Sunset, Limited

Bobby the cute biotech scientist drives me to the train station in Palm Springs which isn’t really in Palm Springs but set among the wind farms on its wilder northern edge. Amtrak says to check in at least 30 minutes early but not only is there no place to do this at the unstaffed station, there’s simply no one else around either. It’s just a platform and the rails turning copper in the late afternoon sun.

Two coyotes chase across the edge of the desert and deserted parking lot.

Thanks to a 1-800 automated information service we soon discover the Sunset Limited is already running 20 minutes late which means we’ve effectively an hour to kill but it passes very easily and actually we get to know each other better for it.

There’s a lot of freight. A LOT of freight trains, maybe seven or eight in the time we’re waiting, each with four big diesels hauling about a half-mile of wagons most of which are carrying a double deck quota of containers. Among the Mitsui, China Ocean, Tianjin and similar transpacific cargo companies are several units branded with the Tropicana juice name, suggesting that if they can haul it through deserts in steel containers it’s so chock full of preservative you probably don’t need to put it in the fridge. For years.

The passenger train arrives without fanfare and whilst there are only two or three people boarding here – I’m the only one up the sleeper end, it’s unhurried and a conductor points me towards roomette 11 in coach 230. There I meet steward Yvonne, one of those topheavy black women for whom stretch polyester uniforms were not really designed but she has the broadest of smiles and settles me into the little cabin explaining the light and air controls, and organizes me a reservation for dinner.

Now this isn’t the Orient Express and the tablecloths are paper but the cutlery’s real and there are fresh flowers on the tables. The menu is short but surprisingly varied – besides the American burgerish staples are crabmeat enchiladas, arctic char resting on a bed of orzo pasta and my choice, a tender and delicious piece of chipotle beef with baked potato (baked a while back it has to be said) and fresh vegetables. The ‘no added sugar’ cheesecake may have its peach topping slopped over it as from a bucket but it tastes as good as restaurant fare.

The dining car operates ‘open seating’ which means singles like me are encouraged to share tables for four which is fine. My companions opposite are a white woman from LA in her late twenties chaperoning a pretty but initially sullen six year old girl of a distinctly Amerindian cast. With her dark almond eyes and glossy hair she's a Disney Pocahontas who will grow up to be a stunner but at the moment she needs some coaxing to eat and sit properly. She warms up eventually – actually she eats a huge hot dog, some salad and half her mom’s chicken – and I learn that her name’s Esmeralda and they are traveling together to Tuscon so she can meet, for the first time, her father.

This is almost a Jerry Springer moment as I dare to ask why she hasn’t met him before now – and mom’s gaze is completely level as she tells me they split soon after the daughter was born and he “wasn’t ready till now, but now he’s in a much better place” which the cynical side of my brain interprets as ‘out of prison’.

We’re due into Tucson shortly before 2am and he’s meeting the train, in what promises to be the kind of middle of the night childhood trauma the extended analysis of which should in later years buy her therapist a Porsche.

Our merry foursome is completed by an unshaven gentleman who has arrived for dinner in a powder blue surgical scrub top with almost matching boxer shorts possibly not intended for street wear. He prefers train travel ‘for health reasons’ and ‘because of all that security stuff at airports’ so I mentally X-ray him for weapons (not much concealed in those shorts: definitely no loaded weapon but he may be packing a small slingshot with very loose elastic).

He’s conversationally acute as he describes his itinerary from Los Angeles to some burg beyond Portland, Maine, via a seven hour layover across New Year’s eve in San Antonio and another of five hours overnight in Chicago. He is traveling in a seat, not a sleeper, and won’t arrive home until January 4th having spent five consecutive nights on trains or in station waiting rooms. He is certifiably insane.

Shortly after dinner we skip forward a time zone and at 10pm it seems justifiable to make up the bed in the roomette. I thought at first the upper berth was a proper mattress and the lower one formed of sliding the two seats together but concealed in the upper fold-down is a complete set of mattress, sheets and blankets which make the lower option even more cushy. I like that word, it’s American but I don’t apologise for using it.

