Dear Old Blighty

A week in Southport would once have seemed the dullest of destinations.

But having now lived in a variety of elsewheres for about seven and a half years, I think I’ve spent long enough away to appreciate what can be a surprisingly pleasant town.

Perhaps absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I’ve no doubt that I’d be bored silly if I were to spend years, or even months actually living there again, but yet a week was not quite enough.

I hadn’t been back to England for almost two years, and quite aside from family and friends there was so much more that I’d missed without even realising it.

The journey to England was no less painful than 6,500 miles perhaps ought to be, mercifully broken by a couple of hours in Dubai’s newest terminal building, where I was so relieved to be able to have a (sickening, I know) cigarette break, that I was almost grateful to be charged the $11 “minimum spend” for a cup of tea in what appeared to be the only smoking bar/cafe in the entire building – “The Hub”. The service was glacial, and the tea only a little warmer. Still, nicotine eh?

I also took the opportunity to purchase 200 B&H for the princely sum of £9. I would later see a packet of 16 B&H in a Southport nightclub vending machine priced at £7.50. Astonishing.

But not, to be honest, all that surprising. I was expecting England to be expensive, and in some senses it was. In others, I perhaps hadn’t realised just how expensive Bangkok is. Alcohol is certainly cheaper in Southport – at least in most of the pubs and bars I drank in.

Food varies – where there is a direct local equivalent, obviously Bangkok wins hands down. But there so often isn’t, and although a few meals at classier establishments seemed expensive, I’ve certainly spent more in Thailand – tapas for two, a few glasses of wine, then drinks in an upmarket pub cost me the best part of £80 here in Bangkok a couple of weeks ago.

While I figured that my budget for my trip to England was on the generous side, I was still pleasantly surprised that I actually returned home with a decent amount of change.

On a tangental note, I had wondered whether I’d be asked by UK Customs/Immigration why I hadn’t been “home” for almost two years, and why I was now using a new passport which had never even been to England – issued by the FCO in Bangkok. Nothing to hide, and no problems – I just wondered whether my path to the airport exterior (and more nicotine) would be delayed by endless questions in these security-conscious times.

So it was with surprise and astonishment that I came across the automatic immigration turnstile at Manchester. I swiped my RFID passport on the console, looked into the camera as it took my photograph, and gaped as the plastic saloon doors automatically opened. Welcome to the UK. No human beings were involved at all (although of course rows of officers were present for those with older or non-EU passports).

Red and Green… and that suspicious shade of grey

Red was, inevitably, the colour of my face within 24 hours or so. Not due to any embarrassing cultural faux pas, no forgotten Anglicisms here. Simply due to the fact that whilst I do live in a very hot country, I also bear this fact in mind, and behave accordingly. It is simply too hot to remain in the sunlight for long in Thailand, so I – and most who live here – avoid it. In England, it simply didn’t occur to me. So after a day of walking around the town, along the pier, and eventually retiring to a pub beer garden for the afternoon, I was thoroughly sunburnt – to the amusement of all and sundry.

Green, on the other hand, is something I missed. There is a scene in Peter Hyams’ generally under-rated 2010 (under-rated perhaps simply because it wasn’t Kubrick’s 2001 – but what else is?) where Floyd and Curnow are idly chatting aboard the Leonov:

Curnow: You know what I miss? I miss green. The grass, the trees… I love green!
Floyd: I’d love a hot dog.
Curnow: The Astrodome! Great hot dogs!
Floyd: The Astrodome?! You can’t grow good hot dogs indoors! No, no… Yankee Stadium. September. Hot dogs have been boiling since the opening day in April. Now that’s a hot dog!
Curnow: With the yellow mustard, or the darker?
Floyd: Darker.
Curnow: It’s important.
Floyd: Darker.

There are green parts of Bangkok, of course – a garden full of mango trees faces my rear balcony, in fact. But it’s not my garden – it’s a neighbour’s. So I can’t go and sit in it. And even if I did, I would soon melt. The swimming pool in front of my apartment is tree-lined, but the surround is still mostly concrete.

There are huge sprawling parks here too, of course. But they’re too hot in the daytime, and too dark to see the green (and in the case of Lumpini Park, locked and surrounded by hookers) at night.

On the hot dog front, an Englishman would, of course, never stoop to such culinary lows. The humble donner kebab, however, is another matter entirely.

Foods from the middle-east and from the Indian sub-continent are not merely available in Bangkok – they are abundant. They are not, however, particularly familiar-looking to the average Brit.

