It is odd, to wake up from a red-eye and valium-exacerbated overlong afternoon nap in a nice comfortable bed to the sound of a loudspeaker saying first something incomprehensible then 'this is a fire drill. please use the stairs. please don't use the lifts' and, still half-asleep and having no idea what to do nor any way to find out, to pull on some clothes, find the emergency stairs, walk half-asleep down 11 flights, find two men in a hard hat at the bottom who direct me outside to where there is nobody, walk round the front of the building and back in and up the lifts and be none the wiser. Except that I'd almost forgotten, in my doziness, that I was in Tokyo. I shouldn't have forgotten, as this was the fact that made me laugh aloud while I was sitting at the number 11 bus stop at Narita, waiting for the Airport Limousine (also known as “a bus”) to take me into town, and it was icy cold and I was still doped and then I thought, “I'm in Japan and I'm being paid to be here” and I laughed.
I laughed less when a French fashion designer who lives in Hoxton and a young Japanese woman who used to live in Hoxton both got on and sat in the seats behind me and that's how I know about Hoxton. Also, because they were both intolerable. I now know the following, all said in an obnoxious French accent.
Japan is so ugly! It looks like an Eastern European country.
Japan is so ugly!
Yoki is a bitch. She's always complaining.
This year's season, we only have ten shops and four of them are awful.
I flew business but it wasn't proper business. The food was dog food. It was so British.
Japan is so ugly.
A few weeks ago I told everyone I hated Japan and they were like “ooh!”
(points to construction worker on the road outside, says to Japanese girl) is that your dad?
So we are doing the Christmas window this evening and tomorrow and on Sunday you're going to take me to see something beautiful. I hate Tokyo. I want to see something beautiful. Like a temple or something.
If I hadn't been so zonked, I would have shed my British reserve and told him to do something even ruder and more obnoxious than he was.
Luckily, given the zonkedness, I had perfect instructions to reach my destination from my very kind host A., who is the brother of my clever and brilliant friend, also an A., and who has just flown to England to see A's brand new baby, and left me his delighful apartment on the 11th floor of building in Roppongi which I now know has clean and functional fire escape stairs. I am usually envious of people who “just happen” to have been lent a villa in Spain or something. But now I have been lent a lovely apartment with a fully-stocked fridge in the centre of Tokyo, I am as content as this dog, and I have a lot of karmic debt.
For my last day in Bangkok, I had two missions. 1) not to talk about or think about shit 2) to visit the Grand Palace. I accomplished both. I had seen the Grand Palace from the river, gold and enigmatic. Now I have seen it up close, gold and swarming with tourists. I wish I'd stuck to the river. All guidebooks refer to it as a “must see.” They should be more accurate. Must-see on a temperate day when it's closed to the masses. My impression was overwhelming heat and overwhelming bling. There's only so much gold I need to see before I get the point.
The only saving grace was the occasional information about alchemic design principles and manifest and non-manifest geometry supplied by E, one of two Italians I'd met - and actually spoken to - in the guesthouse the night before. E knows all about sevens and eights and pacing and proportions. He made the Grand Palace tolerable, because it usually looked like this:
Wat Pho Buddhist temple nearby was calmer, either because - as I nearly did - people believed the nice Thai man holding a newspaper who said it was closed for lunch, right opposite a sign saying *Wat Pho open all day 9am-5pm, or because at Wat Pho, they can turn to these people for help:
Wat Pho is famous for a very large reclining Buddha, who is also very bling. Puff Daddy/Diddy/whatever never had mother-of-pearl feet. There is also a massage school, and many young Thai schoolchildren wandering around doing Buddha school:
One of the Buddha School groups had a ladyboy teacher, which leads me to believe Time Out (Thailand is very gay-friendly) over Toey, as I have yet to see, and cannot imagine seeing, a cross-dressing camp and clearly male pretend-female leading primary school groups around Westminster Abbey.
The Italians went off shopping to buy more presents for their family (they had already bought five shirts and six pairs of fake Diesel jeans). They had been travelling in Thailand for three weeks and before that had only really travelled to Mexico. They thought Thailand was becoming too Americanised. There are indeed some chubby kids there, and the odd KFC, but as things go, Thailand is more homogeneous than most countries I've been to, except Bhutan. The yellow helps. The Italians also run a guesthouse on Lago di Garda, which I would recommend but can't. Our flights were due to leave around the same time - mine at 00.50 and theirs at 00.20 - so we shared a taxi to the airport. But then they couldn't see their flight listed, and realised with much “che stupidi” and “IDIOTI” self-abuse that 00.20 on 23 November was Thursday early morning, not Friday and that they were 24 hours late for their flight. They were last seen heading with horrified expressions towards the Thai Airways ticket office.
Tomorrow I go to Watanabe hair salon to get my hair cut by a woman called Chie. I reason that there are so many Japanese hairdressers in London, they must be good. I could be wrong.