A slow day in Mai Mee Nakhon.

 

What about Arthur? We left him in Thailand in present time. He was riding his Honda Dream into town to get his bookshop open. Here he comes now…

It’s another slow, hot day in Mai Mee Nakhon. Arthur parks his Honda Dream outside the Last Gasp Bookshop. The shop across the road is still selling plastic buckets. Some dogs are sleeping in the sharp shadows cast by the Krung Thai Bank. An ice-truck makes a delivery at the 711. A few motorbikes and a tuktuk or two putter around aimlessly.

Arthur has  been very preoccupied lately. More so than usual. Simon is coming to Bangkok with a BBC crew and Arthur has agreed to show them around. Thinking about Simon brings back all kinds of memories. Schooldays, jazz clubs, Paris, Turkey, Afghanistan, India. It interferes with his other daydreaming. Did it all really happen? Where does the time go?


Ten years in Thailand now and not a lot to show for it. Still he doesn’t see it as entirely wasted, not at all, and as for the bookstore, well it isn’t a bad life. Or hadn’t been until recently, he should say. Lately it had got a little depressing. Hardly any customers and now the Thais are starting that thing again about falang not being able to work in their own bloody businesses. Enforcing some petty law. Ha. They are good at doing that when it suits them. So now technically he can’t move the books around or handle money…typical Thai bureaucratic nonsense really but it means every now and again he has to hide in the storeroom upstairs and hire a Thai student to run the shop. Two students really because it needs one to sort the books and stack the shelves…in alphabetical order ha ha, and another to sit behind the till staring into space. The other problem is his own literary aspirations. It’s very frustrating, suffering from a severe case of writer’s block and being surrounded all day long by other people’s outpourings. Not ideal conditions for writing that’s for sure. Or maybe it’s too easy to blame the shop. Perhaps he just isn’t cut out for writing. There are so many possibilities to think about, so many ways of looking at things. Maybe that’s why writers use a group of different characters…get them arguing and discussing amongst themselves, showing different points of view. James Joyce for instance. He was just writing about himself really.

Arthur's mind wanders back to that fateful day in Madras. Yes he had been lost and confused but he had made a decision. He chose to go back to England and confront his  mother and his pregnant girlfriend. He deserves some credit for that surely...