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Byline: Ruby Smith

Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures

This week I draw your attention to my sister, that saintly progenitrix who slavishly tends the alarming coven of teenage ne’er-do-wells she insists on calling “the kiddiewinks.” I think a few weeks back I may have mentioned her – she won a snack ‘n’ sandwich toaster in an Extreme Ironing Contest at the 1998 Sheepvention.

Ring any bells? The one who could start an argument in an empty house? You’d know her if you saw her. Anyway. She’s a frequent visitor to CharmingVille: enamoured, as we all are, by fresh coconuts for breakfast, affordable access to an outstanding roster of Indian melodramas on Star Plus, and $13 gin. Especially this last bit.

Scant minutes post touchdown and she’s lashing a careening tuk tuk eastbound on Russian Boulevard, taking a hard right at Bayon and bounding past the abalone display without a backward glance. Within seconds their booze aisle is alive with the sound of satisfied sighs as she skips into the embrace of bargain basement Beefeaters and those dazzling blue gems of Bombay.

More than once I’ve got the call from the Chinese lady who runs the joint like a retail Nurse Ratched; sis has been wet sampling the merchandise on site, and I’ve had to go collect her and her careworn My Little Pony wheelie bag from the massage chairs next to the trolley bay. Thai Huot may have a better dairy section but you can’t beat Bayon for discreet personal service. Being pleasantly hammered and manhandled into a mechanical shiatsu recliner by a couple of strapping stockboys may be the closest thing to a happy ending she’ll ever get. At least for free.

Aside from the cheap plonk there are the balmy morning strolls up Wat Phnom, an armada of disco boats on one of the world’s landmark waterways, and who doesn’t love a game of boules under the Museum’s stately trees.

Sis has fallen so hard for our fun-loving hamlet that she’s gone and bought a neat little flat near Psah Thmey. And since she’s still antipode-bound, rearing her snap-chatty millennials and working full-time to keep them in crop tops and weed, me and the Hubster are managing the renos.

It’s a shame you can’t choose your family. There are plenty of times I would’ve swapped my Dulux-chipping, Ikea-catalogue-referencing, polyurethane-specifying younger sibling for a ham fucking sandwich.

Luckily there were no colours involved. She’s insisted on white everything, though naturally the “right” kind of white, i.e., not too white. And like not chalky white. But like antique white. Don’t get me started.

On the bright side, her choice of a monochrome palette means that’s one less can ‘n’ string Skype call from an unairconditioned chemical warehouse in Takeo to discuss how to perfectly match and mix PMS 324 when all they’ve got is a container load of Jotun Tangerine Blast, some metal primer and a dirty old stick.

A small mercy though. Hubster and I have needed counselling over the still unfunny debacle that accompanied the installation of an exposed brick backsplash and waterproofing for the skylight. A vertiginous shitfight followed the fitting of a new balcony cage to avoid braining pedestrians with errant shrubbery. He went home to mum’s over the wood for the bar top. But eventually it all started looking like the “after” pix on Apartment Therapy. I even made a terrarium.

And just when we thought we could break out the moist towelettes, crack an ice-cold tinny and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, we discovered an alternate rat universe in the roof. Twenty-seven of the little bastards. Eating through newly laid wiring and pissing down that goddam skylight all over the freshly (white) painted drywall. It nearly sent us over the edge, and were it not for another family member’s timely intervention we may well have challenged each other to a duel down the shooting range. Good times.

Enter sister-in-law. A recent beauty school graduate and No. 5 in Hubster’s pantheon of seven handsome sibs, Sister is sweet and a little bit shy. She’s got flower pictures on her nails and terrific hair. But this rat fiasco revealed a hitherto unexercised facility for rodent annihilation – a steely backbone I suspect most Khmer women possess. She loves Bunster, and most other animals I’ve seen her with, but rats are a whole other can of verms. If the buggers are too wily or big for those Starckian cage traps that I want to make into a bedside lamp, out comes the glue on a plate. I’m not condoning. I’m just in horrified awe. Once those four-legged Typhoid Marys and their customary posse of enormous flying roaches hit the glug she spins them into a black plastic bag and dispatches them with one, decisive thwack of a foot-long two-by-four. Then she chucks the bags with their expired contents out into the skip.

I’m a bit scared, and also a bit proud. My sister knows I’ll get her home safely, no matter what. And it’s good to know that when rats shit down your skylight, you can count on family to have your back.

Posted on January 21, 2015January 16, 2015Categories Guilty PleasuresLeave a comment on Guilty Pleasures
Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures

Crab sex goes on a lot longer than you’d think.

I admit I had no choice but to watch, Officer, but there was no tingle in my trunks this sunny A.M. I felt some objective admiration as those little critters went at it hammer and tongs on the plastic bag isthmus that passes for the Sihanoukville shore. It made a change from enjoying them tossed in a fingerlickin’ Kampot pepper sauce.

All the other crabs sat in a circle around les amoureux with their backs to the surprisingly vigorous action for privacy’s sake. I thought that was lovely of them. But I could only stare with purely scientific interest at those green-shelled hump-meisters – either that or burn my retinas to cinders glued to the exquisite buns of a coyly posturing devotchka trawling up and down the foreshore in a lime thong.

Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate a peachy buttock as robustly as the next human. I myself have bounteous globes – back in my salad days I was a saucy burlesque with a penchant for the pole and my unequivocal rear assets meant a garter belt overflowing by dawn’s rosy crack. But there’s a time and a place for egregious Lycra cleft kecks, and on a public beach chockers with New Year families of every ilk, bending over to beachcomb in a co-polymer stringlet the size of Kaliningrad Oblast was not it.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful for a perfect sunkissed bum, or for nature’s jam packed cornucopia in general. Don’t get jealous, but as we speak I’m writing to you from an over-water cabana down on our patchy old south coast. It’s a breezy overcast morning. There are seafaring butterflies, silver fingerlings skipping away from some inept Korean tourists with half a million dollars worth of fishing equipment, a couple of lolling hornets that I got my one good eye on, and an unfeasibly fit Slavic couple with a rope-and-swing thing hanging from the rafters. I’m assuming it’s some new isometric Pilates workout but it might just be more Russians having sex. It’s always hard to tell. I’m impressed that they brought all their stuff with them though: they probably need to be that pumped to carry it all.

I thought a few days away from CharmingVille’s bustle and grit would help me blow away some life-muffling cobwebs and ponder my Goat Year resolutions with fewer distractions. Being a water rabbit, I love the sea, and Kep was fully booked, so while Hubster just gets on with it with nary a navel gaze, I’m here in this Onassian playground to take a good hard look at myself. I got some serious stuff to work out.

  1. How to be kinder to people. The barking should stop.
  2. Patience. Get me some. Right fucking now.
  3. Perhaps it’s also time to get a proper job – a cube farm with a staff canteen and some kind of health plan that lets me drink the minibar dry in a luxury Bangers condo while I recover from increasingly urgent wattle surgery. Plus one can’t live on the miniscule compensation payout from last Easter’s tragic eyebrow incident forever. I’m down to my last furry 500 riel. Yes. A job might be something to consider.
  4. Also, should I go back to my natural hair colour?

The tropical lullaby whispered by wavelets caressing the giant concrete octopus at the foot of the hotel garden has been most inspirational for these and many other ponderments. But I’ve turned to my internet for some of the answers that can’t be forecast by the intersecting lines of Sergey’s impressive six pack or counting the back hairs of the gold-toothed boozenik lights out and face down on the sand in front.

Apparently, terrariums are going to be super important for me in 2015. I like the look of macramé potholders too. There’ll be plenty of fruits. I’m urged on a couple of sites to curb my control freakery and delegate important tasks, or at least ask for help more often than I do. So instead of googling AskJeeves for a toothpaste recipe that’ll remove unsightly coffee and beetroot stains, I’ve made an appointment with my dental hygienist. I’ve given up on my self-styled exercise regime that counted my trips to the fridge as a “five second fat blaster” and enrolled in rope wars at the local gym. I’ve also enlisted the services of the tuk tuk guy who cleans our gutters. He happens to be a dab hand at wardrobe culling and has promised to do my colours. By June I should have nice white teeth, an even hotter body, and fewer but more important clothes.

The biggest change of the year will be for our pet. Bunster‘s days of squiring the chesterfield are over: he’s scheduled to get his bits done in the first quarter. Hubster’s not too happy about it but we tried a girlfriend and he just ran away. He might be gay, the Rabbit I mean, but I’m over his raiding my wardrobe and chewing the bejesus out of my black t-shirt collection. His hormone-fuelled sofa-rooting shoe-feasting days are so 2014. Like me, he’ll just have to get along without his damn biscuits.

Posted on January 14, 2015January 8, 2015Categories Guilty PleasuresLeave a comment on Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures: Sozzled

Call me an alarmist, over-protective broken record but if you’ve had one too many ales at the sushi train or scoffed a bottle of Johnny down The Rock then tottered to yer Dream or that hornet-waisted shag magnet burbling out back, odds are something unpleasant’s going to hit the fan. Make it past the door trogs without being shanked and before you’re even out the bike park you may drive into some delinquent off-duty boy in beige, all tiny finger waggy and equally impaired but, crucially, packing. He may stir your shit until there’s a claret carpet underfoot and the ladyboys are posting your demise on Khmer Hotnews. All over red rover and thank your mother for the rabbits.

If you don’t expire in the carpark, or fall asleep while negotiating Independence Monument – you go around, remember, not up and over – you may well encounter a gang of machete-wielding “playboys” hooning around on those farty-blart KTMs and scaring the crap out of timid old ducks like me minding my own biz in a tuk tuk on my way back from a two pot sherry knees up. They may snatch your purse or your man bag. They may grab the phone right out of your helmet. I guess I should be thankful at least you’re wearing one.

Unlike too many Nutella baguettes, which just make you feel guilty and fat, a skinful of beer can persuade you your closet is the dunny or worse, that your sleeping spouse is. Just yesterday Ricky Gervais off of YouTube told me he’d wee’ed all over Jane one night by accident after a protracted grog fest. I had a serial drunk piddler for a boyfriend once – he saw a man about a dog all over my one good work pantsuit. Another time he tinkled like Seabiscuit on the central heating so for the rest of the winter the whole house stank like the Japanese bridge underpass and I had to sleep under a tarp in the back of our ute. I froze my tits off and admit to a nip or two to keep the rest of my cockles warm. Things went downhill from there relationship-wise, which was probably his plan after all. But still. Smashing my autographed Duran Duran snowdome would have done the trick.