It’s certainly relaxing as I watch on my laptop the Christmas special of Downton Abbey whilst we barrel through the starlit mesas of Arizona in a surreal movie collision of the 3.10 to Yuma with the 4.50 from Paddington. I have to catch the conclusion in the morning and Matthew proposes to Mary in the snow with my eyes both squinting from the rising sun and, go on I admit it, misty. I seem to have got in touch with my emotions in the last couple of days.

Sensitive to the needs of passengers not to be disturbed till morning, the train conductor elaborated the rules for coach passengers disembarking before dawn: a coded series of coloured dockets is placed over their seats so they can be selectively awakened just before arrival. It’s all very well managed and I’m barely aware of the stops in the night, except perhaps surfacing momentarily at Tucson to silently wish Esmeralda luck for her first meeting with her daddy.

The rocking motion of the train is both restful and potentially conducive to masturbation but I resist. Got to save something for New Year’s Eve.

Palm Springs Modern

It’s that unholy hour between breakfast and the time the sun’s warmed the garden sufficiently for sitting out, which encourages either quiet reflection or a small sense of desperation, I’m not sure which.

I’m really enjoying the house and its facilities, in many ways it’s like being at home – everything I actually need is within reach, but the ticking of the clock is getting on my nerves. I mean the real ticking, of a cheap and rather ugly stainless steel wheel-spoke timepiece in the kitchen, not my life ebbing away. But that too.

I’m spending more time here than planned, mainly because of my own stupidity: my driving licence was due for renewal in early December. When I got the reminder I thought it was just a request to update the photograph and that the currency of the licence would continue normally while the vehicle agency received the picture and sent me a new card.

Evidently not, as the charming man at the Alamo car rental desk in the airport pointed out very gently once he’d deciphered the tiny numerals. Not even pretending there was an American/British differential in the way we recorded our date and month numbers saved me, American 3/12/11 being even earlier than ours. Fortunately Palm Springs is very walkable and nothing’s more than a short taxi ride away.

Ian’s rented a bike and has gone out to re-photograph whichever of the five hundred 1950s modernist buildings in Palm Springs have so far escaped his attention so I have the place to myself. I’m not complaining: travelling with a friend rather than a lover supplies just enough companionship to make it feel as though you’re not entirely alone, but our different circadian rhythms of sleep, eating and drinking mean the overlap is small.

He doesn’t like to compromise on those things, but then again why should he? It’s his holiday as much as mine and for once his preference for a 9.30pm bedtime actually suits this town which for nightlife at least is midway between sleepy and deceased.

So like all gay men with time on their hands, we turn to the internet for amusement. Oh, there is a Cable TV/DVD package in the property but we haven’t managed to turn it on, and the hosts thoughtfully didn’t provide any instructions how to use it: something else I’m not unduly distressed about because apart from anything else it’s meant I’ve learned how to download movies from iTunes.

Back to the internet. This being Palm Springs and me being something of a poster boy for the recentlly-developed category of ‘older gay men’ for which the town is somewhat notorious, I’ve been flattered by the attention.

What I’ve been less flattered by is the format in which the invitations to meet have been couched. They tend to be of the ‘Hot. I’ll be free at 4.45 for an hour if you care to come by’ rather than attended by flowers, dinner, kind or even polysyllabic words.

I am not such an old romantic or recycled Mama Cass as to assume that when love comes to me it will be with rockets, bells and poetry but I’d rather it wasn’t timetabled like a dental appointment and engendering the same amount of pleasure in its anticipation, despite the resemblance not only in the scheduling but also I suspect in the potential restriction of the dialogue to ‘open wide’ and ‘just a little prick’.

So, at least at the time of writing, I’ve resisted such temptations.

Almost everyone online here is trawling for sex outside their ‘committed relationship’, has come to Palm Springs on a sort of sexual tourism vacation to one of the clothing-optional gay ‘resorts’ in the desert (you get the feeling these resorts are automatically prefixed by ‘last’), or is somehow otherwise merely scratching the itch.

I’ve started reading ‘The Velvet Rage’ which is a book by American psychologist Alan Downs attempting to explain why gay men are so preternaturally angry and how our behaviour to each other in sexual and social interaction is so frequently brutal, but I haven’t got far enough into the chapters to reach the one about how to convert pruritic internet interest into actual affection and warmth.

That may need a sequel.

