KHMER MEKONG FILMS - Cambodian Films and TV Production Company

1,001 Euros? A Fair Cop, Guv

2012-01-07T19:58:00.000-08:00

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!

2011-11-08T04:46:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-02T19:41:00.001-07:00

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

2011-10-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

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 ...

2011-08-22T07:02:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-08-20T07:14:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-11T03:42:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-10T06:07:00.000-07:00

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!

2011-08-08T08:42:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-31T06:48:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

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)

2011-06-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

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!

2011-05-21T06:56:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-05-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-15T07:34:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-13T06:14:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-07T01:08:00.001-07:00

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

2011-02-01T07:07:00.000-08:00

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.

***

Manners Maketh Man (if not God)

2011-01-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

So there’s this spat I had with one of the goodly gentlemen.
(blog: 6 Jan 2011)

During their month’s mission I got to know them pretty well, got to respect them, like them a lot. We had drinks and meals together. Lively conversation ranged across every topic, save one …

… the one that well-brought up Englishmen avoid like the plague – faith in the supernatural. ‘Religion’ in other words.

All the more so because my new friends were Men of God, pastors. To be fair to their American manners, the topic of the Almighty did not once fall from their lips. Pastors they may have been, Evangelicals not.

So why, on the morning of their departure, did I allow myself to give vent to the notion that I didn’t believe in God; that nothing on earth could ever persuade me to change my mind?

For a moment I detected a flush of pity cross their faces. Then one of them, patting my hand, said “That’s alright. Fortunately, God believes in you.”

Great line, neat as a chestnut. How I wish. Oh, HOW I wish!

***

Two Pastors, One Lift

2011-01-06T00:56:00.000-08:00

So there's these goodly gentlemen who, being pastors and therefore godly, I would normally pass by on the other side with a wide berth.

But little berth was possible when I first rubbed up against their wholesomeness. We were sardined together in a small lift.

It was a real squeeze because a young American couple was also shoehorned in: She a bucksome bundle of energy who clearly adored her husband; he hip yet sporting a vaguely Cambodian mien.

As latecomer to the party, I did what latecomers do. Looked at my shoes, my nails, the lift buttons, pretending not to listen to this unlikely quartet’s conversation. Which was fascinating ...

Between 7th and Ground, I learnt that hip husband had been freshly deported from the US, home for over thirty years. In 1978, his parents had fled the murderous rule of Pol Pot. They took with them their two-month old son born in a Thai refugee camp.

Problem one: as a teenager he’d had a minor skirmish with US Law Enforcement. Problem two: he’d never become a US citizen. Problem three: since 9/11, the US has been 'returning' miscreant immigrants to their 'country of origin' – tipping them out as fast as it can.

Problem four (Big One): hip husband, though Cambodian by blood, is American by culture. Hell, he’d even married a bucksome US citizen, had a job as a storeman, and paid rent on a condominium.

He’d never been to Cambodia; he speaks no Khmer; he has no Cambodian friends or relatives. No matter to US Immigration: He'd blotted his copybook years ago; he wasn’t properly American; he was OUT.

He was lucky in that his adoring wife, despite her lack of Cambodian blood, had vowed to stick with him come what may.

Had it not been for her, and the two accompanying pastors, this minor miscreant would have been cast adrift alone in a foreign land with $100 in his pocket, a parting gift from Uncle Sam.

Ah yes, the pastors. Making myself known to them later, I discovered that these gentlemen, hearing of his plight, raised money from their God-fearing flocks to sustain the deportee during his first year in alien Cambodia. These gentlemen were paying for their own airfares and hotel bills. They were giving up a month of their time to support him in his miserable uprooting, replanting - and inevitable depression.

Nothing in it for them except, perhaps, to do God’s will as they saw it. But, by God, how they helped him. You could see it in his trusting face. Theirs was an selfless act, wonderful.

Next time I hear of any US pastor in a lift, however wholesome, I’ll make sure to squeeze in with no sort of berth at all.

***

Beauty in the Eye of the Behoarder

2011-01-03T00:48:00.001-08:00

So there’s this 'beautification' of Cambodia’s capital – though you could have fooled me.

Phnom Penh has (rather, had) a magnificent vista: two miles of arborous promenade running through its centre alongside the Tonle Sap, the only river in the world to change direction of flow depending on the season.

The point at which this mysterious but murky inland waterway merges with the mighty Mekong on its journey from the highlands of Tibet, China and Laos to the lowlands of Vietnam is the stuff of poetry and the reason for the existence of the city.

In terms of river spectacle, London, Paris, even Sydney, can’t hold a bucket to Phnom Penh.

Never mind the Royal Palace or Silver Pagoda. This city’s international draw is its waterfront.

Which has now been 'beautified' in the shape of four giant advertising hoardings. They appeared overnight, despite howls of protest from the owners of nearby buildings whose views of the city were obliterated; half-hearted protests in the newspapapers that fizzled out after two days; ravings of a crazed blog-writer who stood on the river bank opposite pulling out his hair.

'Tis rumoured that their original site was further downstream where more tourists could appreciate their ‘beauty’. Then it was surmised that King Sihamoni, when glancing from the Royal Palace, wouldn’t care for his view to be thus 'beautified'. So upstream they went to where less exalted personages could enjoy them e.g. me, right opposite my apartment.

'Tis rumoured that many hundreds of thousands of dollars were involved in this enterprise to wreck – sorry ‘beautify’ - Phnom Penh’s most precious asset. Exactly through whose hands they passed will doubtless remain as mysterious as the Tonle Sap.

The high-ranking city official, whose idiosyncratic concept of ‘beauty’ the Cambodia Daily managed to extract for an article on the subject, was “too busy” to answer questions on such subtleties.

***

Happy or Merry? Have both ...

2011-01-02T00:13:00.000-08:00

So there’s this event Cambodians don't celebrate by halves – Christmas.

Though 95% are Buddhists, they go crazy for it with zero understanding of what it represents.

No matter: up go tons of tinsel and miles of fairy lights. Cash registers fail as business booms, and the chance to look sweet and sweat in Santa Claus outfits is missed by no one - from bank clerks to bar girls.

And then there’s that phrase …

When I first heard it, seven years ago in December 2003, I thought it was an aberration from the mouth of the odd babe and suckling.

Since then, Happy Merry Christmas has become institutionalized.

Everyone says it to everyone now. DJs sing it on the radio. Shops, offices, restaurants, bars deck their windows with it.

There is something indefinably Cambodian about it. Something naïve, exotic, excessive.

This combination is probably the main reasons I’ve just spent my eighth Christmas here and intend to spend many more.

***

Euro Puckeded Up

2010-11-27T04:36:00.000-08:00

So there’s this edition of Newsnight (courtesy BBC World) about the fragile state of the world economy.

After several minutes of blood-curdling stuff, up came that subject, the hallowed euro.

"Will it survive?" asked Jeremy Paxman, for once a naïf amid three ‘exalted economists'.

“It may not!” said Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, neutral.

“Doubtful!” said Irwin Stelzer of the United States, gleeful.

“It must!” said Will Hutton of the Extreme Left, tragic.

Irwin puckered an eyebrow in Will’s direction. Gillian pursed a lip.

“At last,” I thought, settling down. “The debate proper begins – albeit years too late.”

No such luck. Before lip unpursed and eyebrow unpuckered, Jeremy said, “That’s all we’ve got time for.”
(blog: 21 November 2010)

***
Update - three hours after posting above:

Returned from dinner, switched on TV pre-programmed to BBC World and - up popped Will Hutton saying:

"Euro problems need to be addressed - problems that weren't thought about when it was formed."

Er ... um ...

***

In & Out Fairly Smartish

2010-11-12T08:35:00.000-08:00

So there's this erection in the middle of nowhere; rather erections that from a distance looked like a row of toilets.

We were four kilometres northwest of Oudong Mountain, itself forty kilometers northwest of Phnom Penh.

Oudong Mountain, more Hill in truth, is where an ancient Khmer king established his court having been ousted from Phnom Penh by greedy Thais who always enjoy a good invasion. He moved back fairly smartish when the danger was over.

We were nosing around for suitable TV locations. Deep in unpeopled countryside, usual pancake landscape relieved by usual palm sugar trees, the pagoda-headed Hill hove into sight. At its foot was a meagre village, haphazard array of shacks outnumbered by stalls with nary a customer between them.

Then - a series of weird signs, all pointing northwest:
The Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project!

I’d noticed the first at the main road turn-off. After the fifth my disinterest had morphed to rabid curiosity. No way was I not going to satisfy it.

The red-earth track snaked round endless rice fields. The Hill vanished in the rear-view mirror, as did the village vestiges. Our car rucked in the ruts, deeper by the meter.

The project was heralded by a billboard:
Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter!
Habitat For Humanity!
Helping Cambodians Help Themselves!

We beeped a buffalo blocking our approach. Splashing down into a pool of mud, it revealed – in the middle of nowhere – a row of shimmering identical toilets in immaculate line.

They couldn’t be toilets! It was a mirage, surely, under the midday sun. Perhaps they were sheds for storing tools to cultivate rice fields and palm trees, harnesses to corral buffalo.

But no, toilets they were, this confirmed by a monosyllabic American crophead who appeared from thin air as we, chortling, snapped away.

Crophead somehow made it clear a tour was not a possibility. But while retreating to our car we extracted a modicum of info.

Habitats - as identical as the toilets - were to be erected on the adjoining four-square meter patches already marked out by bricks. Rubbish-dump families would be exported from Phnom Penh and presented with one habitat each.

“Facilities, electricity, running water?” we asked.

“Nope!” said Crophead.

“Transport?”

“Nope!”

“School? Jobs?”

The monosyllables dried up.

Crophead stood bristling, hands on hips, as we reversed through the axle-crunching ruts to the nearest turning point, jolted past the double-sided billboard and beeped the muddy buffalo blocking our way.

God bless the one-term President Jimmy and his Rosalynn. The families will probably bless them when they move in, though probably not when they move out, back to the Phnom Penh dump, probably fairly smartish.

***

Questions Unanswered

2010-11-09T07:02:00.000-08:00

So there’s this art no Cambodian, however talented, has yet mastered. To wit: answering more than one question asked via one sms.

It matters not how simple or complicated the questions.

Example: “Can you come to dinner tonight? If so what time is good? If not tomorrow?” will elicit either “Yes free” or “No cannot”.

As for “Did you receive DVDs? Have you seen them yet? If so any good? Do you need more? If so how many?” might, if you’re lucky, tease out “Yes thanks”.

The more likely “Not yet” is not, I can vouch, helpful for those with a tendency to be uncalm.

***

Right Royal Ride

2010-11-03T06:17:00.000-07:00

So there’s this King driving my tuk tuk tonight from where I'd been up to no good to where one couldn’t possibly get up to any bad.

I didn’t see his face when I hailed him. But in a flash I knew I was being chauffeured by Norodom Sihamoni, King of Cambodia.

The shape of his head, shape of his ears, set of his shoulders, neck-high tunic – I was as certain as Dawkins about Darwin.

Then again, it couldn’t be the ex-ballet dancing King, the shyest and most reluctant monarch on the planet.

Hillary Clinton was in town for two days’ talks about, inter alia, the cancellation of Cambodia’s $400 million debt to the US run up forty years ago. The Khmer Rouge was not even a whisper in Nixon’s ear.

At all times Phnom Penh’s entire glitterati were within spitting distance of the saintly presence, voluntarily or coerced. King Sihamoni was surely no exception.

So I had to be wrong about my chauffeur. Yet ...

… what the hell was Hillary doing thousands of miles away from home? There, another saintly presence, Boss Barack, desperately required shoring up as he was slaughtered at the mid-term polls.

If a Secretary of State could excuse herself from such pressing needs, maybe a King could too.

***

Sad Stag Solo Saga

2010-09-17T22:47:00.000-07:00

So there’s this uncertainty – did my business partner read my last blog?

Three days after their appearance, both helicopter and vice disappeared as mysteriously as they had arrived.

Once again my magnificent silver stags reigned solo and supreme on his hotel’s reception desk.

But only for a while ...

Yesterday two companions arrived in flank - a pair of cheerful cloth donkeys with a glint of permanent fixture in their eyes.***

Of Stags and Helicopters

2010-09-12T06:20:00.000-07:00

So there’s this birthday present I bought for my partner – well, two presents really and, well, business partner.

He’s Cambodian-Chinese and we’ve worked together building our businesses for over seven years. He runs the hotel; I run the film company. If the enterprises are strong, I put it down to our solidarity.

We’ve had our differences sure, but our strength is the meeting of young and old, cool and heat, East and West.

For his 32th birthday I wanted to give him something special. To the silver shop I went, taking an hour to choose a pair of splendid stags, at rest on their haunches, heads held attentively high, both crowned with magnificent antlers.

Blog followers (if any) should have little difficulty unravelling the intended symbolism. Sadly, it was lost on my partner. However, he smiled with his Chinese face at my awkward explanation.

At least he seemed to appreciate their beauty and, without my input, immediately displayed them on his reception desk where no guest, however blind, could miss them and fail to be impressed.

Mission more than accomplished, I thought having hoped only for a modest place on the back shelf, next to the printer and fax.

A digression: My partner’s hobby is helicopters, huge model helicopters that can soar almost to the clouds and fly at furious speeds well out of sight of their console’s operator. He tells me he hasn’t learnt to control the terrifiyng machines that pack his car’s back seat and boot. He enjoys repairing them for the unemployed grown-up sons of Cambodia’s rich and powerful elite.

My stags’ pride of place was short-lived. The next day a small but sturdy vice had been mysteriously fastened to the desk alongside them. My curiosity was soon assuaged when a huge model helicopter appeared, clamped at a jaunty angle.

It wasn’t silver, but it’s arguable that its rotors complemented those magnificent antlers.