I’m not a blotless seraph in the shitfaced drunk department. I used to drink my weight in screwdrivers. Which made me wear shoulder pads and smoke coloured cocktail cigarettes.  I singed all my eyebrows off once in a Pancake Parlour following that exact sequence of events. I’ve also perpetrated some inappropriate weeing – underground carparks a specialty – woken up with my head in a club dunny more than once, and navigated the Stagger of Shame in the white hot 9am CharmingVille glare, gurning and wincing with every brain-pounding step, under the gaze of a dozen snickering tuk tuk drivers. Sometimes it’s good not to know Khmer. There but for the grace of God, they were probably saying. At least when we walk home our skirts aren’t tucked into our pants.

And did you see that thing on the news with the wasted barang asleep in the aisle of a Kiwi Mart? It wasn’t even phone footage – so some little shit must have rung the TV station and got a crew down there ready to roll when the security guard roused that hammered, now unemployed person. Let that be a lesson to us all. Or something. Anyway.

Far be it from me to advocate you go off the grog completely. For the most part people are just a little bit funnier and a little bit hotter after a couple of pinot grigios, and we all need more funny and hot. Plus it’s nice to clink full glasses occasionally with a bunch of likeminded folks I like to call friends.

But given our town’s constant faux holiday vibe and that booze is cheaper than therapy, it’s easy to forget tomorrow is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and not Cinqo de Mayo or National Fish Week. And I wouldn’t even mind the seven-day sozzlement if you would only take a tuk tuk. Because despite the tragic farrago of booze-fuelled madcappery that preceded CharmingVille’s fabled trouser-snake incident of ’04, the sobering road toll, the recent alcohol ad ban, the new helmet rule and the “Bring Sexy Back” government campaign announcement, there are still plenty of us staggering drunks ready to mount and ride. Think twice, wouldja, in this bright ‘n’ shiny new year. Because even though Buddha really was a terrific bloke, I suspect we only live once.

Posted on December 31, 2014December 26, 2014Categories Guilty PleasuresLeave a comment on Guilty Pleasures: Sozzled
Guilty Pleasures: Xmas

Guilty Pleasures: Xmas

Gird your loins, Pleasurers. Just because you’re in CharmingVille for the holidays doesn’t mean you get to miss out on polyester reindeer jumpers and Boney M. You’ve been here long enough to know you’ll take a day off on a boat-top wingding for far flimsier excuses than Lord Jesus’ big day (Paris Peace Accord booze cruise, anyone?). So dig up your dusty tree and sharpen your MasterCard, because it’s robot-snowman-playing-plastic-saxophone-fire-hazard season and there are only so many purple-glitter-pony door chimes that play Away In A Manger to go around.

If you miss out on those actual things, there’s plenty of other heartwarming Xmas-ish memories-in-the-making at this apparently sacred time of year. For sure there’ll be an awkward Secret Santa moment at work, like when you see the driver who got the joke Viagra sharing his blue candy down the car park with his chess buddies. Or that squirrelly chick from Accounts gives you a clock in the shape of a winking teddy bear wearing a festive sombrero that is obviously a regifted Aeon Club present-with-purchase with her phone number taped to the bottom. Just what you’ve always wanted.

Guaranteed there’ll be plenty of parties chockers with backpacking flimpets in babydoll elf drag if that’s your stein of glög. I’ve got a nice brandy ball recipe if you want one. Even you nay-saying Ebenezers grumping home alone will feel your cockles thawing at the sight of a copper in a Santa hat dinking his granny to the chicken shop or a pert-bottomed Wat Phnom temple lion sporting a fancy tinsel merkin. Our tropic hamlet is snowed with twisted Xmas cheer and useless yuletide tat created by those who have no clue for those of us who have everything. If you’re stuck for unique gifts I bet no one does a gold-spraypainted durian-shell manger with upcycled Psy action figure as sweet baby Jesus quite like the folks at Psar Kandal. You can practically taste the nog in the air down there. If you’re a god botherer, or even just a bit of a stickler for tradition, you might balk at IBC’s selection of Mickey-as-Messiah gift cards, but let’s be honest, none of us were there. Along with the shepherds and the donkeys and soforth, who’s to say there weren’t anthropomorphic singing mice?

Many of us either don’t know much or give two shits about Mary’s glabrous boychild, a.k.a. The Son Of God. If you’re a bit shy, cynical, or alternatively faithed, it might seem easiest to avoid the whole shebang. This can work if you’re clinically misanthropic, but anything less and come the 25th you’ll be no-mates sobbing into your yoghurt. Whatever yer ilk, don’t be a stranger to the other things that make this time of year strangely worthwhile, i.e. people. If at first you’re not feeling the twinkly glow of fairy lights and Home Alone marathons, I would still make the effort. My best suggestion is to find some Filipinos.

I know some and those krazy carollers celebrate the shit out of Christmas. If you’re out of luck in the Pinoy department, it won’t hurt to pony up for the turkey buffet brunch or the seafood boat-ride with the odd collection of mates and acquaintances you’ve collated BodeSide. Because, apart from a good reason to skive, making cheery times together is what it’s all about.

Even if it’s a little bit sad that your real kith and kin might be sharing hot toddies and a lame cracker joke 10,000 miles away without you, there’s always Skype. So put down those 27 vodkas, hush those tear-strings. You actually have your own little dysfunctional family of sorts right here in CharmingVille to help you make it through those not so merry FOMO moments. After all, that’s what friends, a felt-covered plastic-reindeer-with-flashing-red-eyes-and-a-peach-on-its-back, and a humongous box of sangria are for. Jingle on.

