Byline: Ruby Smith

If you can’t beat ‘em, you might as well set the alarm and put the kettle on. This past week or so, like everyone in CharmingVille, I’ve been snacking on time-inappropriate fingerfood and yelling ‘GOAL!’ at the top of my lungs at 3 in the morning. First it was the Champion’s League, and now this thing in Brazil. I’ve become quite the aficionado. Just ask me anything. Like: ‘Ruby, I’m drawn to the matador machismo and palpable cocksmithery of Cristiano Ronaldo, but I’ve gone off him a bit over that shock drubbing by the Germans. Plus that red uniform doesn’t make his tan pop the way I like. I think Messi is the better player even though he looks like my cousin from 1978. I was planning to have sex with him and give him the best damn root he’s ever had in his life. What do you think?’

Firstly, my friend, I think you are a warm and generous person. Lionel should be very grateful for your offer. The gift of screaming climax is an awesome ‘Thanks’ any of us would be happy to get. But I hate to rain on your Carnaval. ‘Mas por que você precisa chover na minha festa de rua?’ I hear you say. Because, my dear, sex for our Leo is no more thrilling than going down the PandaMart or talking poolroom colourways with his good lady wife. That genius tinyman gets all the gasping ecstasy he needs from things like kicking his first goal at the World Cup in eight years. Not one of us, not even you, could make him feel how he looked at that moment. Switch on your YouTube and go to the bit at 64:29ish where he miraculously slots it in for Argentina if you don’t believe me. Look at that feisty little fellow run and roar with joy, every neck vein a-pop, in front of 100,000 people shrieking and writhing in mutual, euphoric abandon. Right afterwards a wing of his bellowing, hardbody BFFs descends to ruffle his mullet and give him a nice cuddle. Perhaps a surreptitious spoon, even. Or just a quick cup. Whatever. Anyway. The vídeo cuts off after this (no doubt for privacy’s sake) but with all that explosive emotion released I guarantee he probably had a little cry. There now. I rest my case.

I know the Cambodian national soccer team must be taking a few leaves out of Mr Magic Messidonna’s World Cup playbook. They should. As you know I have my finger on the throbbing pulse of worldwide footballery, and The Angkor Warriors aren’t exactly kicking goals. Apparently they haven’t really since booting Yemeni arse back in ‘66. They’re trying, though. I bumped into the lads in my quest to find a CharmingVille gym that a) doesn’t have mushrooms tumescing from carpet, b) isn’t sick with swaggering narcissists shooting up HGH in the towel cupboard, or c) won’t charge an arm and a leg to wait for the StairMaster while some bodyguarded minor royal trots through her spider solitaire session. Going to a new gym is like Day One at the office or the first day back at juvie. You don’t know where anything is and what the naked/not-naked protocol is in the change rooms. The latter was solved for me by the tiny towels. Whilst no doubt perfect for Lionel’s compact rig, I am a grown woman of luxurious proportions. I could cover front bottom or back bottom but not both at the same time. Boobs didn’t get a look in either way.

No matter which hurt locker I pick, I always start with a cheeky 30 on the treadmills. This particular morning everyone bar the middle machine was thumping and rolling with mid-session fit-ballers looking professionally intense, eyes fixed on the salutary replay of the debaculous stoush between Croatia and Cameroon playing on every dashboard.

I fit right in between two glistening, rhythmically grunting internationals, hardly believing my luck. I batted my good eye and let my shoulder strap slide in the hope one of them might shoot a wink my way or even let slip the strip. No dice. These guys were grimly pumping towards elusive, ecstatic transcendence and I was out of my league.

Lionel already knows the score. For sure most nights when he’s not practicing his star jumps in his private gym or coming up with some great new smoothie recipes, him and Antonella must just lie in bed holding hands.

After dozens of Saturdays lying down in the air-con at 9pm and playing Sudoku on my phone until de la Gare’s finest kicks in, the other weekend I made myself do two things long, if not well, after bedtime.

Firstly a generous but foolhardy acquaintance invited me to drinks with some proper rich people at one of CharmingVille’s five-star hotels. I surprised myself and went. The spangled attendees weren’t just circumstantially well off because three-grand-a-month-goes-a-long-way-when-you’re-living-in-a-third-world-country. They were secret Swiss bank account, island-owning, red-soled pumps loaded.  It was supposed to be a casual thing and I took them at their word. I put pants on. I was wearing shoes. Come on now. But when I arrived, there was an imported Viennese string quartet playing baroque hits in the vestibule. Shit. Except for a matronly NGO freegan in an elephant skirt and electric blue Tevas, everyone else had, as my Nana used to say, ‘made the effort’.

