On Wednesday morning I awoke to the sound of a raging thunderstorm and very welcome it was too. Since returning from the UK I had been wilting in the Bangkok heat and had become increasingly lethargic, sluggish and slothful. After that refreshing mid-week storm I was even more lethargic, sluggish and slothful, but at least a few degrees cooler.
In the week before the storm, it was simply too hot to be doing anything. Even the dog had been banging on the bedroom door every morning, demanding his rightful quota of air conditioning. But on Wednesday his paws were hammering away so that he could hide under the bed to escape the sound of thunder. Big bangs are not his cup of tea.
Of course, Bangkok’s motorists celebrated the surprise wet weather in customary fashion by everybody cleverly crashing into one another on the slippery roads. Oh well.
Busy doing nothing
The sensible way to tackle hot weather is to do absolutely nothing, and I’m slowly getting the hang of it. But it is not as easy as it sounds. You can even build up a sweat just thinking about it.
The experts at doing nothing are undoubtedly those officials we read about every week who are transferred to inactive posts. They receive special training at doing nothing and are particularly adept in hot weather. Some of the more dedicated even make a career out of it and get transferred to extremely inactive posts.
During the hot season, perhaps it would be a good idea to transfer everyone in Thailand to an inactive post — The Ideal Society. Then we could loaf around all day without any feeling of guilt.
Mad dogs and Englishmen
Noel Coward took an entertaining snipe at British colonial life in the tropics with the song Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a favourite of Winston Churchill. The song’s lyrics included “In Bangkok at 12 o’clock, they froth at the mouth and run”. The exact position of this line in the song sparked a heated dinner party argument between Churchill and US president Franklin D Roosevelt in 1941. It turned out to be a rare occasion when Churchill admitted he was wrong.
Adapting Coward’s theme some years later, comedian Spike Milligan observed of Sri Lanka: “By midday in Colombo the heat is so unbearable that the streets are empty, but for thousands of Englishmen taking mad dogs for walks.”
Yasothon takes a bow
The people we have to thank for this week’s thundershowers are clearly the participants at the annual Bun Bang Fai rocket festival held in Yasothon and villages throughout Isan. The giant home-made rockets are fired, or quite often misfired, to the heavens in a symbolic bid to entice the reluctant rains to come.
This incidentally also requires much drinking of alcohol.
Well it worked this time folks, at least in Bangkok, although it could still be as dry as a bone in Yasothon for all I know. But even when it doesn’t work in Yasothon, everybody ends up rolling about in mud, which almost makes sense in the blistering heat. Now that’s what you call sanook!
Misguided missiles
I am glad to see there were no major mishaps in Yasothon. A few years ago, a cabinet minister attending the festival discovered local rockets are not exactly of the type approved by Mission Control in Florida. His giant ceremonial missile, worthy of a launch at Cape Canaveral, veered off course, bounced off a house and demolished a mango tree, nearly taking out a number of villagers in the process.
It still got a hearty round of applause from onlookers.
I survived the Yasothon festivities a number of times in the 1980s and ’90s and witnessed numerous rogue rockets taking off horizontally, sending spectators diving for cover.
The missiles also have a nasty habit of blowing up during launch, and being stuffed with gunpowder, this can have unfortunate consequences for the gentlemen responsible for lighting them.
Shall we dance?
What proved much more of a health hazard than low-flying rockets in Yasothon, however, was being ambushed by merry villagers and forced to consume wicked concoctions of lao khao (home-made rice whiskey), fermented coconut milk and other local moonshine of unidentifiable origin. Absolutely lethal.
After the drinking came the dancing and just like Coward’s song, too often I found myself performing the ramwong in the midday sun in a dusty rice field with elderly ladies who appeared to have enjoyed more than their fair share of the aforementioned lao khao. The following morning you felt like those characters in Hangover II.
Soul man
A belated few words on the great singer Ben E King who died while I was away. One of the first records I ever bought was an EP (four tracks) in 1960 by the Drifters, led by King. The standout song was Save The Last Dance For Me, and it was King’s rich, soulful voice that appealed to me. The following year came the magnificent Stand By Me, an iconic number which holds up even after 50 years.
One song that people might be less familiar with, Supernatural Thing (Part 1 and 2), released in 1975, was also a soulful belter.
As a friend commented: “Hardly a month goes by without one of the greats of our generation checking out.” Sigh.
Contact PostScript via email at oldcrutch@hotmail.com.