Posted on December 17, 2014December 11, 2014Categories Guilty PleasuresLeave a comment on Guilty Pleasures: Xmas
Guilty Pleasures: Superstition

Guilty Pleasures: Superstition

I spent this past week without the use of my hands and feet. You’d be right in thinking I fancy myself the Lady Gaga of CharmingVille, borne aloft on a marshmallow ‘n’  banoffee palanquin by topless glitterlings burnished to an ottery sheen with litres of virgin civet musk. I’d command my meaty, spangled minions to goosestep up and down the aisles of Bayon while I point operatically to the smoked salmon and order scads of Pol Roger. Unfortunately I am not Gaga. I am currently immobile because I’m infested with excruciating tropical buboes on all four extremities thanks to either amoebically moist gym equipment or a mani-pedi gone awry. Or the ancient sorceress from downstairs. More on her later.

Anyway, it’s gross and it hurts. From my ankles to my wrists I’m blain-free, but from there on out it’s like my purulent digits cameo’d on the Walking Dead without my permission. I won’t go into any more technical details except to say that I can’t walk, The Hubster’s feeding me with a spoon and I’ve watched every single episode of Melissa and Joey because my claw-hand can’t press the ‘Fuck off you awful, awful crap’ button on the remote. Thank you, Nils Lofgren (the Swedish scientist, not the guitarist from The E Street Band) who invented lidocaine: The Hubster fetched a ‘de la Gare dozen’ and I’ve sprayed it over all my festering, sausage-tight appendages. Under Doctor’s orders I also swab my soles and palms with 70% ethyl alcohol three or four times a day. It stings like buggery and I reek like the dancefloor at Heart. On the plus side, a low-grade fever and some dubious Pakistani antibiotics together with a vodka or three have given me a cheeky mid-morning buzz that only Walkabout aficionados will truly appreciate. Seriously, if I was a street I’d be Pasteur. As we speak I’m a little bit shitfaced and tapping out this week’s column one letter at a time using a chopstick jammed into the finally handy gap in my front teeth. I’m glad we got that all sorted then.

Bunster’s also more sullen than usual if that’s zoologically possible, given he’s an ungrateful killjoy at the best of times. To be fair though he has just returned from the pet dentist to get a molar spur removed. It was giving him all kinds of gyp, poor bugger, and he’s still not 100%. So each morning before work The Hubster whizzes us up a mutually acceptable Bulletproof Kale and leaves we two sorry malingerers to our own devices. For the next 12 hours me and my humourless orange sidekick sit together with a bowl and two straws, sucking through our various tooth holes and perving on the neighbours while the drugs kick in. I like to think of us as a postmodern, Bode’s-Side version of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The rabbit is perfect type casting in Jimmy Stewart‘s role, with his mangled leg and all, and I can be the cool, elegant Grace Kelly. But with pustules.

So it was that we two, supine and helplessly drug fucked in the balcony hammock, watched good old Psah Chas burn to a crisp. We’d been spying on the aforementioned crone across the road. By day she sits at her little kiosk, flogging phone scratchies and icy cold beer from her big orange esky, chewing betel and incantating. By night she sweeps a lot, which is apparently a very witchy sign, along with a shock of white hair and the generally accepted fact that she’s 170 years old. Perhaps she’d pony up some amulets or swivel her head 180 and laser-beam us with coal-red eyes. I willed her to give me a little something.

Minutes ticked by and I was about to give up when I noticed people looking north. There was a smokey tang in the air. Then I heard the sirens. Had my trotter boils allowed me to stand, I could have watched the action from the comfort of my own home or, better still, wandered down to gawk. Instead I made do with a MacGyver-style periscope fashioned from a moto wing mirror, packing tape and a stick from my artfully arranged driftwood collection. I couldn’t see the whole conflagration but enough flame and smoke to know the game was up for my go-to hair-extension place. I know it’s not about me, but this dermal plague had something of the dark arts about it, too. Maybe I should stop scoffing at the old duck downstairs and Khmer superstition in general. Although our beloved hamlet is a-buzz with Thai conspiracy theories, it just might be the old girl settling a beef the supernatural way.

Posted on December 10, 2014December 4, 2014Categories UncategorizedLeave a comment on Guilty Pleasures: Superstition

Guilty Pleasures: Popstars

So Robbie Williams came into my office today. I’d just settled upstairs into my vast corner suite with a bubble tea and a bushel of deep-fried plantains, ready to write the bit in my million-selling erotic novel trilogy where Anya goes on a glamorous date with Crispian, who takes her to his penthouse apartment in his matte-black helicopter. As you do. My farmer sister, in CharmingVille on a three-dollar-mani-pedi bacchanal, having absconded the pastoral yoke and a harebrained project at her local daycare to turn the decrepit family RV into a rescue-chicken petting motel, was downstairs in reception practicing her fruit sculpture.

I heard the front door open, a man’s voice then a squeak of shock and indistinct babble, the latter both from my sis. ‘Zounds!’ I thought. She may be struggling with a) the local firemen demanding money to check our extinguisher for the third time this week, b) that touchy-feely fake Tibetan monk who seems to be everywhere lately luring her with some pretty convincing mala beads or c) a lost French person. Such are the pitfalls awaiting an innocent country girl just trying to make it in the big smoke. Though by now smeared in fragrant banana grease and batter-deep into a particularly lusty ‘ardent manhood’ trope, I thrust my sizzling bestseller aside to pop down and help my hillbilly sibling. As I was going down, she was coming up, almost exactly like a person windmilling away from a fatal wasp attack. “OMG,” she whisper shouted. “What shall we do? It’s Robbie Williams!!!”

