Category: Guilty Pleasures

“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.

 

I love it when I can see that pouty bloke out of Game of Thrones strap on some sandals, oil-wrestle some muscly black guys, maybe ride a horse topless, have another fight this time with swords, have back-lit sex with a pert lass in a see-through nightie, and then get blown to kingdom come by a histrionic Italian mountain. I must have a sixth sense about these things because exactly that movie was playing at the mall last weekend.

Up front at the ticket counter a dad was whisper-shouting at his kids to act shorter and younger so they could share a seat. With three pre-teens to entertain, you can’t blame him for trying to save a few bucks. While he wheedled for a discount and dithered over row numbers, his Swensen’s-smeared male progeny viciously assaulted a life-size cardboard Robocop with their squeaker sandals. His little princess meanwhile stood akimbo in a Hello Kitty confirmation tutu and caterwauled at her brothers from three feet away, almost loud enough to drown out the noise of my grinding teeth. Certainly the dead were stirring. Passing shoppers smiled and laughed at those adorable tykes. I really wanted to pinch ‘em, which I know is probably wrong, and would have no doubt made things louder. But still. Instead I struggled to muster a half-arsed ‘benign indulgence’ face and dragged my X-ray death-stare from the cavorting demon spawn to the cashier’s touchscreen to see what heartwarming, family-friendly visual feast pops had planned.

Call me old-fashioned, but if I’m the wife and by some miracle the husband says: ‘Oh darling, let me take the kids off your hands this afternoon – we’ll go catch a nice movie to give you a bit of well-deserved ‘me’ time,’ I’m thinking they’ll be off to see some enchanted deer babies chatting with anthropomorphic insects or a charming penguin who can breakdance. At a pinch maybe a band of barely closeted single menfolk from mythical, culturally diverse backgrounds traipsing all over New Zealand looking for a fabulous ring. But the picture this parent had picked for his rambunctious offspring was a ghosty Thai terrorfest, complete with long wet hair over gouged eyesockets, institutional hallways with sickly flickering fluoros that reveal sphincter-twangling twin sister ghouls, lifts that are empty, empty, now not empty, empty, and holy fuck, don’t look up but that clickety click above your head is someone’s undead auntie scuttling crab-style across the ceiling.

This film looked particularly inappropriate for the under-tens because most of the characters, alive or beyond the grave, seemed all under ten. Except for the cackling spectre of a coal-eyed, gore-spewing 20-something in a blood-stabbed nightie. Oh, and the ever popular Arp, which is a pretty floating head with pulsing heart and entrails dangling by a skinless windpipe, and which everybody knows is a alive and well and materialising with pant-wetting frequency all over the Bodes. Even the vile little poppets gambolling next to me didn’t deserve a lifetime of the lights on after lights out.  Casper it wasn’t.

At home, Western wraiths keep pretty much to themselves. And unless we’re on a reality show or gothic, we generally avoid haunted houses and graveyards, especially at night. But here the supernatural, malignant and benign is, well, super natural. CharmingVille is spook city and everyone’s a believer.

There are the seven-day send-offs, hundred-day reminders and yearly revisitations. There are those meddlesome ghost toddlers who turn the taps on or bang the doors if you don’t bribe them with candy. No change there then. Just across the river and a tombstone’s throw from my in-laws, the neighbourhood phantom occasionally strolls past the pagoda and even buys a pastry. After he pays the vendor discovers the notes are fake. How anyone knows he is a ghost is beyond me, because apparently he looks like every other half-pissed bloke staggering home from the Bayon big screen. But anyway.

Back at our connubial HQ the dead are not only alive and well, they have expensive taste. One afternoon on my way home I met Hubster coming down the stairs. He had one of our good wedding platters, a bag of perfect mangos, a whole roast chicken and a bottle of chilled Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc 2012. He said it was for a haunted tree. Sure buddy. Where I’m from I’d give you 10 points for ingenuity but only after I’d run over your X-Box, keyed your car, and set everything else you own alight on the front lawn. But I’ve been here long enough to know that it really was for the massive banyan at the end of our street. I took back the plate and exchanged the wine for a can of root beer we got free from Sokimex. When in Rome.