You can forgive the social development lady her execrable Christianist wardrobe choices as she was most likely from Ohio. Be that as it may. I’m a faux-artsy, demi-mondrian layabout with a whisper of a job and frankly tenuous raison d’etre. Wearing a lot of black and looking angsty might still work in Zagreb. But here, midst the scent of fougere and ease, my imposterment was shag-like. I had on bright yellow $2 eyeshadow from Soriya, for fuckssake. I might as well have had a thumping great neon rhino horn nailed to my forehead. Or at least my skirt tucked into my undies at the back. Even though I wasn’t wearing either I furtively checked my reflection in the ice sculpture at the elaborate hand-caught wild salmon tableau.

The ladies, mostly white and mostly in their 40s, had plenty of appropriate clothes on. I saw an actual Von Furstenberg wrap dress and a Pucci blouse.  No one had lipstick on their teeth and there wasn’t a daisy pedicure in sight. They waved their tinkly gold bangles and nano-talked golf. Their men wore suits but weren’t sweaty at all. I wanted to bury my face in everyone’s hair.  Instead, under the guise of plucking an airborne canapé from a passing tray, I discreetly smelt my own armpit just in case. All in order in that department. Yay me.

Drinks were French and free. After a few fortifying sorties to the bar, I managed a halting conversation with an investment banker about rabies, and confused some nice women with an inappropriate and nervous burble about Vincent d’Onofrio, with whom I have an unhealthy TV relationship.

Forty seven minutes after I arrived I slipped out on a nature break and kept going, but not before stuffing my Olympic PVC cheetah skin handbag with tiny snacks. These came in handy for later.

Back at Marital HQ Hubster had set the alarm for 1.45am for us to watch 22 cashed-up Spanish soccer crumpets sashay around a pitch for 90 minutes. ¡Ay caramba! All that thrilling manly hugging, prayerful fist biting and primordial, goosebumpy chest beating. Plus the bonus off-pitch, head-in-hands thespianism from Armani-suited second stringers watching from the sidelines. There was a lot of expensive grooming and Bon Jovi teeth on display, and who doesn’t love a good dark stovepipe pant with a sharply fitted jacket on a superfit twentysomething beardyman with blue eyes and olive skin?

Anyway. We quite enjoyed the first half rooting for those shaggy underdogs Atletico. While Hubster cracked open a dozen consecutive ABCs I sipped mint tea and gorged on the contraband canapés. But after a lacklustre middle and the equaliser by shiny white Real in the dying stages, I knew it was all over. The fastidiously groomed Cristiano Ronaldo ripped his top off at the end apparently, but I missed it because by then I was a bit bored. I’d gone back to bed for some critical beauty sleep, though I admit to a modest nest egg set aside for a little nip ‘n’ tuck when the time comes. Apparently that’s sooner than I’d hoped for: the ladies earlier did tell me there’s a guy in town who does nice work. Money’s like beauty steroids for average-looking people. Have you seen young Cris’s before pictures? These days he’s magnificently bangin’ but I would be too if I got paid $100,000 a day.

 

One day this week, as I was cleaning my teeth, I discovered I could make my boobs go up and down, independently of each other and at the same time, using nothing but the sheer herculean strength of my gym-nascent pectoral muscles. This is no mean feat. Each stupendous globe weighs as much as a cat. I know because I got out the kitchen scales. Then I put Pharrell on and we had a dance. I even Vibered the Hubster at work to let him know the good news. He sent me a nice emoticon flower. But like Tinder, kale smoothies and motos in the rain, even getting happy with your chesticles becomes old hat fast. In case I had something more diverting and life affirming up my sleeve, I skimmed through My List Of Things To Do Today:

1. Pay big blue water bottle dude.

2. Go to Central Market/buy new pasta strainer.

3. Buy paint. Paint over grubby fingermarks from            air-con repair guy.

4. Buy bleach + toothbrush/scrub grout.

5. Toenails?

I looked at my toenails with a question mark. I’d made my List in bed the night before, just after two stiff bloody marys and a cheeky Xanax left over from New Year’s. What was the roadmap for my wayward talons? Paint? Cut? Instagram? Was it a trick question? Stumped, I filed them away in the enervated mañana basket of my mind. Back at the List, I was dismayed to find four out of the five Things To Do needed pants on. Mission critical to three of them was actually stepping outside. I opened the window and put my hand in the outdoors. Barely 10 o’clock in CharmingVille and hot as the hinges of Hell. I had to find something at least mildly interesting and moderately useful to do that included icy cold air-con. For once I decided it couldn’t be playing Facebook, taking online personality tests or wrecking a third blender trying to make hummus off the internet.

Soon after I was colour coding my shoes and listening to a free sample of Rob Lowe’s new audio book to kill time before Law and Order. I plucked my eyebrows. I looked in the fridge 500 times. Ours beeps if you leave the door open too long. I spent a while seeing how far I could close it before it stopped beeping. Turns out it only stops when fully closed. Good to know. The Bunster was panting a bit having spent half an hour on the balcony eating his own poo. He seemed to be enjoying it. But I gave him an ill-conceived sponge bath anyway, which ended in me asking Dr Google if you can catch rabies from rabbits, via a long detour through some disturbing cat gifs.