Autres Temps, Autres Moeurs

I’m not sure if I can pull all or any of this into a connected thread but three things happened recently to make me think about (my and others’) gay life.

Ken Clarke the Justice Secretary who I’m convinced moonlights as the Churchill Insurance nodding dog barked some stuff this week about thinking there ought to be different categories of rape – but seemed ignorant of the fact this crime can and does happen to men. The LGMC is currently rehearsing to sing in aid of the male rape crisis charity, Survivors UK.

On the excellent author Paul Burston’s facebook thread, there’s been massive chat about how ‘barebacking’ (unprotected anal sex) is becoming what you might call ‘fashionable’ again not just among older participants who consider that even if they got HIV it is unlikely to significantly shorten their span, but among teen and twentysomethings described as waving their arses in the air in clubs and saunas to invite the invasion of what we once called ‘all comers’ but meant it about boxing. A lot of socially conscientious gay men wrote to defend their right to do so.

A 27-year old guy messaged me online yesterday and recalled a day and night he’d spent at my flat, revisiting intricate details from the key rack in the hall, exactly what I cooked for him, the painting in my living room, the sex , several complex things about my work, hobbies and travel plans, the specifics of how we subsequently broke up, to an ancient anecdote I must have told him about an acquaintance visiting a bondage hustler in San Francisco when there was a fire alarm and the building was evacuated leaving him tied to a kitchen table.

Even prompted by a photograph, I cannot remember a thing about him or our encounter, and it’s barely seven years ago when I didn’t entertain so many hot twenty-year-olds that my memory should erase one so very easily.

Of course some water has flown under my bridge since then but I can’t believe that in the ten years I’ve lived in this flat, sex has become so throwaway, and, if you consider what’s happening in the clubs, life apparently so throwaway too.

It’s trite to blame the internet explosion: gay men were promiscuous long before gaydar, Grindr and their subspecies, but even the most enthusiastic slut would have had more work to do to find partners for anything other than a fumble in a public lavatory.

Throughout my twenties, there was only one place for ‘personal ads’ – the back pages of the fortnightly newspaper ‘Gay News’, dull as a parish magazine and devoid of nudity, it still attracted the attentions of Mrs Whitehouse and a private prosecution for blasphemy in which the editor narrowly escaped jail. But, with careful wording, you could advertise your preferences (no photos, no hanky codes, no reference to active/passive or specific sexual choices) and hope for a response – replies had to be sent to a box number, with a loose first-class stamp for each, and the paper forwarded them a week or so later.



I almost can’t tell you the excitement of receiving those letters. I lived in Southampton at the time and a package of a dozen or more responses meant contact, of a sort, with men in more major cities and a window on their lifestyles which was almost unknown to me. Of course they were all handwritten or individually typed – even photocopiers were pretty rare – and generally contained a fuzzy photo booth picture, since anything racier would have had to be taken to a specialist printer as Boots wouldn’t process shots of your bum or genitals. I went to one in Acton High Street once, and it cost a fortune.

If you liked any of your respondents, you again had to craft an engagingly-worded letter, wait for him to receive it and reply either by post, or phone if you were brave enough to give out your (traceable) landline number. And if you were in when he rang, I’m not sure even answerphones were hugely popular in the 70s and their fiddly cassettes often mangled your messages anyhow.

The point I’m making is not just that it took time to arrange to meet, whether for sex or a potential relationship, but that the back-and-forth of advert, wait, responses and reply made you think two or three times, whether in anticipation or anxiety, about the guys and certainly in my case meant I probably only got as far as actually meeting a very small percentage of my suitors.

It was through one such advert that I got courted to stand in the local elections, and for the Conservative Party, which was a bizarre by-product, but an entirely other story.

This is also in the days before the ‘gay cancer’ was identified, and our only condom-favouring anxiety was to avoid pregnancy, and curable STDs like gonorrhea and NSU. I don’t think I used a condom at all before I was thirty, with men or women except for Vivienne Segal, the University bike, but that was because you’d really have been safer with her to keep your coat on. Funnily enough, she became a genetics lecturer.

So is it better or worse that you can turn on your smartphone or computer and find a compatible sex partner in minutes? Or that you can see his dangly bits from every perspective other than that of his personality? I’d be a hypocrite to say I haven’t taken advantage of this, but in all honesty I do miss a bit of mystery, and romance, and perhaps the optimism of how we went about this back in the day.

