Careless Whisper

rag

As you can imagine, I’ve met some good people on my travels…Robin Gibb is now Robin Gidd albeit he’s a bit of a God Squad type whose enthusiasm for the lord almighty is equaled by his equal opportunities opinion on downing shots and buckets all the while having a better beard than me and a spherical pal called Wilson. 

Another Robin I have met is a Swedish guy who works at my day job that reminds me of Chet, a guy I lived with for 4 years that would go to a club in Speedos and work out in public, Muscle Street doesn’t have the same ring to it as Muscle Beach when you think about it but that’s how I met him and the reason he’s my friend…he can play Careless Whisper on the Saxophone and takes no shame in putting his weight bench out on the street on a sunny day or getting his Dad to reinforce his bed with steel. 

Robin talked me into doing a ‘photo shoot’ with a girl he had been conveniently riding on the side who looked a lot like the girl from the Nickelback Video for How You Remind Me.  My wife was understandably appalled at the thought of this girl, who was in her eyes sexy as France writhing about the surf gien it big licks with her chebs oot.  In reality, she turned up at 9am for her shoot on the beach with a (pure blaggin it) ‘professional photographer’ looking like she had just got out of Auschwitz but with a worse hangover, bruises and everything.  The sun wasn’t really shining and I tried to tell her that it wasn’t worth it as she was simultaneously applying makie up and vomiting in the bathroom.  I gave it a bash and Robin turned out way better than her, as he has been a model, a dancer and also a contestant on Swedish Big Brother (either 2004 or 2006) and knew how to pose and the likes.

So, I’m on the beach giving it the whole ‘oh, the light’s not right’ chat while he is telling her to ‘unleash her inner tigress’ and get sexy ‘like the movie wild things’.  When she still didn’t look like much he promptly told her that she ‘looked like a cow’ in Swedish, which made me like this guy even more.  Robin, as I mentioned is professional dancer and he is most at home in the bar at night when he incites the crowd to join him in the ‘Cha Cha Stomp’ which for those of you unaware is a song much like the Macarena. 

He somehow gets them all going and even more surreally manages to look good doing it.  I love to watch the faces on the crowd when it gets to the bit where he sings “Charlie Brown’ as if it’s a dance move every one should know like ‘Stomp to the left, 2 times’. I put it down to the particularly peculiar night we were having, not only had the drains been cleared out and the whole place smelled of rank excrement but it was also the offical ‘SUPERMOON’ – the point in which the moon is closest to the Earth in more than 2 decades.  It actually was a really big, bright moon and quite impressive but what was more impressive was the effect it seemed to be having on the tides and the weather.  The tide would come in and out by a good 200 yards every 20 minutes…some say all the natural disasters are due to the supermoon but I’m not sure.

I’m writing this blog after the ‘what’s your favourite fish?’ couple incident.  I tried to interject with a wee bit of comedy only to be met with an icy response.  The male of the couple’s answer to the fish conundrum was ‘the yellow one’, ‘that’s Skype’ she said as I interjected with ‘no. that’s the blue one!’  Once again, wit has not prevailed but I need to consider that I am sitting by myself in a bar surrounded by people in shorts while wearing a denim jacket.  There can be only one.

I’m away to wind up a guy I don’t like the look of that’s playing pool in the bar I’m in, to me these are the best kind of wind ups.  My favourite on this trip so far was almost convincing a guy he should call his band ‘Ghostbusters 2’, everyone already knows it and no-one will expect it, he was almost convinced.  I am a dick.

Fuck You Izzard

“Excuse me” said a very chirpy looking fellow from Denmark as I was working the other day.  “Aye?” said I, “Should I beware of Monkey Thieves?”.  At this moment I was thinking he might have been a student who had overdosed on Eddie Izzard in 1999 and still thought it funny to see humour in putting incongruous words together and putting on a funny voice.   But, alas, no, he was serious!  He informed me that an ape had been coming to his hotel room at the same time for the last two days and he had been warned that people train monkeys to steal cameras and wallets for their devious owners.  I was as polite as I could be and told him that he should always beware of everyone, especially with his valued possessions but I still really wasn’t buying it.  It turned out that he was just an unrealistically happy man and was indeed being stalked by an ape, his wife showed me a video they had taken that day of the simian in question trying his best to pry open his patio door, the funniest part about the whole thing though was hearing him saying in the video “oooh noo you ditnt!” in his best Hoochie Mama/Danish tone as the monkey brushed off his shooing and pelting of the glass.  I guess you had to be there, and I guess I wish I had been, even if only to see if the monkey was taller than me.

There is absolutely no chance Holly and I will fall victim to any such aping around as we have now moved to a new gaff with a, wait for it …’Mountain View’!  I’m quite a fan of a wee embellishment of the truth here and there but when your mountain vista is a pane of glass with a sheer rock face one inch apart you have to concede wan tae you and just laugh about it.  We live above a Bike shop and have to raise the noisy shop shutter every time you enter then run the mosquito gauntlet to the room.  Our landlord seems a funny chap that may have been a victim of a shark attack.  The reason I comment is that I see him sans tap practicing his golf swing with a weighted putter and he has an awesome (in my mind) shark enduced scar on his torso.

Tonight I went to work at the nighttime job after working all day and it turned out I wasn’t needed, as the island is getting quieter.  Common courtesy comes into play when you see a staff member sitting there for an hour and a half and your response when he storms out is ‘were you wanting to work?’.  ‘No, I love hanging out in restaurants on my own’. 

In a moment of slight revenge but really just desperation I went to a bar doing 150 baht buckets for Happy hour when I was overcome by the strongest compulsion for a shite.  This bar, as you have probably guessed by the prices doesn’t have the nicest of cludgies so I found myself using a check pad from the night job to wipe my derriere with. Not the most glamorous I’ve ever looked but in comparison to the toilet I was in I was Shirley Bassey on her throne singing ‘kiss me, honey, honey, kiss me’.  The lack of toilet roll or even a ‘Thai Style Bum Shower’ must be apparent to you by now but it gets even worse.  The bottom of the cubicle door seemed to have teeth where it has been kicked in or rotted away that looked like the warnings on cigarette packets.  Strangely though there was one brief convenience for this inconvenience in the form of a rusty nail for hanging your coat, or breeks on…it was a strange kindness in some way and I am thankful for that in some way.  Maybe Buddha is getting to me?

Anyway, the world still looks like it’s going to shit.  After the Japan thing I didn’t watch the news but when I did take a sneak peak I saw that the world seems to have invaded Libya promoting what looks like WWIII.  I guess that’s what happens when you let Mickey Rourke run a country, he was good in Angel Heart and The Wrestler but he seems to have went more aff his nut this time than when he turned down a career getting his head sooked in soft porn with Kim Bassinger to getting his head pummeled in a boxing ring.  I hope Stallone takes his place.

Enough for now, I need to get back to some ‘proper’ writing and ignore the couple beside me asking each other ‘what’s your favourite fish?’ and set about meeting the most Scottish, not Scottish guy in the world and Robin Gibb with the best beard in the world for a light refreshment and ‘beard off’ under a kerosene coated skipping rope.

More to come soon as my good friend Dan and I are planning a wee trip around South East Asia with a crutch each.

Crag