It was in the middle of this flurry of activity that the power went out.

This was not the bad part. We’ve all been around long enough to hear the collective groans of an overheated, entertainment-free neighbourhood reverberate down each searing street. And the cheers as, a sweaty hour later, everything turns back on.

The bad part began when, during the quiet left behind after electricity is gone, I noticed a hairline crack appearing in the thin veneer of busywork, existential clock-watching and emotional jazz hands I’ve plastered over everything. Ennui and Malaise, those continental nemeses, for the first time accompanied by doleful, snivelling Loneliness, crept through my ever-widening gap. Merde. This hole thing threatened to turn a vaguely promising afternoon quickly and dramatically downhill. I admit I momentarily succumbed and threw myself onto the hard cold tile, blubbing and raging into my neatly rainbowed orthotics. Everybody else is having such a great time. I see their picture on Facebook yukking it up with plenty of sexy offline Brazilian friends on a sunset boat. Or eating smart canapés at yet another important basket-weaving exhibition. Normal people go out to dinner in big laughy groups, stay out after 9, run around the park and discuss the cultural zeitgeist over wheatgrass after yoga.

But as those three killjoys loitered in the corner laughing and pointing as my middle-class, first-world, paper-thin walls came tumbling down, my phone vibrated off the bedside table. It was one of the two-and-a-half people who’d actually leave their house for me, inviting me out for a dinner and a movie, followed by a nightcap and gossip chez them. Those whiny interlopers vanished. I found some pants and vowed that with friends like these, I need more. The thing is to get out amongst it. Even if it’s hot and I’m not Brazilian. I turned to grab my keys and Bunster was back on the balcony, despite the heat, eating his own poo, and smiling right at me. I smiled back. It was, coincidentally, the very moment that the lights went on.

 

At 7.30 this morning I saw a penis. I’m a big fan of the little man, so nine inches out of ten this would usually be a welcome start to my day. I’d be chuffed, for example, had I spied a demi-tumescent David on a morning stroll through my Renaissance sculpture garden. Or looked up at the right time at the matinee of a Buns of Steel Vegas hen’s bender. Or been awoken beachside at the Aegean’s premier nudist resort by a wine-dark Adonis bearing dawn cocktails.

Alas, the male part I scoped from my dim-sum-bound tuk tuk was a policeman’s sorry fingerling answering the call on the wall of Sisowath High. He and his mate had just come off shift extorting money from kids not wearing helmets. Maybe, like many members of the animal kingdom, corrupt cops mark their territory. Devil-may-care middle-class Scoopy riders are probably worth their weight in Muscle Wine back at the squad room. Maybe he was just a lazy prick who should have known better, being a role model for the Future of Cambodia and all. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable. The poor fellow may have real health issues. Incontinence can be a consequence of Type 2 diabetes, plus this little piggy was no manorexic. Probably thanks to stealing all that candy from babies.

But maybe he was just too exhausted to make it back to HQ; our law enforcement officials have been so busy lately, after all. Whatever his excuse, there’s not one for flailing his weensy hose willy-nilly in full view of Norodom peak-hour traffic. Oh. Maybe he was drunk. So that’s OK then. Whatevs. It was enough to put me off my chicken paws.

Unless we’re a nutter, or drug fucked, or it’s New Year’s Eve 1998 in the Mount Gambier Safeway car park, we women don’t just drop trou and piss all over town. We plan ahead, or find a dunny while we’re out and about, or just hold it. If this sounds like sour grapes, I admit I’m occasionally envious of the practical aspects the male member affords, most so when I need to spend a pretty penny or twenny. I’ve lamented my lack of convenient tonk on many a miasmic loo stop en route to Temple Town. Or after one too many vodka Red Bulls in the aptly named ‘powder room’ of <insert noxious nightclub here>, scowling and Pretzel-legged for 20 minutes until the inevitable sextet of ladyboys and strumpets tumble giggling from the only unclogged cubicle.

And though there are fewer people to disgust if you’re caught short outdoors outback Downunder, seeing a man about a dingo can nevertheless be fraught. I love camping: sausages and sauce in bread for breakfast, leaping into remote lakes with your togs off, watching your shirtless bronzed beau and his hot mates stride across the Gibber Plains towards a galah-pink sunset. But after a day frolicking in exhausting nature it’s hard to relax with a slab and a fire-side round of Michael Row The Boat Ashore when you know later there’s a life-threatening chance you’ll dock with a 300-year-old fire ant colony or douse a previously sleeping eastern brown snake of the trouserless kind.