As for the barebacking – to quote Joyce Grenfell ‘I am not easily shockable, but I am offendable’ and for a new generation to deliberately ignore the naked truth that barebacking can kill, and kill both parties, seems offensive folly - given the number of deaths and the vast back catalogue of campaigning on the subject by gay activists and health workers.

Maybe in his revision of the legislation, Clarke should be considering reclassifying virally-loaded unprotected sex as ‘assault with a deadly weapon’. Or at least statutory rape.

I think what most horrified me was that there’s a whole terminology for young men who deliberately seek to acquire HIV. They have parties at which HIV positive 'gift-givers' are incited to infect them. They call themselves ‘bugchasers’ which attributes a fake cuteness and taboo-breaking impishess to something that’s eventually fatal and ought to be criminal.

I feel dirty. I want a bath, and a cuddle.

The Tempest

It’s not often you can say ‘I woke screaming in the night’ but I do admit it. I’m not sure if it was the storm itself or the sound of my own terror that actually roused me, but at quarter to five this morning I was fairly sure the end of the world had come. The lightning, frequent to the point of being constant, so penetrated through curtains, mosquito net, sheet, blanket and tightly closed eyelids that I thought it was actually IN the room and was convinced my corneas were about to be seared.

The attendant thunderclaps matched exactly the intense flashes so the storm was obviously directly overhead and despite the wind and the lashing rain, didn’t sound to be moving in any direction as every blast physically shook my little beach cottage like bombing. I thought of getting under the bed like they did in air-raids but settled for covering myself as completely as possible with blankets and pillows in case of flying glass from the battered windows.

It was getting light by the time it moved out to sea.

I like thunderstorms. I can happily lie awake listening to torrential rain and the rumble of thunder for hours, but the power and intensity of this one, and the sense of immediate proximate violence really did scare me.

Midmorning and you almost wouldn’t know it had happened. Leaves and debris have been neatly swept up by the morning groundsmen, people are swimming, the loudest sound is the waterfall in the swimming pool. But still an occasional offshore rumble warns that the cyclone may not have done with us yet.

It’s the midpoint of my stay, and a chance to assess progress. I’ve dropped 10lbs and whilst I still have love handles at least they no longer look as though they’re attached to one of Emerald Cunard’s bulkier steamer trunks wedged in a companionway on the Queen Mary. How much of that is sweat and expelled alimentary detritus is hard to judge, as is whether it will all return with the first bacon sandwich, but my prime objective was to tackle the diabetic blood sugar levels by adopting the Ayurvedic diet, and any weight loss is a bonus.

They arranged blood tests this morning to check my sugar levels, and whilst the poor man found it hard to find a vein (I have no idea why mine are so deep seated, I don’t recall having been a heroin addict in my teens although I may have blocked it out) the results will be available in 24 hours instead of having to wait two weeks courtesy of the NHS. What I can also say is that whilst my GP takes two or three goes with my blood pressure to find a reading he’s willing to enter on the computer, usually settling for something like 135/85, here it’s been 110/70 five mornings in a row.

I also feel quite well. My mind has stopped racing. The aches and pains on raising or twisting my arm for which I’ve been seeing a chiropractor for a year now seem to have abated, as has the old cartilage problem in my knee, and as I’ve mentioned before the flexibility and freedom of movement in my head neck and shoulders has improved beyond measure with daily acupuncture. Well, not today because Malaka my favourite acupuncturist has gone to visit her parents in Colombo, but we may resume tomorrow. Her temporary replacement is the restaurant dietician who may be equally qualified or judging by the number of clients who have said 'it hurts' may just be an enthusiastic member of the hotel darts team.

I don’t seem to have any cravings, either. Not for favourite foods, or chocolate, and certainly not for alcohol: I saw a facebook photo of friends drinking outdoors in the unexpected English heatwave this week and felt almost nauseous at the thought of multiple pints of lager. Mind you, some of my friends can make you feel nauseous even without a drink in hand. I’ve certainly no intention of giving up but it’s nice to know you can survive a month without it.

