It’s normal, I think, to put the most difficult and disturbing realities of life on earth to the back of your mind. None of us could function if we constantly acknowledged the truth of just how messed up this planet really is. If it wasn’t for that safe little smokescreen of wilful ignorance that envelops…
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I’m not a practical person, nor am I a particularly logical one. I daydream. I never know the time. I see the world through spectacles tinted in the shade of what is desirable and convenient to me, a sort of lilacy-blue colour usually. I truly believe that I can bend the universe to my will,…
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Getting lost in Chatuchak Market is a rite of passage for new arrivals to Bangkok. It’s only once you’ve felt that panic, that real thud in the chest realisation that you’re lost and dehydrated and if passed out on the spot nobody would come to look for you, you’d just get swept up with the…
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The first time I went to Chatuchak Market it was a hallucinatory experience. I had been in Thailand for less than two days. I was jet-lagged and hung-over, swept along with the crowd, blinded by the sun, sweating and dehydrated, too overwhelmed to commit to a purchase, of anything, even a bottle of water. I’m…
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From the vantage point of a white plastic picnic chair, the legs of which are half buried in the sand, in the middle of the only beach on Koh Jum Island, I can see…nothing, no one, not a soul. Unless you believe crabs have souls in which case I can see hundreds. Once or twice…
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If the sweltering chaos and debauchery of Bangkok is hell and the blissful shores of the southern islands are heaven, then the parched mountainous haze of Pai is surely purgatory. When we arrived it was forty degrees. In the landscape around the town strategically lit fires swirled like tribal scars, seared into the brown skin…
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You can’t really prepare for Bangkok in all its contradictions. Like all big cities, the extremely rich and extremely poor share the same streets, but in Bangkok they literally brush shoulders. Every stretch of pavement is fair game; giant shopping malls cater to the label-obsessed super rich and right outside children sit on the street…
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The one in red shorts looked like she didn’t want to be there. Her hair was cropped short like Demi Moore in Ghost, a cut I realised later was standard issue for female Muay Thai fighters. And those cheekbones. So shapely they glinted in the spotlight like knives. I cringed at the thought of someone…
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