Plus I don’t know if you’ve been outside with thousands of miles of moonless night around you and not a soul in sight, but it’s a bit spooky. Which means you have to coerce someone to go with you; certainly not the private comfort stop everyone was hoping for. During daytime it’s even harder. It’s not exactly old growth rainforest out beyond the black stump. You’ll be lucky to find a tiny bush, let alone a rocky outcrop. A fluorescent white arse is not naturally camouflaged in the wide brown motherland I used to call ‘home’. A bit of old stick doesn’t provide a colossal bot any protection from the airhorns of a gurning trucker clocking 200 down the highway. He can see you 20 miles off and by jingo he lets you know about it.

CharmingVille’s not the only place on the planet where blokes unzip and let rip, and our coppers aren’t the only ones painting the town yellower than a colonial pile and stinking up the great outdoors. But lads: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. You’re pissing all over your Kingdom, fellas! Only the other night, incidentally during a nature break between episodes of Idol, I heard an epic voiceover on a StarWorld station ident dramatically intone: ‘Home is not the house that you sleep in, but the place where you stand.’ Exactly. And who wants to be standing in their own wee?

 

One morning last month, naked and shivering in my parents’ guest bathroom, I lubed myself from head to toe with half a tub of Body Shop Nut Butter in preparation for some vigorous exercise al fresco.

As a long-time resident of the ever-moist CharmingVille, I usually glisten like an unctuous seal. But after a KNY fortnight Down Under on a power shopping spree ‘n’ parental pilgrimage, my skin was dry as a chip.

Except for a few warm, wet nooks up north, the antipodean atmosphere desiccates a tropical pelt. And autumn down south can be bitter. Not Yakutsk in January, granted, but still. Even a few hours’ exposure tramping from mall to dire mall to tick off my ‘Only-in-Oz’ shopping list (orca-fit cotton underpants, obscure electric toothbrush heads, Spanx™) and I itch and whine until even my deaf mother pulls across three lanes of oncoming traffic so she can dump me on the kerb to find my own way home.

I don’t know if you’re entering middle age and have been recently abandoned in an IKEA car park late on Easter Sunday in a third-tier Australian suburb by your 74-year-old mother, but it really confirms that one of you is the worst person in the world. Luckily she couldn’t work the GPS and after circling the trolley park had to come back so I could help her find the exit. Me and Mum. Probably a good thing we don’t share a hemisphere.

Anyway, as the morning chill goosed my every bump and sucked the juice from every pore, I prepared thusly for my am ‘run’ – all 325 metres of it – which I’d promised my Bodes-side gym instructor I’d do during my trip. Well, I promised him I’d do an hour of meaningful exercise every morning. But these days I’m barely Australian, let alone Christian, and in the lead-up to Khmer New Year I’d forgotten about the whole Easter thing. Jogging past a nearby strip mall wearing a sweatband, tearfully discovering a giant chocolate bilby centrepiece outside the Jobcentre, detouring through the front bar of the local and tottering back to base, hours later, cheeks stuffed with Caramello Koalas, is probably not what he meant. But anyway.

I felt a bit weird caressing myself with a fistful of fair-trade nut fat while Mum and Dad shambled next door in the kitchen. I could hear them stacking the breakfast dishwasher and talking in Old Person (‘Is it bin night tonight? What time does Eggheads come on? Is it bin night tonight?’), but needs must. My epidermis rustled. Like a fragrant but shameful Channel swimmer, I checked and rechecked the lock on the folk’s facilities before waxing on. Given my generous acreage this took longer than ages, and after a while I started to think about the Bodes: the Hubster, the Bunster, pork noodles on a Sunday morning. My thoughts wandered. Now don’t take this the wrong way (if you’re American, it’s not too late to go get a donut), but they wandered to how much I missed bum guns. Mum and Dad had trucked in the best loo paper money can buy, but nothing gets you feeling fresher than a pre-paper blast from the elephant-in-the-room of personal hygiene. I found myself reaching for a phantom squirter on more than one occasion. Pavlov would have smirked knowingly. Though I often whinge and carp about all things KOW, I was shocked at how acclimatised I’ve become.

On holidays in a town with three Targets, four Officeworks and a couple of overrated pandas on a sex-exchange programme, you’d think I’d died and gone to Adelaide. I admit I revelled in my choice of pickled walnuts and cheap gossip mags. I kicked red leaves down the street and rollicked in the dog park with tick-free Tilly, Smokey and Rex. Cold Chisel is still on high rotation if you like that kind of thing. But as the normcore days wore on I began to yearn for old CharmingVille’s quirk and edge. I venture we even have better mod-cons here, too: free wifi, world’s best Bloody Marys, one-dollar eyebrow waxing.

And while the days chez rellies were chilly, the nights had me almost weeping for my adopted home and Marital HQ. Of a sub-Arctic eve, tucked up in the bed where I suspect Gramps drew his last breath in 1988, the jolly thump of the disco tuk tuk was replaced by the council rubbish truck and incessant beep of the nearby pedestrian crossing.