If I have a food fantasy, it’s for a bacon and avocado sandwich. Not in itself a great calorific sin, at least not if you grill the bacon and drain it, and use wholemeal bread, low-fat mayonnaise and only eat them occasionally. Unlike the first two years I worked at Canary Wharf when I bought one nearly every day, almost certainly made with undrained streaky and fully-leaded Hellmans.

And the other thing I’d like is a tomato. Yes, that harmless, watery, vitamin-rich, low-fat, low-carb feature of many a Western diet plan is proscribed here, they don’t use them either cooked or cold. Apparently the cheeky little redskins unbalance your doshas. Who knew?

AND THE RESULTS ARE IN ...

Cholesterol down from 4.8 to 3.4

Blood sugar down from 8.2 to 4.4, below the 'threshold' for diabetes at 7.0

All other blood tests in the 'normal' range

and one interesting phenomenon, I'm blood group O Negative, one of the rarest, less than 5% of the global population has it. So not much chance of a transfusion in an emergency ...

still, all in all, a day for celebration.

Vatha, Vatha everywhere ...

Last night was the wettest and stormiest night so far, and according to one of the doctors this morning officially a cyclone. It certainly began with one of those ground-shaking thunderstorms that drenches everything in the first five minutes, but fortunately always after dark. So far.

This morning has white skies with a strong breeze from the sea.

It’s apparently a good day for wrapping your head in a tight cloth bandage.

Which is what they’ve done to me following a treatment called Shirodhara – which I thought was one of the Japanese guards in Tenko – but turns out to be Ayurvedic for being poured on from a great height with warm herbal oil, it drizzles on to your forehead and is squelched into and out from your hair by a pair of masseurs before your greasy grey-green Limpopo-smelling locks are finally swathed in the cotton headgear and tightly knotted. Sic transit Gloria.

In my case the Gloria being Swanson except this fashion accessory isn’t quite the full Norma Desmond since it is more Russian peasant than Sunset Boulevard in style: I look like a cross between Mother Courage and the cook on the Battleship Potemkin.

It’s meant to be a revelatory experience, freeing your mind and encouraging deep relaxation although it might have been more stress-reducing if the two masseurs who administered it hadn’t chatted in whispers to each other throughout the procedure. I’ve slept a bit during the day but I can’t say it’s made me feel vastly different although I’m certainly relaxed, and I put that down more to yesterday’s double acupuncture when she inserted about sixteen needles into my neck and shoulders and I’ve never felt more fluid in that department. Sixteen more and I’ll be Linda Blair.

On Shirodhara days you’re meant to refrain from swimming, sunbathing or even washing and if you can’t just think beautiful thoughts it’s OK to do a little light reading. I’ve leafed through the ‘Hello’ I brought from the plane and now know twice as much about Kate Middleton and her make-up habits as I’ll ever find useful, as well as having an opportunity to wonder what is the legitimate earthly purpose of people like Peaches Geldof and Elizabeth Hurley or why cap-toothed Gurkha-crusading arctic-sledging Joanna Lumley has sold her soul as an ambassador for Wrigley’s chewing-gum.

I’ve also found my mind wandering and recalling people I’ve not thought about seriously for years, notably Robert Liederman – for a long time ‘the love of my life’ – an American I met in about 1976 and with whom I had tempestuous and romantic trysts in London, Amsterdam and New York – including the New Year’s Eve his boyfriend tried to kill me - until we lost contact back in the days before you could stalk someone successfully on the internet. Somewhere in a box I’ve still got his letters and I’m horribly afraid also the gushing gauche carbon copies of what I wrote to him.

Carbon copies, that dates me.

Some of my seventies flashback may have been prompted by reading Simon Doonan’s memoir ‘Beautiful People’ about growing up gay in a low-rent suburb of Reading and then escaping to London and the States. He’s now creative director of Barney’s in New York so I can’t say our lives are parallel but we’re contemporaries and much of his youthful experience in Reading is similar to mine in the North. I was quite tickled to realise that I knew his best friend Biddie as well as Biddie’s cabaret partner Eve Ferret, in fact I’d hired them to perform at a succession of office Christmas parties I organised at YRM.

