Hip hip ouch!

=
A few nights ago, my bilingual blog, which now has 334 subscribers, passed the 100,000 hits mark – whereas this one, set up a couple of years before, has yet to reach half that many hits, with 70 subscribers.

I haven’t written here for over a month for a variety of reasons. One is bad health. Forget about high blood pressure, that’s under control, I believe, and no bother. Forget about putting on weight, that hurts only my ego. The main trouble is I can no longer walk any distance (over two hundred yards) without pain in the hips, though not down the legs. I’ve seen four specialists so far: the first one was a quack: ‘your pain is due to age, no treatment; exercise, walk more’. The next two, consulted the same week unbeknownst to each other, gave me two different batches of pills and for about a month and a half my joints stopped complaining.

I felt so good I decided to treat myself to a few days at the beach and relied on a famous Thai writer to take me there. We agreed to meet a few miles inland close to his lair. But just walking around in search of a food shop while holding a travel bag was enough for me to call it quits and return to Bangkok after a lunch of khao man kai without kai but with moo daeng (translation: chicken rice without chicken but with red pork). I never saw the sea.

And I won’t see France either this year come August, as daily life in France means walking and then walking and there would be no point flying over to spend the time between bed and armchair, which I can do here without bothering anyone.

The only hope for the time being is acupuncture, one session every Thursday morning. So far, it hasn’t made any difference, except that … I now have backache more often than before on top of the pain in the hips. The young Chinese acupuncture fellow cheerfully says that’s normal. I like his frankness and will give him the benefit of the doubt for a while before I either turn to a physiotherapist or a wheelchair.

Another reason why I haven’t written here lately is quite simply il Giro. When after spending daylight hours translating some short story or other (more than half a dozen of them in the past three weeks, for the bilingual blog, the end-of-year anthology and also an OCAC project) or helping this or that friend by proofing or subbing some texts, I no longer have the stamina to stick to the keyboard after dusk. Now television is consistently out of order (I’ll have to do something about that) but there is the daily pedalling drama on the little screen. Dramas, should I say: there is also the Tour of Norway and even the Tour of California, but that’s broadcast while I’m asleep.

From one year to the next, live streaming on the net has much improved, in coverage and in quality. Two nights ago, I even watched alternately Bradley Wiggins coughing his lungs out and François Hollande addressing the press. One quit, the other quipped and dug in. Not enough AICAR for one, not enough grands écarts for the other?

For whom the brain tolls

=

I have a quarrel to pick with Chart Korbjitti: it took him a year to let me know in under two thousand words that he had the good luck of a brain infarction.

I’m so pissed off I’ll make this text public on my bilingual blog, thaifiction.wordpress.com, this coming Friday at 00:01 sharp, local time.

I’ve fired him a mail just now to let him know I won’t talk to him again if the next time he dies he doesn’t inform me forthwith, but that in any case I’m his big brother and his pushing in ahead of me is just not on, never mind that he was head of the line in primary (you’ll understand on Friday). Hang on out there.

The other bad news of this Thai New Year, which is bad news in itself given all that senseless splashing about and all those truly dead and maimed on the roads, is that Saneh Sangsuk’s The White Shadow won’t ‘see the light of day States-side’ as I foolishly hoped the other day. I shouldn’t have told ’m Saneh is keyboard-phobic and thus unlikely to produce much and make ’m rich.

Just to pep myself up, here is a boob, not of the Songkran-drenched variety:

Bangkok Post, Monday April 8 2013: Page One story entitled ‘Enraged locals attack cops, foil casino raid’ has them locals pelt them cops ‘with projectiles and scolding water’ – wow, even the water was irate! It isn’t just a typo, as a few paragraphs down we read: ‘Some sprayed extinguishing agents and threw scolding water at the officers.’ Something to scald a proofreader with.

Going cool turkey – 4

=

Fag free? Looks like it. It’s been two weeks since I stopped taking Champix pills after completion of the three-month treatment, and the physical need for nicotine has gone.

What remains is the fancy need – the fleeting thought at odd times of how good it’d be to light up – but that’s easily dismissed, like a pesky insect, like that Juno down the street now that I’m gonad-poor and crumpled, dismissed with a flicker of the brain. Or a sugar-free look om to pacify the lips.

These last few months the downside has been a steady revolting gain in weight.

When I flew back from France last September, I weighed 83 kilos for 1825 mm in height. Six months later, I haven’t grown any taller but I weigh as much as 89,000 grams. In all justice, I can’t blame only Champix or cessation of cigarette consumption for those extra six kilos of lard: during that time I’ve been unusually sedentary due to excessive working sessions on the one hand, and on the other a growing incapacity to … simply … walk any longer – believe you me: of three years’ standing.

In the last few weeks, after a particularly painful ordeal in the street that had me mincing steps like a nonagenarian afflicted with delirium tremens, I’ve been consulting with one fake (Dr Amnuay) and two true (Dr Charoen and Dr Manoj) specialists of bone and nerve and cartilage messes and if I’m for the moment mobile and full of pep, it’s because of pills gobbled morning, noon and night this week and the next at Dr Manoj’s whim come what may.

You’d better believe it: I did extensive laundry by hand this very morning and even ironed no fewer than three shirts this afternoon in splendid heat. The last time I forced myself to wash a few clothes – two weeks ago, it was – I had to fetch myself a stool as my haunches refused to give a hand and lit up flares in protest.

The overwhelming feeling at the moment is of distress, or should I say désarroi: I’m an able-bodied man everyone says looks ten years younger than his real age without even trying – and also feel like it most days, damn your eyes – and yet what’s happening inside that wholesome body belongs to the terminal stage. Did I tell you about high blood pressure? And those feet and ankles that keep inflating when I worship the digital lares a tad too long? How boring can I be?

On the plus side: it looks like Saneh Sangsuk’s masterpiece The White Shadow might see the light of day States-side. Just because a butterfly once flexed its wings in the Amazon and many years ago I partook of Korean food with – but hush! What was that, Leonard, about ‘spiritual thirst’?

There’s Diaodai Tai Fa Khlang two-thirds trussed into French on my screen, and Le Seuil has yet to send contracts for it: I checked this very day with the main recipient. Please, please, please, may all things fall into place for once, ma chère Anne,

and I’ll go and have dinner now and be content.