As much as I love my olds, and no matter where I am, I yearn to sit on my CharmingVille balcony in knickers and a T-shirt, any late afternoon of the sweltering year, and feel that portentous wind-rush just before the hot drama of a calamitous, all-night thunderstorm. I almost always feel good in my skin here. And my arse is home and hosed.

 

“What’s the haps?” asks my tousled, recently pleasured 20-something housemate as she stumbles from bed and fridge hangs, poking for treats. I’m deleting last night’s filthiest Instagrams and rehydrating with a tremendous bloody mary. There’s fresh coffee, lashings of Royal D and the AC’s cranked to ice planet Hoth. Jenna* is wearing nothing but a manshirt and panda eyes. Thank you, God. Even after her signature ‘U Care Cocktail’ – 13 Jagerbombs and a cheeky zolpidem chaser – and three hours’ Pon-twerking on the two Korean missionaries now lights out and wuffling on the couch, this self-confessed ‘slert’ looks fresh as a kitten. “Parpcorn! Advil!” she croaks adorably in American, just as our resident ebony/ivory man-child chick magnets, Pavel and Ben**, slap in naked from the pool. We found them in Lucky Soriya loading up on ramen and Red Bull to take back to their egregious $6 guest house. I say something droll and fabulous, honeybadger cool despite their dowsing tonks. Group hugs. The turquoise pool twinkles through the patio palms. I sigh. Oh, yes, these are my beautiful friends. But this is not my beautiful house. This is my sitcom dream pad.

It’s 10 years since I shared a dwelling with someone other than my significant other. I’m now comfortably domiciled in a rejigged 18×4 in the heart of CharmingVille with bloke, pet and, in a nod to cross-cultural connubial compromise, a bunch of sticks fermenting in a wee-like but apparently drinkable liquid on our balcony. It’s a man thing (I’m told). Despite this and other inexplicable personal habits that dare not speak their names, there are perks to monogamous cohabitation. Like waking up next to someone whose name I remember (Jenna wasn’t the only slert around these parts). It’s also nice to have someone to hold your hair back in the most undignified moments, or pull it a little bit during the other ones. But the grass is always greener for those of us fenced in, hitched-up malcontents, and it’s not cheating to indulge in some free-for-all sitcom housery daydreaming.

As I salivate through pool-villa porn on Bong Thom, or tut tut enviously at footloose friends’ Jack-juiced war stories down 136, I sometimes hanker for the heady single sleaze of Lakeside before the ’dozers, or skinny dips in BKK before the betrothal. Pontoon was still an actual pontoon. Thanks to a contemporaneous shitload of happy pizza, my rose-coloured memory screens images of sweet-smelling wayfarers with walnut-cracker arses and Fibonacci dimensions who fell like Parkway ninepins for my potent charms. Like my sitcom dream roomies, these travelling phantasms came for a night and stayed for months, generously sharing their NGO pay cheques and picking up their towels. OK, so, no one actually did that. But spare an old Digger, wouldja?

So while the perfect share house is off my personal shopping list, Phnom Penh’s cheap rents mean there’s no need for you to inhabit a rattan-filled underwater pineapple or squat-share with a bunch of harem-panted students who put their names on their tofu. Throw a bagel from any Browns and you’ll hit a vacant pool villa aching to be desecrated by hot Norwegians in Miley bear costumes. If you get sick of them, they’ll be gone soon anyway.  The ever-changing human scenery in our town means we’re chockers with Spanish Schmidts, French Joeys and Bolivian Vyvyans. Just turn on your Tinder and see what I mean. Near you right now there may be a) someone you know really well who’s married with kids; b) a white rasta who likes to ‘vibe with the tribe’, or c) a like-minded nowhereian looking for a place to lay his or her hat.

* Her real name

** Not their real names

 

Last year my nephew was expelled from school for shaving his head on a field trip to Cheese World. If you’ve not been it’s a forlorn assemblage of derelict teat-suckers and an actual stuffed cow, clustered round a diorama of Sumerians inventing feta. At the end, for the class photos, he could choose to dress up as a dairy pioneer or wear a replica emmental hat. He may be irreverent but he gives a shit about personal hygiene. Quite reasonably unimpressed with either option, and while everyone else was exchanging bonnet cooties, he went to the strip mall next door and got a decent number  one clip at Snipperty Cricketz Hair ‘n’ Tan.

Apparently this was the final straw in a litany of unauthorised behaviours, which included listening to the Third Test while smoking pot in his uniform at the local wind farm, and yelling “On a scale of one to ten Helen Keller, how blind are you?” at the headmaster, who was reffing my niece’s basketball finals match.

