While the UK celebrates red hearts and roses, here the flame-red decorations are for the Chinese New Year. Still, Valentine's day is a good time for a tarot reading, so off we go to an unglamourous shop on the main road which clearly relies on word of mouth and had a queue of 9 by the time we left. Mam translates as Kae has no English and among other interesting insights I find my birthdate shows I'm a monkey. Monkey energy accounts for my constant impulse to travel, apparently.
This is strawberry harvest time too, and in the hill village of Samoeng there's a strawberry fair. Here's Steve and Mam's little girl Idea, already with enough grasp of English to take the piss charmingly out of my 'farang' muggleness.


Food... I can't leave Thailand without paying my respects.

Since the start of my trip the food's been fantastic and, for this daily 33 degC sunshine, a perfect regime for me: no heavy lunch and siesta, just light breakfast and early supper. Meals here are fairly fast events: forget lingering over wine-accompanied european-style courses: everything arrives together and is swiftly consumed. Steamed rice is served individually, immediately, usually with soup - always unthickened broth - not as a starter but to moisten the meal. Other dishes are shared: typically there'll be vegetables, an omelette probably with prawns, and a large deepfried fish. Every meal looks as delicious as it tastes, an artwork of vivid colours and graceful garnish. Here's us at MK in the Chiang Mai Plaza, busy with our interactive artwork meal which arrived in the form of a small market garden and a tower of platters of teeny bits of fish. Idea and Som Chai, supervised by Mam, dropped these into a cauldron of simmering water in the middle of our table and within minutes we were sipping a sensational DIY soup.
Snacks in the market, like cones of pineapple chunks, sweetcorn, and donuts, are only a few baht; at the other end of the scale you can pay 8x as much in the elegant coffee bar of the Mandarin Oriental for a raspberry & lychee macaroon.
It's the contrasts in this land that make it so fascinating, of course, and the way that the sacred and profane coexist so closely, some might say even overlapping.
I'm aware blognotes give only superficial snapshots, while my Thailand journey - like all life's journeys - is far more than the sum of these glimpses.
Take yesterday's nature-watch: a giant Grouper fish in the aquarium at the mall - and a foot-long venomous centipede in the grass. I'm not saying Thailand is a big placid-seeming fish secretly as dangerous as the scolopendra, of course, but I do know this country is more complex & fascinating than merely a Land of Smiles.

And finally: For readers who've never had a thai massage in a non-tourist area of Chiang Mai, it's like being kneaded by a cuddlesome tiger. When the claws make you whimper, the tiger gives an enigmatic smile and continues to press, prod, pull, and generally paddle in your muscles until you sizzle. My tiger growled at my keyboard-tense shoulders and wrists, and gave them a specially meticulous mauling. After 2 hours you pay 300 baht - that's 6 quid - and walk out feeling magical.
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Apparently, in the UK Tesco supermarkets take one pound in every 8 spent. Here in Thailand I think 7 out of every 8 must be spent on the street. From snack shacks along kerbs and temple tourist stalls to thriving local food markets, there's a buying opportunity at every turn. We went by scooter - an exhilarating trip as helmet laws are undetectable here - to the market my hosts use, a sprawl of gorgeous looking fruit & vegetables, still hectic at sunset though the entire place froze on the dot of 6pm for the Thai national anthem. We went by rickshaw, towed by a cheery septagenarian who peddled at the pace of - well, a 70-year old on a bike towing a rickshaw gives the picture - to the huge night market in Chiang Rai.
We walked over the Myanmar border into Tacheleik on a day pass and were overwhelmed with offers of fake relics, fake designer accessories, fake gems and fake viagra. Rather more sadly you can also buy real tusks, horns, and skins of baby tigers. Like the past, Burma is another country: they do things differently there.

Back in Chiang Mai there's Sunday Walking Street, with hill tribe crafts alongside the usual commercial tourist teeshirts, Beautiful bodies are for sale too, on a time-share basis. Bars -not especially aimed at tourists- feature catwalks where girls, boys, and boy-girls in scanty attire gyrate with their sale numbers on display. How do I know? Because after supper in town my host and his charming university colleague on hearing I've been to Thailand 3 times but never been to a ladyboy bar or watched the beautiful kathoye cabarets, decided this must be instantly remedied & carted me off for a wow!-style eyeopener. Home by tuk-tuk.

