On Sunday morning, we woke to wind
hammering the non-double glazed windows of our villa. Lunch in the Mae Rim
Plaza was spoiled by a gust of air as hot as a hairdryer that blew dust over
our plates. (Ruined my lunch, that did!)
As we rode into Chiang Mai, it started to
rain. The rain made everything feel slightly sticky, greasy and grubby. It
rained all afternoon and all night and has only stopped raining for a few
minutes before it starts up again. As I write this, it’s raining….it sounds
like England outside.
It’s not just spitty, half-hearted rain
either, it’s full on POURING rain that’s soaking the earth and making great big
puddles in the roads. It’s perfect movie watching weather, but my goal while I
was here was to finish a book I’ve been writing for what feels like a hundred
years, and apparently you need to ‘show up’ and not watch any movies to do
that. Count this blog as a warm up to the rest of the work that needs to be done
today.
I set myself a goal of 2,000 a day. You
might not think 2,000 words is very much, but it is when half of those words
are notes like [WHEN IS A WILL READ??] and [WHEN WERE CAR SEATS INVENTED?] 2,000 is a MISSION.
There are any number of distractions when
it comes to laying down your quota for the day; the internet, in particular,
YouTube, where you can get sucked into an hour long video hole of ‘research’;
social media, the newspapers, the writing blog I’ve got a bit addicted to (it’s
called terribleminds, all want to be writers should check it out. Once you’ve
done your word quota, of course.)
Cleaning – I must empty the shit bins and
the food bin, sweep the floors, change the bedding, wash up, do a load of
washing, hang that up, oooh it’s time for lunch!
Reading – mmm, I need some inspiration,
let’s read some authors I admire, I’ll have a coffee while I do that. Oooh, it’s
dinner time!
Work-out : never thought that doing
exercise would be an excuse to get out of writing.
THE FEAR: This is shit, it’s shit, it’s
shit. I am not brainy enough to be a writer. I don’t know if I can even
pronounce some of these words I am using. I want to write like Nabokov. Only Nabokov
can write like Nabokov, I just sound like:
THE BLOCK: For the first two weeks we
were in the villa, and I was supposed to be writing, I was struck by the realisation
that this whole idea was ridiculous. I gave up my job and used my savings to
come here and NOT write. Everything about the idea, from actually coming here
to the story I had planned out seemed ridiculous. For a few days, I just
started at a blank page, and then at the blue sky with the mountains in the
distance. I listened to some music – mostly Polymorphia from The Shining, Soren Juul’s ‘Ambitions’ and
some Fever Ray. Listening to creepy music helps when you’re trying to write
something creepy.
Sick of non- productive days, where I
felt like I didn’t deserve to go out for dinner, or do some yoga, I thought
that any writing was better than no writing, so I just started with a stream of
consciousness. It’s working so far. Whenever I’m a bit stuck, I don’t worry
about the perfect sentence or if the story is being told in a linear fashion.
That can all come later. 2,000 words have to been down that day, and they
cannot include the notes I make as I go along. I am slightly dreading that when
I go back to edit, 90% of it isn’t going to make any sense.
Remember I said that we met American
teacher, Donal? He told us the reason why Thais drive so crazily is because they
don’t care about dying. They’re thinking, ‘doesn’t matter if I die, I get to
come back, so why worry about it?’
I don’t know if this applies to the
Muslim Thais that live in Southern Thailand, (what’s their excuse for poor
driving? As far as I am aware, there’s no reincarnation in Islam), so this
seems like quite a sweeping generalisation.
We were at the karaoke shake on Saturday
night (they got us to sing one song, and then asked us to sing more. I suspect
this is because we were so bad, they were laughing at us.) One of the men left. He was so drunk, he couldn’t balance the
clutch properly, and couldn’t get up the little slope out of the carpark.
No-one stopped him from getting in the car, though they all stood in the road
after he’d finally driven off, looking a bit worried. The guy couldn’t even
stand up properly, so not sure how able he was to operate the car.
There’s no real reason to NOT drink and
drive here if you’re of the opinion it doesn’t matter if you die while doing so. And if you get
caught by the police – that’s no deterrent either. The taxi driver that picked
us up from Chiang Mai airport told us it’s a 5,000 baht fine and a 5 day ban. A
quick Google search doesn’t seem to come up with a definitive answer on this,
so there’s no way of telling if the taxi driver is right or not. (what does
seem to be uniform is that bus and taxi drivers cannot drink at all while
working….that’s…. reassuring.)
On the way back from Makro yesterday, I
saw a car on the other side of the road hit the central reservation barriers.
He was only going slowly, so not sure how this happened, but the back wheels of
the car were up on the curb (the central reservations are marked by yellow
fences up on raised concrete strips.)
It’s just another mystery to add to the Mystery List of the
Thai Way of Life, like, why do the girls seem to favour clothes with sparkly embellishments
on them? Why do they not refrigerate the pork sandwiches in 7/11? In the
market, why do they give you your purchases in TWO plastic bags? Why are there
no self-service petrol stations? Why do your meals not all come out at the same
time? Why are they so fond of 80s style imported jeans? And why does everyone
wear face masks in shopping centres??