The previous summer he’d rescued a vicious, heat-exhausted koala from the toddlers’ pool at the Pat Clacker Memorial Sports Centre and saved a lot of kiddies from a nasty case of marsupial chlamydia. This counted not-at-fuck-all with those beloafered Presbyterian educationists. No cheeks were turned and Our Lad of the Perpetual Shenanigans was cast out for his sins. My exceptional but beleaguered sister, a dipsomaniac self-flagellator on a 19-year Xanax jones from a) accidentally marrying a feckless whiner, b) having three teenage children nearly all at once, and c) everything, blamed herself. Unhelpfully, so did her husband. But that’s another damn story. Anyway. The only other place that would take him was the local Catholic college. Despite their grievous academic record, salmon blazers and grammatically incorrect motto, my sister practically had to kiss their rings to get him in.

Children will do your head in if you’re not careful, and babies are tricky little bastards, especially here in the Bodes. My sister-in-law just had one this last CharmingVille Sunday, so I know almost firsthand. It’s adorable. I’m sorry, but much more adorable than a scrunchy newborn barang. Even a stylee French person’s – and that’s saying quelque chose.

To get one can be fun for sure, but once the sexy part’s over, and if you’re the classic Khmer mum-to-be, you’re well knocked-up in a deliberately steamy hospital room at the mercy of well-meaning but gabby female relatives who eat on the floor and watch those endless mindfuck hand-dancing shows full blast while you’re flailing in agony and sipping on stick wine in between contractions. And they make you wear a woolly hat. Beanies are not the wisest fashion choice at the best of times, but when you’ve got a bun in the oven and it’s 75 Celsius and there’s not an epidural in sight… bitches, please!

It’s not over once the fat lady screams, either. After the little tyke is swaddled with scissors to ward off the evil eye, you’re in for weeks of poultices, more steam, wicked nip-lash and a veritable parade of unflattering, Arctic-rated headgear. Meanwhile dad is down the coffee shop yelling at televised sports. No change there, then.

Despite this past week of post-natal voodoo claptrap, mum and poppet are doing well, though she remains nameless and my offers of ‘Tinkle’ and/or ‘Vader’ have been politely declined. I just came back from the blessing and we had a monk with a disco fan, an unseasonally cool breeze and, thanks to the brainchild of proud uncle Hubster, excellent Bloody Marys at 7.30am. So a pretty good outcome for this doting Auntie.

Meanwhile, on his last day at Velcro-Closure-Goody-Two-Shoes-College, my contrite and sharply tonsured nephew handed in his locker key. The snidey Principal priggishly opined that “an important lesson had been learned” and joked that he wouldn’t want to meet any of my sister’s offspring in a dark alley. Too soon and too right, you smug cock. Personally I think the young feller should have got an elephant stamp and a fucking scholarship. The irony is that this month he and 10 other students will shave their heads for charity with his new school’s blessing. They’ve even got a Facebook page. Finally those ragtag Fenians deserve a gold star for effort. And those others get a big fat F. Class dismissed!

Dear mid-life wanderer,

Please cast your mind back to 1974. It was a watershed year for spangly swingin’ Swedes Abba and a ruinous two fingers up for that jowly trickster Nixon. Mustard was the new avocado, since black hadn’t been invented yet. If you weren’t born, and/or you’re middle-class Anglo, you didn’t miss much. On the whole, 1974 will forever languish at the bottom of the beige shoulder-bag we call ‘the mid-‘70s’.

It would have been a complete waste of wall calendar, except that it was also the year my art-school-addled olds embarked on a harebrained circumnavigation of the world, much of it in an orange VW pop-top campervan, God-help-us. Their witless plan included my sibling and me – two bickering blonde poppets who seized every opportunity to derail Ma and Pa’s ambitious Grand Tour and reroute it through the seventh circle of Hell. Think Locked Up Abroad, with the Menendez Sisters.

For designated driver Dad, it must have been a teeth-grinding slog through a million are-we-there-yets, shameless Macca-for-museums bribery scandals and baguettes-at-dawn sibling bashery. Mum wore a lot of berets and recorded our jolly outing in a diary she still quotes from when the annual family slide-night palls. “On this day in 1974, ‘the girls promised the officers they would never do it again,’” or “The trauma nurses were very nice,” etc, etc. Dad was forced to shave his beard-nest at Moscow airport. My sister nearly drowned in Sweden. It cost half a pence to spend a penny in ye olde London towne.

Despite so few universally acknowledged plus points, 1974 gifted me with a LAG-bag of account-draining obsessions that I carry onboard to this day – and not just for the Instagram pics. Almost honestly, I can’t think of anything better to do than travel and eat at the same time.

So it thrills me to my flight socks when this time of year cruises into town. Oh, good old Khmer New Year, eh? Followed by good old May Day Holiday, majestic King’s Birthday, terrific Royal Ploughing weekend or sacred ancient lying-in-a-hammock-somewhere-idyllic fortnight. If you’re canny you can sort a month’s break and no one will notice, since CharmingVille is rolling with tumbleweeds and the only people around are cat burglars and sun-stunned tourists who forgot to check their Thorn Tree.