It's a week now since I left the snow of England, and I'm half-way through my stay. In that time, as well as exploring my local environs, I've journeyed with Steve to the northernmost tip of Thailand, through the beautiful Chiang Rai province with its Laos-y landscape of rice fields and misty distant mountains; I've been to the Golden Triangle and watched the mighty Mekong river winding between Laos, Thailand, and Burma; I've spent time in sacred places, and enjoyed food so delectable it needs a separate post.
Scenes I'll remember: the viridian paddy fields of Chiang Rai hedged with stumpy palms, with water buffalo and workers in broad-brimmed straw hats; and the brilliant jammy colours of bougainvillea along the central reservations of city roads; Wat Rong Khun with its fountains and extraordinary shimmering spiky contours; the sumptuous ancient temples and buddhas, mostly gilded, with their elephant and dragon acolytes. Why is it that these gaudy golden figures, often with supercilious or even fatuous expressions, evoke such feelings of tranquility and awe? I don't know, but they do. Maybe they've become so saturated by generations of reverence and sincerity that even a wary westerner can feel stirred by a bubble of hope for something universally connecting and life affirming...

I'll conclude these transcendental thoughts with an image of one of the many signs along Hang Dong Road.

Another bulletin from Planet Luxury: Breakfast at the hotel is amazing - anything you might conceivably desire is either already on display, probably primped in the shape of a heart or a fan, or else will be created for you on the spot by a team of chefs wielding pans and griddles. Refills of coffee arrive like unexpected purchases at an auction, you only have to raise an eyebrow. The roof-top pool gardens, where my day was spent basking in 32 degree sunshine, are a blossom-filled paradise, but by evening I'm glutted with indolence and ready for the next step in this adventure - the beautiful and culturally fascinating area of Chiang Mai.
The flight takes an hour, and by midnight I'm unpacked in my new temporary home, a lovely tranquil room with views to the Doi Suthep mountains, foothills of the Himalayas extending all the way to Burma.
Stephen designed both house and garden, and sitting here in sunshine surrounded by banana and mango trees I completely understand why he says he'd never go back to live in the UK.
In fact I'd probably sit here all day, listening to the minah birds and watching the fish in the lily ponds, but Mam and Steve are keen to show me more of the local environment. First trip is to Wat Suthep, the temple on the mountain.
Mythology has it that the site, established in 1383, was chosen by a white elephant sent wandering with a sacred relic. Immensely popular with locals and visitors alike, the temple is crammed with statues & gilded chedi. It's approached by 306 steps which are crammed with stalls selling souvenirs and snacks, including delicious fresh mandarin orange juice.


Bhubing Palace, further up the mountain road, was established for the Queen in 1961 and is famed for magnificent gardens so extensive you have to take a golf-cart to get around them. Here be beds of scented old-English roses, vivid scarlet avenues of poinsettias, forest fern gardens, and a resevoir garden for royal parties, with palace apartments scattered around like a private regal Centerparcs. White orchids are everywhere, apparently symbiotic, clambering up india rubber trees and looping around burmese bamboos.

On next to the top of the mountain to see the Hmong village of Ban Doi Pui. The traditional income here was from heroin so the village has become a tourist market, their opium poppy terraces now gardens. These hill-tribes are the oldest indigenous peoples of the area, still speaking their own language and retaining their animist religions which are integrated with buddhism in Thailand - as is Hinduism. Ganesh, the elephant god, remover of obstacles and lord of new beginnings, even has a shrine in the most sacred part of Wat Suthep. Steve tells me more about the amazing tolerance of this culture over supper of Dam fish and Singha beer at a lakeside restaurant.
I'll end this busy posting with a Buddah image in pleasantly reposed Tuesday position, which seems appropriate for today.

The best thing to do on a long haul flight is eat & drink everything proffered and watch back-to-back movies, instead of getting angsty about being unable to sleep. Eleven hours melted by, till was happily melting too in 33 degree sunshine at Suvarnabhumi Airport which looks like a sci-fi space city in the devouring coils of a massive mythical metal snake. My instructions were to take a taxi to Plaza Athenee, possibly the biggest hotel in Bangkok but unheard of by my driver who hung on his cellphone for directions while zigzagging at speed along the 7-lane highway into the city.
This is quite the poshest place I've ever stayed at: a Land of Smiles at every turn, with people to gesture to the people who gesture at the lift. I met up with my Chiang Mai hosts, Stephen Whitehead and his wife Mam who are currently participating in a British Council event here, for a meal in one of the elegant restaurants. Spacious as ballrooms, gamalan playing discreetly, every dish dressaged up like an entry in a flower show. At Mam's suggestion I had Pad Thai - a kind of noodle omelette with prawns and sticky peanut sauce which is a national dish - she had something spicy, and Steve's rice dish arrived in a pineapple. All wondrously out of my league, as is my deluxe room where I can sit in robe and slippers nibbling from the complementary fruit bowl and looking out over the night skyline of Bangkok at 3 am. Which is the best thing to do when arriving in another time zone, instead of getting angsty about being unable to sleep...

