Happy 2nd birthday, blog. Apologies for continually neglecting you. So what happened in 2006?
January
Managed four articles. The first of them was the predecessor to this one. The second was a nice little vignette about Halley’s Comet and the rest of my life. The third was an apology for not writing anything, and I finished by marking the passing of Spam Solved day.
Offline, things were less fun. In late December 2005 I was finally reunited with a girl who I had fallen hopelessly for back in 1998, and never quite got over. The blissful rekindling of the flames of love (or so I imagined it) did not go entirely to plan, and I had a bit of a spazzy fit, then sulked for several months.
February
February brought my third annual holiday to Thailand, which couldn’t come too soon. It actually wasn’t so much of a holiday as it was a house-hunting and job-seeking mission – the last person keeping me in the UK (see above) was no longer returning my calls, so it was time to finally realise my dream of emigrating to the Land of Smiles.
Except I couldn’t write anything about that until I’d formally informed my employers, landlord, lodger, friends, family, etc etc. Hence a quiet month on the site, the epic saga of my trip aside.
March
March was about getting myself organised for a one-way trip in excess of six thousand miles. I still don’t quite understand how I managed to make it, given how appallingly sloppy my preparations were.
I left what had frankly become an untenable job after the company had been taken over by astonishingly feckless hands. I told Sian, the best lodger in the history of co-habitation, that she’d have to find a new home. That was no fun at all.
And I told my landlord that he’d have to find a new tenant. Which he promptly did, in the shape of the one of the most irritating men I have ever met. The following weeks of planning and packing were interrupted almost daily by this idiot knocking on my door to ask the most trivial questions which were nothing at all to do with me, and everything to do with the landlord. Yes, my blood pressure was up a little by this point.
I still found time to release my first attempt at a Ma.gnolia plugin for Wordpress though.
April
Well the main event was my trip to Ireland for my mother’s wedding. I’d somehow been granted pay in lieu of notice from work, so had enough free time to sell everything I owned on eBay.
In reality, I shifted most of my CDs and DVDs, computer hardware and musical instruments, but the furniture and books had to be left behind. Sian was by now working in the post office, where I would trudge every few days with sackfulls of eBay goods. I really should have given her a commission on the sales.
On the last day of the month, I got a bus to Heathrow airport with a suitcase and a backpack containing the last of my worldly possessions, and emigrated to Bangkok.
May
I landed in Bangkok on May 1st, to begin a new chapter of what has frankly been a startlingly fortunate life so far:
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After yawning my way through high school and passing my GCSEs with ease, I’d dropped out of college without really realising what was happening, and ended up living on the dole with similarly rock-bottom friends by age 19. At that point, you needed a degree to be a computer programmer (which was always going to be my career), and I had no means of acquiring one, having been asked to leave both of Southport’s colleges.
At the turn of what was generally accepted by the innumerate masses to be the Millennium (the Third Millennium actually began in 2001, not 2000), I remember bumping into hordes of people in Southport town centre who I hadn’t seen in years. All of them wanted to know what this former child genius had made of his life. All were surprised (some probably pleasantly so) that I was on the dole, an unqualified failure.
In January 2000, I put together what I considered a joke of a CV, and uploaded it to a jobs website for a laugh. I’d been learning HTML in my spare time, because that’s the sort of thing I’d always done with my spare time. A month later, I was working for the web department of an international finance magazine in central London.
From there, I gained more and more skills in a series of bewilderingly higher-paid jobs, at one point getting fired from an “ethical employer” in Sheffield (who “ethically” paid less than any other tech company I could find in the area), then being hired by another company six weeks later – on double the salary.
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The point is, I had been on a roll of frankly ridiculous luck for well over six years. Surely it couldn’t continue? In the capital of Thailand, of whose language I could speak barely ten words, had no business contacts and not that much cash, surely I would spectacularly crash and burn?
I found an apartment, and consulted a fortune teller. I do thrive on a challenge…
June
Watched the World Cup, ate some bugs, and started Thai lessons.
Offline, or rather off-website, I got my first lead in the shape of an email from a UK company who were interested in employing me to be a remote sysadmin. Their MD later got cold feet due to the “remote” angle. Still, Rome wasn’t burnt in a day…
July
I made my first (fleetingly brief) day-trip to Cambodia, wrote a bit about the Thai language, tidied up the Ma.gnolia plugin, and got some freelance development work – right here in Bangkok. Will this roll of fortune never end?
August
Back to Cambodia was the only notable piece to appear online. Largely due to me working my arse off on other things.
September
My first entry of September was the crucifixion of Fox News for their ludicrous coverage of the John-Mark Karr debacle. More amusingly, I bought a guitar and penned a piece about how happy and stable life in Bangkok seemed to be.
Of course, later the same day there was a military coup.
October
From various ventures and good fortunes, I had now made enough money to effectively take the rest of the year off. So I took my first proper holiday since April, and had a long weekend in Phnom Penh with a couple of friends.
This was followed by celebrating my 28th birthday in freak floods.
November
I took the opportunity to petition Tony Blair to stand on his head and juggle ice-cream, before comparing the Thai language to Orwell’s “newspeak”. And continued to neglect this website in favour of actually living. What a shame.
December
I began the final month of 2006 by almost getting myself killed crossing the street, then suffering possibly the worst hangover ever after my friend Ed’s stag night. Oh, and accepted a programming job offer – I start next week.
This is the first piece to appear since then, but in the meantime I had Christmas dinner with a group of frankly great friends, then travelled up-country for Ed’s wedding and a view of Thai country life. I’ll write this up soon and link it here.
New Year’s Eve saw a series of organised explosions hit Bangkok at around 6pm, but I went out for drinks later anyway. I got home to discover that there’d been a second wave of bombs at midnight, thankfully a few merciful miles from where I’d been partying.
Three Thais were killed, and 30-40 people, including Western tourists (to the delight and suddenly-piqued interest of the Western media), were injured. Since I am old enough to remember the provisional IRA, who didn’t fanny about when it came to blowing things (and people) up, I am not particularly impressed by the cheap pyrotechnics we saw here – as I wasn’t by the similarly amateurish efforts we saw in London last year.
It will take more than a (bloodless) military coup and a half-arsed “terrorist” attack to put me off this adventure, I’m afraid. Here’s to 2007.
