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)
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