Once more unto the breachchchyechhhhyuurrgggggghhhhh....

Resuming after an extended break, sadly not spent having a wonderful time but in the depths of personal horror; bipolar depressive disorder can leave you up the shit end for months at a time. Still, nil desperandum....

Was in the relative paradise of East Asia some of the time. China and Thailand.

China

It’s building up nicely for the drug- and nationalism-fest in August. Moronic security-goons everywhere telling you you can’t go here and you can’t go there. I went for a walk in a residential area where I had conducted a romance of sorts some fifteen years ago, and was told by some uniformed turd that I couldn’t go down that street. Why not? I asked in perfectly good Chinese. The guy looked at me as if I were a Martian and summoned a female assistant standing a few yards away who put up her hand and told me “No Road!”. I said it was jolly interesting that no-one would tell me why there was no entrance to this area, and that my Embassy would be most intrigued to hear about it.

The kerfuffle over the Olympic Torch Relay showed me one thing that I shouldn’t have forgotten about – how supremely important it is to the Chinese to put on a show. I can remember thinking when the Chinese first got the slot that it was utter madness putting on the Olympics in August in Beijing – for the simple reason that it rains all the time in August in Beijing, and I lived there long enough to know. However, the Chinese think they can fix the weather. By a process known as “seeding the clouds” they can send aircraft up to cause the clouds to tip out all their rain so it doesn’t fall on the desired occasion. They did this in 1999 on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic and it worked (though who knows whether it might not have been fine anyway?). But, I thought, doing it for one day is one thing; do they really think they can do it for three weeks?

No, I discovered. They don't give a shit for what the weather will be like during the actual Olympics; what they really care about is the opening ceremony (8th August). As it happens my ex-girlfriend, whom I met out there, is the senior choreographer for this performance. For anyone outside the Chinese cultural circle (and probably for a lot of people within it, who just daren’t say so) these shows go on for about five hours and are quite staggeringly boring. For the Chinese, they are the centre of the whole thing. A good five months before the Olympics start, my ex and her fellow-choreographers have been confined in a hotel outside Beijing working 18-hour days and 7-day weeks till August. She got a day off at a traditional festival in April to see her 7-year old son but was called back in the late afternoon. I was bloody lucky to get three hours to have dinner with her. There are 10,000 people involved in this opening ceremony and about 8,000 in the closing job. You can see why they get worked up about who goes to attend the thing. But we can expect beautiful summer weather for the ceremonies and filthy pissing rain for the actual athletics.

Thailand

Thailand, of course, is full of whores. Whatever people tell you about why they go there, the real reason s that it is full of whores. I had some vague plans, and so did the (English) mate I went out there to meet, to do a bit more travelling round the country. It didn’t come off, as it never does, because it’s too bloody hot to move, but also because I realised that the main reason I wanted to see more of the disease-infested and God-forsaken interior of Thailand was so that I could tell people back home that I hadn’t just hung around Bangkok and Pattaya, so that they didn’t think “Ah, just another sex tourist”.

Especially as I wasn’t being a sex tourist. I am pushing fifty, and it takes more than it used to to light my fire these days. In fact I found the whole business a bit depressing this time. I still like hanging around in the sleazy parts of town, because you meet more fun people there, but I wasn’t buying. Over the years I have come to understand the background to the unpleasantly exploitative aspects of Thailand’s main industry (goes for most of the rest of South East Asia too).

It’s clear that there’s no point in blaming the girls for being promiscuous and money-grubbing. Nor, despite the universal witness of Western political correctness, it is right to blame the punters. Some of us don’t like to have to promise all our time and all our money for the rest of our lives in order to get our legs over; and nor do I believe men who want to pay for sex should do it in their own countries, as each country perverts the business by means of illogical laws, and most prostitution in Western countries is far too deeply mixed up with the drugs trade, which a lot of us would rather avoid. No, the problem in Thailand is the local men, far too many of whom want to swan around on motorbikes and swig Sang Som whiskey without doing a stroke of work. Half the young women in Thailand have been raped and abused by fathers and brothers who then effectively pimp them out. Then they find worthless boyfriends who want money without doing anything for it, and are stuck financing these shitheads for the best years of their lives. That’s why Thailand (and the Philippines, and as far as I know Cambodia and Vietnam) are heaving with whores. It’s not out fault.