Posted 7:21 AM by Gobbler
I'm the operator of my pocket blogerator

Afternoon.

There was a plan to go away somewhere wher no-one else would be, like the moon or somewher, and thus have no distractions and be abel to think freely. Instead I am here in Seville with the oranges and the semi-alcohlic students, as in normal student because if i remember correctly most students tend to be semi-alcoholiuc. not tht i can reallly remember, alot of my student days are something of a blur. I am bloody glad i am nto on my own here. I am not made to be alone. the otehr night when the frenchies were still in germany and the dutchis had gone to his girlfriends flat for the evening, i was in the flat on my own and i didn't like it. quiet and still i knew that no-one would be in the house until sometime the next day. in one way it was good but in lots of other ways it was not. so there.

yesterday sent of a couple of packages at the post-office (i know this is fascinating stuff) and the lady ther was higly amused by my persistent use of the word 'claro'. literally translated i believe as 'clear' it is used in peru as 'yup' or 'right' is in england but in espana or at least seville they dont use it. they prefer 'vale' (valey) which means the same darn thing. anyway this woman was terribly amused by claro. ha bleeding ha. actually i found it quite funny as well, we had a good little chuckle together.

Having bought and sent these packages my weekly budget has been badly beaten up. Ive bought one pint in a bar all week. as in ive onjly been to a bar once this week and only had one drink which was a pibnt, not ive only bought one pint all week but i have had 435 sangrias and absinthes.

Anyway let us push on to the main and quite long offering today. hi`ppies, trrains and wanking and history, an obvious combination.


Damned Hippies?

Kanchanaburi, Thailand

June 13-15

Things were getting disturbing for poor Paul. Not only had his Uncle moved one step closer to the loonie bin with his worrying ravings about Dr. Octagon but he was now in Kanchanaburi which, the guidebook promised, was full of tank top wearing, toe ringed, pot smoking, thai dyed damned hippies. This wouldn’t be a problem in itself, Paul had nothing against hippies personally, he hadn’t met any, but before he had read his guidebook he had told his uncle that he was going to Kanchanaburi because he knew his uncle would be pleased that Paul was going to go on a train there. He also knew that his uncle was in possession of the same guidebook and was sure to read it. This was likely to prompt a mad tirade of abuse from his uncle about hippies which Paul didn’t want to have to deal with.

Interestingly, as he sat in the Leapfrog Guest House, supposedly a hippie hotbed, he couldn’t see any hippies and up to now hadn’t seen any anywhere. Where were they all hiding? The only other person Paul could see at that moment was a Danish guy called Stig with whom he was having breakfast before their exciting tour began. Paul asked Stig if he was of ‘The Dump’. Stig didn’t seem to appreciate the comic genius of Paul’s comment and assured Paul that Stig was a perfectly normal name in Scandinavian circles. It didn’t seem impossible.

After Stig had finished his noodle delight of a lunch he set aside his plate and grabbed the edges of the table with his hands, looked at Paul and announced loudly "Okay, sho, now I go to mashturbate. I have not mashturbated in shree days and now it is time. And sho, I will shee you in ten minutsh." With that he got up and left for his room, leaving Paul sitting there dumbfounded. Why, exactly, was it necessary to share that information? Surely a simple "Excuse me for a minute" would have served the purpose. Some things are not meant to be shared, your personal wanking habits being one of them. What was Stig going to do when he got back, give Paul a blow by blow account of his recent encounter with madame palm and her five lovely daughters? Paul had just met the bloke, was there really any need? Thankfully Matt showed up before Stig so at least now Paul had someone else to talk to.

Paul told Matt about what had happened and Matt reminded him of the guy they had met the night before. Oh yes, the night before. Possibly even more bizarre. Chatting away to some middle aged American fellow with a thick mid-west accent who had come to Thailand from Burma and had at one point taken a bus from Rangoon to Mandalay. Unfortunately he did not appear to appreciate the comic ramifications of having taken ‘The Road to Mandalay’ and hadn’t been stirred when Paul and Matt had begun to sing him the song. However, all this talk about roads did lead him to talk about driving and he was all keen on giving them tips on what to do if you are driving long distances and start to feel tired. It’s very useful advice. You know the signs that read ‘TIREDNESS KILLS, TAKE A BREAK’ that are cunningly positioned a mile or two from the next service station? Well, don’t bother to listen to those signs any more, you don’t need them because Paul had discovered a tactic that he was assured would do the trick nicely. Those take a break signs are now redundant, here is the new way, the way of the future. This is what the man had told Paul:

"Yeah man, when I’m driving along and I start to feel tired, you know, when I start to feel myself nodding off, you know when that happens. I got this trick I always use, I gotta tell ya. What I do when I feel myself goin’, is I just BEAT OFF! Yeah, works every time. I gotta tell ya tho’, a little bit of advice i gotta tell ya. Don’t try it on a motorbike. Yeah."