 

I was on all fours in our kitchen yesterday. Not, as you might expect, reprising my erstwhile role as CharmingVille’s sauciest homemaker. I was arse-up, commando-crawling the underbelly of our jerry-built-ins to find the source of our interminable ant infestation and rout the little fuckers with extreme prejudice. This mission remains unaccomplished. Because instead I found a 15-inch steel bayonet in our Tupperware drawer. Maybe I watch too much History Channel but I knew straight away it was a sword-like stabbing blade, usually affixed to a rifle and intended to kill or maim during close-quarter combat, and not Björt, the elegant Starckian apple corer I threw in the trolley seven years ago while on a pear schnapps bender at IKEA Minsk. Disturbingly, one of these objects has been used, and we all know it wasn’t Björt. No one ever uses Björt.

Like every armchair rubbernecker, I read The Police Blotter. My first reaction was: ‘Holy shit I know I’m a battle-axe but this time I’ve pushed Hubster to the brink of emotional extinction with my relentless barb ‘n’ spat and now he’s going to extinct me for real with a couple of decisive pokes from a circa 1966 China-made pig sticker.’ Unsettled, I took a picture and Vibered him at work to see if this was on the cards. A rookie mistake, if one is to successfully elude a tether-end spouse with a massive shiv in his hand and murder on his mind. But still. A few tense seconds later he replied: “No. I heart you,” followed disconcertingly by one of those winky smiley faces. I remain alert.

Back in my antipodean motherland it’s not everyday you’re this close quarters with such offensive ordnance. Apart from youthful farmyard shenanigans with grandpa’s air rifle and the side of a barn, my brush with guns ‘n’ ammo has been mainly limited to winning a hideous octopus plushie at the 1992 Royal Show shooting gallery and watching my nephew play GTA5. Just the once I was instructed by an overseas teacher friend to dispose of something in a toolbox he’d asked me to store. He couldn’t tell me what it was over the phone. In my innocence I thought it might be exam answers or an embarrassing poem. It turned out to be a 9mm Ruger handgun loaded with a full clip but one. I squeaked with fear when it dropped out of its cloth wrapper and landed in my lap. As you would. I sat there for stunned minutes, frightened to move in case it went off. It took me eons to empty the bullets and carefully place them in separate saucepans, terrified they would somehow spontaneously explode. Unimaginatively I put the gun in my underwear drawer. Later in an empty VHS case. Still later in a shoe. And eventually in the hands of an officer of the law.

But here in the Bodes guns and shit are everywhere in plain sight. And not just with the Keystones on the corner or our TMNT mates bivouacked in Victory Park.

A few years ago a colleague returned the company Camry to the car park after a weekend down the coast. Knowing our workmate as we did, it surprised no one that the boot was aromatic with durian stink and the ashtray stuffed with well-sucked hand-rolled filters. There were lusty footprints on the ceiling. However, there was a bullet hole in the rear passenger pillar, which did raise a few eyebrows. I won’t go into that now.

And just last week, stuck in a schools-out mid-afternoon snarl in BKK1, I watched a spanking new black Lexus barge and honk and bully its way to the head of the line, ahead of patient parents and spit-polished kiddies. The lone passenger was a gormless pre-teen nose-miner. The plateless vehicle was flanked by four fat, black-safari-suited bodyguards, two to a moto like pigs on a circus trike. No one wore a joke ruffle, but one of them did have builder’s crack and two of them sported those laughable heelless slip-ons with the turned-up toes. I wanted to point and smirk. But I could only sneer on the inside. Because all four of them accessorised their ample muffin tops with chunky pistols poking grip out. That part wasn’t funny at all.