And it doesn’t really matter where the road takes me, unless it’s the ‘road’ to Rattanakiri. Just the going is as good as getting there, and going by plane has that extra frisson. I relish the weeks preparing for take-off, especially the Sunday afternoons decanting big liquids into small plastics – tiny bottles of conditioner are catnip to me. At the drop of a Zantac I’m off to De la Gare with a shopping list as long as a Koh Rong weekend: I won’t passenge without a Ziploc of Stilnox and earplugs nestled next to my moist towelettes. On the big day, I pause to bag-sit – Russian-style – and recite ‘passport, tickets, money, passport, tickets, money’ in a soothing mental rosary. I routinely arrive at Pochetong three, four, five hours early, which means I can spend a good hour or so using Burger King’s free wifi to gloat on Facebook. Did you know you can pretend you’re posting from the actual control tower? And my phone is sick with travel apps. Fuck Candy Crush. Give me the Air Asia flight schedule every time.

Once I’ve tsked the pushy tour guides line-jumping with a fist-load of Chinese passports at check-in, it’s off upstairs to sigh loudly while booze-reeking, inappropriately dressed bogans argue not to have their nunchucks confiscated. On board, after I’ve wet-tissued the nose grease off the window, viciously bagsed the armrest, and silently blessed the vital four millimetres of fabric between my skin and that of my fragrant neighbour, I settle in for the ride. If I’m not comatose on prescription sleep aids, I look to airline food – that culinary pariah – to provide guilty distraction in the flatulent hours aloft. Is that a black olive or a grape? Will they know if I take the baby salt and pepper shakers? Dinner roll: sweet or not?

Happily for me, the Hubster enjoys tramping, glamping, touring and trekking as much as I do. Well maybe not the trekking part – he’s happy to stay in the hut and mind the duty-free with those nice Norwegian backpackers while I take countless artsy photos in the ‘Charming Mountaintop Village’ genre: still-life pot on rustic brazier, old bloke on donkey groaning with shallots, ruddy cheeked tot. But still.

Unusually – and just in case you cat burglars can read – this holiday season he’s staycationing at our connubial HQ to Bunster-sit and play festive but unfathomable crack-your-neighbour’s-knee-with-stones games while drinking his weight in ABC. Meanwhile I’ve rolled up my elasticated eating pants, stuffed my wheelie with woollens and stocked up on hypnotics for a week with sis and the folks. 1974, you crazy tripper, here I come.

Sooner or later, if a machete-wielding wedding guest or a ‘heart attack’ in a shady flophouse doesn’t take you out, a Honda Dream will. I refuse to sweat through another bellowing nuptial and the only crystals I got are bath salts. So it was on the cards that, while crossing to the plonk shop as the sun hit the yardarm, I heard a throbbing engine and felt the heatstink of Hell draw nigh upon me. I verily nearly shat myself. This past CharmingVille sabbath, I turned to look Death in the eye.

Well, I would have had he been taller. And I’m sure the actual Grim Reaper doesn’t wear weeny penny loafers, nut-cracking cargoes and a salmon polo shirt with a popped collar. This clearly wasn’t the stygian master of my imminent demise, and it wasn’t a Dream. Mortality’s martinet was a scytheless, mid-life tinyman of barang extraction who could barely see over the handlebars of his aubergine candy-flake crotch rocket. This not only because he lacked critical inches where it matters almost most, but mainly because he was eyes-down, texting. This teensy plumpard organised his paltry existence barely perched astride a thousand wild-eyed, spittle-lipped horses, while I leapt for my life and into an oncoming Mormon.

Before I go on, I should confess that I’m an equal opportunity atheist of the first stripe. I’m scared of death too, but that’s no excuse to make shit up then kill people who don’t agree with you. Plus the Big Bang is not just an awesome boy band, although G-dragon wins over some misogynist, stick-in-the-mud beardy man every time.

What’s more, I like to see where my religionists are at all times so they can’t trick me into listening to that innocuous but tiresome preamble that invariably ends in an invitation to a) give money, b) go to a lame block party or c) make Jesus my personal saviour. Monks and Mormons are my kind of godbotherers because they make such distinctive fashion choices, so easily avoided if I’m not feeling up to Brother-baiting or a fruitless argument about the future of my immortal soul. Ditto Sikhs and Wiccans. Orthodoxy of any kind usually comes with easy-to-spot headgear and/or subtler signals of piety like goatskin underpants. I cross the street for inbound Amish.

Common-or-garden Christians are the most difficult to detect here in the Bodes, which is alarming since our Kingdom is bursting at the seams with pre-raptured do-gooders and pro-life proselytisers. Where I’m from it’s easy to nail a holy roller: they wear a lot of nubbly cardigans.

But here, unless you’re Khmer, it’s always too hot for chunky home knits (French people, come on now!). Which means I’ll be having a perfectly nice conversation with an admittedly softly spoken and earnest young person. A few ciders in and I think they’re actually interested in my bawdy life experiences and borderline genius. And then I notice their responses are suspiciously free of the kind of words I love to use. They say flip and heck and doggone it. Fucking bollocks. I’m stuck in a booth at K-West with a Pentecostal who’s thrilled about the second coming. I guess we have something in common after all.