Don’t try it on a motorbike?! Gee, thanks! Useful tip! Why exactly did Paul get the idea into his head that the only reason this guy knew that trying it on a motorbike was a bad idea was because he actually had tried it on a motorbike and it had not been 100% successful. It’s a lovely image, really it is. There you are cruising down your motorway or interstate, humming along to Brahms, counting the minutes since your last caffeine injection, checking your pulse and watching carefully for any signs of tiredness while meanwhile in the car next to you is some bloke jacking off! Yeah that’s safe! Safe as houses mate, no chance of an accident there, not as long as your minds somewhere in a field with a hundred Playboy bunnies. What was particularly worrying was that the American guy had said it with sincerity not sarcasm; he really did seem to think that it was a good idea.

Stig of Denmark returned to the table and wanking seemed back on the menu but thankfully he did not have the opportunity to go into details of his activities of the previous five minutes. It was time for the tour.

***

The tour advertised white water rafting, an elephant ride and the Death Railway. Kanchanaburi is famous, not for hippies nor for seedy masturbation stories but for the fact that it is on the banks of the river Kwai and during World War Two those nasty fiends the Japanese decided to build a railway across it all the way to Burma that became known as the Death Railway. You can see a film all about it, The Bridge Over The River Kwai, starring Alec Guinness, back in the days when he was not yet a Sir. The highlight of the Death Railway is the imaginatively named Hellfire Pass. This is an exquisite example of 1940's stonemasonry; a hand crafted, corpse lined slice through a somewhat considerable rocky protuberance, engineered by the finest slave labour Japanese Imperialism could rustle up. Once Japan had decided to establish a large Empire and attacked China back in 1933, they grew partial to taking over other people’s countries. Once that old cad Mr Adolf Hitler started to give the European Powers a thorough drubbing in 1939, Emperor Hirohito, Adolf’s Japanese cohort, directed his troops to attack parts of South East Asia that were controlled by the Europeans as there wasn’t much they could do about it. The convenient thing for the Japanese was that almost all of South East Asia was at this point under the control of a European Power. Indonesia was Dutch; Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam were French; and Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma and India were British. Every country, in fact, in that part of the world was part of one empire or another, except Thailand, slap bang in the middle of the lot which had managed, through cunning political maneuverings, to remain independent. To be fair, we should add China to the list. China wasn’t a part of anybody’s empire, it had just spent the last 200 years getting beaten up by Britain, France and lots of other western powers and was, by 1939, in the process of being invaded by Japan. There is of course also Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan, but no-one cared much about them on the grounds that there seemed bugger all to do in those mountainous places except run short of breath, shave your head and wear orange.

Before too long the Japanese were in control of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore and were in the process of invading Burma. They never invaded Thailand because Thailand came to the conclusion that instead of trying to fight which would have resulted in lots of dead people, they would remain neutral and let Japan move through their country and build railways and things like that.

The problem with attacking Burma was that the British troops had by then stopped running away and the only way to get large quantities of supplies to Burma was by sea, due to the line of mountains that marked the Thai-Burma border and the British had developed a fondness for sinking merchant ships that tried to get to Burma. This was a serious problem for the Japanese; it was going to take ages to invade Burma and India at this rate. Then some clever Japanese chap came up with a plan. "I know!" he said, "let’s build a railway from Thailand to Burma, then we will no longer be reliant on the troublesome Singapore – Rangoon sea route that is much plagued by scampering and frequently costly enemy sorties and will speed the build up of men and munitions in Burma for the victorious offensive into British controlled India, to further bash those balshy Blighty blighters." He was quite a clever chap that Jap bloke and he was damned good at English.