***

Colgate, Charlatan, Craggy & now Hague

2010-09-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

So there’s this horror story I want to dismiss in as few words as possible, first because it’s tedious, second because it causes me pain: the resulting mess of Colgate Cameron’s inability to win the last General Election against the most unpopular Government in two generations.

For mess, read ‘Coalition’ - attempts to square the 2010 Tory manifesto (weak anyway) with Liberal hogwash.

Robust action declared all too rarely by Cameron, Prime Minister Number One , is mostly watered down after interventions/ objections by Clegg, Prime Minister Number Two , or Cable, Prime Minister Number Three.

Taxation, fox hunting or Europe – there’s no straight line, no rationale, no big picture.

Sound it out, pop two inches above a parapet, duck and, weeks later, pop one inch above another parapet.

‘It’s what the British people wanted,’ intone Colgate, Charlatan and Craggy.

Let’s see how the various Prime Ministers square up with each other and the wants of the 'British people’ when the ‘cuts’ - $6 billion shaved off a total social security budget of $194 billion - are enforced later this year.

In the meantime, I reserve true fire for William Hague, not because of recent ‘gay’ insinuations – who gives a damn about those or his handling of them? But because of his execrable silence on the question of the UK’s relationship with that statist quagmire, Europe – about which his scepticism up until just before the Election was wondrous to behold.

***

Pre-Pubescent Purgatory

2010-09-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

So there’s this subject I'll tackle ere long – my skewed prediction that Colgate Cameron would waltz it over Bottler Brown. One defence is that I hadn’t allowed for the dubious ‘rise’ of Charlatan Clegg.

Without apologies, I’ll return to one already aired and familiar to blog followers (if any).

I’ve just returned from a short stay in Siem Reap, after Phnom Penh one of Cambodia’s four visitable towns (Kampot, Kep and Kompong Som being the others). A fortune was extracted from my credit card by 'Raffles' (aka 'Grand Hotel D’Angkor') a hostelry claiming – and achieving – first-class international pretensions.

Having enjoyed Sunday morning delights of sauna, steam room, and Jacuzzi, I entered the lobby for breakfast. My shorts and vest were hidden by an immaculate gown, earlier plucked from the recesses of my suite’s wardrobe.

An instinct for decorum pulled me up alongside the restaurant manageress, too attractive to stare at for long. I was right! My gown, my satin gown provided by the hotel, was not appropriate apparel for breaking of the fast at 'Raffles'.

The grumpy old man, hi-jacker of my soul, would, in less salubrious circumstances, have caused a ‘rumpus’. But the lemongrass steam had left me and my alter ego well mellowed. I acquiesced without demur or murmur, shortly returning fresh in less offensive attire.

Breakfast, however, was not enjoyable. A pre-pubescent guest had, it seemed, mistaken the restaurant for Disneyland.

Not a corner was free from his adventure-seeking; not a dish of clotted yoghurt, dried fruit, exotic cereal on the self-serve table avoided his attentions; not a breakfaster’s eardrum escaped his expressions of – pre-pubescence.

I looked towards the attractive manageress. Would she politely suggest to the pair of proud Korean parents that their offspring was causing at least as much - er - displeasure to other patrons as my gown might have done?

Blow me down, no! Oblivious to my shattered calm, she was encouraging Dopey Dwarf to use the aisles between tables as a race track from Mickey's Mansion to Donald's Dungeon.

Harrumph! When I was a pre-pubescent, my parents would never have permitted me to – er – is that why I’m a grumpy old man now?

***

True Blue Rhapsody

2010-05-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

So there’s this prediction I made two blogs ago: Colgate Cameron with a 20 to 30 majority.

I nearly amended it to 10 to 20 after Nick Clegg stormed the electorate’s barricades offering personable vacuity in place of policy and vision.

But I held my horses against the might of the entire British press it seemed. And I’ll stick to my guns now.

Not that I’ll salute Colgate's victory in any shape or form. I’ve felt disenfranchised for nineteen and a half years – since November 1990 to be precise.

These days you mention her in fear of being spat at.

***

Roadshow Rage

2010-04-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

So there’s this habit I must kick - reading British newspapers online.

“Polls Show Clegg Almost As Popular As Churchill” splashed The Times following its own poll following the first TV ‘debate’.

I’ve scoured that superficial roadshow in vain for a clear Liberal vision, for solutions to the squalid Blair-Brown legacy.

A muppet could do a ‘Cleggie’ – stare at camera crooning “Listen to them squabbling. I’m different from them.” Yet we’re supposed to believe the public was charmed.

Winston Churchill - Nick Clegg? How can The Times print their names in the same edition, let alone headline?

Why is the Thunderer trying to bump off ex-pats via rage-induced heart attacks?

***

Pig Pokes Pound

2010-04-13T08:02:00.000-07:00

So there’s this prediction - mine - about the General Election.

Despite alarms and excursions in the polls; “Too Close To Call” headlines in national and international papers; pundits who, not long ago when dissecting Bottler’s latest catastrophe earnestly informed us that “THIS was the week Labour lost the election” now write that “he could even win”; the void that is Colgate Cameron – despite all that, there is not the slightest chance of a hung parliament, let alone a Brown majority.

The sanctimonious self-regarding Blair-Brown government has been such a disaster, so destructive socially and economically (name any of its legislation endorsed by any class of the British public) that, come polling day, electors will find themselves unable to drag their pencil stubs anywhere near those little Labour boxes.

Thus Colgate, undeserving and untried, pig in a poke, will be the next Prime Minister by 20 to 30 seats.

Here’s another prediction: the pound, having risen by up to 5% between now and election day as the above becomes perceived wisdom, will soar by another 5% , possibly 10, during the month after the Tory (if only) victory.

Then, as markets realise that a pig in a poke is exactly that, the pound will be toast once more - browner, far browner, than it is today.

***

Is It For Me? How Much Did It Cost?

2010-03-28T08:18:00.000-07:00

So there’s this curiosity Cambodians display about any object you happen to be carrying, particularly if it’s bagged or wrapped.

Curiosity? Downright nosiness I'd say.

Their noses can sniff one at a hundred paces. Like compass needles, Khmer probosces lock onto it even if you walk on the other side of the street – sometimes before you round a corner.

You can feel necks craning and heads turning to track you. Eyes strain from sockets to strip off the bag or wrapping. I’m not just talking about people who know you - that’s another phenomenon entirely.

I’m talking about strangers – motodups, waiters, waitresses, policemen, soldiers, shopkeepers, shoppers, beggars, street kids. Everyone turns into a rotating x-ray machine at the sight of any object in your hand.

It might be okay if you were merely observed. But you are interrogated publicly. First comes “Is it your birthday?” A variation is “Is it her birthday?” The bold are less restrained: “Is it for me?” can be yelled across the street.

Before you arrive at your destination, someone will have asked the most common question in Cambodia: “How much did it cost?”

I took revenge the other day while lugging a red, zipped-up cubic bag from a hotel (temporary refuge until my apartment is ready) to a rendezvous with a girl, the lovely Srey Narean.

It drove them crazy. And I took strange pleasure in unzipping it several times en route to reveal a mass of tangled shirts, socks and underwear.

Narean has been my faithful domestic help for six years.

***

Ho Ho Ho! A-Fondling We'll Go

2010-03-27T07:09:00.000-07:00

So there’s this middle-aged ... er ... stout Australian who is someone to be reckoned with.

I’m told he has big business interests in New South Wales and Cambodia. Judging by his swagger, I wouldn’t argue with that any more than I would argue with him.

He and I used to patronise the same breakfast bar. We always managed to avoid the least acknowledgement that the other existed.

But, oh, was he a wow with the girls? The unblemished Lovelies, buzzing at my table if I arrived first, would swarm off to surround the man from New South Wales whenever he swaggered in.

One Lovely – tall, exquisite, perfect in every way - had clearly caught his eye. Before long they were whispering sweet somethings. Soon they were a-fondling. Then she gave up waitressing and, before you could say 'Thirty-Year-Age-Gap', they were swaggering in together, glint on her left hand putting the sun to shame.

I wasn’t invited to the wedding. The bar closed on the happy day so erstwhile friends could celebrate her great fortune.

Within four or five months, her tailored slacks had given way to a floral smock. Within six, high heels had morphed into sandals. The smock became a two-tone tent. He still accompanied her, but with less tender attention it seemed.

Then, for a while, they went AWOL until, out of the blue, she walked back in, back in slacks and high heels, bundle on arm, Australian in tow.

I didn’t get a look-in despite having ordered my breakfast.

Baby noises, not from the baby, rent the air. It was as if the proud mother was a movie star corralled by fans. The not-so-proud father waited on the periphery for a moment, then slank outside. He fired up his shiny land-cruiser and shot off, presumably to continue expanding his assets.

The cycle began again after three months – with one difference. There was no sign of him when slacks became smocks, heels sandals, and when a second bundle was presented for inspection.

Last week, walking along Sisowath Quay, I was honked by a shiny land-cruiser that parked across the pavement forcing hoi polloi into the road. The man from New South Wales, stouter than ever, erupted leaving his Lovely, careworn and less exquisite, to trail behind as he swaggered towards an ATM.

There was no sign of bundles and absolutely none of a-fondling.

***

Brushing with Death

2010-03-13T18:35:00.000-08:00

So there’s this shock I had while brushing my hair in the bathroom mirror this morning.

Teeth skimmed with electric toothbrush, deoderized, and dewhiskered with triple-head floating blade, I was, as usual, in a rush to do battle with the world.

My laptop, mobile phones and digital camera, stuffed into an All-Weather Back Pack, danced across on my shoulders as I brushed.

And brushed. And brushed. Then, suddenly, so suddenly – someone was behind me in the bathroom mirror

The brush clattered into the sink as, fist clenched, I span round to face my assailant.

Someone was no one. I was alone in the bathroom. The backpack’s strap, taking up the rhythm of my brushing, had flapped, creating the illusion of human form in the corner of my eye.

From man to animal in a second.

***

Mad Missionary Muesli

2010-03-07T16:36:00.000-08:00

So there’s this breakfast that was spoilt by a woman-without-a-face.

Shapeless with spinster hair, she was at it when I carried orange juice from the help-yourself counter to the table next to her, the only table with a nearby wall socket. My Sony needed charging.

She was at it when I collected muesli and yoghurt, and still at it when I returned.

She was hard at it by the time I’d finished the muesli, and hadn’t ceased when I returned with croissant and coffee.

The voice with which she subjected the corralled head waiter to the evils of Cambodia was neither loud nor grating.

A Girton-College-sort-of-voice - insistent, indignant, inescapable.

Her zeal on the seamless subjects of exploitation and corruption was that of a mad missionary. A tome on Gender Balance & Diversity lay alongside her Apple, screen festooned with pie charts on Rural-Urban Income Distribution.

The head waiter nodded marmoreally whenever she paused for breath which wasn’t often. Once in a while he managed to open his mouth, perhaps to offer a polite riposte, perhaps to make apologies for having to attend to other duties. But she’d have none of it.

She scarcely moved during her diatribe on the misery of local mankind. Half turned from me, half turned to him, her abdominal muscles must have been screaming.

Which is what I had to stop myself doing as I downed my coffee dregs, abandoned my habitual second cup, snapped shut my Sony and pulled the plug from the wall.

Caffeine-deprived, I stalked out past frozen waiter and heated woman whose face I'd never seen.

***

Collapsing House of Com ... sorry ... Cards

2010-02-20T22:44:00.000-08:00

So there's this little girl called Alice Brown, who advised by March Hare Mandleson and Mad Hatter Campbell, shed a couple of tears in front of Caterpillar Morgan.

The caucus watched the spectacle then, swept away by the salty flood, told Cheshire Cat Pollster that it liked Alice a little more and liked Duchess Cameron a little less.

Everyone said a new House of Cards would arise, then collapse ...

Is this Wonderland really the land of my birth?

Cambodia, where I have lived for seven years and where I intend to remain, has never seemed so sane.

***

Heads Abundance, Tails Disaster

2010-02-09T05:38:00.000-08:00

So there’s this smell that’s pervaded Phnom Penh since the start of the week.

It’s highly fishy. Everyone blessed with a touch of entrepreneurship has been making Prahoc. To locals, Prahoc is the delicious national dish; to aliens, it’s a miasmic preserve of deliberately-rotted fish.

There’s a lot of Prahoc about - far more than normal because Cambodia’s broad slow-running mud-stained rivers are yielding a fish abundance beyond wildest dreams.

Fish are not just being fished but, apparently, happily leap out of the Mekong directly into the fishing boats ...

... so many fish in so many varieties and sizes that the price has plummeted in local markets. Grey, pink and black, packed head to tail in tin palettes, fresh from the waters, they wriggle and squiggle as women haggle – and the price falls and falls.

Anthropogenic Global Warming explanations have duly appeared in print: “Warmer waters caused by climate change are causing abnormal breeding,” an expert intoned.

Funny: I could have sworn that, two years ago, the same expert forecast a dire fish shortage caused by some other now-forgotten aspect of climate change.

“Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians will be deprived of necessary nutrients”, she had intoned then. “They face dietary disaster.”

Right now, the disaster is so bad I’m forced to permanently hold my nose.

***

Ghost of Hope & Anchor

2010-02-07T18:50:00.000-08:00

So there’s this ghost of a bar, rather there isn’t now.

The Hope & Anchor, run by a British ex-pat, was a fixture on the corner of the street where I’ve lived for six years.

Mine Host, with whom I was on no-name nodding terms, was a pleasant Northerner, hair thinning and body thin despite a glass glued to his hand as he sat, day after day, elbow on counter, surrounded by bar staff, girls neither pretty nor ugly.