Even less funny is that the Type 56 fold-away bayonet sitting on my countertop is available on Amazon for $21.95. Luckily there is one less drunk tuk tuk driver in possession thereof, thanks to my bloke who brought it home for safety’s sake. Or so he says. As far as the gun it’s made for, everyman and his running dog has one in this neck of the woods. Blessed are the peacemakers.

This morning an iridescent boy dragonfly docked his slender bottom into the head of a predictably drab female of the species and fucked her brains out for about 10 minutes. I was afloat alone in the sparkly turquoise gym pool, tasteful whales mating on the outdoor speakers and birds chittering in the whispering palms. The sun was at my back.

Normally such a miraculous alignment of nature’s bounty would have me blubbing into my goggles with joy, but my tearstrings remained unpulled. No sexed-up insects could make me weep with the glory of Gaia’s oneness this sorry AM. It only made me resent the male dragonfly. Of course he’s prettier than her – he does nothing all day except eat, mate and titivate. Of course he gets to fuck her in the head. Creation invents some sick shit that doesn’t fit well with the feminist agenda. And, get this, he’s got six perfectly working legs but the arrogant little fucker does it all hands-free, for Attenborough’s sake! Meanwhile she’s supporting them both and once he’s got his admittedly tiny dragonfly jollies he swans off to the next poor nymph without a backward eye-swivel while she lays 100,000 kids and then her wings fall off or she dies within hours or whatevs, so who can blame her if she can’t be arsed to go out? Pff. This fine morning Nature called, but fucked if I was answering.

Foolishly optimistic, the universe pursued me with relentless eye candy in an attempt to divert my deepening sad sackery. Look! The serendipitous genius of a red chair leant against a turquoise generator! Regard! The flap of a hot orange robe against a weathered wood wall! Aha! Again with the sunburned nutter in the arseless denim chaps devouring a yellow mango! But neither an accidental act of visual artistry nor an inadvertently fashion-forward unfortunate had the power to colour me happy on my glum ride home across the rich tapestry we call CharmingVille. My heart remained eerily empty. There was even tumbleweed and some forlorn whistling. It could only be one thing.

Man trouble.

Whiny man-child trouble to be exact. Across the last week a succession of inexplicably ridiculous spats escalated to serious standoffs with three of my favourite, more youthful XYs: hubster, best friend and gym buddy. They left me sad, sleepless and lonely in the dark with all my lucky stars gone out. And since it had happened with all three, it must have been my fault. I began to cry with feeling, and not in an ‘I’m-high-on-life’ good kind of way. It wasn’t pretty.

Thank goddess for De La Gare. As I commanded the tuk tuk to head north-by-north-west to my favourite apothecary, I refreshed my shopping list by consulting Dr Google and arrived primed with a list of dos and dolls. Despite the youngest pharmacist wearing a Megadeth T-shirt, I put my order in.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for talking things through rationally and listening and understanding and letting go and compromise and using my inside voice and all that other important relationship shit but sometimes you just want everyone to stop being idiots, shut the fuck up and run you a bath. Failing that, nothing fixes you like prescription helpers OTC.

Years of abstinence, wagon riding, self-help books, crystals and a weird mushroom thing I grew in a fridge back in the ’90s have taught me something. In turbulent weather I always fly better with fuel in the tank. No gnomic Pinterest pith, religious text or full set of Thom Yorke lyrics gets me through a rough patch like a little cheeky something something. ‘Better living through chemistry’ is the mantra of my generation X after all. It was probably hormones from all provocateurs in this current little ménage a merde that got us here in the first place.