And so the Japanese began to build 440km of first rate railway to link Burma with Thailand. There was a good reason why up to that point no railway had been built which was that building a railway through mountainous jungle is quite tricky and the Japanese had to employ lots of manpower. Fruit Loop merchants like Paul’s uncle weren’t the only people to be under the impression that the British knew a thing or two about railways and they used British prisoners of war to build it. In fairness they used any old prisoners of war they could get their hands on, they just had more British than any other especially after 50,000 odd surrendered at Singapore. The Battle of Britain may have been Britain’s finest hour but Singapore certainly was not.

Imagine it. There you are in mid-1939 pursuing a happy existence as a clerk in some smoky London office. Then, all of a sudden Britain is fighting a war against some beligerent foreigners. Before you know where you are you’ve been drafted into the army and whisked off to Singapore to defend the Empire. Before long you’ve surrendered and have walked all the way to Kanchanaburi where you’re told to build a railway. Then you catch malaria and die. It wasn’t what you had planned to do with the rest of your life. You had planned to marry Doris and do all sorts of other exciting things. But it doesn’t matter now. Not a lot matters when you’re dead.

Yup, Surrendering spelled trouble for the Allied P.O.W.’s because the Japanese were contemptuous of anyone who did so and treated them like dirt. They were considered the lowest of the low because they had disgraced themselves by surrendering. For the Japanese, it was better to die fighting than surrender. Better to commit Hari Kiri. Better to send Kamikazi pilots whizzing into American warships when all your own ships both merchant and military have been sunk than admit that you have lost the war and should therefore surrender. Even when Japan had been nuked and it was obvious to even the most thick skinned Japanese patriot that all was lost, Japan refused to give in. It took a second nuclear bomb to convince the leadership that it was time to put those hands up. And even then, when the Emperor addressed his people telling them the knews that it was game over, he employed one of the world’s most masterful strokes of understatement by saying that ‘The war has not gone entirely in Japan’s favour.’ Many Japanese soldiers refused to believe that Japan had actually lost and one poor sod ignored all the ‘War is Over’ messages, believing them to be bogus, and carried on his war until 198? when he finally surrendered in a war that the world had already forgotten about. Those Japanese of the Empire of the Rising Sun were fighters, not quitters and they didn’t like quitters.

This all meant that the Allied P.O.W’s weren’t treated well at all. Underfed and overworked on the railways they dropped like flies from malnutrition and disease. Mind you, they did develop some clever new medical practices. As an example, have a look at this question: What do you do when you’re in the jungle and have no medical supplies because your captors can’t be bothered to give you any and you have a man with an infected wound? Tricky one. Answer: take the injured man down to a river and stick him in it. Keep him there until the fish have eaten all the infected parts of the wound, then take him out pretty sharpish before they eat the rest of him. It’s aquatic leech technology. Good job there are no piranhas in that part of the world. Despite this cunning plan, at Hellfire Pass one man died for every sleeper that was laid and 8,000 men died in total. 8,000 Allied P.O.W’s that is; in our history books we don’t hear too much about the estimated 200,000 Asians who died for the same. Luckily for all us non-Nazi, non-Fascist, non-Empire of the Rising Sun people out there, by the time the railway was completed the Allies were winning and Japanese Imperial dreams crumbled. Most of the Death Railway is closed now; ever since Burma was taken over by a military junta in 1948? There hasn’t been much call for legitimate cross border trade or communication.

Nowadays, now that the war is over and we’re all friends, the Death Railway is a tourist attraction. And I’m sorry to say it but Paul wasn’t there purely in persuit of historical knowledge; he already knew about the Death Railway. If you want to know about what happened on the Death Railway you buy something known as a history book, you don’t need to go to it and look at it, that’s voyeurism and that’s really why Paul was there. He wanted to see the chisel marks in the rock, he wanted to see the graves, the places where people died, the terror, the hopelessness, the darkness of human nature, because he wanted to understand more than the bare facts. How had it happened? How had the Japanese sent these men to build a railway knowing that many of them would die because they were not given the means to stay alive? How?