Wowser! Robster. The Rob. Mr ‘Angels’ himself slouching cheekily in our very reception. No wonder sister was agog. She’s routinely starstricken at the faintest glimmer of famous person. Once she passed out in the dairy aisle at Big W because she’d so seen Sting buying yoghurt. I also promised her I’d never tell about the time she… Oh, never mind.

You don’t see many A-listers swanning around Riverside glad-handing us little people. Though not long ago, after a few appletinis, I thought I saw that blue-eyed soulster John Newman aka Sam Smith over in Street 308. You never see them in a room together at the same time, right? Anyway. After I said: ‘Oh My God, if I was 20 years younger’ and ‘I love your song how does it go again?’ about 15 times, his mam came over and told us to fuck off. I haven’t seen him lately and I’m over him, frankly. Lovely singing voice but now that he’s climbed aboard the Bob ‘n’ Bono Ebola Train to Patronising Schmalzville… well, I won’t be buying him another passionfruit caipiroska, let me give you the tip.

Ronan Keating crooned at Olympic Stadium in 2007. Then there were some K-Pop D-listers and Stacey Orrico. Pitbull turned up from his non-stop Miami discoke party in the days before he was everybody’s rapping-bit-in-the-middle bitch. CharmingVille isn’t even a whistlestop for tragic troubadours Michael Learns To Rock, and they’ll go anywhere. Jesus. Can you believe they’re still at it? Southeast Asia has a lot to answer for. David Archuleta. Bryan Adams. Limp Bizkit. Don’t even get me started now.

Anyway. My only physical touching of an actual famous person Bodes-side was in 2008 when me and the ever-fragrant Preap Sovath stood in front of Sambo the elephant for a photo op back when you could make her wear fairy lights and satin pants and put your client’s logo all over her saddle. There’s been a Boeung-Kak-size black hole in the starless firmament since, but the turntables they are a-turning now that we have Buth Seyha, our first home-grown reality TV singing superstar. In case you live in an underwater pineapple or you simply don’t give a shit, he’s a beer-garden wedding singer turned winner of Cambodia’s version of The Voice. The one where questionable cultural tastemakers sit with their backs to you in massive vinyl thrones and press the buzzer if they like the sound you’re making. Young Seyha wins 25K, a moto and enough Cambodia Beer to keep us all believing he can actually sing. Given those melodica ‘n’ bontempi hand-dancing shows, he’s a fucking prodigy.

But meantime back at the office I was calm on the outside but inside gagging to throw down some louche banter and swap numbers with Stoke-on-Trent’s Naughtiest Nightingale. I flicked the crispy batter crumblets off my perky rack, hitched up me trews and stepped into reception with what I hoped was a convincing approximation of an appreciative but not desperate resting niceface.

It was immediately clear no one in reception remotely resembled Robbie Williams. It was actually Bon Jovi, with his teeth and everything. Crestfallen, my sister offered him a fried banana. They chatted for a bit. I went back upstairs to write porn. Just another CharmingVille work week. Ho hum.

Posted on December 3, 2014November 27, 2014Categories Guilty PleasuresLeave a comment on Guilty Pleasures: Popstars
Guilty Pleasures: Water Festival

Guilty Pleasures: Water Festival

Naysayers worried and whinged in the lead-up to this year’s Water Festival. My favourite gaudy vested anchorman finger-wagged a lot about it. A poor show this year: apparently just 248 boats, instead of the usual 800. Given the festival’s recent tragic history, mums in the provinces naturally fretted about their kids in the big smoke. The TV got grannies from Prey Veng to Battambang predicting something supernaturally shady with the whole shebang. There was carping down the Panda Mart about the loony street closures and which crooked rozzer was selling VIP access to locals who were entitled to pass for free.

Most vocal, though, were the rheum-eyed jades, those been-there-done-that couldabeens who shuffle the seedy expat path between babytalking their lap-sat bodega girls down 51 in broad daylight and late-night, pompous tit-for-tat grammar scuffles on their bitter ‘Cambodia is Crap’ Facebook pages. The races may be over, but those gouty dotards are still bitching about the lack of shady daydrinking spots on the riverfront, and how that provincial plastic-belt salesman cheated them out of half a pent. You’d think they would’ve ironed their cleanest singlet and fucked off on the apparently extortionate $8 bus to Snooky or the sexpat express to Pattaya for the duration. Or forever, even. Anything to get away from the crowds of everyday out-of-town Cambodians (or ‘peasants’, as they’re called on the official Tourism website) spending hard-earned cash, overcoming natural trepidation and enduring a 14-hour chickentaxi sauna to come root for their home-grown boats hauling arse.

And, shiver me timbers, didn’t they?! I’ve enjoyed my fair share of sweaty slappy man comps in which vigorous teams of colour-coded beefcake achieve something thrilling together, but I didn’t expect to see that kind of manly action – and with far more august historic pedigree – this past Bon Om Touk. ‘Cos let’s get real, Khmer fellers. Though props for handcrafting a space-visible religious wonderment, you’ve snoozed on your laurels since 1150AD. Drinking coffee en masse at every available street corner and screaming at John Cena fake-beating the crap out of an actor in lycra tights and a bedazzled cod piece don’t count. It’s yelling at American TV with a bunch of similarly skiving mates. An active celebration of the majestic tradition and awe-inspiring cultural muscle that created a once great empire it certainly ain’t.

