Carnival Chaos

Over the bank holiday weekend just passed, like so many millions, I flocked to the Notting Hill Carnival. That could, however, be like so many thousands as the number differs from report to report. How the hell can you count a constantly flowing, non-ticketted crowd where there's no one entry point anyway? Do they hire some guy with a statistics degree to look at the crowd and calculate it?: "Uh, yah, so, for X m-squared to be packed there are Y amount of people in it at any one time. With the crowd walking at approximately 0.000001 km/hr over a period of 6 hours there are 656,463 people in attendance." Anyway, that wasn't even the point I was trying to make in this entry, I just don't understand how you can accurately count a crowd and needed to rant.

So, the point is... out of those thousands (or maybe millions, who knows?) much has been made of the fact in the BBC that there was a "hardcore" of trouble makers but that the "interventionist policing" that prevented the "criminals from taking over the streets of Notting Hill". So that's why a 17-yr old and 14-yr old were shot and a "small number of people suffered stab wounds." Nothing to worry about then! The gang of 20 menacing-looking youths that walked past us when we were dancing happily on the street couldn't possibly have been stopped and searched by the non-existent police presence before something awful like a shooting happened.

I really am, for all my sins, a casual follower of the news and politics and I am in no way claiming to make qualified socio-political comments. However, reading this morning about the sudden prison worker strike across England and Wales makes me wonder about security services in the UK in general and how they need a complete revamp to deal with the "criminals" of today. One of the (rather eloquent) prison guards aptly said that jail is no longer a deterrent for criminals but an occupational hazard (there are no restrictions on TV or meals etc.) and that some kids today don't know the distinction between right and wrong. And this all comes back to modern-day parenting, another pet peeve of mine. My mum smacked me alternatively with a bamboo cane and a balloon stick when I was naughty and look at me now: a shining beacon of social perfection (almost). Nowt wrong with a bit of discipline to teach a kid the basic difference between right and wrong. At least I'm not firing random shots out into a crowd of strangers dressed in sequinned spandex for no apparent reason other than that I'm a troubled youth.

Fry Up v. Khao Tom Pla

I'm feeling awful. Probably due to the fact that, last night, I consumed an amount of tequila that would last a week in a small Mexican bar. So this morning, as with many hungover Saturday mornings in the past few years, my flatmate and I went to the local greasy spoon in the hope that a mountain of (veggies, look away now) greasy sausages, fatty bacon, hash browns, toast, other assorted fried things and copious cups of tea would make us feel better. I won't go into the details of what happened afterwards, but let's just say that it didn't.

So I am now of the opinion that London would be much improved if they opened little road-side stalls selling khao tom pla (boiled rice with fish - amazing comfort food, also healthy) on Saturday mornings, just like in good ol' B-K-K. I would probably be their only customer since, as chic as Thai food is in London, with even Chinese restaurants doing mediocre Thai buffets to cash in on the trend, I've yet to meet an English person who doesn't think the idea of rice at breakfast is weird. Oh, but consuming the half litre of oil that your full English breakfast is cooked in is fine. Oh dear, am missing home, something that seems to happen mostly when I think of the good food. Right, going to go to the local Chinese to get some Tom Kha Gai that will almost certainly be dissapointing, I should really learn to cook properly one of these days...

When it's good to look Chinese

As a postscript to my first ever post, I'd like to say that although our Belgian masseur was mistaken about my heritage, my new Chinese landlord agent-to-be certainly wasn't. He manages the property for a Shanghai-based landlord and the flat seems to have only been previously let to Chinese students. One of the first things he said to me was "Are you part Chinese?". I said yes and told him the (slightly exaggerated) story of my grandfather fleeing the communists, said "Gong Hee Fat Choi" and we secured the flat - score! Now let's just hope the reason it's so cheap isn't because of dodgy Triad links...

Shoe Wars

So, I'm a week and a day away from moving in with my boyfriend. My English boyfriend. Who was brought up wearing shoes inside his house. Now, this is one of my pet hates but it's also a topic upon which I feel myself extremely conflicted. I essentially believe, and was brought up by my Asian mummy accordingly, that it's disgusting to bring the shit of the world that you traipse around in all day into your home, which should not be somewhere you might catch ecoli but somewhere you could, if you really wanted to, roll around on the floor/carpets without worrying what dirt and germs lay about. I know I sound like an anal clean-freak but, looking round my room, I can tell you that definitely is NOT the case. It's just the shoe thing.

In university at least I could mark my territory around my bedroom, which was a shoe-free zone. And in the past couple of years I've been living with a very nice, cosmopolitan friend who, at least initially, was very good with the "no shoes in the house" thing. But now, moving into a one-bedroom flat where we share all spaces (and all floors) how can I enforce this rule without seeming like an anal cow? Short of making a sign saying "No Shoes Allowed" and providing a stack of size 5-10 slippers and foot spray for all visitors (the boyfriend has some friends with very smelly feet), what can I do? How does one make their boyfriend more Asian?

I DON'T look Chinese?

For the first time in my quickly accelerating life, I was told by that I didn't look Chinese. The guy, a Belgian masseur, thought I was fully Western!? Now, the Chinese part only accounts for a quarter of my mongrel blood but it's pretty dominant - I have a wide nose, "almond" eyes (i.e. they close when I smile) and a pretty large forehead (Chinese say, "Large forehead mean large wealth". Yeah. I wish.) Has living in London for 6 years actually affected the way I look or have my increasingly Western mannerisms fooled people into thinking I'm a different colour? The masseur (we'll call him Jacques) said I had Western features. This could be due to the fact that I was face down on the massage table and he only had a view of my large Western-style behind. And I do have pasty white skin, thanks to the British non-summer, or as Jacques so eloquently phrased it, "you're not yellow". Hmm...thanks?

Our dear, agile-fingered friend Jacques might be forgiven for being so ridiculously mistaken as most of my London friends are white middle class meaning that my accent and speech has become pretty Anglicised. Each time I go back to Bangkok people are schocked at how British I've become, as one American friend once said, "Talking to you is like listening to the BBC".

I have therefore made a vow to start watching Thai films without the subtitles in an attempt to reverse the Westernisation process, especially since my boyfriend found a blonde hair in my head the other day. It could have been a white hair but we'll leave my irrational fear of aging in a city where the old and disabled are ignored for another post.