Love is in the air. Everywhere I look around there’s canoodling sparrers a-chitter and love-struck man-buns holding hands with doe-eyed elephant pants. Flirty girlfriends nuzzle their boy racer dandies: the wind in their ombres and bubble tea-for-two on their minds. If I listen carefully I can almost hear my newly besotted American bud doing lumbersex with her latest beardy Euro-squeeze all up in her Wat Langka loft. Normally glued to her gadgets, she hasn’t updated her status for days, so I’m assuming they’re at it like a couple of Yukon Hares.
All traffic jams lead to swags of silver sprayed coconuts dangling from rose-coloured wedding erections, and for once nobody seems to mind. My pearly invites have yet to hit the doormat but that’s not a bad thing. I won’t have to feel guilty about not going and not wearing a polyester lime satin prom gown, heels and six inches of makeup, or resentful that I have to give a complete stranger $50 to do so. If that’s what folks here are into fine, but where I come from they’d normally be paying me for that kind of thing.
Though it’s not springtime in Paris, Charmingville’s delightful winter weather means everyone’s feeling their oats, and most likely somebody else’s too. The Bunster’s hormones are off the charts since his spay date was postponed thanks to an 11th hour reprieve – his vet eloped with the anaesthetist after a late-night rummage ‘round her groaning medicine chest. No one likes to reach for the remote during an Idol ad break and instead make contact with a suspiciously and emphatically moist patch twixt the Conran couch cushions. So we’ve had to cover every cleft of his deeply studded paramour – the ever-faithful Chesterfield – in prophylactic PVC while he’s hot to trot. This may actually have the opposite, undesirable effect of making the little tinker even randier. I can’t blame him. God knows a few metres of wet plastic and a hefty inanimate object are hard to resist even for those most jaded libertines among us.
Yes indeedy, how pleasantly loved up this weather makes us, and how purty our balmy hamlet is to do it in, especially with those twinkle-dripping trees up ‘round the Monument, like City Hall went all Avatar and blew their 2015 budget on fairy lights. For once, I love what they’ve done with the place. Not even their wastrel offspring disturbing the peace in their gull-winged, tiny-winky-wagons, T-boning parked cars and setting all the dogs off can coitus interrupt us in our quest for les liaisons romantiques in Cupid’s soft tropic gloam.
Which brings me to the usually taciturn Hubster. His idea of a nice evening together is Skyping me from the petanque club and propping his phone up with a can of ABC so I can watch him play with his cabal of, nota bene darling, divorcé teammates.
But perhaps it was the seductive perfume of the flowering romdoul, or the call of the open car park, that prompted his change of heart. This past Monday we mounted his moto and took a ride in the breezy neon evening over the dragon bridge to the concrete boulevards of Koh Pich.
You don’t want to blink. It’s been six months since I was last there, at a wedding as it happens. It’s still the bastard sandpit born of dirty money and breathtakingly poor taste, but it’s not the limbo wasteland it once was, at least, not in the dark. The tumbleweeds have rolled over and out and the place is bustling with Chinese constructors and floodlit pile drivers banging on into the night. And they’re not the only ones. In an effort to find private nookie-nooks away from prying parents wherein to mingle and spoon, middle class singles seeking likeminded fun lovers are tailgating en masse in the vast concrete lots next to those cod-classical wedding sheds. They come prepared with folding chairs and playlists of angsty Khmer pop and Selena Gomez power ballads, coolers and cards, their trunk-mounted woofers booming from car to car in ambitious hopes they’ll clinch a late-night booty call, or at least a funny Valentine.
My Life Partner and I zoom by aboard our modest Dream, free from traffic to roam and weave round the black streets like wannabe hellions on the tear. Our soundtrack is always the same – two wonky songs belted out at the top of our lungs – You Are My Sunshine (just the chorus, since who knows how the rest of it goes?) and Wimoway, which is perfect for two howling parts and increasingly hysterical falsetto. It ain’t pretty, but it’s fun. If one of these electric nights you’re out on the prowl, prick up your ears. The lion might be sleeping, but nobody else is.