Last night there were only two things worth watching on TV. One was Channing Tatum and Bear Grylls stripping off their zippy trousers and lumberjackets atop a mossy precipice and jumping into a waterfall together, whooping like gibbons as they went. I loathe heights and, so engrossed was I in their manly jackanapes, I forgot this was just TV and waited breathless for a bloody bloom to appear in that roiling, rocky basin below. Just in time, those alpha boisterers shot out from the chill depths in super slow-mo with their ab packs glistening and shaking the drops off their hair like sexy TV seals. And laughing and laughing. Oh, how they laughed. After sundry muddy rollicks they made a little house in a batty cave, scouting for broody she-cats first. As they lounged shirtless and musky, consummate woodsman Bear showed greenhorn Tatum how to light a fire with a single human hair. Or fashion a saucepan out of his belt buckle then cook some grubs in it. Something like that. Anyway it was just delightful to see two red-blooded outdoorsy gents from oh-so-different entertainment genres bromancin’ over ant scroggin and scouring each other’s pelts for juicy ticks.
Over on the other channel it was the same odd-couple madcappery, but with adorable animal babies, untimely wrench’d from nature’s furry teat. Clint, a destitute rhino tot with abandonment issues, was paired with an experienced sheep called Harry. Harry was shit scared – and who wouldn’t be? Young Clint was one thousand pugnacious kilos of seething rhino resentment. But as the almost unintelligible Seth Efriken voiceover man said, this year’s star ungulate is genetically predisposed to flock up, and ain’t too fussy who with. Soon enough our woolly helpmeet was cleaved to Clint like lamby Velcro, fluffing and jinking round those thumping great clodhoppers and weaponised snout like Maddie Ziegler in a shaggy jacket. It was so heartwarming I soon realised I was squealing with delight at the TV. Later, we saw a widowed Orangutan and her colour-coordinated cat, a badger and foxlet couple and, most darling, the toddler baboon mothering a clingy, glassy-eyed bush baby all over the shop. My tearstrings were yanked right out of their sockets. Honestly, TV doesn’t get much better than that.
Like when Bear met Chan and Clint met Harry, CharmingVille’s chockers with all manner of incongruous togetherness – animal, vegetable, mineral and metaphysical – that cook my cockles all the way through. Like, who in their right mind pairs a green tartan Easter bonnet with tailored woollen jacket over black satin pants, artisanal spats, and make it work? Impish Mr. Fang, the cyclo gaffer at Psar Kandal, that’s who. He’s a fucking sartorial genius, like a nuttier Alexander McQueen pre-incarnate. And who doesn’t love sunflower pyjamas at the movies at four o’clock in the afternoon? A policeman with a Pleasant Goat helmet? Socks ‘n’ thongs?
Call me chkuit but word mashups tickle me fancy almost as much as old Bear ‘n’ Tates comparing third nipples. Today on my way to lunch I saw a blackboard outside an all nations eatery on Pop Street – I could have Crimboll Eggs with my choice of penkeks and/or bacon. I had to say Crimboll in my head and then out loud, in a decreasingly Khmenglish accent, before I got scrambled. I gave myself a mental back slap: what an inadvertently marvelous new word, and how clever of me to work it out. But wait. As I stepped out of my tuk tuk, I accidentally left my eyewear on the seat. My driver handed them back. “Take care your sunclash!” Of course that’s what they are.
Pulling up to the pumps just as your motoduhp lights up another Disco, you scope a centenarian codger and his srey saart strolling with his ‘n’ hers bubble teas. You may see two constabularians holding hands in the shade of the Wat Botum banyans.
There could be a street kitten snoring like a trumpet in the arms of a God on 178. And don’t look now, but there’s a man sitting cross-legged by a temple lion at Chbar Ampoev, singing to his blissfully comatose fighting cock. My favourite ensemble is usually parked outside the Ministry of Cults and Religions on Sisowath – a Golden Retriever sitting opposite the stout fortune teller in her tuk tuk having his cards read.
Oh, of course there are the other strange bedfellows in our pandemonious hamlet that’ll raise the ire of some and eyebrows of many. I may have a PHD in Hedonic Psychophysics, a three-legged rabbit and a husband, but I’ve still got no fucking clue about love. So who am I to judge?