These days I avoid the illicit stuff. It makes me more paranoid and that’s saying something. So with Vic Rattlehead gurning from the chest of the white-coated 12-year-old serving me I calmly ticked off Zolpidem (sleep), Advil (post-cry headache), Murine (post-cry red eyes and post-Zolpidem wake-up), Nose Spray (ditto with the crying thing), Ventolin (anxiety, panic, too many puffs on the cig I have tucked away for moments like this), Omeprazole (reflux from not eating, smoking and all that crying), Xanax (um… well you never know). When the chips are down, and that’s not often these days, thanks to my favourite albeit currently feuding blokes, this will be bedtime chez moi this evening. As it always does, I’m sure everything will look brighter, maybe even iridescent, by the time I hit the pool tomorrow.

 

Rottweilers don’t give two fucks about fashion, which is lucky because at the pet shop on 163 they sell about 20 different styles of dog shoes and it’s all underarm-teacup-type sizes. It’s so hard to find stuff for the fuller figure in CharmingVille. But suck it up, Kaiser. That’s the Bodes all over when you’re a creature of size. Along with nanoscopic footwear for doglets you can get a weeny outfit and a matching clutch to put little Shitster in when you tire of him peeing down your kaftan at the next Meta House thing.

Apart from the canine clothes and accessories there’s little else for the rest of god’s creatures. Not a cat hat, lizard legging or beak warmer to be had for love or money. Snake belts are like hens’ teeth. I swung by there last weekend to purchase a tasteful merkin for my obscenely testicled rescue rabbit. He’s about 19 in human years with balls about the size of a 19-year-old human. Seriously. Those massive danglers are so completely out of proportion to the rest of his sorry physique that when they dropped I thought they were tumours and panic-Googled for an hour. Apparently it’s quite normal. But still. And he’s only got three working legs so his knackers just flap around in the atmosphere where a fourth leg would normally hide ‘em. I don’t judge him but it’s embarrassing when guests come over and Bunny’s just lying around, nuts out. They’re mesmerising and not in an attractive way. Plus he’s no oil painting – kind of a splotchy orange with hairless veiny ears and a mouth like a cat’s arse. So not the most attractive lagomorph on the block, then. It’s why we decided against a Facebook page.

He sniffs at any sun-warmed local market greens but devours crisper-fresh Bayon herbs. Coriander and dill are favourites. God help us if they’re out of season in Latvia or wherever they come from. On the weekend the crinkle of homecoming shopping bags has him skittering to meet us, trying his best at those vertical joy jumps that rabbit-nerds call ‘binkies’. On three legs he’s not Nadia Comaneci. He only drinks Evian.

Despite the massive gobbets, the ginger-no-mates pelt and the champagne tastes, he’s quieter than kids and watches American Idol tucked up in my armpit, nibbling imported gluten-free muesli and Arnott’s water crackers. He grooms our furniture, which saves me half an hour dusting. He likes to host the occasional rice knees-up on the balcony for his chittering sparrow mates. He’s a literal party animal.

Most entertainingly he grimly and regularly fucks anything that doesn’t move. This could be a chair leg or an actual leg. Rabbits do have sex faces. They are eerily familiar. On frenzied completion he’ll swoon dramatically and wake up seconds later as if nothing had happened. Pff. No surprise since 94% of our genes rabbits also have.

And if the arsehole neighbour comes to our door muttering and unlocking his service revolver, Bunster bravely thumps the bejesus out of his solitary hindquarter to let us know shit’s going down. I don’t know how he knows it’s him and not the man with the water bill. Bunny is an actual pet detective with x-ray vision and supernatural powers. He may be a libidinous, unattractive three-legged Paul the Octopus, but I wuvs him.

Committing to a companion animal other than your other half is as strangely liberating and transformative as it is comforting. I stopped worrying about life being so much better somewhere I wasn’t. A little furry mate turns a transient stop in an alien land into a feel-good place to call forever home. I’m heartwarmed to see more and more foreign pet lovers here in CharmingVille. And not just the good folk who liberate bestringed kittens dancing for the tourist dollar at Wat Ounalom, or rescue wormy street puppies from a terminal game of chicken with the oncoming traffic (bless you everyone, by the way).

