A fool and his money they say are soon parted but that is’nt me i’m just so good hearted This morning she called me at Three Twenty Five her Mother was sick and might not survive “Send money now” she pleaded through tears I said that i would to allay all her fears “Is Ten …
Another two beers.Another barely concealed look of contempt from a waiter wanting a Twenty Baht tip as he slouched away empty handed. It was midnight at The Bamboo Bar-Pattaya. The place was packed. As the band launched into Hands Up, the old disco favourite, Farangs at the elasticated waistband stage in life flocked to the …
Before my good friend Chris died (see my story In Memory of Chris) I was fortunate enough to have spent some time with him in Bangkok. It was some years ago now when The Beer Garden was just about the only place on Soi 7 where you could get a drink. Unlike today it was …
“Pit fai pit fai (turn the light off) Mook pleaded. She was clinging so tightly to the towel she’d wrapped around herself that her little brown knuckles were almost as white as the towel itself. Unless I’d made a terrible mistake and was about to find out that she was in fact a he, the …
It’s the cool season in Bangkok. I know that because bargirls are shivering outside the bars as well as in. It’s about twenty four degrees centigrade and they’ve got goose bumps. My first night back in Bangkok and I’m welcomed with open legs as always at my favourite little bar on Soi Cowboy. Five girls …
On winter nights at home in England, when the rain outside was horizontal, those of us who had been to Thailand would be cackling in corners at a local pub. Stories we’d each told a thousand times before, of various mis-adventures in The City of Angels, were all enjoyed again as though heard for the …
It was one of those evenings where the elements had conspired to produce the kind of sunset that is only ever seen in the pages of National Geographic magazine. A photograph you see, while idly flicking through its glossy pages, that makes you stop and open the page right out and think wow, I wish …
Duong says that i have the legs of a ninety year old.I’m forty six. “Why everything hurt”? she asks as her vice like hands force my skinny white, non supple limbs, into positions that they were never meant to be put into. “I think you take lady too much” she accuses. I whimper and groan …
The late Spalding Gray in his book Swimming to Cambodia wrote of finding the “perfect moment”. A precise moment in time when nothing else exists,you are just in that moment. Gray found his, somewhat understandably, on a beach in Thailand. At first glance I just couldn’t imagine Bangkok, a sprawling city of heat and chaos, …