Every year since I’ve lived in CharmingVille I admit I’ve upped sticks and headed out to somewhere beachy or chill, but this time me and The Hubster decided to stay. I didn’t know what to expect except maybe a beer concert and some kind of half-arsed regatta. So imagine my surprise when, after negotiating the three separate road blocks in the 100 yards between Marital HQ and Riverside, my Lifemate and I met with the spectacle of hundreds of thrusting mariners standing shoulder to shoulder and rowing in perfect unison, club coloured and kroma’d, while clumps of floating lotus and water hyacinth swept by. Delighted citizens thronged the banks and cheered and selfied and snacked. Wiry blokes just off their boats with muddy legs and lip-hung fag ends still had the energy to tomfool with rivals and pose for toothy portraits. Monks shared prehistoric binoculars, ladies in eyewatering jimjams, toesocks and matching hats sold pneumatic bags of squid floss to toddlers half their size, and a wizened codger sporting a pork pie hat and amulet tattoos sat on the parapet swinging his legs and teasing his giggling grandkids. I looked up and saw throngs of smiling tourists watching the races with icy cold beers and cameras from balconies and rooftops along the Quay. Cops of every stripe hogged the shade.

I felt a bit wrong going into the ‘foreigner’s only’ tent, but they had white satin chair covers and headsets translating the live commentary in English. Hubster pretended he was Malaysian. We sat there in relative cool with a great view of the flower-festooned water dragons, some with female crews and apsara coxswains, knifing through the swift, olive Tonle Sap and urged on by their hometowns on both banks. I learned that some had rowed kilometres down various rivers to get here. We motoed across the Japanese Bridge early on Day 2 as the first racers geared up and watched 40 men in yellow T-shirts and red krama climb down the hasty ladders to the mash and trash of sludge below, 80 flip-flops left behind as they pushed off with rousing chants. These dudes meant business. These rice farmers and shop keepers and motodops and fishers. These 21st-century strugglers, stoic, shy, dirt poor. And usually invisible. They outshone the Ministries’ lacy floating light show, and the fireworks, and all the combed-over, white-suited Oknhas and their bejewelled wives.  They brought the pomp and swag and vigour of Angkor princes and stirred us pasty city folk, for just three days of the year, and I was so glad to see it. Young guys full of noble piss and vinegar, old ones quietly confident and twinkly, all justifiably proud of a tradition 1,000 years old, and giving everyone who stayed behind a Very Good Show.

Posted on November 19, 2014November 16, 2014Categories UncategorizedLeave a comment on Guilty Pleasures: Water Festival
Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures

This time last week I was at Changi, kipping on a beferned slumberette in ‘The Sanctuary’, otherwise known as the arse-end of gate E5 near where they park the disabled golf carts. It wasn’t my first choice for a seven-hour transit bask waiting for my flight home to Charmingville. In the not-so-distant past, I was a bewheeled corporate hamster gainfully employed by a London consortium of pre-crisis profligates who had us all flying Business or – if you were a skilled lickspittle – First to PowerPoint training sessions in the Algarve. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. These days I kill time airside hoiking my crazed Russian Market wheelie bag round the Duty Free, pilfering eye-cream samples, taste-testing flavoured vodkas or going round and round on the Skytrain just for larfs.

So having scoffed my pocket-linted plane loot of breakfast rolls and mini milks from the last 12 hours aloft, I malingered in an $8 shower at the Traveller’s Lounge, then searched for one of those free foot-massage chairs. But my plans – to doze, earplugged and masked, in a fragrant fug of perfume testers while having my feet shiatsued gratis by a mechanical finger wizard – were thwarted at every turn. Bickering Chinese grannies in rhinestone Christmas knitwear with no socks on and way too much inexplicable hand luggage (salad spinner, jumbo pack of Pampers, beets) hogged every chair in the terminal. I eventually settled for the aforementioned garden nook, which had a view of the control tower framed by a massive moss ‘n’ orchid studded carved styrene sculpture of a glitter-spangled turtle couple holding hands and standing on their hind legs in a bed of weeping fig. Oh, Singapore. Anyway. Two of the contoured recliners were occupied by giggling Indian gents and a third by a ginger woman snoring like a walrus. She was only slightly louder than the tannoyed Kenny G, whose saccharine noodles have had me reaching for my sidearm on more than one occasion. Too jetlagged to give a shit, I settled in despite the aural distraction and the felonious garden art and soon drifted into a perfect, blissful snooze.

It was the best sleep I’d had since undertaking my stint as the only female person on the ill-fated MV Nanjing Pluck. Battered to death by an enraged polar wind, the old girl ran aground on an uncharted igneous atoll. I’m sure you saw it on the news. It was a life-threatening but not unwelcome diversion; every failed Murmansk-Spitsburgen Sturgeon Muster has a silver lining after all. I’m not sure if you’ve ever been stranded for 10 days on a volcanic outcrop surrounded by apocalyptic ocean with a crate of 100-proof aqvavit, 17 thumping great twentysomething Norwegian deckhands and a litre of rubbing alcohol, but there wasn’t much sleep for this little puffin, let me give you the tip.