Doonan’s life moved to LA and New York at the start of the ‘plague’ and he lost a lover to AIDS almost before the disease had been accurately named. As I said, I’d lost touch with Rob and heard nothing more about him until about ten years ago when I had dinner with a mutual friend whom I’d also not seen in the intervening time and who mentioned, as though I already knew it, that Rob had also died of AIDS in 1982.

You’d be surprised how devastating it can be to hear of a twenty-year-old death.

When I was in New York three weeks ago, I had brunch with Susan and Rhea at the Fairway supermarket on the Upper West Side and effectively just round the corner from Rob’s apartment, so took a nostalgic walk to find the address on West End Avenue, but too many of the buildings looked similar and I’m not so sure I pinpointed it.

Simon Doonan found fortune and happiness through moving from the English provinces to America at a time when such geographic flexibility was comparatively rare. I do think if I’d been brave enough to do the same then a great love might have blossomed. Then again, I might also have died in 1982.

It’s six o’clock and time for some more foul-smelling medication. The four o’clock libations have been changed and I now have to drink half a bottle of what tastes like the vinegar from the pickled onion jar. Which is a taste I’m familiar with because when I came home from University to critique my mother’s Sunday salad-making and tell her on good authority that smart people made salad with ‘oil and vinegar’ rather than Heinz Salad Cream she promptly dressed a bowlful of lettuce, cucumber and tomato with the juice from the pickle jar and a ladle of oil from the chip pan.

I’ll have been here a week tomorrow, and whilst I’ve lost some weight I don’t want to quote numbers or speculate about the outcome, partly because it’s difficult to assess what counts as sweat and ‘vitiated Vatha’ (which is what you produce on the loo) or to know whether I may yet break out to find beer, chips or chocolate in the nearby village ...

The Curious Incident Of The Drink In The Night-Time

temple is tended by very young trainee monks

Sunday was Full Moon day and at 5 in the afternoon they bussed us to the local temple, site of the biggest Buddha in Sri Lanka, a 60 metre modern man-mountain where we milled about with the locals making their offerings at the temple. However anti-religion you are it’s hard to dislike Buddhism because it seems to engender such kindness, and since it’s anti-violence doesn’t tend to wage wars or subterfuge against those who don’t subscribe.

It certainly produces smiling people who don’t push and shove their way to the front of a queue, even to do their devotions, and there seemed to be much sharing of fruit and flowers, including with us: overhearing Lesley and I debating whether we should have bought a garland at the gate, a charming family offered us two handfuls of their beautiful white blooms to scatter at the feet of the statue. Try pinching your neighbour’s chrysanths next Harvest Festival and see how far it gets you.


There were a few retail stalls around the temple, including an incongruous ‘Highland Ice Cream’ van on blocks under a sea-almond tree and a stall promoting an organic green tea ‘guaranteed to cure diabetes in three weeks’. I’ve paid nearly three grand for this trip to reduce my blood sugar and steady my diabetic development, I shall be exceedingly miffed if it could have been cured by a three hundred rupee packet of tea.

When I came back the room attendant was arranging the mosquito net and just as I was leaving for dinner I noticed a bloody great – well, 8cm long – cockroach basking in the netting, on the inside. I told him to get rid of it, completely forgetting that his Buddhist tendencies would mean he wasn’t allowed to kill anything and there then followed ten minutes of pantomime whilst he chased it around the room, up the curtains and under the wardrobe trying to coax it into a sanitary towel bag. Eventually I stunned it with the bug spray and he nudged it into the bag to take away and, I assume, release into the wild.

Like a cockroach Schwartzenegger, it will probably be back.

Another rainstorm broke during dinner and the pounding of the surf and thunder should have combined as a soothing sedative if it hadn’t been for some German banker twunt at dinner sounding off about how this was the sort of weather that made snakes seek refuge indoors and 80 of the 87 indigenous species were dangerous.

So I didn’t exactly drop off to dreamland in an instant, even having checked under the bed and in the shower drain for sheltering serpents, and after some fitful napping realised about midnight that I hadn’t taken my 9pm medicine – even though I’d mixed it with hot water and left it beside the bed. So I chugged it, and the disgusting residual taste meant I had to grab a bottle of water from the dressing table and wash it down with that.

It was only when I put the light on I saw that the bottle contained a milky liquid suspiciously like cleaning fluid that I realised it was probably something the room boy had left earlier.