People like to think that they are good and largely faultless and that they could never act the way some bad people have acted in the past. People say of murderers and rapists and perverts and masochists that they could never become like them, that they are normal and the others are twisted. I could never be a murderer, a rapist, a pervert, a masochist, I am not like like that. Tell that to yourself if you want my friend. People are not born as these things. They become them. We are all human and we do not simply become whatever we want to become. We are effected by our environment and we can do nothing about it. Think those Nazi SS troops were born with the desire to kill lots of people and take over the world? Think those Kamikaze pilots were born with a death wish? Think those Arab suicide bombers are born with TNT strapped to their chests and just can’t wait to set it off? You are what you eat and you are where you eat as well. You learn whatever you are taught and you are left with little choice but to believe it.
Those Japs were taught that their Emperor was basically God on earth and they must serve him to the death, something they were adept at doing and they weren’t at all keen on anyone who wasn’t on their side. Coupled with what has already been said about surrendering this meant that the Japanese didn’t really care if you lived or died, they just wanted their railway as soon as possible. Bad luck if you were sent to build it.

Here was Paul having a look at it all. Walking through Hellfire Pass he counted the sleepers that had been thoughtfully left in place or replaced so that you could count the bodies, one for every sleeper. He examined the chisel marks left in the rock. He looked around at the other tourists. What were they doing there? Did they too have a morbid interest in the human capacity for cruelty? There they were now, walking along the track hewn out of the side of the mountain by virtual slaves, clicking away with their cameras. Had they come because they were genuinely interested or was it because they were here on holiday and the guidebook told them that Hellfire Pass on the Death Railway was the thing to see? What were they thinking about? Did they know how and why the railway had been built, did they actually give a damn? What were they going to do when they got home? Go and tell their friends that they had been to Hellfire Pass and it was awesome? I don’t know. I don’t know about them, I only know about Paul. Paul saw what he wanted to see, took the photos he wanted to take and then moved over to the Matt who was standing by the sign explaining all about Hellfire Pass. They began to chuckle quietly to each other at the mistakes in the english. Something to relieve the serious air. Paul had been dangerously close to thinking about things too seriously. It was all very well thinking about things, but what the hell could Paul do about it anyway?

As they returned to their minibus Paul noticed nearby signs for a hotel, the perfect thing for all those tourists who want to sleep in the jungle just next to Hellfire Pass. He hadn’t known beforehand that one of the old POW camps is now a tourist centre and hotel with no doubt lots of authentic prison camp paraphernalia to look at. How cheery. It didn’t sound like the most tempting place to stay but no doubt plenty of other people thought it was or it wouldn’t be there.

After Hellfire Pass, obviously, the tourists were treated to the white water rafting and the elephant ride. The rafting involved sitting on a half sunk raft as it drifted gently down the river. It became ‘white’water rafting only if you swished the water round a bit. The elephant ride involved sitting on a smelly elephant as it plodded around for half an hour so that you could take photos and tell all your friends how wonderful and awesome elephants are. Half an hour is plenty; any more than that and the novelty value wears off and it occurs to you that its actually quite boring and uncomfortable sitting on an elephant plodding along at one mile and hour.

Back in Kanchanaburi via train on a still operational section of the railway, it was about time Paul and Matt had another go at not being sober, so that they could think about all the interesting things they had seen that day. They gathered together as many people as they could and visited the imaginatively named ‘No Name Bar’, where the sign instructed them to ‘Rock and Roll or Fuck off’. The English proprietor was in no mood to mess about and had covered the inside of the bar in more charming messages, including one that read ‘If you sit down buy a beer. This is a bar, not a bus station.’ This was not a problem for Paul, Matt and company. But where were the hippies? Was it off season for hippies? After all this talk of hippies you would have thought that there would be some about. As he was getting drinks Paul quizzed the barman. Apparently it was off season for hippies; they tended to come out in July and August and then again in December and January as that is when the students had breaks. No, said Paul, he didn’t mean wannabe student hippies, he meant real hippies, where were they? "Fuck off," said the barman.

Put off by the abrupt conversational techniques of the barman, Paul left the bar with his drinks. On his way back to the table he spotted something. A flip-flopped foot with a toe-ring, belonging to one of the girls at his table who wore, among other things, a purple saree and had messy brown hair. A sign! A sign from the Hippie-God!

