July 25 2008
I went to start to take some pictures of other houses where we live so you can see the relative hovel in which we dwell! The parcel of land next door is on offer at £250 per square metre. K paid £100! And I don’t think there is much of a market in sub-prime lending here. So if you have nothing better to do with £20,000 you could buy us a kitchen garden
Of course there is always just the view from The Office
People are forever asking me ‘How we live?’, as though it were likely that daily routines were somehow extraordinarily different in the Orient!
Well, boringly, this is it!
And it started off as a simple timetable…but there appeared a need for some decoration!!
06.00 Arise. You know its wakey time when the Nightwatchmen turn the street lights off
06.05 Let Dog out, or in, according to previous night’s behaviour
06.10 Make Tea. Count Water Lilies. Count Morning Glories. Planted some seeds from UK yesterday. Today 1 inch high sprouted already. K feeds the catfish, some of them checking in at 2 kilos I should say. I want the klong drained to see if they can walk.
06.20 Iron Elodie’s Clothes. Run Elodie’s Bath
06.35. Wake Elodie, carry around for 10 minutes
06.45. Put Elodie in Bath
06.55 Elodie dresses. Try and remember which Uniform for which day. This week she took her exams. Ac K this meant: have to have proper uniform not gym kit, which is Thursdays. However as no-one had said anything….Half the class in Gym Kit, Half in Uniform. Elodie changes clothes….others in tears as have no change of clothes. Ability of teachers/schools to render children hysterical never ceases to amaze me.
07.00 Elodie Breakfast..Watch CBBC. Something faintly surreal about watching Fifi and Roary here!
07.25 Elodie to School. This requires 20 minutes of nervous exhaustion on the Chiang Rai-Chiang Mai highway while negotiating demented motopedists, drag racers, those stopping for nosh, lorries whose carbon footprint exceeds in a 8 kilo journey mine for my whole life, Grannies moving across highway at snail pace. Today the San Khampaeng-Mae Rim traffic lights are broken. Policeman giving good audition for Mr Hulot’s Holiday/The Windmill from Hell has managed to jam all four directions. At this point he gets on motorbike and leaves the scene. Those of us in the know turn left, do spectacularly dangerous U turn across dual carriage way and proceed. Elodie listens to Edward Lear on the CD which seems appropriate. Once get to school have to wait in queue of 2008 model Benzes and huge Toyotas and Hondas for the privilege of parking in a mudslip. Others don’t get out of their cars and wave the kids airily off into the carpark. None dead yet as far as I know. I think I read that the yearly death to car ratio in the UK is 1:10,000. Here it is 125:10,000
08.25. Home. Breakfast. Bath
09.00 Check emails etc. Write aggressive letters. Recent spat with OUP as to target audience for Up and Away. Requires children who cannot read English to spell afternoon, radio, breakfast and other staple vocabulary from Ladybird books. For some reason E can do it. My expectations clearly too low. Rang Oxford, New York, ELT Department at TVU-no reply there, of course. Might as well been asking for the price of Fish Sauce in 1920. One charming receptionist said: “ We are trying to help” I asked what was the nature of this help. Put [phone down quickly. Company of clearly staggering incompetence. All OUP books now have this written on the Copyright page:
OUP is a Department of The University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship and education by publishing worldwide in……….then a list of cities. Not too sure about either the grammar or phraseology of that statement, never mind the accuracy.
09.30 Bit of gardening/washing/house cleaning. Not a lot of the latter thanks to minimalist living. Washing machine which is Korean has unpleasant characteristic of a ’ring tone’ on completion of cycle which always sends one looking for a phone
10.30. ie 04.30 in UK. English banks probably managed their Book keeping, Compliance etc by now..though not always. For some reason which I cannot fathom they appear never to do it at the same time everyday, nor will they tell you when they are doing it. This with HBOS regularly incurs a bewildering array of error messages and service discontinuities. RBS/Natwest better. Check balances, Pay bills, Launder money etc.