When I’m wondering what the fuck I’m doing here, I see some hot new bloke taking his beagle to the shops in a tuk tuk, or a French chick gamely dragging up and down Riverside on the end of a standard poodle. I’m not alone in my choice of one-horse hometown. CharmingVille is the cat’s pyjamas after all.

 

A giant flesh-crazed centipede viciously assaulted my mother-in-law. Hubster rang in a panic. “An animal like a snake but with plenty of feet” had crawled up her leg while she was gardening. Wielding her trusty machete she’d tried to flick the thing off, but the angry brute sunk its fat fangs gum deep.

I was born in that antipodean vipers’ nest otherwise known as Australia – a pitiless bastion of murderous fauna, where super-smart, venomous, heat-seeking arthropods and plagues of ill-conceived animalia are Hell-bent on relieving you of life and/or limb, or at the very least giving you a nasty bite. Having koalas and baby wombats comes nowhere near to making up for all the hideous shitty creatures we have to put up with. There are people far more qualified than me to give you the lowdown on our creeping pantheon of death. Some people even like them. Steve Irwin could tell you all about it. Oh, wait. He was stabbed in the heart by an ungrateful stingray.

Despite their deadly reputation, Australia’s bugs are generally elegantly built and usually reclusive. They look nice in a Perspex paperweight or the gear knob of a Monaro HT. If you poke ‘em or forget to check your shoes, of course they’ll get you. But with few exceptions they seldom attack unprovoked.

So I’m no fan of insects and shit but if I’m feeling righteous I do save errant bees, earthworms and skinks from the gym pool of a balmy Bodes morning. I’ve hooked a massive rhino beetle out with a stick. I’ve even given an overinflated toad miniature CPR, with my finger wrapped in a leaf. But have you seen those ghastly vinegaroons? Gothic matte-black whip scorpions with stingers like toothpicks and pincers that could drag a baby right out of a tent. I draw the line at these freaks. They can fucken well drown. Oh shit. They can swim.

There are those big black bumbling bees that love the smell of Elnett in the morning. If you’ve seen how high I like my hair you’ll know why I’ve got my own swarm. They have massive stingers but aren’t that smart. You can trick them by waving your arms around and running away.

Here, cockroaches suck the biggest of all. They are the worst. They chase you, or – help me, Jesus – fly at you. Sure they don’t bite, but their scuttling filthiness makes me squeal like a little girl and phone for help from atop the nearest chair. One can of Mortien is never enough for those disgusting bastards.

Although related to lobsters, Cambodian centipedes are not delicious flame-grilled with a lime aioli on the side. I don’t know if you’ve seen one but they’re scary as fuck. Eight inches of red pointy aggression heading straight for you at speed. For once, this is not a good thing. According to Wikipedia, once they’ve stabbed you they ‘cut away at their prey’ with their ‘forcipules’. Fucken hell. This mother was hanging off mum’s leg. She must have been terrified.

She eventually kicked that devil’s spawn to the kerb and made it to the village healer who put a poultice on it. Three hours later she was prostrate in pain and I got the call from my lifemate. This wasn’t at all funny, or even a bit interesting like when they put a tarantula and a scorpion together in an episode of Japanese Bugfight. Mum’s leg had swollen and by the time we got her to a foreign clinic in CharmingVille she was barely conscious in agony.

Don’t you just hate it when you’re at the doctors and they keep you waiting for three hours even though you feel like shit or you’ve broke something and just 10 minutes of their care and some basic medication would fix everything and totally justify their fucking obscene bill at the end of it?

But never mind. I sat trawling the internet and seething loudly while Ma lay shivering in shock. Dr Google prescribed a codeine tablet and an icepack. Which is exactly what the lip-smacking-post-5pm-snack-returnee-cum-intern prescribed for her, two hours and 57 minutes later.

Like everyone, I’ve given crickets a try and sucked the hair off a spider leg for a YouTube video. Sometimes I guess it’s just payback time in bugland. Watch where you put your feet.