A 48-inch flat screen TV for premier football was sometimes watched by a bit of a crowd, sometimes by no one save him and his girls.

Not a lot wrong with the Hope & Anchor: View of the magnificent conjunction of the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers; website on awnings; beef-fried-rice acceptably served; draft Tiger acceptably chilled; cane chairs acceptably comfy; pool table unscuffed despite bad play by girls bored by lack of custom.

There’s the rub: custom - or lack of. Mine Hosts can sit nodding at the world, elbows on counters, surrounded by girls, all they like. But if dollars don’t walk through the doors, sooner or later nemesis will .

As it did at the Hope & Anchor when, three months ago, police swooped and Mine Host vanished, chairs and pool table tipped higgledy-piggledy onto the pavement. Lorries carted them off later. Mysteriously, the flat screen had also vanished - before the raid.

This prime riverside property, barricaded and abandoned, has since grown ever more desolate.

Of Mine Host, there's been not a peep. Is he still in Cambodia? Is he now propped up by a new counter in an unsalubrious area of Phnom Penh, Ho Chi Minh or Huddersfield?

Of the premises, its website and ghost were exorcised yesterday when a gang tore down the grime-encrusted awnings, the last indication the Hope & Anchor and Mine Host had ever existed.

***

To Bogg Off

2010-01-15T06:24:00.000-08:00

So there’s this question about Blighty's slide since 1997:

What’s the difference between these pictures, both of British police?

Answer: One was officially sanctioned; one was officially reprimanded.

Had I been Chief Plod PR, I know which I’d have preferred to adorn the world’s newspapers as both did, as it happens on the same day.

I'd have assigned cutie-cutie to my waste bin. I'd have cracked open the champagne when real police sledging on real riot shields splashed Santiago to Sumatra.

No such sport: "I’ve reminded the officers in no uncertain terms that tobogganing on duty, on police equipment and at taxpayers' expense is a very bad idea should they wish to progress under my command."

What? Say that again, Superintendent Andrew Killjoy Murray.
Bog off, you humourless New Labour apparatchik.

Bring on the election - fast.

***

Was Norman Tebbit's Dad A Cowboy?

2009-12-23T06:10:00.000-08:00

So there’s this cowboy loose on the streets of Phnom Penh.
'Cowboy' is what he calls himself. In fact, he’s anything but.

Unemployment is also on the loose. You see it on street corners; groups of guys waiting hours to scrape a quarter by pedalling fifty-year-old rickety cyclos to wherever fifty-year-old rickety tourists deign to be pedalled.

Higher up the transport chain, still in effect unemployed, are motordops, younger than cyclomen, astride clapped-out bikes, attempting to extract fares with crocodile charm.

Top of the league are tuk-tuk men with no English or knowledge of the city’s crannies. Tuk-tuks are motorbikes strung to towing carts, contraptions marginally more comfortable than motordops and cyclos.

Nevertheless, tuk-tuks hardly forge a gold-paved road. Most drivers are idle most of the time, impeding Phnom Penh’s pedestrians with magnificent insouciance.

Cowboy bucks the trend.

When I first rode with him, I thought all my local travel problems were over. Cowboy understood English. Cowboy knew the city. Cowboy smiled. Cowboy’s motorbike, seamlessly grafted to his towing cart, allowed a ride smoother than bull horns. Cowboy whisked a cloth across his leather seats before my bottom dropped.

One problem: Cowboy is rarely available. He’s booked up three days in advance. Everyone wants to ride with him. Unemployment? No way, Guv.

I doubt Cowboy has ever heard of Norman Tebbit’s dad.

***

Ex-Prat

2009-12-16T04:52:00.000-08:00

So there’s this Johnsonism at the back of my brain. It goes something like:
‘Anger is the first refuge of the ex-patriot.’

Whether or not the good Doctor ever coined it, I vaguely remember hearing, or reading, the saw eons ago, long before the thought of becoming an ex-pat entered my head.

A letter appeared in today’s on-line Daily Mail, one of a chorus posted in response to the latest catastrophe foisted on the UK audience by The New Labour Band under conductor Gordon Brown.

“The Government has allowed uncontrolled immigration from anywhere at whatever number; allowed house building to cover our green fields to cater for foreigners; wasted money on IT systems and Big-Brother data bases; employed millions of 'jobsworths' doing nothing of value; sold our gold for peanuts.

The UK is now a time bomb. These amateurs have destroyed communities, families, marriage and stability. They have destroyed trust between parents and children; between public and police. They are destroying us by changing our cultural make-up. All of this was planned.

But with the New World Religion of 'Global Warming’ deluded into thinking that we are all going to be washed out of our homes and starved, our future is neither bright nor secure, nor likely to improve decade by decade.

The biggest problem of all is ignored - over-population.

The future looks bleak for the plodding worker – taxed, taxed, taxed ever more.

I hope those who voted Labour get their just rewards. Thanks, mates!”

It was signed – ‘Anne, Ex-Pat’.

If Anne happened to be domiciled in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I could probably spend an extremely congenial half-hour with her.

But not one minute more.

***

Bigger Than A Whole Polar Bear

2009-12-15T19:55:00.000-08:00

So there’s this prince, Charles Windsor, who, from his position of inherited privilege and wealth, with a personal retinue of fifty servants, each with a ‘carbon-footprint’ bigger than a whole polar bear, dares to lecture us hoi polloi on the deprivations we must impose on our quality of life.

I have no elegant phrase to express the full extent of my fury.

But I’d like to share it (my fury) with followers of this blog (if any).

***

Have Yourself A Happy Merry Xmas

2009-12-09T06:16:00.000-08:00

So there’s this celebration that Cambodians do – big time.

As Orwellian Britain veers towards kicking into touch life's every joy, Cambodia, one of the world's poorest countries with a horrific recent history, buzzes with zest and palpable humanity.

British busy-bodies ban seasonal decorations from towns lest they ‘offend’ newcomers. Bishops claim it is obscene to chirrup Happy Christmas lest it ‘offends’ the unhappy. Vicars rewrite beloved carols lest they ‘offend’ God Knows Who.

In Cambodia, restaurants and shops are ablaze with Christmas trees, sparkly snow and Merry Happy Xmas inscribed in tinsel and tat.

A waitresses without a Santa Claus hat is a rarity, despite the tropical heat.

Whether Xmas spirit here is based on goodwill to all men or goodwill to all money, at least spirits and goodwill abound.

Never coming home.

***

POTUS is not a Poet

2009-11-23T05:48:00.000-08:00

So there’s this look that Barack Obama has always had – weak.

Here’s an example – taken on his return from a purposeless meander round South East Asia.

Weakness may be a virtue, indeed necessity, in artists - particularly poets. In a POTUS, it’s a liability.

This man is not only weak, he’s dangerous. To us. To me. I don't like it.

(Here's another ...)

***

Who's Who? Who? WHO?

2009-11-20T02:08:00.000-08:00

So there’s this photo published today that makes me want to laugh and cry in equal measure.

It's of Mister Herman van Rompuy of Belgium and Lady Catherine Ashton of Upholland.

I want to cry because, voilà, here are the new unelected President and Foreign Minister of the United States of Europe.

I want to laugh because neither of them is Tony Blair or David Miliband but mainly ...

... because it's such a funny photo.

***

We Will Control The Climate - We WILL

2009-11-18T05:08:00.000-08:00

So there’s this email that plopped into my inbox - consuming enough electricity across the world's servers to boil a kettle according to AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) alarmists.

Oh joy! A press release from the DECC (Delegation of the European Commission to Cambodia) about a workshop in Phnom Penh.

Three things stood out in a bland document:

1) The workshop was part of a cripplingly-expensive EU initiative to support alarmists’ attempts to “limit Climate Change to 2 degrees Celsius”
2) No part of the workshop was to discuss if the globe is warming and, if it is, that its cause is human activity
3) A subtle threat to future EU funding for local NGOs not subscribing to alarmists’ theory and practice.

My take on this is simple:

After those pip-squeaking tax euros have been spent on wooden windmills stretching from Koh Kong to Ratanakiri and one-stroke solar-powered SUVs and, by 2050 or whenever, global temperatures have risen only by 1.9 or 2.1 degrees Celsius, or possibly fallen by similar amounts, and everyone in the EU is throwing a party, an extra large sunspot will suddenly burst forth - or evaporate - and the climate will be as unpredictable as it always has been and always will be.

***

Bad Samaritan

2009-10-11T05:11:00.000-07:00

So there's this body I passed yesterday on my way from cafe to office after breakfast.

I’d passed it every day on the same journey for as long as I can remember. Until yesterday, it wasn’t what you’d call a body. It was a woman, maybe thirty or fifty, who'd sat on the corner of 136 and Sisowath, back to a wall, doing nothing.

All day. Every day. All night. Every night.

She didn’t seem distressed, or sick - just vacant. She changed clothes occasionally, I suppose from the small bundle always by her side.

A motodop, plying his trade near her spot, once told me she didn’t eat, though locals offered her food. I think I heard him say she didn’t drink either, refusing gifts of bottled water.

I didn’t believe that. Without water, a person dies quickly and she’d been there for months.

A small crowd kept a discreet distance from the bundles, big slumped against small.

“Dead!” breathed a buxom young waitress, idling away welcome moments on the opposite corner .

A cursory glance confirmed her observation. “Has anyone called the police?” I asked.

She shrugged, retreating before the boss noticed her absence.

As the small crowd dispersed, I mobiled my Cambodian business partner.

“There’s a body on the corner of 136 and Sisowath. No one's doing anything about it.”

“Who?”

“No idea. Some woman who’s been sitting there for months.”

“I’ll deal with it.”

When I passed by for my mid-morning coffee, the big bundle had gone. The small bundle remained where it had always been.

***

Colgate Cheater Cameron

2009-10-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

So there’s this rubbish that Colgate Cameron deposited in front of the conference hall.

Scrabbling for a phrase that would not commit the Tories to a referendum on a ratified European Constitution, he said:

‘Let this not be the week that we talk to ourselves but the week we talk to the country.’

It’s rubbish because 80% of Britons strongly favour the referendum promised, then spirited away, by Arch-Cheaters Blair and Brown.

The only thing the country does want talking to about is exactly why Cameron is going to cheat it too.

***

Wheezing Cnuts

2009-10-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

So there’s this wheeze that Climate Change Cnuts employ to harass the sane.

They admit that temperatures have been steadily declining since 1998 - ‘the hottest year on record’ (which it wasn’t) – and are likely to continue falling for the next thirty years.

The wheeze? 'Short-term downtick masking long-term uptick.'

I admit it’s devilishly clever. With this wheeze, the sane can now be harassed forever - whatever the evidence.

***

Cruelty To Friends

2009-09-30T20:15:00.000-07:00

So there’s this friend I’m being cruel to.

I don’t know where she came from or how long she’s been there. I was thirteen in 1957 when another friend arrived similarly. Months passed before she and I parted company.

At first, my 2009 friend wasn’t much noticeable, just there. After being padded around Phnom Penh for a while, she got a little tender. Bearable but tender. Then, she began to make herself felt. Not long after that, she became unignorable.

So I limped to the so-called pharmacy for a caustic cream the so-called pharmacist plucked from the piggledy of packages stacked behind him.

Within an hour my sole turned white; within a day, yellow; after a week a large flap of skin peeled off - leaving my friend still firmly burrowed in my foot.

Strangely, though my sole was now sore, my friend was less tender, more ignorable. But, as the skin grew back, she began to make herself felt again. More and more.

And more.

Not wishing to lose my whole foot to caustic cream, I hobbled to a proper doctor – one who always cures my proper ailments.

‘Four choices,’ he said. ‘One, liquid nitrogen - only available in Bangkok; two, laser – unreliable; three – surgery, painful, very painful; four ...’

‘What’s the fourth?’

‘A plaster!’

‘Plast ... ?’

‘A verruca is a living thing. A plaster stops it breathing. It dies by smothering. You strangle it to death.’

It’s working. Every day, I feel her shrivelling, sighing and moaning under the plaster, struggling, gasping for breath as she slowly asphyxiates.

My friend is no longer tender or unignorable. I no longer limp, let alone hobble. But at what price?

Cruelty to Friends; and soon, I hope, First Degree Murder.

***

Preposterous POTUS

2009-09-26T06:41:00.000-07:00

So there’s this blog that's called time several times on Barack Obama long before anyone else.

This one ...
(blogs: 29 Sep 2008, 25 Feb, 5 Mar & 25 May 2009)

There’s no point in rehearsing it again, particularly as
(a) his incompetence and naivety are now manifest
(b) journals more august than mine are now chronicling the danger he poses to the West.

But is it not preposterous that this chimera's only hint of military action is againt Israel (via 'advisor' Zbigniew Brzezinski) - should it attempt to take out Iran’s nuclear capability?

Two more predictions:
(1) unprecedented international turmoil ahead
(2) Obama will not be in office on 20 January 2012.

***

Designed to Annoy

2009-09-21T04:59:00.001-07:00

So there’s this other annoyance at the Siem Reap hotel in which I'm ensconced, the one with guilt-inducing roundlets of soap (blog: 19 September 2009).

Anti-Utilitarian aka Design.

Take a look at the breakfast utensils:

Pretty yes, but have their designers tried to pour milk from that tear-shaped 'jug', or stabilize a knife on that four-cornered 'plate'?

If they had, they must think it a laugh that milk goes anywhere but in your cup; that laws of physics will slither the knife down your plate's corners into its pit, smearing the handle with butter deposited there by polite Englishmen.

Though the knife itself would grace a silver shop or wreak havoc on the belly of a crocodile, has anyone ever attempted to spread marmalade with it? 'Patchy' is a generous description of the results.

As for the obelisks passing for salt and pepper pots, a score of one speck per second would be a triumph.