However. Thank the lord for Nationwide which sets standards of speed, cheapness and competence of which other banks only dream-well I don’t suppose they do as that would require a degree of consciousness they appear to lack. Only gripe with Nationwide is that they won’t display the exchange rate of transactions so have to do sums. However given that a. They don’t charge for ATM withdrawals and b. that their exchange rate is consistently better not too much of a hardship. Today Nationwide are converting at 66.3 Baht to a pound. RBS is converting at 63 Baht, charges £2.50 for an ATM withdrawal plus some outrageous ‘exchange fee’ which means that I got 5000 Baht from Nationwide for £75.41 which would have cost me about £84.30 from RBS/Natwest! One knows the whole thing is a rip off/charade. The onshore offshore rates have been out of kilter for months and Nationwide’s rate is still better than KasikornBank’s rate…..besides which you have to pay some nonsensical sum for an electronic funds transfer which for no discernible reason takes 5 days. Also HBOS has a friendly wheeze of blocking ATM cards unless you tell them that you will be going abroad; so you will find yourself in Bangkok airport at 06.00 am with your ATM card blocked and it takes them ‘At Least…I quote’ ..24 hours to remove the ‘Restriction’. Why I asked? Oh well we have …I jest not…to Send an Email to the relevant department…..Oh says I which Department is that I will call them sand send an email….Ooooooh no you we can’t reveal that information. Bet the person who needed to be asked was at the next desk. Obstructive twits. Glad they cannot raise any more capital. OK enough of Meldrew.
11.00. Write
12.00. Lunch..Sometimes we will go down to CNX to the Flower Market or Carrefour eat lunch by the river or lake.
13.00 Read and Sleep. I have been falling asleep reading Lizzie Collingham's Curry. I then had to0 struggle out into CNX to buy all the ingredients but I cannot find asafoetida. There's a Pickle Company that produces stunning Bulgarian Yogurt.....
15.15 Go to pick up Elodie, School out 15.45. Go to the market/ shopping/ swimming, buy supper etc.
17.00 Homework. Gruelling trilingual marathon with sums thrown in. Post arrives. Royal Mail International Redirection actually works. Not cheap but quick
18.00 Watch peculiar Japanese Cartoons, Play on the Computer. Watch CDs. At last count E has about 200!. Gardening..mainly watering
19.00 Elodie Supper. Cooking
20.00 Garden. Elodie Shower
21.00 Read Books. Have abandoned Gobbolino for The Wishing Chair. Wants to read the whole of The Faraway Tree again. Elodie to Sleep
21.30 Supper
22.00 Write
23.00/24.00 Shower. Read. Am nodding off at night with Jonathan Spence on The Great Chan. Sort of does for Chinoiserie what Said diid for Orientalism. Sleep.
We spend £30 a month on electricity. This enormous sum is the price we pay for having continuous hot water. I like hot baths and hot showers, not cold ones; so that is a luxury. £300 on cars, £100 on petrol for the Toyota and the Honda; today the price of petrol has gone down 10% or 12p a litre. That will bring the price of Gasohol down to 56p a litre. I wonder where it comes from?! Not seeing that showing up in The Guardian-rather a few more £billion on Nuclear Warheads to keep the immigrants out, or nowadays the natives in.
I went down to Carrefour and bought a Kilo of Prawns, Cream, Sage, Marjoram, Thyme, Bottle of Brandy, Potatoes, 2 Bottles of Green Tea, Fennel, Broad Beans, Roka Cheese Biscuits and Two Toothbrushes for the extravagant sum of £9.50. Cost in the UK? About £40 I should guess. And the Prawns probably unpleasant pre-frozen things from Youngs. These were huge shell on stripy blue things tasting like a prawn. I should think the average food bill is £7-£8 a day. If you were poor you could live satisfactorily on 70p a day each-eating out! A bit more to cook at home.
Elodie’s school is £100, UK Poll Tax £80. £30 on English Language TV
OK we are probably not leading the most eco of lives. I was trying to find Garotta in the market to make a compost heap. Not here!! But everything-paper, glass, cans, plastic is collected for recycling.
Couldn’t do it on a Thai salary. K’s sister has £300 a month after 10 years working as a nurse and becoming a big cheese. On the other hand the parents of the 2000 or so children at E’s school have no difficulty in finding the £1200 a year fees, nor money for new Toyota Fortuners coming in at well over £20,000+ a throw! So clearly plenty of money in Chiang Mai
So it is hardly that different from life in Wales. Both houses relatively pared down. The older I get the more I cannot stand clutter and the more I live anywhere the more of it appears. On the one hand it appears to take forever, if starting from scratch, to acquire all those little necessities-thimbles, picture wire, a magnifying glass, different size envelopes, drill bits, and then where to put them, and always missing some vital thing-could not find a pair of tweezers/pliers small enough to remove panel pins from a picture, nor a thermometer; and then you find there is an array of files, books, papers, sauce bottles, old inflatable toys that cannot be thrown away and where to put those?
All ends up like Elsi’s loft. Endless boxes labelled: Precious Venetian Jewellery, broken, to mend.
