'.

I scraped a 2.2 a long time ago and haven’t dusted off my Smith, Keynes or Samuelson since.

Thus, economics wizard I am not.

But, thought I, back in the 90s when everyone and his dog were slavering about the brilliance of being 'In The Euro' while howling about the madness of being out of it, Hang On!

Er - a single currency means the same interest rate across member countries, yes?

Um - countries with economies as diverse as Greece and Germany, Ireland and Italy need different interest rates, yes?

Despite my degree not including a bit of politics (as in a ‘PPE’ from The Other Place), I also thought (back in the 90s):

Er - a single currency must be managed by a single government, yes?

Um - political union before economic union, yes?

Back in the 90s, I waited and waited to hear a single euro-fan from the benches of our HoC, in the pages of our FT, on the airwaves of our BBC, address such ignoramus-like questions. I don’t remember the questions even being asked.

All I ever heard from the mouths of really REALLY brainy euro-fans was how convenient The Euro would be for tourists, importers and exporters.

I had one further thought then that, being an ignormaus in economics, I put to the back of my brain. (Annoyingly, it's been popping round to the front for years and years.)

Er - um - it’s going to be a bit of a mess, no? Yes?

***

Maggie Mist

So there’s this unattributed sentence, a draft of common sense, that flashed up somewhere on the internet, the likes of which I hadn’t heard since … since ... since longer than I care to remember.

“The European single currency is bound to fail, economically, politically and indeed socially, though the timing, occasion and full consequences are all necessarily still unclear.”

A lightning bolt: “yes Yes YES” I wanted to shout. Which of today’s movers and shakers had said it? And said it with belief to act on it?

Cameron believes in the pleasures of premiership and little else. Clegg and Miliband Junior joust on marshland to be, among other useless things, Europe’s, and presumably the euro’s, prime paramour.

The only mouth of our current crop of ‘leaders’ from which such a sentence could have fallen is that of William Hague. But so mired in coalition compromise has he become, the words would have choked him.

Going back, Gordon Brown was, I think, anti-euro though passionless, forever speaking sideways to encompass his party’s starry-eyed collectivism. The slop of Tony Blair’s third way meant he rarely said anything substantial or understandable. John Major – remember him? I don’t, let alone his sayings.

Surely, it must have been … HER, her for who I still mourn, whose ascension I cheered in 1979 and whose nemesis in 1990, when announced on my car radio, caused me to pull up lest the mist in my eyes caused an accident.

I googled. Yes! The quote was Maggie’s. Margaret Thatcher said it, rather wrote it, in her book ‘Statecraft’. Google also led me to a thoughtful person’s compendium of its fifty key saws and instances.

Scrutinising them, I marvelled at her wisdom, astonished that she could be so reviled for articulating such obvious unadorned truths.

Dissenters are requested to offer a single utterance, let alone fifty, by Cameron, Clegg, Miliband Junior or Senior, Brown, Blair, Major, anyone that - if applied - would better improve our collective lot.

***

No Defence Left

So there’s this guided missile directed at Dr Liam Fox that I wish I had launched myself, not someone styling himself ‘Scottishman’ in response to a Telegraph piece.

“Suppose a person worked for a defence contractor. In the course of his work he had to make frequent overseas visits to clients.

This person's company discovered that a shadowy figure had accompanied him and attended some business meetings using the company's logo on his business card.

When asked about the situation, the person laughed it off saying the shadowy figure was a Walter Mitty character and was harmless.

The management accepted this as a perfectly reasonable explanation.

In David Cameron's la la world this is a reasonable scenario.

This is what happens when politicians with little or no experience of business life are elected to high office.”

Pow! Double Pow! Both blasted to deserved oblivion.

Another missile in the same column targeted Fox, previously a GP, for the ‘Dr’ he still appends to his name.

"It’s as logical as Alan Johnson MP calling himself Postman Alan Johnson MP,” chortled blogger Peter Wood.

Spot on. No defence left.

***

M'Lords, Might I Humbly Suggest ...

So there’s this report today that some politician or other, not far below the rank of Deputy Prime Minister (seventeen and counting) soon plans to introduce a law compelling motorbike passengers to don crash helmets under pain of, what, a ten-pence fine.

It’s two years since he, or maybe one of those Deputies, pushed through laudable legislation requiring helmets for drivers.