"Just Write" was the title of Alison's workshop in Frome Library, and two dozen people squeezed around the table to follow her injunction: No procrastination, no excuses - and not much elbow room, but a highly successful session.


There's something about the Bath Theatre Royal that always makes me feel like a footballer in the wrong terrace... or perhaps at the wrong game entirely. Lacrosse, maybe.
My Wonderful Day is Alan Ayckbourn's 73rd play and his trophy shelf groans with past awards; the acting was impeccable and the lighting was memorable, cleverer than anything in the script in fact. The characters comprised a philandering TV presenter, his dippy blonde mistress, angry wife, hanger-on chum, loquacious cleaner and her daughter Winnie. And before you take that short step to the conclusion they're all last-century clichés let me tell you that 9 year old Winnie is a biddable child who prefers writing to watching television and speaks French all day on maternal demand, a device necessary for the plot: that Winnie unobserved can chronicle various previous and present infidelities in her notebook. Ayesha Antoine - unbelievably 20 years older than her role - is brilliant as the child who follows every nuance of the adult action with eyes like sucked gobstoppers, but despite rapturous reviews of this play off Broadway, in the chilly stalls of Theatre Royal Bath it was a long two hours.


And now I'm bailing out on February - UK February anyway: on Friday I'm off to Chiang Mai. My host, Dr Stephen Whitehead, tells me not to pack any woollies for my stay.. I'll be thinking of you all, speak later....

Midsummer at Soho Theatre is billed not as a musical but "A Play With Songs". How does that work? you wonder. The answer is, brilliantly. A lyrical & erotic story of a lost weekend, a comedy of manic manners, and a mesmeric, moving, metaphor for that extraordinary process we call falling in love. Written by David Greig and Gordon McIntyre, events unfold at an exhilarating pace veering from breathless physicality to tender reflection: moving, funny, unexpected, delightful - 2 hours of theatrical magic enhanced by genius casting: Cora Bissett as the disillusioned divorce lawyer with a penchant for rom com and recklessness, and Matthew Pidgeon as the small-time crook who'd rather be busking, can melt your heart from their first words.
Which incidentally are sung:
Love will break your heart...
but sometimes you want it to...
... and like the parking machine says, change is possible. Contagious midsummer madness that sends you out into the winter night with a luminous smile.

Luke Wright's Petty Concerns turn out to be difficulties around balancing slight conceit with overweening insecurity. His hour-long solo show features 7 poems - all new - among the rapid rueful reminiscences. From the scatter-gun self-assault to the painstaking trawling through Google for disparaging comments by others, this is an ego stripped bare. More than poetry, more than stand-up, his performance has the audience rocking with laughter while showing us humanity as scathingly as Eliot's Prufrock. "The best thing I've seen since.... ever!" said my friend Roger as we left The Old Red Lion Theatre where Luke's foppish buffoon act finishes this week - catch it on tour if you can.

Another reason for my London visit was the annual-ish reunion with two writer friends, both of whom have a book launch very soon: for Christine Coleman, her new novel Paper Lanterns, and for Roger Jinkinson a biography of the Kevin Andrews, another Hellenic travel writer. Roger's Tales from a Greek Island is about to hit Greek bookshops too.
Chris was one of my Plinthathon supporters last July, so we included Trafalgar Square in our itinerary, and found the One-and-Other space now occupied by Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Park, GCB, KBE, MC, DFC, DCL. So, the idea of breaking the monopoly of militaristic men in the heart of London has melted like a dropped lollypop in the fountains. It's a dreadful statue, too.

Current affairs corner: Christopher Reid is the surprise winner of the Costa Book of the Year for A Scattering. Asked how he planned to spend the £30,000 prize money, he said "as frivolously as I can", which is also surprising since his collection of elegies was reviewed as "understated, elliptical, glowing with restrained passion."