Designers are pests – because most useful things have already been designed. Go away, please, and re-invent the wheel. But try it out on your own bicycles first.

See how sore your fanglings make your own bottoms.

***

Fresh Frangipanis & Blissful Sleep

2009-09-20T03:39:00.000-07:00

So there’s this phone call I took at 07.26 on Friday.

Friday was the start of the four-day Pchum Ben holiday when everything in Cambodia closes and everyone pays homage to ancestors in far-off parts.

Not quite everything; hotels stay open and it was to an idyllic one in Siem Reap I had retreated, exhausted to my marrow by the relentlessness of KMF, non-stop since its formation three years ago.

Running a Cambodian media company may not seem onerous compared with running General Motors, the Bank of England or the European Union. But how many of these CEOs, Governors and Presidents could cope with my constant stream of deadlines and deliveries, quotations and quality control, misadventures and mollycoddling, yet remain as fresh as a frangipani?

Thus, harrowed, red-eyed and round-backed, I boarded a light aircraft on Thursday night to escape the frenzy of Phnom Penh for the hush of Siem Reap. Four days of peace and solitude waited; escape from the demands of Ministries, NGOs, funders, advertisers, agents, partners, actors, crew, hangers-on, time wasters – and that’s just a few of them.

I would lie under Egyptian cotton sheets, enfolded in an Italian mattress, cosseted on pillows of Gloucester goose. The splash of an ornamental pool outside my door would soothe the sleep I craved. I would not turn on my phone during my sojourn.

So why had I bothered to bring it?

... brr brrr ... 07.26 ... brrrr brrrrr ...

I had forgotten to turn it off.

Shaking off a century's sleep, I squinted at the flashing number. I did not recognise it, but it looked important.

‘Ye..es?’

‘Mr Robinson?’ breezed a youngish Cambodian male.

‘Ye..es.’

‘You run Khmer Mekong Films?’

‘Ye..es.’

‘I represent the Council of Ministers. We need your help.’

‘U..m..’

‘Actually, the Deputy Prime Minister needs your help. He’d be so grateful. Can you help?’

‘Ye..es.’

‘The Deputy Prime Minister needs an English voice on a video which he needs to send to the European Parliament. He needs someone to polish the English first. Can you really help?’

‘Ye..es. Wh..en’s yo..ur de..ad li..ne? Ne..xt we..ek?’

‘Twelve o’clock today.’

Three hours later, having rung every possible contact in Phnom Penh, having lined up a South African reporter to do cod English who then backed out because a Government recording could compromise his journalistic independence, having lined up a Siem Reap studio to do the job myself only to learn the Council couldn’t handle a sound file via the internet, having booked a mid-morning flight to Phnom Penh to deliver myself in person, I took another call.

‘The Deputy Prime Minister has arranged for someone from UNESCO to record the voice. So we won’t need your help after all.’

‘I .. um .. see.’

‘But we’d like to form a partnership with your company because I’m sure there will be lots of useful work we can do together in future. Please come to see me on Tuesday. Goodbye.’

My phone has since remained firmly off during my sojourn. God knows what useful work Khmer Mekong Films has been missing.

I don’t even care. The sleep has been blissful.

***

Feeling Bad in Cambodia

2009-09-19T02:03:00.000-07:00

So there’s this tiny roundlet of soap in the bathroom of my Siem Reap hotel, one of many catering for those touring the temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s main and, let's face it, only tourist attraction.

The hotel is full of greenery and not just in its well-watered gardens: ‘This soap’ (wrapped in plastic, devilishly difficult to remove) 'is produced by methods proving least harmful to the environment.’

The same goes for miniature plastic bottles of shampoo, shower gel, bath foam and, naturally, body lotion.

I am exhorted not to ask for my luxurious sheets and towels to be changed ‘unless it's necessary, so as to make a contribution to the lessening of global warming'. No clue is offered about ‘necessary’ or ‘unnecessary’.

Yet, thundering planes from Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, China, Australia, New Zealand, North America, Europe, Russia and, recently, the Middle East disgorge hirers of limousines and cruisers for temple tours, buyers of trinkets and tinsel, patronizers of plush restaurants, scoffers of fine wines imported on thundering planes.

I offer no criticism of all this necessary or unnecessary activity. It boosts Cambodia's developing economy – and, God, how it needs it.

But why must I suffer damp towels, creased sheets and feel-bad soap?

***

Hitchcock in Holland

2009-09-10T07:22:00.000-07:00

So there’s this thriller, playing to packed houses in Phnom Penh – except when rain turns the cinema into an island – opening in Siem Reap, Cambodia’s second city, tomorrow.

It’s not a bad little movie, made on half a shoestring pulled from my own shoe. I’ll be lucky to get much of my money back, but that wasn’t the idea.

Movie-making is icing on the cake for my company; there's nothing like a cinema packed with ticket-buying strangers screaming and laughing in all the places you'd imagined and in others you hadn't.

Not too serious then, apart from that bit of shoestring from my own shoe. That yawning hole in my bank account, despite the review in the Phnom Penh Post comparing the twists and turns with Hitchcock, reminds me of my father’s stricture years ago: Never pay for your own creative endeavours. If they’re any good, someone else will pay.

But I digress. Take it from me, Cambodian reactions have been enthusiastic: Amazing! Fantastic! Best Movie Ever! are the least complimentary.

However, the Barans (foreigners, mostly Europeans and Americans) were less fulsome:

“Congratulations. When do you make the next one?”

“Your film had its moments.”

“My wife enjoyed it and her opinion is more important than mine.”

“Your movie will be good for local cinema.”

But I was royally stuffed by the Dutch proprietor of my regular breakfast haunt. I’d given his staff – 32 Khmers – tickets to the premiere. He’d shut up shop, hired transport and bussed them downtown.

Two days later, he caught me over a Cafe Latte & Croissant.

I tried to look modest. Honestly, I had my non-solicitation face on. Honestly, I didn’t ask, What did you think of my movie?

“Your movie ...”

“Ah yes, my movie. Um ...”

“Thank you for giving tickets to my staff.”

“Pleasure! Um ...”

“They all seemed to like it.”

(Like? Like!) “Oh good. Um ...”

“But me ...”

(But? But!) “It’s ok. If you didn’t like it, you don’t have ...”

“I really didn’t like it. I’m not sure I should be saying this ...”

“No, no! Please. Please go on ...”

“In fact, the acting was acceptable.”

(Acceptable? Acceptable! The acting was bloody brilliant!)

“But the story was a bit thin. I don’t know about other Cambodian movies but ...”

(Story? Story! Other Cambodian movies? Are you fucking joking?)

“... for me, I like Hollywood movies. They have good stories.”

(I’ll ram this cardboard croissant down your Flemish throat. Hollywood? Hollywood! Hollywod pays of a bevy of scriptwriters twenty times what our movie cost to rewrite a single line.)

“Another thing – it was quite slow to get going.”

(You half-baked Edam Cheese Tulip-Tipped-Windmill-With-Clogs-On. Slow? Slow! You think I haven’t beaten myself up for months in the edit room about the pace of the first half hour?)

“So, really, I don’t think it was for me. Actually, I don’t like Dutch movies much either ...

(Several expletives deleted!)

“ ... but don't listen to what I say. My staff seemed to quite like it.”

Throwing a smile more stuck than a Dutch pig, I headed downtown to the cinema, not yet an island as the thunderous sky hadn’t quite broken.

In the arena bursting with audience, many ticket-buyers paying full price to perch on the foyer's plastic chairs, the screams and laughter were not as sweet as they were before.

The acting I had thought so brilliant at the premier seemed less than acceptable; the story was thinner than a wafer; the pace as flat as Holland.

***

Two Hundred Gallons of Orange-Yellow

2009-07-18T04:59:00.000-07:00

So there’s this bloke I’ve fallen in love with, perhaps unsurprisingly as he’s my partner.

We’re building a skyscraper together, our offices, my apartment, his hotel. But there’s been an argy-bargy about what colour to paint the exterior.

At first, Millan ventured the notion of Modern-Office-Grey - smart, cool. I was all for an Old-French-Primrose - classic, classy

There we stuck for a week or two.

Then, out of the blue, I was rushed up to the crow’s nest at the very top and the very top is very high. Out-of-breath, he pointed to a square meter patch of orange-yellow slapped on the lift shaft.

“Look! There! What do you think?”

“Ahhh ... ergh ... um ...” I wheezed. “Um ... it looks exactly the same as Central Market.”

“Exactly!”

Central Market is the most iconic building in Phnom Penh. I under-exaggerate. It is second only to Angkor Wat, the most iconic building in Cambodia. Central Market is currently undergoing mega million-dollar preservation, reconstruction and refurbishment courtesy of World Heritage.

It is also being repainted – orange-yellow.

“But we can’t do th ... oh, yes we can!”

Millan’s brilliance hit me in a flash. KMF Tower and Central Market, giant orange-yellow twins dominating Phnom Penh’s skyline.

“But where did you get the paint?” Now I was pointing to the square meter patch.

“The Central Market builders. They had two hundred gallons left over.”

Oh, Millan, my Chinese partner! I love you!

Green-Eyed Monster, Me

2009-07-15T17:27:00.000-07:00

So there’s this sudden surge I experienced while reading a headline that topped an article in today’s Phnom Penh Post:
‘UK Producer Airs History On Television’.

I admit to a twinge of jealousy.

Over the years, I admit to similar surges when achievements of competitors – film or television producers or directors – have been foisted on me by an eager media.

In the home country, where my chosen profession is more tightly packed than sardines, it was an everyday emotion with which I’d learned to cope.

However, during my six years in Cambodia, still rising unsteadily from its totalitarian-induced Year Zero haunches, I’ve had the media field pretty well to myself.

So, I’d got out of the habit of shrugging, moving to the next item, swatting my irritation that another naive journalist had poured adulation over the head of a ‘talent’ many years my junior.

Imagine my brain circuitry, then, after absorbing that Cambodia was, not only playing host to another UK TV producer, but allowing him (or her, not quite so bad) to ‘Air History’.

Worse followed. The first line of the copy revealed that the producer was indeed male and - could I believe this? - called ‘Matthew’. Rather than read on to discover the full identity of this impostor, I tossed the paper away. In a huff, I stuffed down the papaya and mango, squeezed with lemon juice.

Suddenly, my circuitry jumped back into gear. Of course! Two weeks earlier, an eager journalist had interviewed me about the televised reports on the Khmer Rouge trials I'd been making.

His rather wonderful adulatory copy licked my career. I could not have put it better myself, apart from that obligatory inclusion – my age, presumably dug up from the internet.

64! Sixty-fucking-four. My circuitry is so poor these days that I’d forgotten the article was due to appear this week.

***

Pusillanimous POTUS

2009-05-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

So there’s this prediction, mine, coming to pass. Barack Obama will sooner rather than later bust his flush, plunging America and the world into disaster. (blog: 25 February 2009)

Let’s put aside his hyperinflationary tendencies, appeasement fixation, control-freakery at home, partnership obsession abroad, naive shilly-shallying.

Let’s ignore the man’s vanity.

Let’s consider only his reaction to his nation’s (and my) security - surely prime duty of any leader, let alone top dog.

Obama, leader of the planet's sole police force, made vague threats before North Korea launched its long-range missile last month. Then, when it took no notice, he muttered something about 'need for action' . He did zilch. (blog: 5 April 2009)

Lunatic Kim Jong-il has now let off a really big bang six miles underground in the northern part of his god-forsaken kingdom.

And what do we hear from the lips of steely Barack?

'North Korea's nuclear and missile tests are a matter of grave concern to all nations. They warrant action by the international community.'

Kim is now jongiling in his standard-issue boots (extra comfort with tassels) at the ‘action’ yet to be orchestrated by a chimera that is the 'international community’, conducted by a phantom that is the present POTUS.

POTUSs should not be pusillanimous.

***

Me Love Da

2009-05-24T07:16:00.001-07:00

So there’s this tiny thing I’ve done. And I don’t care who knows it.

Now her heart is a whole load better (blog: 3 January 2009) and the angry weal down her chest is a whole load less angry and she still smiles shyly from her balcony as I cross the street and she still hides behind her door then leaps up into my arms, I’ve sent her to school.

How could I resist grandma’s blandishments on our staircase? She thinks I’m her Da, does she? And she knows her Da is a very kind man? Is that so?

$100 a year did you say, Granny? No problem at all (even though you could probably afford your own granddaughter’s school fees without too much hardship).

A week later, my beaming protege leaps up into my arms brandishing an exercise book full of A to Zs, capitals and smalls. I'm sure I heard ‘Me love Da’.

Whether learnt from schoolmarm or Granny, that snippet at $1,000 would have been a snip.

***

Squeakier Than Clean?

2009-05-17T01:38:00.000-07:00

So there’s this mess in Blighty right now, right?

Everyone, but everyone, is steaming about it, yes?

The Old Bill’s been called in, correct?

Hysteria and self-righteousness abound, am I right? Indeed but, running my conscience over certain aspects of my days of yore, I cannot hand-on-heart claim to be whiter-than-white, holier-than-thou, Tony-Blair-squeakier-than-clean.

99% white, holy and squeaky but not quite the full monty.

So, while not condoning the troughery, I can't condemn it outright, unlike just about everyone else in the land. I will, though, allow myself to whistle through my teeth at the idiocy, arrogance and bleating of our elected representatives.

These are, after all, our Sharpest, Smartest, Shapers, Sherpas, Goodly, Godly. Am I wrong?

Why do I bumble on when others have so eloquently vented their spleens? You need read nothing else on the miasma (I’ve read everything) other than Dominic Lawson and Rod Liddle.

Did someone say the Old Bill’s been called in?

Odds on it’ll sound the retreat within an hour of arrival.