You’d be churlish not deny the primary law has been a partial success. It took months and months but your blogger estimates that these days around 75% of Phnom Penh motorbike drivers comply …

… between seven in the morning and six in the evening.

After sunset helmeted drivers become rarer, perhaps one in three. At weekends lawlessness reigns; the species seems endangered.

And that’s in Phnom Penh. Country folk clearly have a touching faith in their skulls’ resilience, day and night.

Maybe it’s to do with the likelihood of being caught, urban police working seven to six, Mondays to Fridays; rural police, if any, confining themselves to barracks.

Not being a Deputy Prime Minister, nor any kind of legislator, I humbly suggest that, if the aim is to save lives, action focuses on enforcing the primary driver law, while also refining details such as helmet quality and the fastening of chin straps.

With 95% compliance in the bag, it might be time for the labyrinthine difficulties of wording a helmet law, one that encompasses passengers such as grannies with drips in their arms on their way from home to hospital and new-born babes on their way from hospital to home.

Not to mention more obvious life-saving measures such as banning motorbike drivers talking on phones or passengers carrying sheets of glass or long steel rods or seven-on-a-bike plus the family dog plus a dead pig etc


***

Where The Hell Does A Squaw Squat?

So there’s this thing all of us do – British, French, Cambodian; children, women, men.

Piss.

And there’s this thing that none of us do, unless we’re Gerard Depardieu or Cambodian men.

Piss in public.

Not quite none. I’ve lived in Cambodia for eight years and can count the number of women squatting before my eyes on two fingers of one hand.

Whereas, during each waking hour and often the rest, my eyes are treated to at least two men rotting posts, rusting fences, eroding concrete with streams of steaming urine.

In truth, public pissing ranks pretty low on my antisocial scale. Were I running this country, I’d impose one year of continuous torture on those blocking pavements with monstrous SUVs, thus forcing me to dice with death on the chaos passed off as roads.

I’d subject mobile vendors who terrorize my eardrums with loudspeakers strapped on three-wheeled selling contraptions to exquisite forms of execution, always halted at the last moment, before the application of yet another imaginative method.

Indeed. The arrogance of public pissers is small beer compared with that of pavement-blockers and eardrum terrorists. But, while making allowances for the absence of a single public lavatory (this being the 176th poorest country), I can’t help wondering that, as Cambodian females must need to piss as often as Cambodian males, where the hell does a squaw squat?

(note the rust)

***

Making A Clean Sweep

So there’s this bleeding-heart-leftie stuff about looting and marauding all over the Independent and Guardian.


Typical is:
Now that they have a broom in their hands, can these wonderful “clean-up” people carry on to the nearest sink estate and perhaps clean up the neglect and deprivation that is OK out of sight of their nice streets and tidy businesses?

Steely-heart-rightie asks:
How about the neglected and deprived cleaning up their own estates that might then become less ‘sink’?

***

Grey & Once-Pleasant Land

So there are these three aspects of the mayhem that distressed me – one of them NOT that, for two whole days, British newspapers, as if in accord, expunged the ethnicity of Mark Duggan whose shooting apparently catalysed the Tottenham mob. (That was distressing enough and I was forced to perform due diligence on Google Image to confirm my hunch that he was black.)

In no particular order, the three are:

1) in Battersea, warnings to ‘Big Society’ volunteers to leave the clean-up to the council because of Healthy & Safety regulations
2) in Dalston, threats to arrest Turkish shopkeepers who lined up with baseball bats to protect their property and person, action the police force (aka service) manifestly failed to take during the initial anarchy
3) all over London, orders to the police force (aka service) to ‘stand and observe’ the looting, thuggery and murder because of fear of legal action under the Human Rights Act.


My once-pleasant country is now a once-unimaginable shambles.

***

Spare A Dime, Seurrrgh!

So there’s this tuk-tuk driver as if from heaven sent.


Cambodians, mostly impoverished long before financial crises girdled the globe, were unlikely to escape the maelstrom.

Nor was your heartless (and fortunate) blogger. His mood of late has not been best served by the unsolicited overtures of Phnom Penh’s battalions of unemployed disguised as street vendors, beggars and – tuk-tuk drivers.

The last are least tolerable. Useful when you need them, they are insufferable when you don’t. When I first fetched up here eight years ago, they were stationed at 20-yard intervals on popular streets and ranked on certain corners. Their manner was reasonably jovial though with attuned ears you could hear a slight cockiness in ‘Sir’ as in ‘Tuk-tuk? Serr!’