From then on Paul was not concerned about trains or railways or moody barmen but hippies, or rather one hippie. Sally, as she turned out to be called, wasn’t really a hippie, at least she didn’t consider herself to be one, but as far as Paul was concerned she was at least half-way to being one. Besides, contrary to his uncles prophesies, she didn’t seem to be damned in any way at all, she seemed to be very nice. Which was lucky, because Paul liked nice people. By the end of the night Paul’s bed was plus one hippie which suited them both very well. After all, nobody wants to be alone. To have someone to hold, just to have someone there, is infinitely better than to spend the night alone and nothing mattered for a few hours.

When she left early next morning to catch her bus, Paul felt more alone than if he had never met her. He would never see her again, their paths had only crossed for a few short hours. Paul lay there feeling hollow and regretful. The whole thing seemed now to have been so futile, never more than a passing high. But Paul would do it again. He was looking for more, but until he found it something was better than nothing. Even if that something was a one-night hippie.

FIN

Cheesm: i had no idea there were so many types of pie out there! a thought has just occured to me: has anyone mentioned hip pies yet? ah its all coming together nicely! indeed foul evuil uncle is taking his toll on my previously clean mind...

Greg: Pies have been around since greek tiomes eh? well i never. Whats a sharpie?

Rich: Well,yeah, not quite a third but not far off! admittedly igot the maths wrong, woe is me. dont worry, got this stuff backed up left right and centre.

Rach: Like for example we shoult learn from mr creasote: he explooded after eating a wafer thin mint and lots of other things but he never eat a pie in his life. note to self: eat more pies

Kat: -so asking somebody out to coffee doesn't imply sex in the uk?- not if youve just met someone in the street i dont reckon although I take the point. certainly not in the pie story miss kat.

so i'm normal for "procuring" that bureau/dresser via dumpster-diving, then?- what? where did this comment spring from? you have me confused. ah, now i think i see. TYess, absolutely, not only normal but col. although you'd be better off it was something that hadnt been thrown away. like the new additions to my house: two 'danger, no entry' signs and a steel barrier.

being a girl is easier. we can hide the cash with the girls in our brassiere- what useful things you have there

now we all want to know what christian really said, yes.- Not I want to lick you but I want to lick your pussy. For some reason sensitive me dones't warm to that sentence

i can't understand why you went to spain and yet aren't participating in the feria. spain is inherently a fiesta.
I am supposed to be writing not drinking and i am a good boy...

Evil Uncle: so what happens if you invite someone up for some hot rampant sex?

Kat: dont knock it til youve tried it.

corr im going now

Posted 7:45 AM by Gobbler
The Feria

It's the biggest party in Seville, it lasts all week and it started last night. Our whole house joined the tens of thousands of people for one whopping flamenco fiesta. All except special agent Goulden who stayed at home to work. He was still awake when they returned fully fiesta'd at 6:15. Boo hoo.

This one I don't like

This one's got something so unpleasant in it I have just deleted the offending word. Perhaps I am just a sensitive bunny. The thing is that some bloke actually said it. The trouble is that I am sure that many people would have read the line in question and said "eww, that's just not pleasant, I don't want to read any more." and so i have edited it down.

Even so, I don't know if you really want to read this. It's got funny bits I suppose but is at the same time unpleasant. Having said that, and for all that, it's quite interesting.


Bad Christian
Siem Riep, Cambodia
June 16th
There is a sort of man who is in some ways a hero of our time. The sort of man about whom thousands of stories have been written, the Han Solo’s of our world. This is a person who has escaped the system, who doesn’t exist from day to day in the suburbs and the office. Instead they travel the world, their life one long tale of excitement and adventure. This person doesn’t do anything they don’t want to do, this person is independent, this person is free. This person might be a man named Christian who was, on the sixteenth of June 2003 in Siem Riep, Cambodia.

Paul returned from the Angkor ruins and sat at a rickety table in the cafe bar restaurant car park front garden of his two dollar a night hostel. Also sitting down at other tables were two Japanese girls eating dinner and a man who got up from his table and asked if he could join Paul. Paul vaguely recognised the man as having been on the bus to Siem Riep – he had made mumbling noises a lot and had eventually abandoned his chair and jumped on top of everyone’s rucksacks at the back of the bus, blurting out to no-one in particular that it was ‘more bloody comfortable’ on the rucksacks than his seat.