Anyway. Hallelujah and, if you’re there, props to the person upstairs, because this Sunday’s Latter Day Saints came in the nick of time.

Elder Malachi remained crisp and decorous despite the unexpected circumstances. He was only a little startled: clearly we weren’t in Utah anymore. Yet his grain-fed, bicycled thighs steadied his own two-wheeler as I swooned in shock and lay momentarily cradled in his surprisingly studly arms. I confess that recovery took a little longer than strictly necessary.

Elder Trevor, my saviour’s neatly pressed sidekick, didn’t mince words about the now distant and oblivious Kwakka-straddling noblet. “Gosh darn it! Is he crazy? Or just Canadian?” I was thinking Belgian, but still. Meanwhile I counted my blessings, briefly indulging in a wholly unholy mental Missionary position with my street-side, sanctified Clark Kent. Squinting up into the noonday sun, I swear his backlit helmet looked just like a halo. Jesus Christ on a bike, there IS a god.

 

This time of the year I wish I was French. You get to ride bicycles in vintage skirts and fantastically expensive sandals and, even though it’s like the Venusian Plateau right now in CharmingVille, you still look like you’re on the way to une lavender fair at le old stone mill.

You and your Olivier Martinez looky-likey always seem effortlessly put together and barely moist despite your harebrained plan to take the kiddies for a midday nature walk in Hun Sen Park. Given what’s on the menu round yours, I don’t understand how. I shop-stalk you at Thai Huot in the hope I can learn what you guys make with those tins of chestnut cream. I notice you buy a lot of rusks.

So how do you stay so unshabbily chic? The French people at my gym don’t humiliate themselves wheezing through dozens of knee-cracking bunny hops while balancing a massive blue plastic ball above their heads at 8 in the morning. Or afterwards, weeping through 150 huffy puffy star jumps. Non. They ride their searingly elegant Lapierres to the tennis courts for a proficient doubles match with Jacques and Marie-Claire. How they laugh and laugh! Meanwhile little Serge and sister Frou Frou plash and peal in the sunkissed shallows poolside, each modelling a tasteful neoprene Confidence Jacket, watched by their francophone Khmer nanny. She’s wearing a spring-fresh cotton shift and a straw hat the size of a Provençale cartwheel. Just before 12 they all head home for paté on toast and chilled sauternes.

If this sounds like sour grapes from a blousy antipodean with a green streak, it’s not entirely true. I’ve been to Paris in the springtime. It’s glorious. And I like many French things. Monoprix has great homewares at reasonable prices. You can walk down the street eating cheap cooked langoustines right out of the bag. Policemen wear rollerblades. Old fellows have actually got berets. Many cups are big with handles on both sides. And then there’s the art.

Sometimes I even practice French stuff. Like while I’m choking down a Pastis and some artisanal duck-fat thing at one of CharmingVille’s gallic eateries, I pass the time with those online quizzes in the hope that somewhere deep in my DNA I’ve got a little bit of style-redeeming je ne sais quois to help me through the next four sweltering months. Like, Which Capital City Are You? (Capetown Shmapetown) Or Who Should You Really Be Married To? (Homer Simpson. Merde!) I had a few goes on the first one, trying to get Paris. Or Nice. Even Marseilles would have worked for me, but cheating and ticking all the French-sounding things I still got Dallas, Port Moresby and Islamabad. I’m sure each has its plus points, but îIe de la Cité they ain’t. On the second one I hoped for Nicolas Cazalé or a 30-something Alain Delon. Clearly I ticked the wrong ‘choose your favourite wolf’ box.

Though most French ladies I see here look like Tatou, I resemble Depardieu in leggings and a sports bra. While I stagger, beetroot faced and heaving from weightroom to lap-pool in my orthopaedic thongs, I mentally step into my club-mates’ Coq Sportifs. We’d start the day with a breezy half hour of family Parkour around Olympic Stadium, followed by a carefree lope home down Sihanouk to our renovated colonial pile on Street 19. The kids go to fencing lessons so it’s a simple repast of figs, sharp cheese and a smart little Chablis with previously mentioned Olivier, with whom I’ll then do some French kissing, naturally. We’ll make stormy continental love just as a hot season downpour breaks overhead. He might read a bit of poetry. Later we’ll share a tarte tatin.

As my idyll melts under the relentless Bodes sun, the post-workout Red Bull and boiled egg in my gym bag have lost their appeal. The ear-withering screams of multicultural tots gouging each other with plastic dinosaurs ring across the twinkly pool. No matter. I plug in my headphones and order an icy cold beer. Here in the Paris of the East, you don’t have to be completely French to enjoy la vie en rose.