Now they are serried two yards apart on every street and triple-ranked on every corner. The ‘Serr’ has morphed into a ‘Seurrr’ delivered with obsequious contempt.

They feign outrage if their solicitations meet with no response. They bellow after you and rock their hips if you ignore them. They turn a stroll from the comfort of your home to the sanctuary of a café into a journey to hell. They are the pits.

Yet –

I’m alright (for the moment) and they are not. But there is only so much bleeding a heart can do. There are more deserving cases for compassion than able-bodied tuk-tuk drivers.

Imagine my relief, then, when, wrapped in self-justifying indignation, I recently passed this paragon of courtesy on my way to breakfast.


Had the Minister of Tourism instigated a programme of tuk-tuk etiquette? Was this the start of a better life (for me)? Was this too good to be true?

Sadly, yes. Despite my encouraging words and promise of eternal patronage, he and his sign had vanished the next day with ne’er sight or sound of them since.

With dollars drying up and gold shooting up, I’ll swear those two-yard gaps are fast closing to one and ‘Seurrrgh’ is in the air on every breath.

***

The Great Pebble Dash

So there’s this urban facility currently enthralling hundreds of Phnom Penh denizens, both sexes, all ages.

Without fanfare or announcement, sturdy all-weather fitness machines - exercise bikes, balance bars, swing hipsters, gorilla grabs – recently sprang up like metallic mushrooms along the pedestrianized area of the city’s renovated waterfront.

Such a success they’ve been! Morning, noon and evening you can’t get to them through the crush. Even at midnight, there’s usually a short queue for the most popular contraption – the swing hipster.

Instructions for safe use and health warnings –‘Consult a doctor if in doubt that exercise is suitable for you’ - are posted on prominent noticeboards in French and Khmer. Thus it’s likely the machines are guilt gifts from France (Cambodia’s colonial master 1863–1953) abetted (without cash) by Phnom Penh’s City Hall.

Nothing wrong with paybacks of course. But, despite the genius behind the concept and despite health and safety concerns, a certain small detail in the big picture has eluded international officialdom.

The machines’ bases – protectors against grazed knees, scraped palms and dashed skulls - do not comprise of rubber matting, wood chips, or sand. It must have taken a very special kind of civil servant to come up with -


- pebbles.

***

Pity Us All With POTUS On The Stage

So there's this stuff I said, possibly the first to say it, about a humanoid who's supposed to be in charge of all the world.

I said it long before all the world's love affair with him exploded in arc lights and a great deal of noise.

Now everyone's saying what I said - for example, the Wall Street Journal.

Within this blog I said that Barack Obama was:
'absurd' - 29 September 2008 (pre-election)
'vain', 'pusillaminous' - 25 May 2009
'naive', 'preposterous' - 26 September 2009
'weak' - 23 November 2009

In total, are these much different from the WSJ's 'loser'?

And how had I managed to become so prescient, my face set against the world? Maybe the experience of forty years in TV drama, working alongside hundreds of strutting actors, gives one a certain eye for nothingness.

***

Six good reasons from my hero, Daniel Hannan, MEP for South East England, for not saying what I just said in the way that I said it. I happen to agree with all six but, somehow, I just can't bring myself to be as polite as Brown-baiter Hannan.

Colgate Quixote Rides (Again)

So there’s this day – Father’s Day – that David Cameron, leader of my erstwhile country, celebrated by tilting at what he calls ‘Runaway Dads’.

An RD is one who, having fecklessly sired offspring, vanishes into thin air leaving his complementary progenitor to pick up the tab.

Or, more likely, the state.

Society must, Cameron bellowed from the grandstands, ostracise these fiends. They must be considered as 'beyond the pale' as drunk drivers. So strident was his tone I was surprised not to see RDs strung up with rapists and murderers.

Good one, Colgate. Rhetoric aside, who would disagree?

Now re-aim your lance at higher targets. Start skewering instead the deficit, inflation, the NHS, unemployment, the police, education, the EU, Libya etc etc etc.

Stop twisting at every puff of a focus-group and do your proper job.

***

Angel, Weep No Longer!

So there’s this photo that caused excessive delight when, on a recent visit to the auld country, your blogger, anxious for home news, visited the Phnom Penh Post online.

