Mr Wappi-Fellow

To reach the goal of non-attachment there are many distractions, particularly if you are a consumer-minded 4 year old.

We went to see the biggest Buddhist temple in Malaysia, Kek Lok Si, in Georgetown. Beautiful, golden, many temples and so on. But lining the many many steps on the way up are shops selling a concentrated crappiness of items that are sold here everywhere: T shirts with I-Pood (figure crouching on loo)  hand-held fans, flashing spikes, spiky flashes, etc etc.

Dragging Dash up the steps grimly chanting “we are not buying anything” I get him to the temple. At the mouth of it there are more shops and in the inner sanctum, to the accompaniment of religious chanting, there is the most glitziest shop of all. This time the golden trinkets are more likely to be Buddhas, but there is still a load of rubbish in addition, but all profits go to the upkeep of the temple.

Dash senses weakness and redoubles his efforts. Tristan has grown fond of a hand-held fan in the shape of a chubby figure, Mr Wappi-Fellow. He buys it, but for some reason tells Dash he cannot play with it immediately. I think he is trying to teach him the concept of pleasure-deferral.

The visit to the giant meditating Buddha at the pinnacle of the mountain, eyes half-closed, mouth slightly turned up with the joyfulness of inner peace, is accompanied by the screams of  both children. Edith because she is hot and probably has ringing in her ears from Dash’s screams.  Dash because he is unbelievably desperate for Mr Wappi-Fellow.

I try to reason with him, as I do nearly every day when he pleads for some rubbishy item: this toy won’t bring him the happiness he seeks, we buy him millions of toys, can he remember any of them? Life is destined to disappoint, and so on. The whole consumer obsession that Dash is very much in the grip of is one of the reasons we moved out of London – so he would see that there was something in the world beyond shops.

In the end we give in and let him push Mr Wappi-Fellow’s button on and off, stick his fingers into the fan. I don’t think he’s played with it since, even though the fan, which extends from the tip of Mr Wappi-Fellow’s nose, is very cooling.

photos

double dating

Now that I am married with kids I can’t chase boys (too often). Instead Tristan and I, one unit, apply the same dynamic to other couples we meet on our travels.

We often find ourselves saying to each other anxiously: “I really like them. Do you think they like us?” Then we will scan our acquaintance for signs: a smile, sitting down near our table, a brush on the arm.  

But we are fearful of seeming desperate, forcing ourselves not to go to the same restaurants in case they think we’re stalking them. Consoling ourselves if we have tentatively asked them out  but are rebuffed. It’s not that they don’t like us, we say, it’s that we have different needs. They have one quiet baby perhaps, we have 2 noisy children. We represent a liability in restaurant terms. Shameful to admit, yesterday I had real feelings of rejection when we discovered our friends had gone out without us. And I was jealous that they were spending too much time talking to a grizzled old man on the beach – what does he have that we don’t?

My situation may have changed from single to married but still the same old emotions and insecurities come bubbling up. Sometimes I think I have been allotted a certain amount of happiness and unhappiness, through character and upbringing, and if no tragedies befall me, I will live it out whether on a tropical island or rainy isle.

Babes and Buckets

There is no babysitting on Koh Lipe so we had to take the children to the Full Moon Party last night. It wasn’t THE full Moon Party, they happen on another island (Koh Phangan). But it was a copy – right on the beach, pumping house, moonlight glinting on water. DJs from Switzerland, UV skulls spouting music and flowers painted onto palm trees. And buckets, which are apparently big news at the real Full Moons (OMG: so over FIND LINK)

We opt for the mai tai bucket – rum, coke and redbull poured into a bucket, eschewing the Bloody Marry (so true) on the menu. Tristan has a pang of guilt as we dose Dash up on his anti-histamine medicine (side-effect – drowsiness) and put him down on a mat. I have fun dancing a solemn dance with Edith. My younger self would have looked at me right now with a massive cringe. Finally Edith agrees to sleep, but by now I have finished off the sickly bucket and cannot imagine drinking anything else. The music is dull dull dull. It is high tide and the sea laps oppressively at the dancefloor.

But we cannot leave – we are out at a party, both the kids are asleep. This never happens. “It lacks ecstasy,” says our local bartender, and he’s right, in both meanings of the word.

So we sit our butts on a fallen log and force down some more alcohol. (I am in danger of having to visit the doctor with a serious case of loaf-ass – all I do right now I slump from the chair of the bakery to the sand of the beach to the stool of the bar.) Then we haul the kids onto our shoulder and go home.

I can’t handle the spicy

Is it spicy? Dash always wants to know. And then, if he’s eaten it already -  I can’t handle the spicy! Then he tries to claw the heat out of his mouth with his hands.

Also his body is bumped up with mosquito bites. People gasp at the look of him in the street.  On his body are open sores where he has picked the lids from itchy bites and made them bleed.