***

Three Giant Pink Envelopes

2009-05-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

So there’s this motorbike I’m on the back of, cutting through the Sunday afternoon traffic choking Phnom Penh’s sweltering boulevards.

I’m clutching three giant pink envelopes.

When I left England six years ago to conjure up a TV drama for Cambodian television, I could never have magicked this scenario.

The drama is long gone, as dead as my BBC contract. Since 2006, I’ve been running a production company - on behalf of which I’m now biking towards a thousand Cambodian teenagers shoe-horned into the 800-seat Chenla Theatre.

The envelopes contain this week’s results for Cellcard Star, a bowdlerized version of American Pop Idol, Cambodia’s first attempt at 'reality TV'.

My company was parachuted in to rescue the show after its disastrous in-house launch. Me, a whisker from my pension, driving a talent contest in a far-off fucked-up country in a language that, to my shame, I have no more than a smatter.

Every Sunday afternoon, last-minute computerized results are emailed to our office. Loser of the Week, the contestant attracting least phone votes, is ejected, accompanied by audience hysteria never seen here before on live TV or in any other circumstance.

This week, three contestants are down to the wire. I print their scores on separate cards in a huge font size. I slip them into giant pink envelopes.

I bike off to oversee an execution.

Incredibly, I'm now as hooked as the audience. We’ve turned Cellcard Star into the most-watched most-talked about television show in the land. By his own admission, we've saved a bit of bacon for the ex-pat TV mogul who bravely instigated the spectacle at a cost of mega-dollars.

How? By answering a simple question that few employed in Cambodian TV ever bother to ask: ‘If I was watching this show, what would keep me watching?’ Not exactly brain surgery.

I jump off the bike and run into the Chenla, overwhelmed by cheers from a thousand teenage tricoteuses at the sight of my three giant pink envelopes.

***

Don't Warn If Wimpish

2009-04-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

So there’s this test that Barack Obama just failed – his first real test, as real as the device with which he should have destroyed Kim Jong-il’s rocket the second it left North Korean air space.

Basking in the dazzle of G20 dribble, he had whispered a hint of warning to the fossilized state that is North Korea.

“Hey Guys, be reasonable and don’t light that touch-paper. You haven’t got a firework licence.”

But to warn, even once, without the stomach to slap a wrist shows you up for what you are.

Naturally, the robots in mud-coloured crease-proof suits and ski-jump caps, sensing a wimp, shouted Yah Boo Obama! as sparks from their pyrotechnics lit up the heavens and Japan’s air space, extinguished only after splash-down in the Pacific.

"Ok! That’s it! You've tested your rocket and my patience,” sighed the Anointed One between posing for photo-ops with Magnificent Michelle and Bottler Brown.

“You’re for it now! I’m off to the Security Council to … er … seek a … um … resolution and then I’ll … er … hold a G21 summit to dazzle them into … um … imposing a couple of trade sanctions for a couple of months. Oh no! That’s a bit unreasonable. Maybe just one.”

Dubya, where art thou? Ronald, do us a Lazarus. Even Bill once steeled himself to lob a cruise into an empty desert when no one was looking.

But Barack? Just listen to him: "This provocation underscores the need for action." Lead on, brother. Over a cliff.

***

Operation Destroy Tourism

2009-04-03T07:53:00.000-07:00

So there’s this police raid on Sisowath Quay early one morning. Within ten minutes, they had swept it clear of every table and chair outside the charming cafes and restaurants for which the spectacular Quay is famed.

The avenging angels ignored the everyday mess of cars and motorbikes parked at right angles across the pavements, forcing pedestrians into the roads to face obliteration by teeming traffic.

At the best of times, let alone in a global recession, the removal of higgledy-piggledy vehicles – not neatly-placed tables and chairs - might, one would have thought, boost much-needed tourism.

But there’s no one to who bemused proprietors can protest, or even ask why their trade has been so pointlessly handicapped.

Operation Destroy Tourism was, apparently, a response to an off-the-cuff remark that fell from the lips of the Prime Minister, Samdech Hun Sen, during an impromptu speech in a far-off province.

No one is quite sure. No one dare ask. No one sits outside any more.

But one person's curse is another's blessing. Now there’s more space for car owners to impede the passage of pedestrians.

***

Doctor, Unpoison Thyself !

2009-03-27T00:15:00.000-07:00

So there’s this doctor in sunny Phnom Penh, saturnine and Scottish. Sallow too. Looks as if he’s been through more than a touch of malaria during his time here.

That’s at least ten years, four more than me. I know because I googled him, an extremely interesting journey, albeit irrelevant to this story.

There’s also this night numbness in my upper arms I’ve experienced of late.

Not too serious, but annoying enough to bring me to the good doctor’s establishment, its dank interior replicating an Edinburgh surgery in mid-winter.

"Blood tests," he declared after a series of ums and ahs, stomach prods and tonsil probes, "will determine if faulty nerves are causing a circulatory problem or if the circulation is faulty in itself."

"How many tests?" I asked. He listed an essential four or five, three or four less vital, and two or three "medically recommended for a man of your age”.

"How much?" "What’s money when health is involved?" he asked, trousering the best part of $200 with one hand while extracting a phial of my blood with the other. “Just a tiny prick for so many tests!”

An email arrived, as promised, the next afternoon. “I prefer to email results,” he had ejaculated without explanation as I left the gloom of his surgery for the shimmer of Phnom Penh.

Everything was normal – except my uric acid level.

At 8.7 mg/dl, it was, apparently, “high”.

The good doctor had included two recommendations:

1) Another test soon
2) Reduce alcohol consumption

Me? Alcohol? Reduce? Consumption? Harrrumph!

“Are you seriously suggesting my 8.7 mg/dl is due to my drinking?” I emailed back. “I strictly limit myself to two units daily, maximum fourteen weekly. The British Government’s safe drinking limit is 21 units. I never binge drink.”

His verbatim reply:
Elevated uric acid levels are associated with excess alcohol. Who cares what a government authority says - ALCOHOL IS A POISON !

Thwack! No more poison for me in sunny Phnom Penh then. Yet, from time to time I bump into said doctor at glittering social occasions, for example the annual Queen’s Birthday bash, thrown by the British Embassy at the plushest hotel in town.

He is always more discursive at these events than at his surgery. And considerably less upright.

***

BBC Prevents Collapse of World Economy

2009-03-22T05:40:00.000-07:00

So there’s this missive I received last night, on the one hand deeply impressive, on the other deeply depressing.

I’d emailed a senior BBC editor whose name appeared on the credits of the TV programme about which I blogged yesterday.

Unable to control my irritation, I’d emailed him, politely expressing the blog's sentiments, posing the same final question.

His reply was extraordinarily impressive because it arrived less than ten minutes after I’d dispatched my impulsive critique. A response within ten minutes from the BBC? Hope for 21st century Auntie yet.

But it was also utterly depressing because - well, judge it yourself, 100% verbatim (omitting the author’s name):

“Probably. Thank you for your detailed interest. The report was a shot-in-two-days slice of life of America six months into recession. I probably agree the content did not quite $atch the promise, but the overall sentiment was absolutely on the money but again, it's one programme within an iconic series of 'bottom up' journalism - if the series had only existed 5 years ago we may be in the mess we are now. Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld so please excuse any typing errors.”

It’s a reasonable assumption that the BlackBerry Wireless Handheld morphed an “m” into a “$”.

But does one assume the error-prone BlackBerry also excised a “not” from the penultimate sentence?

If it didn’t, I have no idea what the senior BBC editor meant.

If it did, he can’t possibly be serious. Or can he? For the life of me, I cannot detect a trace of irony within his text.

“BBC Prevents Collapse of World Economy ... ”

... a headline you’re unlikely to see in the Daily Mail.

***

Don't Blame Us, Blame (cough cough) Them

2009-03-21T20:45:00.000-07:00

So there’s this BBC programme on the TV that accompanied my divinely delicious fish casserole in downtown Phnom Penh.

Because it was billed as ‘Have the Americans Learned Their Lesson?’, and further described as coming ‘from the heart of the country where the world’s financial problems started’, I assumed it would be reasonably interesting.

It turned out to be a Big-Breakfast frolic with a forgettable presenter I’d never seen before (or, if I had, I’d forgotten him), alternately speeded-up and slowed down as he perambulated through Chicago, pushing a microphone into the faces of super-charged show-offs.

I stayed tuned to its tiresomeness in the hope of hearing two questions put to at least one erstwhile mortgagor:

1) “Why did you take out a loan that commonsense would have told you was unsupportable by your income?”

2) “Do you feel in any way responsible for your own predicament/foreclosure?”

No such luck. The world’s current woes were foisted on unsavoury US banking practices and the policies of the Federal Government – (cough cough) “previous Federal Government”.

I painstakingly and gratefully learned my trade within Auntie's pinafore from the mid-sixties to the late eighties. ‘Balance’ meant something then.

Can we expect the BBC to broadcast another programme filling in the above editorial lacunae?

Forlorn hope.

***

Obama Oboom Obama Obust

2009-02-25T22:47:00.000-08:00

So there’s this prediction I make without glee: Within one year, Barrack Obama will be a busted flush, and a disaster for America and the world.

I won’t say worse than George Bush, because I thought W did rather well in the saddle.

I approved of the way he went after psychopath Saddam, giving one finger to the ‘International Community’ (whatever that is).

I appreciated his two fingers to Kyoto and the Great Global Warming Lie.

I admired his three fingers to the Guatanamo Bay abandonists, all without the foggiest how to contain the army of terrorist nutters bent on the West’s destruction.

As for his fist to Europeans who deny their security since WW11 has mostly depended on Uncle Sam’s generosity, wave it my face at any time.

Now what have we got? An unproven parvenu with little obvious talent other than a silver tongue – already tarnished judging by his recent speeches – and with a basket of mish-mash policies.

I cheered him on in the early days only to keep out the horror-story that is the wife of Charlatan Clinton. Power hooked up to the McCain/Pailin train was unthinkable , particularly its grotesque rear end.

But, barely a month since it left the station, there are ominous signs that the Obama/Biden train is losing its wheels. Arrogance and naivety make dangerous bedfellows, particularly snuggled up against industrial sabotage (carbon taxes), Brobdingagian deficits (so-called stimuli) and appeasement of enemies (Iran).

Those still dewey-eyed at Obama's anointment might mop up and examine the 'flexible' views of his (current) top economic adviser, Larry Summers. Ten years ago, Summers was US deregulation's cheerleader-in-chief. Now he's champion interventionist, turning 180 degrees without a blush and, like Bottler Brown, without a hint he might have majorly helped cause the world's woes.

Could this be Obama's fourth botched, and perhaps most crucial, appointment?

***

Cleansing Cambodia

2009-01-24T21:15:00.000-08:00

So there’s this alley that usefully links the street on which I presently live to the street on which I will be living soon.

At dawn, it is passably clean and just about passable. By dusk, it’s choked with detritus – split garbage bags, jettisoned food, expectoration and feces. The journey, if one dares set out, is shared with scavenging dogs, brazen rats, gargantuan cockroaches.

The reek is of the fifth dimension.

A question in two halves: Why is the alley clean in the morning, filthy by midnight?

I’ve long known one answer: Congregating youths, as brazen as the rats their insouciance attracts, fling away all unwanted things while kicking open any bag they chance upon. Preeners and strutters, spitters and shitters, they are masters and mistresses of their tiny universe and don't give a damn.

After a recent dawn stroll, I now know the other answer: A bald bent-backed widow, living in the dingy nooks, clears away as much muck as the bristles in her decrepit brush can garner.

I cannot guess her views on the wantonness of her grandchildren’s generation. Her worn face is marmoreal. The unpleasant daily toil to make her surroundings tolerable do not approach the miseries she and millions of Cambodians endured during 3-8-20, the three years, eight months, twenty days of the Khmer Rouge.

That was thirty years ago. It’s a safe bet that the wayward undoers of her cleansing know nothing of her past suffering - and care even less.

***

Nabber of The Yard

2009-01-05T07:28:00.000-08:00

So there’s this last word on the new crash helmet law
(blog: 2 January 2009).

After five days of a 'crackdown' on lax road safety habits, half of Phnom Penh's motorbike drivers are helmeted, and 10% of pillion riders (my estimate).

Here’s a policeman yesterday, waiting to nab the unhelmeted.

I can’t think of one good reason to return to England.

***

Health, Safety & Snoots Galore

2009-01-04T07:53:00.000-08:00

So there’s this concrete slab, 8 x 25 meters, that got laid today.

Pumped in liquid state seven stories into the sky by a second-hand concrete-pumper from Korea, this slab is special.

It forms the floor of the home I hope to occupy in June, then occupy for ever or the rest of my life, whichever is the longer.

So, it’s special. And significant. Breathtakingly so.

Late this afternoon, after the concrete set, I climbed up through the lower stories of our parking lot, my partner’s hotel, then the KMF offices. I climbed via a series of 'ladders', nailed-together fire sticks, rickety enough to catalyse the apoplectic demise of Britain’s Health & Safety industry.

Without mishap, I arrived at the top of my world and stood, King of the Castle, in awe of the breathtaking significance - and view.

These were my horizons from now until I drop off my perch (but not my building):

- East, magnificent Mekong snaking away to Vietnam;

- North, mysterious Tonle Sap, the world's only river to change flow, either to or from Cambodia’s mighty internal sea;

- South, fairyland spires of the Royal Palace, National Museum and National Assembly;

- West, expanding Phnom Penh, pulsating as the country bursts out of its recent traumatization, cocking snoots galore at the global recession.

Never have I felt such affection for a concrete slab.

***

Flying to the First, Leaping like a Lemur

2009-01-03T18:36:00.000-08:00

So there’s this tiny person whose appearance on a balcony today made me even more joyous than I was three days ago.