Due to a series of happy accidents, not least that the vast majority of the UK’s “Indian” restaurants are in fact run by Bangladeshis, who invented many of the most popular dishes in such exotic locales as Bradford, Glasgow or Birmingham, most of the items on a British curry house menu are nigh-on impossible to find outside of the UK. Balti, Jalfrezi, Dopiaza and even Chicken Tikka Masala are difficult to find in Bangkok’s actually-authentic Indian restaurants. Lamb Rogan Josh is a mere fantasy – mutton or goat is all you’re getting on the ovine front.

Similarly, whilst shwarma stalls abound in what locals fondly refer to as Little Beirut, a UK-style donner kebab is also conspicuous by its absence. That’s not to say that you can’t get a pitta bread filled with slices of suspicious-looking grey meat. But that’s not a donner kebab. Not to an Englishman.

To an Englishman, a donner kebab is a mistake. It is something ordered either out of bravado or sheer drunken idiocy, or possibly both. It is what turns a queasy stomach, full of beer, vodka, aftershock and something fizzy, into a suddenly empty one. It is ordered from a swarthy gentleman of unclear ethnicity in a dimly-lit grease den at 3am, and consists of shavings from what appears to be an elephant’s leg deposited into a stale pitta, then drowned in an excessive amount of chili sauce potent enough to make Chuck Norris weep. Asking an Englishman whether he would like salad on his kebab is akin to asking him for how long his father, his other male relatives and all of his friends have been active homosexuals.

This is not an experience available in Bangkok, as far as I can tell.

It is available in Southport, and one was purchased on my first night back.

However, since I am almost 31 years old, and was staying with a friend and his girlfriend, who are also grown-ups, I took mine back to their house in a taxi, and ate it from a plate with a knife and fork.

It didn’t help.

The Week

The week was spent mostly in Southport, with excursions to Bolton, to Hull and to Wallasey.

Aside from pubs and beer gardens, and of course real ale (another luxury missing from Bangkok), I watched several live bands who weren’t just playing covers of Thai pop songs (relief), felt oddly out of place as an ethnic majority, and managed to blow up a sound system and short out the power in the town’s finest nightclub. Which was nice.

A day trip to Bolton to spend time with the step-family included a trip to Bolton Crematorium to see Dad’s plaque for the first time. My last trip to England had been to say goodbye, and to attend the funeral. The gardens were beautiful, peaceful, tranquil… It was never going to be a pleasant experience, but neither was it too traumatic.

Then there was the family reunion in Wallasey, which deserves a post of its own – one day. I am writing this piece more than a month after returning from England, so expect that one sometime before summer 2011…

The rest of the week was taken up by watching crap British TV (simultaneously awful and yet somehow enjoyable), ambling around childhood haunts, taking a walk past my old school, old homes, and a thoroughly fantastic stroll around Hesketh Park, where I used to tear around on my mountain bike fifteen or more years ago, when that was the thing to do…

And, yes, lots of time spent in pubs. I couldn’t get over how empty most of them were – the economic downturn and the smoking ban have not been kind to the traditional British pub. And it does seem rather silly that, unless there is a designated outdoor area, one can only drink inside the pub (or face an £80 spot fine), and only smoke outside it (or risk firing squad, or whatever the punishment for smoking indoors is). Straddling the threshold with one in each hand is, I was informed by an angry-looking man in a black bomber jacket, not allowed.

On Further Examination

For some reason, I had painted a picture of England that was far more grim than it had ever deserved. Perhaps this is something every expat subconsciously does – to have felt the need to abandon one’s country of birth must make that country a rather unpleasant place, after all. Perhaps I had spent too long listening to the grizzled retirees who prop up rather too many bars here, telling me forever how awful the UK is, and how they’ll never go back.

In reality, my seven days there (I will aim to double this next year) was a pleasure. Sure, a week off in a warm August is rather different to a working week in a frozen January, and perhaps after a couple of months I would soon tire of the place, but when it was time to return to Manchester, and fly home to Thailand, I did so with a lingering gaze at my former home.

That’s not to say that I’m not happy here in Thailand – the climate (although they could turn the heat down a little and I wouldn’t complain), the scenery (mostly outside Bangkok!) and the easy-going Thai approach to life are all things I’ve come to love. I’m very happy in my career right now, I’ve met some fantastic people here, and to reproduce this lifestyle in the West would probably mean earning more money than I’m likely to be offered at this point in my life.

So I have no plans to live anywhere else anytime soon, but whereas a year or two ago I could never see myself living in England again, I’m now less sure. I’ve no desire to do so anytime soon, so while it remains a hypothetical scenario, it’s now a scenario which fills me with intrigue rather than dread.

The return flight was showing the new (-ish) Star Trek movie, which I somehow hadn’t seen yet. I liked it.