Meanwhile, back in the Lion City’s vaunted aeronautical hub and coaxed into consciousness by the afternoon glare bouncing off those gigantic loved-up chelonians, I dragged myself and my flabby air-pillow off to the departure gate for the uneventful leg home.

After a rather invasive but not unpleasant Ebola screening at Pochentong, I hauled my souvenir meerschaum collection and vintage Minke harness through Customs to see The Hubster’s beam light up the arrivals breezeway. At first I thought he might be drunk – you’ll know by now he’s not the most demonstrative helpmeet in Love’s collection. But a month is a long time to spend with a relentlessly priapic rabbit and a broken fridge with the instructions in technical Dutch.

“I have a surprise for you, darling,” he gushed as we loaded up the aircon taxi – another first (I usually hail a tuk tuk and get home to find a ‘Gone to Mum’s’ note, which means he’s actually playing boules with a slurry of Phnom Penh’s finest, up to his eyepits in sangria cask). As I dumped my Nordic souvenirs in the hallway, he made me close my eyes and led me into the bedroom. Taking up space once reserved for our ancient round (don’t ask) Ikea nap sack was a brand new, king-sized Sealy Posturepedic. It would’ve cost an arm and a leg. Certainly a round trip to the Algarve flying Club Class. But with a bed like this, who needs lie-flat seats? I’m not going anywhere in the foreseeable future, unless you count the Land of Nod.

Posted on November 3, 2014October 30, 2014Categories Guilty PleasuresLeave a comment on Guilty Pleasures
Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures

By the time you read this, I won’t be here. Hush now. I’m not ‘going to Belgium’. This Pchum Ben I’ve booked three weeks of Me-Time aboard a Liberia-registered beam trawler to join the infamous Murmansk-Spitsbergen sturgeon muster. It’s a notion I’ve been woolgathering since childhood: the sting of gale-smacked salt on my cheeks as I stuff them with snus. A hearty cod mulligan at the end of a long haul, whipped up by an avuncular yet somehow sexy ex-legionnaire with an uncanny resemblance to Jean Reno. Sat round the wireless whittling scrimshaw and listening to the shipping news with Ronnie, the bosun’s cat. Chunky cream cable knits. Lashings of rum. From the brochure I understand that my real-life shipboard adventure will be somewhat more taxing. On the MV Nanjing Pluck there’ll be just me, the doomcrack of icebergs calving as the polar caps melt us all to hell, and 18 trainee deckhands from Norway wearing thigh-high rubber wellingtons. So not much Me-Time, then.

In an effort to outfox impending midlife entropy I’ve embarked on a personal rewilding project that includes this jaunt to points North: I’m thrilled to my Stubings to be setting sail for the high seas. But my Life Partner isn’t as ecstatic about his first mate leaving CharmingVille for so long just to chow down on puffin or circumnavigate icy bollards or some such with a bunch of steam-breathing Yngwes. For the seven years we’ve been together, we’ve spent just two days apart. Actually I was watching TV and he was sleeping off a rice-wine bender in the next room and time got away from us.  But we’re having to think for three now that we’re saddled with our partially-abled furry albatross, The Bunster. So mainly because I’m bigger than him, my heart’s captain gets the short straw and stays behind to tend the needy Long John lagomorph. To help them make it through I’ve been up till sparrow’s, freezing 21 days worth of microwaveable casseroles, grown a pot of dill and there’s a case of Bombay Sapphire chilling in the vegetable crisper. Odds on neither will notice I’m gone till I’m back and unpacking 30 kilos of salted Minke cheeks on the lounge-room floor.

Hubster’s the strong silent type, with a romantic bone not instantly visible to the naked eye. I’ve come to accept empty vases on Valentine’s Day, though he does take out the bins every Tuesday night and I can’t say fairer than that. But I know my upcoming absence must be sinking in somewhat because for the very first time he suggested we overnight at Kep together. He even organised the car. Maybe I watch too much Law & Order – and I do; don’t judge me – but the suggestion of a romantic trip away was so out of character I looked for any concealed weaponry and/or the scent of bitter almonds in the curried-egg sandwiches he made for the trip down. All clear. Miracolo. So last weekend we left our furry faux child thrusting manfully at the chesterfield and eating his own poo and went to Kep for 24 hours.

Our driver, Lot, put up with an unacceptable number of shit jokes about his name once the license-plate game had palled. We managed the journey without hitting anything. Excellent. And then, voila, we’re there. The weather was rather dramatic, so we repaired to the relative shelter of a seaside crab temple.

Have you ever seen a windspoon? I never had until then. As my burly hammocked arse gently grazed the floorboards in a post-prandial nap-fest, I lapped in and out of a warm Angkor reverie, listening to the ardent bicker of two rambunctious geckos getting on each other’s tit-end in the palm-thicket roof above. Considering they’re really just tiny flesh tubes with no teeth (though admittedly supernatural suckery feet), those little buggers can wake a person right up. I was about to launch an immaculately Hoovered crab shell in their direction when I noticed a dirty old rice spoon tied to a bit of string under the eaves on the sea side.