Panic ensued, not just in me but in the two doctors who arrived within minutes and then later the receptionist, room attendant and cleaner who had all been summoned from their beds by management to give account of how this bottle could have been left in my room and what exactly were its contents. And a fair amount of ranting, largely from me, about how cleaning products should never be put into drinking water bottles and what sort of place were they running that didn’t have proper health and safety procedures to avoid such risks.

In return the doctors had an urgent debate about whether I should be taken to hospital for a stomach pump or just given a total purgative in the morning if I lived that long.

There was a lot of shaking the bottle, holding it up to the light and sniffing it, before anyone summoned up the courage to tip a drop into his palm and taste it – it looked like lemon barley water but had no scent, no flavour and certainly wasn’t corrosive, so we concluded that the balance of probability was that whatever it was wouldn’t kill me, at least not tonight, but the doctor made me drink a litre and a half of water just in case.

Obviously I survived otherwise I couldn’t be typing this now, but I did have considerable anxieties and a pretty bad night.

It was only the next afternoon, when I was taking my handful of ‘Western’ medicine which includes a daily soluble aspirin that I remembered a previous occasion back home when the aspirin once slipped back into the drinking vessel. And clouded the water ...

Sports Day

Friday

After a night of glorious thunderstorms I wake too late and have to combine my 6am and 8am medications with breakfast in order to make an 8.30 start on the treatments. It’s the same rituals as yesterday but fortunately the acupuncture’s at the end instead of the beginning and I’m fairly relaxed when it comes round.

The woman on the adjacent slab introduces herself as Lesley, one of the two other ‘English’ guests, although she actually lives in Holland. She’s outgoing and funny, and chatting to her takes my mind off the needling. At lunch she introduces me to the other one, Andrew, on first impression an unreconstructed old-colonial club type of stentorian voice who during the fifteen minutes he talks at me from the adjacent table doesn’t ask me a single question about myself. I must be a ‘good listener’ because at least I don’t allow my glazed expression to transmit to him, but for a man who’s lived in Borneo, Argentina and New York, not to mention travelled to places like North Korea and Mongolia, he’s surprisingly unforthcoming, although he did warm up on subsequent meetings and turned out to be amazingly well-connected.

In continuation of the new year holiday, this afternoon is the staff sports day and they gather, with their copious offspring, to play the sort of games which would have graced a summer fete in England in the sixties. Perhaps in rural villages it still does, but it’s rare and charming to see children queue willingly to be blindfolded to play ‘put the eye on the Elephant’ (work it out) whilst their fathers have an adult version where also blindfolded they have to hit with a big stick one of three crocks of coconut water suspended on a wire. At the edge of the sea they’ve rigged up a log on two cross timber supports and opponents sit astride it with a hand tied behind their back to swing a rag-filled bag at each other and see who’s knocked off first to loud cheering.

The kids compete to drink Fanta from a baby’s bottle, there’s a raucous three-team race to transfer water in cupped hands from a bucket to a bottle, musical chairs, a beauty contest and a fancy dress competition. Everyone joins in with such innocent good humour that in sharp contrast I’m reminded of ghastly hierarchical company picnics at Barclays, or terrifying office Christmas parties with dire food and gut-wrenching cheap wine and 63-year old Tina the Cleaner getting her tits out. Here, there’s no alcohol, or smoking, but a good time is definitely had by all.



My masseur brings his two small sons to shake hands, and makes them speak a few words of English which is brave of them and nice of him: the boys are carefully turned out in their ‘best’ shirts and pressed jeans and their mother has a sparkly sari swathing her ample frame. I’m reminded that in this culture to be larger and rounder is desirable for married ladies, they seem a happy family as the boys each hold dad’s hand and steer him to the next entertainment.

There’s a table laden with parcels wrapped in yellow paper and it seems ‘all have won and all must have prizes’ as Alice was told after the Caucus Race in Through the Looking Glass – again it’s a credit to this family business that not only all the children but all the adults receive something with which they seem to be pleased.
Either I’ve become acclimatised very quickly, or it’s much less humid today and typing this on the terrace of my little cottage (more about the accommodation tomorrow) just after sunset with the breeze from the pitch black ocean, it’s really not unpleasant.

Talking of which, it must be time for some more medicine.