Depicted was a heap of mangled wreckage, the remains of a row of giant billboards that for the last six months had disfigured the magnificent waterfront of Cambodia’s capital city.
(blog: 3 January 2011)

I read the front-page story avidly, hardly able to trust the visual evidence.

Had Phnom Penh’s authorities come to their senses? Had they accepted that, far from ‘beautifying the city’, the billboards – mobile phones, fake Scotch whiskey, Japanese sanitaryware - were a blight to make an angel weep? Unlikely, as Khmer aesthetic awareness, Aspara excepted, is mostly remarkable by its absence.

Had the sponsors slipped up on a greaser?

No! Mother Nature (allied with Auntie Angel) had taken the matter in hand, letting loose a brobdingnagian puff of wind during an unseasonal thunderstorm and - Jericho! The boards came tumbling down.

So convincingly had they fallen to earth that one person was injured, two cars crushed and three houses damaged.

Relieved that the injuries were slight, I could do nothing other than rejoice exceeding glad, particularly on my return to Phnom Penh. There, across the river from my apartment, was a crane and crew dismantling the leftovers of my – and what should have been every denizen’s - bête noi.

The Post, while latterly reporting the billboards’ official demise, glossed over any understandable soreness felt by the sponsors.

Now for the Egg Men …
(blog: 23 February 2008)

***

Maid Mighty In Heaven?

So there were these Mighty being Put Down From Their Seat ten days ago in King’s Chapel, Cambridge.

High in a college stall listening in rapture to Evensong’s 'Magnificat', positioned as always just behind the mellifluous altos, I wondered which Mighty would be next in line for a put-down.

Mubarak put down; Brown and Miliband Senior put down; Blair put down (definitive put-down lurking).

Who could possibly be next? Miliband Junior is not yet sufficiently mighty to be worth putting down. Clegg? Cameron? Buffett? Bono?

Certainly not me, mighty minnow in miniscule pond - though my sins are manifold and many.

Pow! Zap! Out of the yonder, put right down from his 1st Class Air France seat, a gargantua, arguably the most mighty on Earth save Obama (who will be put down sooner or later).

So, courtesy of a hotel maid, the Lord delivers once again on his covenant, perhaps neither unexpectedly nor mysteriously given Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged antecedents.

Maybe it’s nothing to do with the Lord. After all, when hath He ever Exalted The Humble And Meek? Whatever the outcome of DSK’s put-down, the maid is unlikely to receive such beneficence.

***

Plump Pink Pigeon Pie

So there’s this pigeon – plump and pink, a cut above his three blue-grey companions.

I knew he knew his mustard as he soared from the hotel rafters to the swimming pool; the others flapped.

Pinkie wasn’t first to drink. He held back as his friends, one after the other, waddled to the water lapping onto the baking tiles from the length swimmers. Head up, neck straight, he waited as the others quaffed, each miniscule sip punctuated by 360 degree surveillance.

Puffing his plump chest, Pinkie strode forward, winging the blue-greys out of the way. Was his beak a straw? No up-and-down motion for him so intent was he on draining the pool.

A belly-flopper caused a flurry. Back to the rafters flapped the scrawny three. Unperturbed Pinkie drank on, pausing only as a goggled swimmer, completing a length, somersaulted and torpedoed away. Pinkie’s beak dipped as, coast clear, his friends flapped down.

They had scarcely landed when, beyond the Frangipanis, a cat yowled. In a whirl of worry, the three were off again, despite heat and thirst.

Not Pinkie now quenched. Too hot to fly, he dove like a penguin into the bright blue pool, causing a tsunami with his flutterings. Suddenly, with inimitable manoeuvres, he was up on the tiles, shaking his feathers like dog fur.

Glancing at the heavens, Pinkie strode towards the ten steps leading to the vestibule. The midday sun gave shade only on the seventh – which is where he stopped his hoppings and, as if hatching eggs, nestled.

I’ve never seen a pigeon do that before and I won’t see Pinkie do it again. Next morning, around midday, as I sought shade on my recliner under the Fragipanis, I spotted a pink mess, steeped in blood.

***

You're perfect already so STFU

So there’s this hotel, perfect in every way save one. The setting’s magnificent; rooms spacious; beds are for dreams; breakfast scrumptious; pool, spa, health club state-of-the-art; all at a price that puts a motorway motel back home to shame.