And finally: "Boy when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something," says Holden Caulfield. No chance of that for his creator. Newspapers this weekend bulge with images of J D Salinger, all movie-star-eyes in his youth and wild-eyed recluse in his old age, together with analyses of his works and his womanising.
The curse of immortality again...
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Friday's arrival at Farncombe was in fog as thick as junket, at the mph of a hesitant hedgehog. Such is the cosseting charm of the Cotswolds Conference Centre and Chris our ebullient host that by the time the 9 members of my writing course assembled together after supper, the drive-from-hell had slipped from our agenda: from that first session till we parted on Sunday this was an outstanding group, mutually supportive as well as creatively diverse.
Some great stories were germinated, and Saturday night was an especial delight, with thought-provoking and entertaining readings varying from Nick's droll morality tales to James's 'rumble in the jungle' honeymoon blog.


Back when Kate Winslet -who played the novelist in her wayward youth- was still reading Janet & John, I was avidly devouring the novels of Iris Murdoch. The film of her life was based on her husband's insensitive memoir and consequently paid scant tribute to her luminous literary talent. To my mind, the scandalising and sentimentalising of her life story was probably the reason there was no major retrospective review of her works, and I wrote as much in The Journal of the Society of Authors. I grieved for the downgrading of her reputation from clever philosopher to barmy bag-lady. "In his book of that name", I wrote, "Milan Kundura imagines two dead writers talking about immortality. Hemingway protests bitterly to Goethe that this is no honour but a cruel sentence: Our books will probably soon stop being read. But people will never stop prying into your life. I used to think that Ernest Hemingway, with his fearful homophobia and flaky sexuality, would forever be the leading example of this ironic truth, but poor belittled ‘Iris’ has left him far behind."
The serious retrospective review hasn't happened yet, but some of her letters have been published in a collection entitled Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War, and I'm interested that editor, Peter J Conradi, writes in The Times: "Dame Iris, in life so august, remote and intensely private, was in death unwittingly reduced to two opposed stereotypes: in vulgar language, bonking (younger Iris) or bonkers (elderly Iris). If you’re American: screwing or screwy. Both sensationalisms reduced her to gross physicality, bypassing and demeaning the one thing about her that was truly remarkable – the freedom of her mind."
If you're interested, I recommend The Bell, The Nice and the Good, and A Fairly Honourable Defeat. It's not too late...
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February 2002

Bath Poetry Cafe has had a worrying few weeks but the January meeting on Wednesday was able to celebrate a future now no longer precarious. This was a medley night, with a wonderful range of great readings skilfully choreographed by Sue Boyle whose passion for poetry always illuminates the room.

And this week I had the fantastic privilege of an interview for Plays International with Tom Morris, the much-admired new artistic director of Bristol Old Vic, who really is as awesome as his reputation. We met in a cafe near the theatre on a freezing morning so I greeted him from behind steamed-up glasses and dripping blood from a cut finger which decided to re-erupt, neither of which could be called a good look. But Tom was effortlessly polite and his enthusiasm for his new role and for the creative community comes across as utterly genuine. 'Our starting point is collaborative,' he says, emphasising how he's hugely excited by the 'crucible of culture' that Bristol is becoming. One example of his own contribution is Bristol Ferment, nine days of theatrical experimentation,“a forgiving environment were people can try things out and learn from performing whether an idea has legs” - which looks simply brilliant though frustratingly I'm already committed elsewhere on every night...

“It is only when the bodies start piling up that the world takes notice of Haiti” wrote Andrew Marshall in The Independent. That was back in 2000, as a sombre tribute to Jean Dominique, Haitian journalist and human rights activist, assassinated on the steps of his radio station. I'm abashed to admit I knew nothing about this charismatic champion of the powerless and campaigner for justice, until the Haiti benefit night organised by my friend Niamh included a showing of his life story. The Agronomist was made soon after his murder by Oscar award-winning Jonathan Demme who also directed The Silence of the Lambs. Jean Dominique knew his struggle was his death sentence: he believed "You cannot kill freedom, you cannot kill justice". Savagely sad and inspiring in equal measure, this is a story of a country in need of not just donations but far better treatment by the world beyond its borders.

This week's weird footnote: A reading test!
I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the first and last ltteer be in the r ghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

- and a totally irrelevant image of Bristol docks on the first night of that much-welcomed thaw.