Other bad moments: Edith, in the jungle in the night, having a tantrum so bad she could barely breathe, trying bolt from her family straight into the dark undergrowth. In Georgetown where there are no pavements, being hoiked along by the arm, her white skin enraged by sun, miserable. Yesterday I turned to see her silently bobbing under the sea, one minute into drowning.

And the hard work of persuading two young children half way round the world, the effort of getting them in and out of planes, boats, buses, tuk-tuks. Dash confided that the worst thing about being away was when he couldn’t see me, he always thought he’d been left behind and we had gone back to England.

How much are they getting from this HOAL (holiday of a lifetime,) how selfish am I being?  I think – quite selfish. I may have told Dash’s school that I would teach him to swim, that he would benefit culturally from visiting Thai schools, etc etc. But he is too crazy in the water to learn to swim, yelling at the feel of a single drop on his face. We have played with Thai children, he knows they might live in a tin shack, but he doesn’t learn from that the lesson of his own luckiness. He thought for months he was going to Toyland, so Thailand might have been a disappointment from the outset.

Edith is 2, it doesn’t matter to her where she is. She sometimes hopes she is going to Grandma’s which she thinks is round the corner. She has taken to slapping my face a lot and demanding I cry, in retribution perhaps.

So today I feel guilty.

When I see them laughing and slapping around in warm sea, not shivering when they get out, marvelling at an enormous dragon-fly, being bourne aloft on a sea of love by the child-loving Thai people, not so much.

Georgetown

In Koh Lanta on our beach there were three or four great traveller-type resorts with groovy bars overlooking the sea: thatched huts on stilts serving cappuccinos, beautiful lanterns, a bit like being at a festival. Every day we would spot the same people in the same bars in the same resorts. They liked where they were, why go somewhere else?  

I am restless. Even if I like where I am I want to go somewhere else. Beach ennui set in on the third week and we decided to leave. It took a long time to get to Georgetown, a hot and expensive 7 hour taxi ride, wrangling at the border, children rushing into incoming traffic. But now that we are here I love it.  

The British built a few colonial buildings, so there is some pomp, at the same time it feels insanely exotic. Ancient Buddhist temples smoking with incense and hung with caged birds, chichaws – bicycle rickshaws jangling along, monkeys, heat, a real Chinatown, a real Little India.

There are tourists, the usual travellers section, but it’s still easy to feel adventurous. Maybe Georgetown is anticipating a tourist boom – beautiful new cafes and a western-style healthy vegan restaurant have just opened on Penang Street. Just closing was a children’s clothes shop full of dead stock from the 1970s(see top); Ladybird and Carters, run by an impeccable old Indian man, all dark wood and glass counters and children’s neckerchiefs. I bought tonnes – I could make a killing in Portobello market.

But Edith got sick straight away, so now we don’t know where to eat. In Thailand you can eat anywhere – the street food is some of the cleanest. And the Malaysians are a lot ruder (more on the way to Englishness) than the Thais. They do not greet our children like Gods. And shepherding kids around a foreign city is a lot harder than the beach – no pavements, relentless moaning, nowhere to run.

 I give Georgetown a week.

 

Satun – the Thai Stroud?

 

Satun, a town in the far south of Thailand, looks unprepossessing at first. Gloomy low-rise architecture, one block-like hotel, endless shops selling fake Ralph Lauren shirts and Croc-offs. It is a place through which people with enormous back-packs pass on their way to Malaysia, like turtles. (Why do people need giant backpacks in Thailand? The Thais don’t travel round their own country with a backpack. There is hardly anywhere a wheel won’t roll at all.)

But if you have to take it slower, if you are travelling with an overwrought 2 and 4 year old say, and if you want a break from the Disneyland of the Thai island, Satun is the place. First I spotted a Japanese-style coffeeshop, all girl grooviness, hand-knitted scarves and hats. Then a tasteful-looking sign – Ang Lee’s Guesthouse, “Niceness Guaranteed.” Inside was an embarrassment of boutique riches: chandeliers, burgandy walls, teak beds, Grace Jones on the stereo. Run by an outlier called Sarah-Jane Googall who is indeed very nice. She is from England married to a Thai who came from Notting Hill via Koh Samui ten years ago and just opened this place. We were her first guests in fact and were quickly feet-up on the bed in a waffle bathrobe.

It’s a bit like Stroud in England, scratch off a surface of gloom to reveal groove. Just as the Thai islands, when it’s raining, are a bit like Scotland. And Bangkok is a bit like LA, if you squint.

In Satun, which felt like the end of the earth, I am only 6 feet away from someone who used to live Notting Hill.  Everywhere is a bit like everywhere else now, no matter how far you travel, but it makes me feel at home.