No question, where I’ve fetched up for Khmer New Year is the best hotel in Siem Reap. It’s the best in Cambodia and that’s not best of a bad bunch. Like dentists, Cambodia does a line in top-flight hotels providing you don’t venture beyond Phnom Penh’s city walls or those of Siem Reap.

So what’s the snag here?

The staff are the snag. Are they rude? No. Surly? No. Inattentive? No, no and no again. Problem is - they’re too attentive.

Oh, those staff. I feel such a cad because, with their shining morning faces, they are so eager to offer their salutations; to enquire how one is; to pander to one’s least desire.

Morning faces? Afternoon and evening faces too. Every hour, every minute they shine at you, those faces, beaming with pleasure if their owners can be of the least service, gurning with unfulfilment if they can’t. From hidden alcoves they suddenly appear. From behind potted plants they glide out, accosting one with greetings and enquiries about how one is.

And how is one? One was fine, perfectly fine, on one’s way to breakfast, the pool or a glass of cool white wine (almost a tenth of the room price). Then, ambushed by attention and solicitousness, one is fine no longer. One wants those shining beaming faces to disappear back into the alcoves, glide back behind those potted plants, to leave one alone and - STFU!

I blame climate change myself.

***

S/he S/ells S/ea S/hells

So there’s this word – Quasimodo of a word – assimilating itself into our lovely language, ruining our syntax. Objections lodged with perpetrators induce “But that means you’re - Sexist!”

‘Rapist’, ‘Racist’ or ‘Fascist’ could not be spat with more contempt.

It’s not even a word within the definition of 'word': S/HE. What? What the hell is s/he? Pieced together from a rubbish tip?

Here’s a recent example - from an organ of HM Government.

The contractor will manage the drafting and printing works. S/he will have excellent written English.

Interesting. How will the seekers of this fe/male contractor adjudicate the excellence of hers/his English? With difficulty, I'd say, judging from two lines in the job description:

3) Ask the Ministry of Commerce if they are willing to contribute to an introduction and draft one.

5) Draft a letter to sent with the publications.

The dismal grammar of civil servants is less dismaying than the quotidian use of the guilt-rousing S/HE.

If we must have a non-sexist version of the collective singular pronoun, can’t the OED committee gather the Great and Good to come up with something like HSE? Or even SHE?

Ah yes! She solves everything wonderfully.

***

Striking Twelve in Phnom Penh

So there’s this grandfather clock that had never struck twelve. Not when I was three and first became aware of its doleful chimes from a nook in my grandmother’s house.

Not when I was thirty and the clock took up residence in my father’s house after his mother’s funeral.

Not as centre-piece of my Phnom Penh apartment, the clock passing to me after my father’s funeral.

My father, dab hand at fixing things, couldn’t fix it. The twelfth chime eluded even him and his many attempts at rectification with screwdrivers, pliers and probes.

Ten the clock chimed at ten. Eleven at eleven. Then, oh dear, eleven at twelve. And, heaven be praised, one at one. Day after day, year after year, century after century.

Two centuries actually. My father had stuck a Post-It note - still there - on the inside of the mahogany door:
“circa 1800, made by Jonathan White, Lincoln”

Though good at Post-It notes, my father failed at chimes. As had, apparently, his father, my grandfather; his grandfather, my great-grandfather; all the way back to – who knows? Maybe Jonathan White was a prankster-clockmaker, determined to torment his customers – in this case great-great-great-great-etc-grandfather Robinson - with slumberless nights, waiting for a chime that never came.

Roll of drums, raise the curtain and enter – Puthea Chin, Cambodian, at 19 never having seen a grandfather clock in his life.

Puthea works wonders as a designer for my film company. He conjures illusions out of nothing and weeny budgets, enhancing and repairing what exists already. Fixing, in other words.

Fixing! What took me so long to put two and twelve together?

For three days, bits spread around him as if from an explosion, Puthea toiled while the clock tolled – eleven, eleven, always damned eleven.

For three days he smiled enigmatically, delicate fingers calmly filing, oiling, massaging Jonathan's jigsaw. Eleven, eleven, always damned …

... twelve! On the fourth day, twelve. Not just once, again and again as the clock hands coincided at the apogee.

Separated by two centuries, Jonathan White and Puthea Chin, prankster and perfectionist, Lincolnshire clockmaker and Cambodian genius, had been as firmly united as me and my slumber.

***