As he sat down the same thought occured to Paul that had occured to him on the bus – this bloke was what is known in the trade as a sketchy punter: he was dodgy, a bit wierd, not the hit of the whole fruit, not nice to see and overall best avoided. That may have been the case but Paul was not in a position to be fussy over friends, beggars cannot be choosers. He had to his name at that point a grand total of 0 friends. Matt, the guy he had met in Bangkok, had flown on to Saigon and although Paul planned to meet him there, that was days away. Yup, Paul needed new friends and even if this bloke was dodgy as hell he was bound to be at least reasonably interesting.

The man, who turned out to be called Christian, was Irish and forty-four. He divulged that he had been travelling more or less constantly since he was 16 and was now on one last trip before he settled down for good. Perhaps this bloke was going to be quite interesting after all; if he had been travelling for the last 28 years he must have some fascinating stories to tell.

Fortunately, Christian was quite happy to talk about his adventurous life. The first fascinating tidbit that he decided to unleash on Paul was that he had slept with lots of women and that the main purpose of this last trip was to sleep with a Japanese girl because he had neverf slept with one of these before. He threw Paul a crooked grin and with lecherous eyes indicated the two Japanese girls sitting away from him. After excusing himself for a minute, Christian began to try and make conversation with them but, luckily for them, their english wasn’t very good and they didn’t take to Christian at all. As Christian showed no signs of leaving them alone they themselves decided to abandon the rest of their meal and scuttle away, which they did. Christian turned back to Paul. Part of Paul told him that he should probably do the same thing as the Japanese girls and get away from Christian; sure he needed friends but surely he didn’t need tham that badly, did he? Some sketchy, aging punter who cracked onto young Japanese girls the first chance he got, did Paul really want to spend time with this guy? The thing was that even if he could have thought of a way to get rid of Christian, which he couldn’t, at this point he didn’t really want to. Christian may have been dodgy but he was nice about it and Paul had nothing better to do at that moment.

Free now of other distractions, Christian suggested going round the corner to buy a special type of beer he knew and then going to back to his room to drink it, where he had a fan and it would be cooler. As ideas it wasn’t the worst that Paul had heard of in his tme and he agreed.
In Christians room the two sat down and Paul tucked into his can of Black Dog Stout. Christian guzzled away atthe stuff as if it was a life preserving nectar, he couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Paul sipped his and reckoned that, on balance, he probably could get enough of the stuff and that in Christians room there had been any other beverage options he would already have had enough of the stuff, but there weren’t so Paul persevered.

Christian busily set about rolling a spliff and it was clear that Christian’s main reason for wanting to go to his room was to smoke weed rather than, as he claimed, gain the cooling benefits of the fan, which he had yet to turn on.

Paul asked Christian if he had been that day to see Angkor Wat and Christian told him that he had been before and couldn’t be arsed any more with that concrete gobshite. No, he told Paul, bollocks to all that shit, he had spent the day in his room getting stoned, far more constructive he thought. As the conversation went on Paul came to the alarming conclusion that Christian probably spent most of his days in his room getting stoned and indeed had probably spent most of his adult life getting stoned. The result was a man who didn’t seem to be entirely there. The story he came out with about his life was hazy. He now lived in Ventianne, the capital of Laos, with a French woman, about whom he could not make up his mind was his wife or his girlfriend. This French wife/girlfriend did not apparently mind him wandering off for a couple of months to try and pork Japanese women, at which he had not thus far been very successful at. Indeed, as his life story emerged it seemed that the only thing he had been terribly successful at was not settling down and taking lots of drugs. He had worked various jobs around the world and had at one point, ten years before, been the proud owner of a bar on Koh Samui until it had been confiscated from him and he had been thrown off Koh Samui. Apparently those callous bastards the Thai Government hadn’t been at all appreciative of the amount of drugs that Christian had been using. I mean, how oculd they do such a thing?

So, here was Christian now, living in Laos. He claimed he had recently got a job as a professor of English at Ventianne University which seemed a little implausible as his only apparent qualification was that he spoke English that was for large parts of the day reasonably coherent. Paul didn’t suppose the educational standards in Ventianne University are the worlds highest but you would have thought or at least hoped that the skills required to become a professor of English are more far reaching than the ability to teach English.

Christian began to roll his latest spliff and Paul reckoned it was a good time to excuse himself and get a couple of hours sleep before he was due to meet his Angkor driver for a game of pool. Christian volunteered to join him and as he could not immediately think of a good reason why not he agreed.