After two months away, the little girl downstairs is back from Rome (blog: 16 October 2008). Shy, she could scarcely bring herself to wave as grandma, erstwhile jet-black hair now a patchy silver-white, pointed me out as I crossed the street.

I flew up the stairs, arriving on the first floor as her disintegrating door opened a crack.

Inch by inch she emerged , frail, pale, taller. And shy. So shy. Her eyes skirted my shoes, staying low even as I crouched to level our heads.

“You’re back! You’re BACK! How are you? How ARE you?”

What use was talk? I can’t speak Khmer. The only English words she understands are Hello, Goodbye, Up, Down.

I chucked her chin. Only then did she look me in the eye. After a hint of a wistful smile, she dropped her eyes again.

Rising from my haunches, I patted her cheek. Suddenly, she flew up and leapt into my arms like a baby lemur. Face buried in my neck, she hugged me dearly. I could feel her small heart, now made whole, beating against my chest. Though weighing a little more, she was missing a top tooth.

Hallelullah! She had survived the Italian surgeon’s knife and was very much alive. We were reunited.

So there is a god after all.

***

Horrible Helmets & Hair-Dos

2009-01-02T00:06:00.000-08:00

So there’s this law on crash helmets that came into force as midnight rockets burst across Cambodia's New Year.

No one yet knows its exact details – The Cambodia Daily neither published my letter nor clarified matters in its editorial pages (blog: 25 December 2008).

One thing's for sure – drivers of two-wheeled vehicles must wear helmets or risk being stopped and fined by traffic police (presumably helmeted).

So, two days after its introduction, how’s the new law going down with two-wheeling Cambodians?

Your blogger can report that yesterday and this morning, with more helmets undeniably in use, no police were to be seen doing their duty - or even seen. The many law breakers not wishing to ruin their hair-dos with those horrible helmets were unstopped and unfined.

But entrepreneurs are clearly banking on things getting serious before long. Helmets on hangers have sprouted at street corners like daffodils longing for a lick of sun.

Very unhorrible they are too. Here can be found pieces to suit the taste of each and every fashion bunny, no matter how fastidious.

Prices range from $3 to $6.

As my plea for enlightenment was ignored, I do not know how - or if - the law defines 'crash helmet'. School science taught me that anything, however flimsy, placed between colliding objects (skull & road) reduces the effect of impact.

Testing time for teacher's theory?

***

Wrath at Days of Froth

2009-01-01T08:10:00.000-08:00

So there’s this joyousness Cambodia instills within me, and not just on joyous occasions.

I cannot let the New Year in without registering it. Blog followers (if any) needn’t worry. I’m not about to pen paragraphs of analysis. They can work it out for themselves (a) by meandering through past posts (b) from the picture below.

Much would fill me with joylessness, nay despair, should reason arise to force me back to my once-beloved country of birth:

- puffed-up Bottler Brown, 'rescuer' of Britain (now the world) from a meltdown of his own making

- Bottler’s shamelessness at breaking his promise on the EU referendum

- return to power of that twice-discredited slitherer Mandelson, clandestinely slithering the pound towards enmeshment in a fake foreign currency

- patronizing lectures from Jacqui Smith, Hilary Benn and Harriet Harman, domestic science teachers all

- vacuous artifice of Colgate Cameron, bereft of one single policy to distinguish his party from the Labour quagmire

- sogginess of the legal system

- emasculation of the police

- snooping by public officials into private lives

- aversion to risk taking

- terror of 'offending' anyone except Englishmen

- dismemberment of education

- vilification of the idea that someone can be better at something than someone else

- slavish endorsement by British journalists (99%), British politicians (100%) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (1000%) of the Great Global Warming Lie

- dumping cherished traditions and culture

Enough! By continuing, I’ll work myself into a wrath, ruining the joy I feel in my adopted Cambodia, alien and far-off land.

As for my abandoned England, can anyone, anywhere, anytime, do anything to stop the rollicking locomotive – set in meaningless motion in May 1997 - throwing itself off the buckling tracks?

Was I alone in seeing through charlatan Blair and his utterly hollow posturing well before those hallowed Days of Froth?

***

Parking and Barking

2008-12-27T04:43:00.000-08:00

So there’s this rumpus that suddenly flared in the street below my balcony. Rumpus? Raucous row, more like. Rabid rage would not be an exaggeration.

It came from nowhere. One moment the street was its normal self, noisy – ice cream chimes, egg men’s loudspeakers, bike-borne boom boxes, axles crashing through potholes. The next, all that prosaic cacophony was muffled by a hellish screeching that is unique to Khmer females.

Let me not be sexist: a raucous male was giving almost as good as he got, certainly in terms of outraged fury.

But nothing sets one’s bones on edge like a Cambodian woman in full flood of self-righteousness (blog: 20 February 2008).

Were they husband and wife in dire dispute? Lovers sick of each other? No! A gentleman had parked his car on a public road - in front of a lady’s flower shop (blog: 25 February 2008).

In vain he shouted he had the law on his side. But, with curs seizing a barking opportunity and rubberneckers congregating desperate for blood, the lady was not for listening.

She was for screeching. Loud endless screeching.

The gentleman did not give ground. Fingers in ears, he walked away, insults hurled at his back, his small saloon left in its original spot, apparently ruining the lady’s afternoon flower sales.

Rubbernecks dispersed disappointed; curs slunk off whimpering. Boom boxes and crashing axles, unmuffled, filled the ether once more.

He’s a braver man than me. I’d have been petrified about returning to gouged paintwork.

Not that she was in any way cowardly. Passing the car later, I noticed “Police” on its front number plate and a holstered gun on its back seat.

***

Having It Both Ways

2008-12-25T07:33:00.001-08:00

So there’s this letter I sent yesterday to the Cambodia Daily for possible publication in its august pages. Contentedly breakfasting (Western-style) this Christmas Day in an airy hotel lounge, I have no idea if it's been published.

"A motorbike crash helmet law comes into force on New Year’s Day. This is probably to be welcomed.

But I am ill-informed about exactly what the law entails.

I have read all newspaper articles on the subject.
I have listened to TV reports.
I have gleaned ministers’ speeches and exhortations.

Yet I still remain ignorant.

Sir, can you please supply answers to the following:

1) Does the law oblige passengers to wear helmets?
2) If so, does it apply to children?
3) Any exemptions - babes in arms, grannies with drips in arms?
4) Are straps to be fastened under the chin under the law?
5) What constitutes a “crash helmet”?

Many other questions regarding motorbike safety deserve answers. Here are two:

1) When will drivers using mobile phones be outlawed?
2) Ditto bearers of glass plates, fish tanks, ladders and steel rods?

Perhaps these questions should be left for another day."

I now rather hope my letter has been spiked. The left and right halves of my brain are in constant battle over the way Cambodian life, deliciously laissez-aller, plays out.

Left says, “Good God, how CAN these maniacs do this to each other? Clap them in irons. Pack them off for social re-education.” Right says, “Thank God I’ve escaped the over-regulated, bureaucratic, nannying, bullying, pettifogging, tyrannical quagmire that was once my beloved country.”

How to resolve? Now that’s a question that really deserves answering.

***

Tiggywinkle's Revenge

2008-12-17T15:08:00.000-08:00

So there’s this hairstyle that can only be described as indescribable. Sported by young bucks between 14 and 24, it doesn’t look like hair. It looks like a cross between a Chinese crash helmet, Mrs Tiggywinkle’s bonnet and an abandoned beehive.

Unlookable at, it is also impractical, requiring half of a tube of gel to mould into its laborious shape, then a whole can of spray to hold in place for the next fifteen minutes.

It first hit Cambodian skulls liking a falling brick last year, rapidly causing a nationwide outbreak. Indeed, it may well be infectious as I haven’t spotted a single Khmer girl within a meter of any Khmer buck sporting such artificial glory. This is perhaps not surprising as its nuance is distinctly -er- non-masculine.

“Where on earth did it come from?” I asked a young colleague, surrounded (as we were) by a sea of abandoned Chinese bonnets at a weekly TV pop music show I now produce (for my sins).

“Thailand,” he replied, winking.

Further inquiries revealed that, eighteen months ago, a visiting Thai boy band had indeed worn Tiggys at a Phnom Penh concert. The band is now washed up, the gel washed out.

Sadly, no one has bothered to tell the Khmers.

***

Balancing Braggadocios

2008-12-15T04:25:00.000-08:00

So there’s this new aggravation to complement youths racing motorbikes, front wheels raised like centaurs, along Phnom Penh’s public roads. The latest assault on our peace and sanity is jet ski racing along the Tonle Sap.

Please note, the racers are not middle-aged men - or women of any age. Yet again, peace is breached by young male braggadocios suffering a surfeit of testosterone. Just watch them, beehive hair all messed up, showing off at forty-five miles an hour only a meter from the edge of river causeway, place of pleasure for hundreds, thousands, of Phnom Penh citizens on Sunday afternoons.

Fishing boats rock precariously in one jet ski's wake and threaten to sink in two; their noise is a million mechanized mosquitoes; their gasoline emissions as noisome as Bangkok airport on a windless day.

Who will stop them? Will no one in authority balance the rights of the promenading many with the rights (rather wrongs) of the waterborne few?

I’m not such a grump to demand a total ban on hoodlums who wish to indulge in this noisy, smelly, anti-social pastime.

But, Your Excellency, Governor of Phnom Penh - please kick them five, preferably fifty, kilometers up the Tonle Sap, leaving the rest of us able to enjoy your beautiful city in peace.

***

Poor Little Poppet in a Black Hole

2008-12-10T06:21:00.000-08:00

So there’s this hiatus over poor little poppet downstairs with a hole in her heart (13 May, 9 June, 16 Aug, 16 Oct).

Rather, a black hole - into which she seems to have fallen.

My concern is not that she hasn't risen from the operating table in Rome and returned home, grandma in tow, after a two-month absence.

I’m freaking at the total absence of news.

Whenever I ask someone downstairs – uncle, aunt, cousin, real, half- or step-brother or sister, putative mother (who showed up a day before poppet's flight to Rome and now flutteringly appears and disappears), milling and spilling in and out of the tiny apartment - how she is, where she is and when she’ll be back, I’m answered with shrugs aplenty and showered with sprinklings of “ot dongs” (don’t knows).

They don’t know?

Hasn’t downstairs collectively saved a few hundred riel to call the hospital on a dirt-cheap 166 pre-fix number?

Hasn’t grandma tapped the bankrolling NGO for a couple of thousand lire to phone home and tell them how the poor poppet is doing?

Or is this the truth - no one gives a damn?

***

Male Mutton

2008-11-22T03:30:00.000-08:00

So there’s this outfit a gentleman of a certain age, that is a gentleman visitor to Cambodia of a certain age, should not be seen alive in.

Trouble is, this gentleman, always solo and always prowling, is not the exception. Phnom Penh swarms with him.

I do not begrudge him his prowling. Of a certain age myself, I well undertand that, from teenager to corpse, a gentleman must cope with a certain urge that simply won’t lie down, even as his body does.

That’s urges. That’s gentlemen. That’s why life goes on.

But I do begrudge him his prowling outfit. He looks so … so … eye-wateringly inappropriate in his shorts, white socks and new trainers. I want to howl with simultaneous laughter and pity.

A similarly-afflicted lady of a certain age evokes a well-deserved cliché. I don’t recall an equivalent male epigram.

Bull Dressed As Calf ?

***

AK-47 AKA fun

2008-10-26T19:56:00.000-07:00

So there’s this pastime for bored tourists suffering temple overload or a surfeit of fat Buddhas.

It caters for those tired of the dismal school buildings in downtown Phnom Penh known as Tuol Sleng, aka S21. Thirty years ago this was the Khmer Rouge interrogation centre. Today it is a museum arrayed with graphic evidence of the hundreds tortured to death within its walls.

It caters for those weary of the Killing Fields just beyond the city. To this bucolic meadow, now decked with a pyramid of mangled skulls, the thousands not torn apart in S21 were transported to have their heads smashed with bullet-saving axles.

Bullet saving is not the aim of this pastime. For $40, you can fire a whole magazine of them. With muffs to protect your drums, goggles to protect your retinas, supporting hands to protect your muscles, you shoulder an ancient AK-47 and blast away at pyramids of tin cans in the murky depths of a disused army base.

Your magazine empties in fifteen seconds. The noise is terrifying, kick-back fearsome, tin-can pyramids …

... you never know how much damage you inflicted, winging, scattering, mangling, because of the murk and the smoke from the discharge.

Your support leads you away. You have a cup of coffee. You get over your shakes. You pay your fee at the booth.

The army base, also beyond the city, is far from the Killing Fields. Until last year, tourists could mow down tin-can pyramids in the open air. Less smoke, less noise, less fear.

Out of the blue Cambodia’s prime minister, His Excellency Samdech Hun Sen, took up golf and joined the adjacent club. Within a day, the AK-47s had been banished to the interior. Whether for the benefit of Samdech’s safety, drums or handicap we shall never know.

***

Whole in her Heart, I hope

2008-10-16T06:54:00.000-07:00

So there’s this motorbike that carried them off – girl and grandmother; girl with a hole in her heart and grandmother with a cackle to bring on a migraine.
(blogs: 13 May, 9 June, 16 Aug)

In pyjama suits identical but for size, they were pulling away from the kerb in front of our shared street entrance as I arrived home yesterday – girl with Mickey Mouse backpack, grandmother with small square suitcase, canvas corners concave with emptiness.

There was scarcely time to wave, let alone ready my camera to snap the first leg of the trek to Rome via Pochentong Airport which is where I assume the unhelmeted motordup was transporting his unhelmeted passengers.

That was thirty-six hours ago. Now, who knows? Is she under an Italian surgeon’s knife as I type? Are her fingernails less blue? Is her heart whole again?

