Sandstone Press

A watched pot

Posted by Ron McMillan on 8th June 2010

I write this in strict watched pot never boils mode. A package of Yin Yang Tattoo books has been in limbo for nearly two weeks, not so much winging their way to me as stuck in a transportation and communications mire whose origins bear little scrutiny - though, it should be said, they do not rest at the grand doors of Sandstone Towers. The mystery of their non-appearance was solved earlier today when I heard from the courier (who goes un-named, lest its mention be read as an endorsement), and so, instead of watching the telephone in the hope of it ringing, I write this.

The last month has been an interesting one. Bangkok made a fleeting appearance on international news platforms whose purple prose had the rest of the world convinced that an entire city was either ablaze or strafed by constant gunfire, when in fact only a few grand buildings were being torched and gunfire was both isolated and sporadic at worst.

A couple of days before it all came to a bloody head (oh, the unintentional irony), we moved into an apartment tower that is about four kilometres from where one of the main protest sites was dug in behind barricades of bamboo spikes and bald tyres. Our first night of new residence was played out to the percussive background crackle of small-arms fire. Lives were being lost while we re-arranged furniture and hung photographs.

The re-arrangement of furnishings was not, I soon discovered, without its dangers. While moving a large desk I succeeded in setting even larger candle-holders a-wobble, and in an act of singular clumsiness that surely speaks loud of middle-age, I succeeded not only in failing to arrest said accoutrement wobbles, but to stumble in a pirouette around the table leg, batter unprotected forehead against desk edge - and come within a ligament’s-breadth of dislocating a shoulder.

And so I found myself out on the street of a city in the grips of rioting - though far from the centres of violence - trying to find transportation to a hospital where I might receive treatment for a broad gash on my head. The overhead Skytrain system was closed down (due to the small matter of M79 grenades raining down on one station), which meant that vacant taxis were more rare than St Mirren cup final victories. So I waved down a motorcycle taxi. This, to the uninitiated, is exactly what it says on the tin. A guy in an orange vest on the front of a step-through Honda or Yamaha two-wheeler of about 125cc who operates as a licensed taxi operator. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the absence of tens of thousands of these fellows, Bangkok traffic would grind to an even more complete halt than it normally experiences.

The taxi rider took one look at the deep tissue wound on my celtic coupon, listened to my request to go to a well-known hospital about three or four kilometres distant, bid me to my perch behind him - and took off like a wailing banshee on what he clearly considered to be a mercy mission of the utmost urgency. And so I sat laughing aloud as we cleaved a near-imaginary corridor between parallel lanes of dense, fast-moving downtown traffic through which my pilot wove a gentle 50 kph slalom between car and SUV mirrors that whisked past on either side, a skin’s breadth away, like the doorways and furnishings in a Tom & Jerry chase scene. Five minutes and not one single near-death experience later, he dropped me at the hospital A&E, a proud expression on his face. I tipped him well, which brought the total fare up to at least a pound.

Four stitches in the forehead later, I was on my way back to the apartment. And here I am now, with a newly-healed scar that makes me look like a low-rent extra from Pirates of the Caribbean, and in an increasing state of restlessness over the books that have still not turned up, never mind my sustained efforts to look away from the telephone/stove/pot.

No sooner have I finished typing the above sentence than the telephone rings. My package awaits me downstairs. I knew this would work.

Five minutes later: back in front of the computer. The unopened package beckons from a nearby chair. Time to go. Things to do. A head to pat (I’ll be wary of the scar).