Blue Sky at Night, Fisherman's Friend

Poverty has struck once again but the constant gardener is undeterred. My aim in life is to have a better ginger garden than the smoking area at Changi Airport. The groundwork has been well and truly laid with this 80-baht banana from Jatujak:

And this 60-baht ginger and her sisters, which attract a tiny species of wasp (click to see it horribly enlarged):

The walls will by and by be convered in teen thook kae or lizard's feet. I ordered 10 near Jatujak last week after my visa renewal ordeal at the mad government complex in Laksi, and then when I made my way back through the heat and smog on Saturday they'd forgotted to get them. I went home dejected but just on the off-chance asked the garden centre 100 m from the house, and they said sure, we've got plenty, 20 baht a pop. Sometimes there simply aren't the words:

From Tom and Mam come a couple of frangipani, which are branches that their landlady's factotum ripped off the trees (with his teeth, it looked like) and put in water. That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Indeed it has:

I'll plant a banyan tree in the bottom right-hand corner in due course, they root in anything; it may over the years bust that hideous wall, but they tend to be holy so there's nothing the neighbours can do but grit their teeth and worship. A sea almond tree in the other corner, I think, they also root in any ground no matter how stony.

Leo and Cheetah don't care one way or the other:

Lantern Jaw

After all those years of living in Chinatown and finding there a single shop that sells them lanterns, I was wandering around the bottom of the road here in search of some noodles today when I happened on a shop that makes lanterns to order. They also make elaborate funerary and ancestral-rite thingies, and were surrounded by frames in various states of completion. Is that--? I said. Whatchoo want, the woman said, fabric or paper?

All very exciting; it'll have to wait till pay day, but maybe I can have a more interesting design than the red lettering on white.

Meanwhile, a ramble round the houses.

Coda

The end is never the end, is it? Thanks to my mother I'm now in possession of a brand-new camera, so there's no reason why it should ever end.

At any rate, once I'd moved in it got to the point where the idiots proved such utter and complete idiots that I threw them out. What a pig's ear Nek's morons made of every single job they attempted. Utterly, utterly useless. I don't see how the world could possibly be a worse place if they were wiped out by some horrible disease. The paint jobs, as you can't quite see in the pictures, are abysmal, the plumbing is a fucking disgrace. I won't start on the job they made of the first-floor polished concrete which, until they dripped paint all over it that embedded itself deeply in the cement, was really quite nice. These things are best forgottten.

One day on the phone Nek, then hard at work ruining someone else's house in Lad Phrao, whined at me that he doesn't want me to complain to him all the time, he doesn't like, what would I think if someone complained to me all the time? I said he who takes the money listens uncomplainingly to the complaints, and at any rate if he wasn't such an idiot there'd have to be none. Serves me right for being cheap, I suppose, because in the end they won, simply by doing an even worse job than their low fee would justify. Without Nun it'd have been a complete disaster.

Never mind, never mind. They're gone, alhamdullillah. As you can see, the cats are happy:

Or almost:

And so am I, almost. The air is a million times better here, and in the small hours, despite having only a fan to cool the bedroom, I cover myself in the Cambodian scarf Cheetah is hogging in the picture. The local iron man, under the Klong Tan flyover, did an excellent job on the bookshelves and desk, and the maid is a treasure -- to the point where Tom and Mam have pretty much appropriated her, and I had to summon her back from their house last week to do the ironing. Admittedly the washing wasn't quite dry, so she thought she'd go over there and do whatever needed to be done first and come back as and when, which is fine.

Progress from now on will be too slow to warrant blogging, but I may put up a little tour of the area, with running commentary. The upstairs bathroom will be built eventually, and yes, I realise the Chinese lanterns out front are too small; I was too mean to spend an extra 200 baht on the bigger ones, so they'll be replaced in due course.

Meanwhile I leave you with a mood picture of the view out front at eventide. As m'uncle rightly observes, sooner or later the ground floor will have to be equipped with bamboo blinds for privacy. I'm exposed when I'm cooking, and the locals are wondering whether it's a restaurant. The maid, Noi, suggested I open a 'cocktail lounge', which I'm sorry to say in the argot means a whorehouse:

The End

My camera disappeared in the move, so I'm afraid that's it.

Thank you for stopping by.

He Moves

The movers, five of them, turned up at 9 o'clock on Sunday morning and emptied the entire house of all valuables and invaluables within an hour, levering the hideous Chinese bed out over the front, strapping themselves to flowerpots the size of small mountains, everything. My belongings, such as they are, filled the whole lorry.  They drove over and performed the same manoeuvre in reverse and were all done before 1 o'clock. I've never seen anyone work so efficiently, or certainly not recently. All for 2,500 baht for the lorry and driver and 300 each for the strongmen, who would have been worth their weight in gold, but who am I to quibble. I gave them my TV and the dvd 'collection.'


Here, on the other hand, no progress at all had been made. The top floor was in the pristine state Nek had left it, gypsum wall a moonscape, airing holes uncut, dust an inch thick, no panels in the windows. A buck-toothed gentleman and the painter fixed the walls within about three hours -- as contrasted with the three weeks they'd remained unfixed -- and then I forced them to buy glass and do the back windows. On a Sunday? they said. Last Tuesday also good, said I, but failing that a Sunday will have to do. By the end of the day the windows were in, and I spent a restless night in my new bedroom listening to the cats explore their new home with anguished cries for help and orientation till I was well nigh out of my mind.

Cry Freon

The air conditioner has been installed:

You have to admire the concentration of the Chang: when he paints he paints and nothing can blur his focus, not the floor on which he's dribbling, not the bedroom lampshades he's generously slathering in emulsion, nothing. Silk doesn't really take to scraping, so they're ruined. On the first floor the drippings seeped into the concrete and are now preserved for all eternity under a layer of crystalline sealer; looks horrible where it's black. The only option is to sand the sealer down in those places, paint the splotches over thinly with the grey wall paint and seal it again. Luckily the sealer turns it roughly the same colour as the concrete, and if it's not overdone it'll serve. I nonetheless threw another screaming tantrum and cut 2,000 baht off Nek's total, which leaves zero.  

The welder plumbed -- so why don't I call him the plumber? -- quite well I think. He'll finish that today, attach handles to the first-floor windows, and patch all manner of holes with cement and generally tidy up. The useless pair spent another day desultorily scraping things off floors. The he-useless tends to wander off halfway through some minor task in search of more moonshine, and when he comes back he's forgotten where he was. Sad, of course, except he then bellows at the little wife to get a move on.

P.S. 'Quite well' my arse.

Designated Driver

Another day and Nun switched his phone on, only to tell me he's waiting for Nek to pick him up and bring him back. I told Nek to do it fast as the boys can't work on their own, partly because they don't want to and partly because they have limited resources. They can paint, but that's about it, and there's lots left to do, as you can be sure I pointed out.

Later I rang back and said can't you sit on a train or bus? It'll cost about 150 baht. He sounded as if this was the first he'd heard of these modern marvels and said he'd have to confer with Nek.

Later still he had some other reason why it's going to take several days, so I told him not to bother. The welder can apparently also plumb, and the coat of tile putty on the roof can wait till another day. Instead Nek can make me a little roof over the back door from the leftover iron or wood. All that remains is to add handles to the first-floor windows, put obscured glass in the top-floor windows, make a bathroom threshold and drain, and to sand down the botched paint job on the shutter and spray it instead. Oh, and replace the doorframe on the top floor. And put in some porous barrier in the courtyard to keep the sand in but allow the rainwater to flow out into the drain at the back.

PS: And fill in the hole next to the back door. And put a strip of rubber sheet at the bottom of that door.