Will the Mickey Mouse bag return to Phnom Penh with or without owner? Oh, I so hope the answer is - with. If not, my life will be as empty as grandma’s suitcase.

***

Promises (Preposterous) Promises

2008-09-29T02:56:00.000-07:00

So there’s this promise I thought I heard Barack Obama make in the first presidential debate.

A promise so utterly absurd that either he’d taken leave of his senses or I’d taken leave of my hearing.

As neither John McCain nor quiz master Jim Lehrer remonstrated, nor could I immediately find any web reference post-debate, I resolved to have my ears tested ere long.

I mean, the world’s banking system apparently needs shoring up to the tune of $1.8 trillion - over $5,000 for every American man, woman, child and baby - courtesy of the US taxpayer.

In such circumstances, Obama couldn’t possibly promise that, as President, he would allow no tax increase for 95% of his fellow Americans, nor for anyone earning up to quarter of a million dollars a year. He couldn’t possibly promise that with an straight face, could he?

The economics of that promise are so ridiculous, its fiscality so preposterous, that even someone as desperate to be Head Prefect as Hillary Clinton wouldn’t spout such claptrap.

Yet while the pleasures of an ear trumpet awaited, something rankled. No one loses his hearing overnight, unless by an accident - and I hadn’t had one. So I googled assiduously, eventually finding the debate transcribed word-for-word in an internet cranny.

It was a shock to discover that I am, in fact, going deaf.

It was a far bigger shock to discover that Obama had made an even more preposterous promise than the one I thought I had heard.

“I can tell the American people: 95 percent of you will get a tax cut. And if you make less than $250,000, less than a quarter-million dollars a year, then you will not see one dime's worth of tax increase.”

What? 95% of Americans will not only not pay one dime more tax; that nice kind Barack’s going to give them all a tax cut as well …

… as funding a $1.8 trillion bank bail-out plus funding all those myriad social programmes he’s also been promising left, right and centre.

Despite the grotesque prospect of Sarah running the world should John croak, I’ll have to vote for the old bugger's “hatchet” (Obama’s description of McCain's fiscal rectitude).

Oh! I must be going gaga as well as deaf. I’m not American, am I, so I can’t vote for it, can I?

***

Pooped by Brian the Briton

2008-09-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

So there’s this party-pooper who pooped my party a week ago. He pooped it so perfectly that I considered immediate blog revenge, holding off until now for mature reflection.

I had issued invites via press adverts for a free "audience preview” of an early cut of my company’s second movie.

Venue: Meta House, relaxed Phnom Penh arts centre screening old and new local films – documentaries, NGO and student stuff, dramas.

Movie: Heart Talk, contemporary thriller, conceived by me, penned by a British writer I’ve worked with for years.

Idea: to gauge, via a questionnaire, non-partisan reaction to my movie, informing a final cut before cinema release.

Partisan view: despite fixable flaws, it’s fun, fresh and filled with good things, certainly compared with the basket of unwatchable Khmer movies I’d forced myself to watch (for research).

My little thriller, daring to pop its delicate head over the parapet, was made on a shoe-string. The budget was less than the cost of one middle-ranking “star” of a British TV film. On display are bursts of delightful acting by the cast of Cambodians, a physically-stunning race with reservoirs of natural on-screen talent.

The preview went off without noticeable hitches. Fifty people turned up despite the rain; half young Cambodians, half ex-pats: Germans, Burmese, Greeks, Americans, Canadians, Austrians, Australians, Norwegians - and Britons.

Well, there was one Briton. Called Brian.

They oohed-aahed and jumped where they were supposed to ooh-aah and jump. They laughed appropriately. When the lights came up, they clapped - quite enthusiastically. (I’m a connoisseur of fake applause.) No one walked. They filled in the questionnaire on which I had laboured for two days.

In bed later, before drifting off, I could not resist retrieving the raw results from my bag

Quick analysis laid bare the top line – not brilliant but not bad. Seasoned movie-buff ex-pats had confirmed the flaws. There were, however, three gratifying features: (1) appreciation had steadily increased from 63% after ten minutes to 76% by the end; (2) only three people had correctly guessed the murderer; (3) almost all the Cambodians would “definitely recommend it to friends”.

Despite a request for “No Written Comments” on the multi-choice questionnaire, a few appeared - restrained plaudits, polite and constructive criticisms.

I picked up the last questionnaire, boxes unticked, pages scrawled over with chunky capitals in angry red biro.

“ONLY IDIOTS WOULD PAY TO SEE THIS RUBBISH”
“NOT A THRILLER, A TRAIN WRECK”
“LEAD ACTRESS TYPICAL KHMER VIRGIN PRUDE"
"CAN’T ACT HER WAY OUT OF PAPER BAG”
“HITCHCOCK’S DUDS COST $1 AT RUSSIAN MARKET"

“BRIAN” was scrawled over the top, chunky capitals, angry red biro.

Perfectly pooped, I found sleep was no longer a drifting-off matter. When it eventually descended, there was consolation: a recurrent dream about never EVER returning from whence I came.

***

Out Out Brief Coconut

2008-09-22T07:03:00.000-07:00

So there’s this former coconut tree that becomes a little more former with every passing day.

Together with its brothers, this once-flourishing coconut forms an elegant half-avenue along the two-mile west bank of the Tonle Sap, one of the Ten Wonders of the World.

The arborous array acts as a brake to protect city facades from vicious winds that roar up the Mekong from Vietnam. It also provides weekend walkers, families and lovers, with shade from an eleven-to-four sun that would, given the chance, scorch skin off elephants.

A few weeks ago, as Blog Followers (if any) will know, a bolt of lightning descended from a devil of a thunderstorm to exact vengeance on a young Khmer woman unwisely sheltering from torrential rain under this particular coconut. She struck up a conversation on her mobile phone and ...

... she is no more. The coconut, zapped through no fault of its own, will soon join her in a state of non-existence.

Looking at the damage to its ever-decreasing bulk, I have to shut my mind to what physically happened to the anonymous woman. Ignorant or careless, she was snuffed out in a flash, her demise earning two short paragraphs in the local press three days after the event.

***

From Bullies to Bovver Boys

2008-09-17T23:53:00.000-07:00

So there's this pleasure about residing in Cambodia that could be about to dissolve.

For many months, indeed years, I had believed myself safe from terrorism - that of the CCBs (Climate-Change-Bullies). To my knowledge, ne'er a word about global warming has passed the lips of any politican with power. Khmer newspaper pages and TV screens have been gloriously free of this tiresomeness.

But ... guess who's invaded Cambodia's shores to put the fear of God into us all? The CTBBs (Carbon-Trading-Bovver-Boys).

Fortunately, the CTBBs aren’t quite as evangelistic, and therefore objectionable, as the CCBs because they’re more overtly in it for the money.

Brave Cambodian entrepreneurs! As you carefully nurture the tender shoots of your flowering but precarious businesses, be warned …

The CTBBs will throw fallacious CCB statistics at you, forged to fit the anti-capitalist agendas of arch-gurus Al Gore and Michael Mann (of the infamous and now utterly discredited 2001 IPCC’s “Hockey Stick” graph) to (a) fan your guilt about your “carbon footprint” (which, whatever your boot size, will make not one jot of difference to the climate) and (b) hand over chunks of your hard-earned profits should you happen to have made some.

If you are so persuaded, they will then either squander your money on unproven schemes in far-off lands about which you (and, in all probability, they) know nothing, or use it to feather their own air-conditioned aeries from which they can preach ever more shrilly about “saving the planet” which doesn’t, in fact, need saving.

Finally, congratulations to Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Royal Cambodian Government. Full marks for side-lining the whole global warming razzmatazz and the hysteria gripping the rest of the world.

That’s not to say I’m unconcerned about the local environment. Far from it. If invited, I’d willingly to join a Government think-tank to devise inexpensive ways of cleaning up, inter alia, Cambodia’s smoky exhausts, street urinations and expectorations, and piles of moldering garbage.

Not to save the planet. To save my sanity and, with a fair wind, that of my fellow citizens in this potentially green and pleasant land.

***

On Noodles and Shoelaces

2008-09-14T02:42:00.000-07:00

So there’s this cackhandedness at which I’ve always excelled – using chopsticks.

That’s not to say that I can’t eat with chopsticks. I can get food into my mouth, but not while it’s hot and not without finger aid or, worse, begging a supporting spoon from a smirking waiter.

This despite hundreds of 3/9d student chop sueys at the Hang Chow and countless more Chinese meals since.

Now Khmer or Vietnamese food several times a week. And I still can’t shovel rice grains or slippery noodles from dish to mush in a manner for which those elegant chop sticks were designed.

How do nimble-fingered Asians do it? Obviously, they learnt young.

How refreshing, though, to recently observe a little lad outside his family’s gift shop with a bowl of noodles on a stool. How reassuring to see that infants here have as much difficulty with those damned chopsticks that we did with knives and forks, and tying shoelaces.

I’ve noticed that most Asians wear slips-on, doubtless for the same reason my noodles still slip off.

***

Mad Dogs and God's Particle

2008-09-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

So there’s this midday sun which mad dogs and Englishmen, or men of any persuasion, should not go out in.

Particularly with their shirts off.

Particularly in Cambodia’s midday sun, a blowlamp known to scorch skin off elephants sleeping under banana trees.

Why do dollops of my ex-compatriots (whom, without regret, I have left behind to wallow in Bottler Brown’s Britain) act as if their brains are smaller than God’s Particle?

Why should I care? Nothing to do with me if they - and their chips of the old blockhead – fry to a frazzle within five minutes of venturing from their guesthouses.

Why? Because I've always suffered from an overload of empathy with human suffering. Even when it’s down to self-infliction and thus deserved (not, of course, by the little lad pictured above on whose behalf I still suffer excessively).

I say “left behind”. If only it were true. Cambodia, virtually Brit-free until last year, is fast becoming the world’s “cool”, worse “hip”, playground. I’m steeling myself for an invasion of tattooed and bloated murderers ...

... murderers of their mother tongue, an appendage unlikely to fry, with or without shirt.

***

Three Pot-Bellied Questions

2008-09-01T08:03:00.000-07:00

So there’s this unsightliness that pot-bellied Khmer males inflict on the rest of us and I can’t work out why.

Yes, Cambodia is tropical - meaning it’s sweaty for much of the year.

But heat affects everyone, men and women, flat-stomached or pot-bellied. You don’t see slim males doing it. Nor pot-bellied Khmer females, nor, sadly, those with flat stomachs.

So what makes every lolling man with a ridge of midriff blubber tuck up his T-shirt and expose a fair-round belly to the passing world?

Is it a sign to passing females that he's wealthy enough to indulge himself?

Or, as a victim of Cambodia’s sexually-repressed culture, has he given up even trying to attract?

Or is the Laughing Buddha his role-model?

***

And Today's Gouge Of Flesh Is ...

2008-08-21T03:06:00.000-07:00

So there’s this rule about filming: a set of teeth will emerge from the least expected place at the least expected time to gouge flesh from your bones.

We had already lost our main location. The disused “beer garden” we’d found was perfect in every way: spacious, quiet, 90% “film ready” and, above all, cheap. We looked forward to eight days' back-to-back shooting. Our director had prepared a shot list for every scene – hundreds of shots because beer-garden scenes make up nearly half the movie.

Then, for a combination of unmentionable British and unfathomable Khmer reasons, we lost it (owner withdrew) with three days to go.

That’s a nasty nip as bites go, but the wound it left wasn’t too big for hardened professionals like us to plaster over. We rushed around, found another location, bigger and quieter than before, twice as much loot but who’s counting with, now, two days to go?

Our designer re-designed, our director re-listed shots, schedules were re-printed, rigs re-rigged. All systems go for our new “beer garden”. The old “beer garden” never existed. Crisis? What crisis?

The lady owner of a popular corner restaurant had been “very happy” to rent us the third floor, used only for party hire. There were no parties booked, so we were told.

The first morning went well. This space was enclosed, controlled and airy, accommodating cables, lights, monitors, costume rails, make-up boxes without crew, actors and extras stumbling over them. The panoramic windows were not a problem for our dozens of day-for-night scenes. A convenient balcony above allowed us to hang black drapes blocking the sun on the filming floor.

Ah, those black drapes. Those black drapes.

We got whispers of a problem before lunch. “Will the cloths be up for long?” smiled the manager on behalf of the owner. By mid-afternoon, the smile was thin: “When will the cloths be coming down?” By evening, the smile had vanished: “The owner doesn’t want black cloths.”

No use remonstrating about standard filming practice, black cloths being the only way to block the sun, day-for-night scenes yet to film, signed contracts. “The owner doesn’t want black cloths!”

“Surely,” I burbled, “the symbolic Khmer colour for death is white.”

“The owner is Chinese, not Khmer.”

“But black doesn’t symbolize death in China either!"

“The owner doesn't want black cloths.”

"But ... but ... is black unlucky in China?"

"The owner doesn't want black cloths."

I googled it later. Black is not an unlucky colour in China; it's an evil colour ... "the colour of faeces".

Our flesh had been well and truly gouged by today’s unexpected set of teeth.

***

Ha Ha Ha Slap Ha Ha Ha

2008-08-16T06:28:00.000-07:00

So there’s this crack that sounded like nothing on earth. But it was on earth - for less for a second before vanishing as it had arrived, a bolt from the blue.

It descended from one of those ferocious thunderstorms that envelope Phnom Penh without warning: flawless turquoise sky and angry sun eliminated by a sudden caucus of blackheart clouds; an ocean’s water deposited on the defenseless city in minutes.

The crack that rippled the yoghurt on my fruit wasn’t a thunderous crack, the sort that elicits demented yelps from mongrels and screams from massage parlours. This crack was of a different dimension. Cataclysmic. Nuclear. End-of-the-world.