In the pool hall a couple of hours later it emerged that there was indeed a very good reason why Christian shouldn’t have joined them as he was now completely shot away due to an extra two hours of Black Dog and marajuana. This did not improve his ability to play pool or, if it did, his pool skills when sober were something less than non-existent. What made it worse for all concerned was that he was clearly more interested in the table attendant than the table itself. Every table in the pool hall had its own attendant who sets up the table for you and rescues the white whenever it disappears and so on. Their table was manned by a pretty teenage girl who was doing her best to keep proceedings running smoothly. This task was severely hampered by Christian who had managed to sink twice as many Black Dogs than balls during the first game and was now becoming dangerously lechy. You might have thought that, given what he had mentioned earlier about Japanese girls and given that this girl wasn’t one, she would be safe, but sadly not. As he closed in on her she did her best to avoid him and get on with her job. If it had been back home she would have told him to fuck off or at least get someone to do it for her, but she did nothing. After all, you can’t go around complaining about the foreigners, these people are gold dust and a heck of a lot more important than you are. Paul, his taximan and the taximan’s mate weren’t doing much to stop Christian either.

Some time later Christian obviously reckoned that the preliminary stages of flirting had been successfully completed because he now moved on to the next stage which was propositioning her and trying to touch her. His propostioning techniques were somewhat base, they consisted of repeating to her over and over again "I want to lick you." Fortunately nobody in the room bar Paul understood what he was saying. As the girl didn’t understand Christian pointed to his desired location and gestured with his tounge exactly what he had in mind to do down there.

Astonishingly, this tactic did not produce the desired result and served only to disgust the by now frightened girl, but that didn’t deter Christian. Paul tried to get him to stop but he was now out of control and short of assault him there was nothing Paul could do. Eventually the girl was forced to abandon her post at the pool table and run away. The game was now over. Not only was Christian incapable of playing pool but no-one else was in the mood.
By the time they got back to the gurst house Christian had regained most of his senses and asked Paul if he would like to join him for a spliff, presumably so that he could lose them again. Paul declined; his enthusiasm for marajuana was markedly lower than Christians and his enthusiasm for Christian had taken a serious nose dive. In any case Paul had to get up a few hours later to watch the dawn at Angkor and some sleep would be welcome. Christian then said that he couldn’t remember most of what happened in the poolhall and when Paul told him he looked agitated. After mumbling apologies he finally said "It’s just... I don’t really amount to very much." He looked sadly at Paul. Then he brightened a little and asked "Are you don’t want that spliff?" Paul was sure and said goodnight.

Back in his room Paul thought for a while about Christian. On the face of it Christian was a hero of our time. He had escaped the system, no office had ever tied him down. He had been places and seen things most people can only dream of, he had lived his life as he pleased; he had lived a life millions of people would love to lead if only they knew how. But after it all, what did he have to show for it? Not diddly jack shit, as far as Paul could see. Whatever hopes and dreams Christian might once have had had now been drowned in a sea of Black Dog and lost in a hash cloud. Here he was at forty four with almost nothing to his name; having accomplished virtually nothing beyond melting half of his brain through continued and dedicated substance. You would have thought that his years of travels would have made him sage and wise yet here he was getting blasted out of his mind trying to pick up girls about a third his age. Just what was the point? Perhaps when Christian had set off on his travels all those years before he had been trying to find something but now he was only trying to escape. From whatever it was. Christian was trying very hard and by all accounts succeeding to avoid reality, real life. It’s true that a rolling stone gathers no moss. If that stone rolls too long it gets worn down and then breaks into pieces until eventually there’s nothing left of it.

An important and disturbing point occured to Paul. Was he running away from something or was he looking for something. There was no simple answer, probably a little bit of both. Certainly he was looking for something; he was looking for something that would help him understand what the hell it was all about, what he should be doing with his life. He may not have got very far on that score yet but Christian had taught him one important lesson: don’t be like Christian. It doesn’t matter what you do but do something, something you can believe in. Otherwise you might find yourself at forty something with nothing better to live for than alcohol, marajuana and girls a third your age. Perhaps you, reading this, think that sounds like exactly your cup of tea. But Paul had met Christian and knew it wasn’t his.

Posted 9:11 AM by Gobbler