Hansel & Gretel is the quintessential tale of abandonment and child abuse. Psychologists following them into that dark forest speak of the terror of rejection and other dreads at the heart of our individual and cultural psyches but you can't have a Grimm tale at Christmas so the Kneehigh production at Bristol Old Vic gave us a much jollier version. This is a rumbustuous lederhosen yodelling romp, enlivened by song, puppet rabbits and philosophical hens, and exciting Heath-Robinson contraptions. As their parents are too ineffective to lose them successfully, the children set off into the forest themselves like Enid Blyton kids on a holiday adventure. Having dispatched the witch - who rears up like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction in a very funny protracted death scene - they head home with a picnic singing the family song Yes we are fine and we are dandy. Don't have nightmares, kids.
There's much to enjoy in this retelling, beginning before we even reach our seats with a journey through the Old Vic's underbelly dressed for the occasion with witchy decorations like eggs clamped in clawlike dangling forks. There's the live music, Carl Grosse's manic transvestite witch, Giles King who brought wonderful energy to the action as both the mother and the witch's birdlike familiar. The set, essentially a vast tower of metal riggings, seems designed to facilitate the impressive array of stage tricks rather than enhance the atmosphere of the story, and the one element that was missing was emotional engagement with the characters. To me it all belonged to a more innocent time, the era of Terry and June, tickle-sticking business from a ferret in the trousers, and the incredible inventions of Professor Branestawm. But the mostly-teenaged full house audience clearly loved it and that's what matters.
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The big freeze continues and days zigzag by in forty shades of white.
Either I'm getting blasé or cabin fever has kicked in because on Monday I set off with writer friend John Payne, who's researching a quirky city guide, to walk the Bath Skyline route... through Rainbow Wood and Bushy Norword, past Sham Castle - sounds like a Rupert Bear adventure, doesn't it?
It took us nearly 3 hours to cover 6 miles. I'll skip the full list of hazards; suffice to say that tho we enjoyed it, my top tip for anyone intending to undertake this in the middle of the most snowy snap in 30 years would be: Don't.
Stourhead is still accessible, though, unless you're a duck. Snow has turned frozen lakes into fields.

Luckily, the night Debby Holt launched Recipe for Scandal at Bath Waterstones saw a brief respite, so a posse of Frome writers managed to be there to celebrate her latest novel as it swoops off on its journey from the shelves to the best-selller lists - with a rave review from Heat magazine. Good too to catch up with Sarah Duncan, whose novel Single to Rome has been nominated for the RNA 'novel of the year' award.
Debby always gives an electrifying talk at these party-style launches, mingling witty anecdote with tough tips for writers:
"Never kidnap a person and plonk them in a book without bothering to do anything with them. And never think you know what’s going to happen...
When I started this book I thought it was about something else, but when I finished I realised it was a story about how we let our pasts control our present – and sometimes we have to jettison our past. When we get older, shock horror, we don’t get any wiser."

The power of the past is an appropriate reflection, perhaps, for this time of year, and it seems to have loomed everywhere for me lately. Everything is Illuminated was filmed 5 years ago but I only caught up with it this week on DVD: Cohn-brothers-style spiky comedy and poignant historical backstory, but essentially it's a road movie: the journey of a belligerent old man and two young men with little in common but their inarticulate mutual commitment. Like all good road movies the journeys are within. "The past" Alex concludes "is always inside us, looking out."

In Your Image, the new play by Rob Benson staged at the Ustinov as a 'Script Factory' reading, replaced the Ukrainian road with a rubbish-filled flat but the abrasive relationships, the lost boys searching for answers, the old man who walked out on his life, were all there- although the debris of the past had not been so tidily collected. Rob Benson started with the idea of disposable cameras which might, or might not, hold secrets to the past, as two estranged brothers coincide at their dead father's flat to rummage through his debris in their different ways. 'Leave those pictures there,' the older brother urges, 'it isn't our past - he's not our past.'
Director Mark Powell emphasises this is still a work in progress, but there's already much to appreciate especially in the structure, which time-shifts the father's death to the second act and slowly probes the dark confusion until everything is illuminated...

This posting's unrelated endpiece: A friend introduced me to TED - a kind of cerebral youtube. Go to 'most favourited' to hear Ken Robinson explain how schools kill creativity.

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