We were all stumped, including Hubster, my erstwhile oracle of Cambodian-ness. The waitress said they protected against storms and calmed the wind. I don’t believe in that stuff, but admit it was quite blustery out – enough to blow the White Lady’s skirt right off her dimpled bum. In our little sea shanty, we remained fully clothed and unruffled. A while later we hauled ourselves into the Camry and headed for the hotel. Tucked away in my overnighter was my own personal windspoon, gifted me by the crab lady: a humble plastic talisman to protect me from whatever the Barents might have on its briny mind.

All aboard and see you soon, me hearties.

Posted on October 6, 2014Categories Guilty PleasuresLeave a comment on Guilty Pleasures
Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures

Who doesn’t love an old pile? If you’ve just flounced into Pochentong from one of those mid-year holidays, you might have eaten cake off a marble dolphin while gazing up Versailles’ frothy petticoats. That dreamboat Gaudi and his loopy landmarks were possibly on your summer To-Ogle list. Maybe you paid through the nose to lollop past Giza’s famous tetrahedrons on a stinking dromedary. The pipeystripey Pompidou might be more your bag, and you don’t have to be French or Tom Hanks to crack le Canon at les Pyramides. The Great Wall, the Grand Canal or even the comparatively medium-sized but still imposing Big Pineapple are worthy exemplars of humanity’s knack with a brick. And don’t get me started on the eye-watering erections in Petra, Atlantis (just testing), Kathmandu, MacchuPichu and everywhere Greco-Roman. Closer to home you’ve got yer luvverly big wats: Angkor, Bayon, Ta Prom and the regrettably underrated Wat Phnom. If you haven’t gone there early on a soft CharmingVille Sunday, I think you should. Totter up the easy back way, round by the museum (those front steps are a publicly humiliating myocardial infarction just waiting to happen.

My personal penchant, bricks ‘n’ mortar-wise, are the mainly public buildings with noble Sangkum bones that tremble on the brink of extinction with every ominous, pile-driven thud. I’m not the sharpest angle on the floorplan, but I know what I like and I like anything by that home-grown architectural alpha and omega Mister Vann MolyVann and his mid-century band of swingin’ draughters. His buildings are smart and considered and lyrical. Every wing and buttress is designed with so much care for us tropical humans and our hot, soggy surrounds as to seem empathic. His lecture halls at RUPP’s Faculty of Foreign Languages sit amidst venerable banyans, up on their haunches like elegant space-frogs. They have shutters like gills and voids on top and rain spouts that will help cool a building faster. To capture the light or not, as needed. To soothe and breathe with a pleasing spaciousness. Each of MolyVann’s remaining buildings is precisely crafted to serve complex demands – perfect for its purpose – meaningfully composed with dignified, elegant simplicity at precisely the sweet spot where natural law, practical need and sheer beauty get it on. They give me shivers.

Yet as this town’s philistines plumb mediocrity’s dumb fundament and the venal clamour grows for another preposterous Angry Bird Bank or monstrous blot on our riverine horizon, it seems that my favourite quietly cool, almost sentient structures are not long for this unlovely, unloveable, shoddy new landscape.

Which is why, every month or so, I collect on The Hubster’s doghouse points (he gets them for things like coming home pissed as a lord on the night we were ‘sposed to go to that Meta House thing. OK, so, fair play. But still). His penance is to help me prise open rusty gates, slash through poison ivy, wake hysterically barking dogs and tiptoe through an arse-ton of nameless ordure to snap away at little gems of architectural genius. Actually, in the case of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, we just walked through a freshly painted gate as the security guy tipped his fedora. But anyway.

So last Sunday, early, we went to the White Building, aka the Bodeng, designed by Lu Ban Hup and Vladimir Bodiansky and overseen by Mr V. It’s not the first time I’ve been inside. When the elections were on, our little mates in Law Enforcement wheeled out their spanking new razor wire and put up barricades between the side of town I live on and my work. After a bit of argy bargy with a succession of nadless tuk tuk drivers, I found my own way through: in one door, up the stairs, across the breezeways above the blockades and back down the other side. It was like Grand Central Station in there. They even had buskers and a stern old bird sitting in her doorway keeping things tight with her palm fan and a vicious, yappy little underbite on legs.

This last visit I could see how wide and long these dark corridors really are. At that time of day strips of light dazzle under east side doors like the alien arrival, the busy open breezeways cut with hard morning angles and shadows. You can feel your pupils dilate and contract over and over adjusting to the mad, relentless chiaroscuro. Some apartments were locked and shuttered, some people had just their grilles pulled across: kids watching TV, a lady sewing magenta cushions in a royal-blue room, a madhouse of arguments and one dim place with nothing but a solitary rooster crowing inside. Drop cloths and scaffolding stood near a wall swathed in fresh Tiffany blue. Murals and kids, little shops and monks paying visits, pregnant mums chit-chatting in doorways. And those damn yappy dogs.

Though I know there are dark stories inside, the life domestic triumphed on this sunny Sunday am. You applaud the tenacious foliage cascading from cracks three storeys up and ignore the shit piles in the odd derelict stairway. Though its face needs a damn good wash, the White Building’s heart beats strong and regular and it breathes in living, vibrant colour despite its name. The foundations seem as sturdy as any other living place in town. It was built for the long haul, but like Olympic Stadium and the 100 Houses and all the good people who have no place like home, it’s in for a fight. As I stood on the roof amid billows of freshly laundered kramas, I felt the Building’s roots, like toes in sand, burrow deeper, hanging on for dear life.

Posted on September 19, 2014Categories Guilty PleasuresLeave a comment on Guilty Pleasures

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