It was the end for an unfortunate young Khmer sheltering from the storm under a coconut tree with her boyfriend, yards from my office balcony.

Ignoring the cardinal Rule of Thunderstorms (as well-known in Cambodia today as in East Anglia when I was a child), she was, apparently, also breaching another - using a mobile phone.

THWCRACKKKKK! The God of Lightning did not hesitate to avenge himself, coconuts sent flying, boyfriend sent reeling “as if his ankles were broken”. She, poor girl, died instantly. Slap! Never has the Khmer word for “dead” sounded more onomatopoeic.

I did not directly witness the strike, consuming my pick-you-up in a nearby restaurant at the time. But several colleagues on our office balcony did. Arriving a little later, I found them awed by the magnitude and wantonness of the event. Shocked by their own brush with nature’s violence, they were gibberish.

Not so my downstairs neighbour, grandmother of the little hole-in-the-heart girl, soon to be flown to Italy for her operation (we hope).

A crone with a cackle to bring on a migraine, she had a dull sparkle in her eyes as she swept dust from her flat onto the communal staircase (up which I bounded to investigate the recent ungodly disturbance).

Cackling while impeding my passage with her brush, she drew lightning jags from ceiling to floor with exaggerated arm movements.

“Ha ha ha! Slap! Ha ha ha! Slap! Ha ha ha!”

She may not have been amused. But my comprehension of the Khmer language is on a par with my understanding of the Khmer character. So I cannot be certain.

***

They Park Their Barking Dog In Your Space

2008-08-10T02:47:00.000-07:00

So there’s this saint I’m not, but blog followers (if any) may as well know that I occasionally spend a little time on Sunday mornings giving English lessons to street children.

The convolutions Khmers, young and old, suffer when tying their tongues round English consonants warrant a dedicated blog – as do my own labours when licking Khmer vowels.

But not today. Today I return without apology to my favorite subject –"Neighbourliness", rather its virtual absence, in this supposedly Buddhist country.

This morning, I checked the school work of one Srey Neang (unpronounceable). Her teacher had, under “Vocabulary Review”, required his pupils to copy these sentences chalked up on the blackboard:

Their dog barks late at night
They park their car in your parking space
They leave their garbage outside
They don’t say hello to you
They watch what you are doing
They make a lot of noise
They don’t take care of their yard
They don’t return things they borrow
Their pets make a mess

Was the exercise purely linguistic or did the teacher also intend to subtly imbue a sense of social responsibility in his charges? If so, I don’t think he’s stands an earthly ...

While the TV in the breakfast bar where I hold lessons blared Carpenters at volume 9.5, I prevailed on Srey Neang to read out the list in English then translate it into Khmer – several times.

Though both renditions were perfect and thus fully understandable to her, not for a second did I detect a flicker of interest in the subtext of her teacher – clearly a blogger-by-stealth after my own heart.

***

The Walking Wagging

2008-08-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

So there’s this inky finger that Khmers by the million are walking round wagging. It’s the right-hand index finger, inky in the interests of democracy.

Last Sunday, Cambodia went to the polls, an event that, never mind the result, few will be able to forget for at least a week. Ten days is the official time for the National Election Committee’s fearsome indelible ink to wear off human skin.

Being inked - your finger grabbed by an Election Officer and plunged into a cesspit of an inkpot after crossing your box - is Cambodia’s way to prevent double voting.

The NEC is proud of the system. The electorate love it. Inky pinkies, despite their gangrenous appearance, are held aloft like pilot lights as the population goes about its daily business on street corners, in markets, at food stalls. Erect fingers are stuck upwards as if engaged in debate or pointing to God.

Heads down to avoid accusatory stares, the uninked – the undemocratic - keep hands in pockets and hurry past the great clan of the inked. But failure to be fingered may not be political apathy. This year, at least 50,000 were disenfranchised - accidentally left off the voter lists. Maybe not accidentally ...

The losing Sam Rainsy Party has already accused the victorious Cambodian People’s Party, iron-clad masters since 1993, of vapourizing the voting rights of a million of its supporters.

So an uninked finger could indicate allegiance, public declaration ordinary Khmers aren’t too keen on given their recent history.

A minority – fashion bunnies and the smart set - don’t care a cuss about that though. Rapid de-inking means they can continue to pose and prance pristine. Apparently, three hours with a pumice removes the proof of good citizenship - taking the skin with it.

For some reason, poseurs prefer red to black finger tips.

***

Topping Plastic Temps Perdu

2008-07-24T08:28:00.000-07:00

So there’s this game they play in the street – three girls and a boy – that utterly engages and absorbs them.

Last week they were at it when I passed for breakfast and were still at it when I returned replete. The next day too: morning before school; late afternoon after school. In their absorption on the third day, they scarcely glanced up for a second as I snapped their game on behalf of blog followers (if any).

Measured by income per head, Cambodia is near the bottom of the world’s poverty league. This means very very few of its pre-teens have the wherewithal (courtesy of parents) to enjoy iPods, Play Stations or Remote-Controlled Toy Helicopters.

Even as a mature – some might say ripe - adult heading rapidly towards UK state pension entitlement, I am not a technological Luddite. I’m as fascinated by the latest electronic gizmo as others half, nay a third, my age.

But the left (or is it right?) side of my brain rarely lets me forget my own pre-teen years when my friends and I spent hour after hour, day after day, month after month, contentedly entertaining ourselves with whatever was to hand – stick, bird’s nest, sit-up-and-beg-bicycle – or with nothing at all . And I don't remember any of us ever complaining we were bored. Reason? We weren't.

A poignant reminder then of Temps Perdu to see those four Khmer kids flicking three plastic bottle tops – red, blue, white - from one side of the pavement to the other, combining the rules of snooker, boule and shove-halfpenny with a precision matching that of Steve Davis or Rafael Nadal.

I nearly cried along with one of the little girls when, on a wily flick, the blue bottle top rebounded off the red top, nudged the white top, and disappeared into a drain.

***

Bad Mood Music

2008-07-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

So there’s this torture a well-known international bank with branches in Phnom Penh inflicts on its customers. Its staff are, apparently, immune to the pain.

TMT (The Music Torture) emanates from a television screwed to a pole screwed to the ceiling above the counter so that no one without a ladder can seek relief.

The bank can be proud of its latest TV commercial. It’s truly arty: dusks, dawns, sun rises, sun sets, slo-mos, freeze-frames, silhouettes, flares, births, re-births, ancient values, modern values - this minute of glory lacks nothing. It’s a mood piece, mood on mood, mood tripled. (Viewers are not breaking down the bank’s doors to open accounts but, hey, when was that ever advertising's purpose?)

Shorn of all commentary, this commercial doesn’t lack music. Languorous, calming, uplifting, dreamy, escapist, sickly, visionary … Did I just write “sickly”?

They weren’t sickly when I first heard them, those sixty seconds of plinky-plonky languorous dreaminess. Nor the second time. The third was a little grating.

After five renditions, I felt queasy. After ten, distinctly nauseous. Yes, ten. A month ago, a proud executive saw fit to cheer up his customers. The commercial is played again and again, over and over, all day every day, without a break, on the screen above the heads of his counter staff.

A ten-minute wait for service, not an infrequent occurrence, means having TMT forced into one’s ears ten times. (Eyes can be averted from dusks, dawns, flares.) Visit the bank twice a day, that’s - yes - twenty plinky-plonky-plinky-plonks.

A whole month! This morning I offered uninvited sympathy to a cashier, despite her unzombified mien.

"What music?” she asked counting my bundle of dollars without error.
I pointed to the auricular irritant's source high above her head.

“I hadn’t noticed,” she said cocking an ear. “Nice, isn’t it.”

(Content unrelated to Khmer Mekong Films not being asked to pitch for the making of said commercial.)

***

Go Green Gene Go

2008-07-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

So there’s this press statement by someone called Stephen Green who is, apparently, National Director of something called
The Traditionalist Christian Voice.

He made it after one Bishop Robinson, gay and from New Hampshire, was heckled by a fundamentalist as he, Bishop Robinson, attempted to deliver a guest sermon from the pulpit of St Mary’s Church, Putney.

For the record, the fundamentalist - before “being escorted from the building” (and tipped in the Thames?) - shouted at the packed congregation that Bishop Robinson, Christian name Gene, was a “heretic”.

Green's statement: "It is a sad day when you get a bishop in a church preaching something that God himself called an abomination."

Not a hint of a nod from The Traditionalist Christian Voice in feminism’s direction then.

And what’s that? “Abomination”? Did God really call it that? Who to? When? Why?

Here’s one more question: Do people who actually believe in God's Calling - including Bishop Robinson, Stephen Green, fundamentalists and Putney congregation - share my planet let alone genes?

***

Pop Goes The Chinese Ghost

2008-07-11T21:35:00.000-07:00

So there’s this thing that goes bump in the day – causing Cambodians perturbation.

For once, your blogger underexaggerates. It’s not just a thing: it’s anything. At anytime. And it causes immense perturbation.

Be it a door slammed by a rainy-season gust, a light bulb giving up its Chinese ghost with a pop, or a new biro of local origin thrown onto a desk for failing to deposit so much as a comma, Cambodians will jump out of their skins uttering imprecations that in decibels outperform the causative bump by a factor of several hundred.

It isn’t akin to a sudden overhead crack of thunder causing mouse and man to react instinctively, protectively. Khmer histrionics at anything more than a pin drop is, I believe, a welcome chance of release from the stultifying behavioural calm programmed into the population from birth.

My hoary old theory of the prosaic effects of Buddhism goes bump yet again.

***

The Impossibilty of Pedagogues

2008-07-10T03:21:00.000-07:00

So there’s this pedagogue that Cambodians – old and young - morph into given the least chance.

Particularly if they’ve commissioned a film from you and they’re viewing it for the first time.

Here’s the scene: Chief Pedagogue invites as many Deputy, Assistant and Hanger-on Pedagogues as can be crammed into a viewing room. Never mind a sea of heads will block the projector or a symphony of chirruping phones and not-so-whispered conversations will destroy the concentration your masterpiece demands.

Either because of the national reluctance to offer any singular opinion about anything or because the occasion is an afternoon out, your film’s first viewing resembles the funeral of a deputy prime minister (seventeen Cambodian DPMs at the last count).

Not that the mourners are here to pay respect to your powerful storytelling, focused messaging, honed audience appeal. They all know they’re out of their depth in that pond. No; they're here to catch you out – collectively.

For they are Khmer and know Khmer behaviour, appearance and, top of the list, language. You are foreign and don’t.

Everyone in your film should behave, look and speak like the collective view of the Cambodian "role model" . Problem is, there isn't a Cambodian role model and, even if there was, there isn’t a collective view – rather certainty – about how it should speak, look and behave.

Collectively, your Pedagogues hold multitudes of differing certainties. Crumpled, you listen to the pronouncements whipped up by your Chief Pedagogue who takes no issue with anyone's certainties, however bizarre. It matters not what is said, providing assembled Pedagogues pronounce aplenty.

Just as you feel you can take no more – Cambodians don't talk like this, walk like that, dress like the other; nor be so “rude”, “rough” or “excited”; nor put feet here and absolutely not there; drink tea and eat noodles together; drive a car like the one they drove; touch mother-in-laws’ arms; hair wouldn’t be that long or that short; people don’t cry they way you made them cry, in fact Cambodians never cry; was that a dream about a beggar? Cambodians only dream about good things; and was that a conical hat in a rice field? This is not Vietnam - and you are about to remind them that 7% of people living here ARE Vietnamese, comes the whammy:

The Actors Are Ugly.

Your crumple becomes a slump because (a) you know “ugly” is synonymous with “dark-skinned” (b) all the Pedagogues are nodding collectively.

As the Chief Pedagogue invites your response, eyes drop and hands reach for mobiles. You manage a few muttered words about the need for the traditional Khmer view of “beauty” equating to “fair-skinned” to be challenged through films such as this.

Enough!

With a sudden nod, Cheshire smile and obligatory sampas, the viewing is over. All rise with the Chief and leave in order of seniority i.e. age. You, horizontal in your seat, are expected to incorporate every point every Pedagogue has made.

It is, of course, impossible and your own certainty is this: that your masterpiece will, in the end, be accepted almost exactly as you showed it.

***

Hush Li'le Baby - Dohn't You Cry

2008-06-28T07:25:00.000-07:00

So there’s this theory of mine that’s been almost blown apart.

Followers of this blog (if any) know my contention: Khmer babies don’t cry. Rather, though they may whimper, they don’t Yell, Scream, Howl. They absolutely do not Bawl their lungs out.

Smug in my belief it’s down to Buddhism's calming effect from the moment of birth, even conception (Cambodians are possibly the world's most passive lovers – er, women certainly), I’ve enjoyed a five-year respite from the racket of Western babies.

(blah blah blah an infant's guttural foghorn, impossible to ignore, is nature’s way of ensuring the species survives blah blah blah)

Yet, despite nature's grand design being thwarted in this pocket of South East Asia, how come Cambodia’s population has more than doubled in the thirty years since Pol Pot decimated it by a quarter?

An interesting question, but not one much on my mind right now as my company expands frenetically.

Until a week ago when …

… a damned stork dropped the most raucous baby I've ever heard into the apartment across the street from mine.

Night after night, dawn after dusk - Yell, Scream, Howl, Bawl. Enough to make me rush over in my jim-jams to offer an arid breast. Anything to shut it up. Buddhism discredited. Theory blown apart.

Until yesterday when …

… emerging from the offending doorway leading up to the offending apartment was the offender - Yelling, Screaming, Howling, Bawling - angrily papoose-packed on its father’s chest, pallid mother struggling behind with armfuls of baby accoutrements.

Both parents British to the core.

***