Nautical metaphors.

Finally a bit of good news. Oscar has decided to fly to Barbados from Grenada! He's had enough of me and Millie and he has a standing invite from Simon Cowell.

I think he changed his mind when I explained how difficult it can be sailing East in the Caribbean. You're fighting the wind all the time I said. Bloody great waves. You'll be sick for sure.

Which will leave me on my own. People often ask me if I get horny stuck on a boat by myself. Well it’s a bit personal but you expect questions like that when you have a blog. Let’s just say I’m single-handed these days. Do I miss the girls? Yes and no.

You may recall that I left Pattaya with a crew of girls. There was Ning and Nong, trainee masseurs from Buriram who used to hang around my bar and of course Nyum from Vietnam, our navigator, who had a very interesting story. Her father was a Dentist in Saigon. He was also a Recividist. I looked it up. That’s someone who starts to have second thoughts about Communism. People like that got sent away for Re-education. I’m glad I wasn’t a Recividist in Vietnam. I would have hated being sent away for Re-education. Come to think of it I don’t think I would have made a very good Communist at all. Nyum’s father didn’t like the idea of being Re-educated either. Somehow he managed to get himself, his wife and Nyum on a leaky boat. But it didn’t do him much good. His plan was to get to America and make false teeth for horses but he was drowned with Nyum’s mother in the Gulf of Thailand after being robbed and thrown off the leaky boat by Thai fishermen. Nyum drifted around for few days clinging to a packing crate. She thinks this is when she learned Celestial Navigation. A Russian freighter picked her up and took her to an internment camp in Hong Kong where she learned English watching TV.

From Hong Kong she got sent back to Vietnam where she sold things made out of Coca Cola cans to tourists. Around that time she met an Austrian Count, a proper one, descended from the Hapsburgs, who paid for her education. That’s how come she has a degree in Freudian Psychology from Ho Chi Minh University. For someone who grew up on the streets of Saigon she also has very good teeth. When I met her she was working as a waitress in a restaurant in Dalat. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Dalat. Very popular place for Vietnamese honeymooners. So that’s Nyum in a nutshell. Fascinating girl. I’m still filling in the details.  

Things changed, as they do. Nyum left us on Mona Island, got a job with Madonna. Ning and Nong came with me to Oscar's place before running off to Miami with my credit card. Can’t really blame them. There wasn’t much future with me. Knowing those two it won’t take them long to find rich geriatric husbands. They may not be intellectual giants but they know what men like. And they have a good grasp of economics.

And I’m happy to be rid of Ning and Nong to be honest. They were starting to get on my nerves. Women do that. But at the same time I don’t want to be on my own. It’s a problem. So it looks like hand-shandies for a while. Doesn’t leave a lot to do in the evenings. Usually I just get drunk and insult people on the internet. Basically it’s just me and delirium tremens cataracting toward the abyss…not the movie by James Cameron (starring Ed Harris)….the existential abyss. But I do miss Nyum. A very independent young lady. I used to love watching her handling the halyards. She was the only one who could hoist a spinnaker without strangling herself.

Still it does feel like a storm of depression is building up to be followed in due course by a tsunami of despair and other meteorological metaphors. Do I care? Not me. I'll  just sail off forever on the infinite sea. Look on the bright side….no girls means no more tampons in the bilge pump.