Of course, even more eagerly awaited is the second tome: the same stories translated into English, to be published … later this year, budget willing.

Also in the OCAC pipeline: English translations of three novels: ฝั่งแสงจันทร์ (Fang Saengjan – The moonlit shore) by Prachakom Lunachai, ปลายนาฟ้าเขียว (Plai Na Fa Khiao – literally Green sky at the end of the rice field) by Wat Wanlayangkoon and ชะบน (Chabon) by Thirayut Daojanthuek. The latter almost made it into my list of ‘the 20 best Thai novels’ some two decades ago, along with Nippan’s Pheesuea Lae Dorkmai (Butterflies and flowers): I found it a bit too narrow in scope and at times long-winded, even though it’s written beautifully.

Forget the cheap paper and the cramming of its 560 pages with print too small for tired eyes: this is a treasure trove of some of the best short fiction ever published in Thailand in the eyes of a dozen Thai literary luminaries. Besides, it’s free.
Get yourself a copy while stocks last, through ocac.go.th.

This ‘literary garland’, as the title translates, lines up 41 stories by 41 writers, only six of them female. Many of the names are well known and feature in all anthologies, but here with an alternative story. For instance, Dorkmai Sot has a one-page story rather than her regular ‘Phonlamueang Dee’ (The good citizen, which I featured some time ago in my bilingual blog). I’ve just read that page and am left perplexed: was that her next best effort?
Others are less known but will welcome the exposure (and incite jealousy). A few I’ve heard of but have yet to read, and who is Nat Sartsongwit? No matter how I spell the name in English, Google won’t tell me. I’ll read his story next.
There are some surprising absences – major writers of the past such as Yacob, Malai Choophinit and Humorist, all, I’m told, dismissed under the far-fetched claim that they borrowed most of their plots from western stories (what is Kukrit Pramoj doing here then?); and top contemporary short-story writers as well, none of whom more laughably dismissed than Chart Korbjitti as allegedly having penned no outstanding story!
Ditto for Wimon Sainimnuan or Thatsanawadee, among others.
The lengthy, informative introduction protects the selection committee from controversy over absent worthy writers by claiming problems with copyrights. Yeah, right, I sympathise: Bunluea is another noticeable absentee.

To the future volume of English translations I’m to contribute four stories, translated at various times in the past fifteen years: Seni Saowapong’s ‘The lone sunflower’ (available on my bilingual blog); Sila Komchai’s ‘Blood buds’ (published in Caravan in 1994); Phaithoon Thanya’s ‘A death in the month of October’; and Chatcharin Chaiwat’s ‘Boy’s reporter’ (at OCAC’s request) – the latter two featured in 11 Thai short stories – 2011 now available at thaifiction.com.
I was surprised by the listing in the anthology of a fifth story, ‘The wish’ by Prachakom Lunachai, a rather corny short story I translated some time ago for the Bangkok Post. Obviously, it’ll be translated by someone else, and it’ll be interesting to compare the two versions.

The downside of this volume for me is that, promising as it may be in its scope, variety and literary quality, I may not translate those stories I find most interesting, unless the translations to be published are dismal. I reckon we’ll have to wait and see.

At 4pm on the 18^th, having long booked a late flight to Orly and a room at the Ibis Orly hotel in order to catch the next day’s 10am flight to KL, I was informed that the flight was delayed … to 7:30pm – only to be rescheduled overnight to 10:20pm – more than twelve hours altogether.
(The airline’s only gesture was to provide us with a free dinner around 7:30pm at the airport; when a night’s airborne rest later we were woken up three hours before landing, AA didn’t have the decency to offer coffee or fruit juice to passengers free of charge but those who had paid for it in advance got their dinner … at 8am French and body time. Feeling like puking at the salmon’s fumes, I returned mine and literally had to beg for a cup of hot black coffee – got one without being charged five rupiah I didn’t have and was probably the only one on the plane to be such favoured. On the KL–Bangkok flight, feeling ravenous after dieting for thirteen hours, I asked for any makan I would pay for. All set dishes were sold out. I ended up with a bowl of noodles – 60 baht, 1.5 euros.)

At 5pm on the 18^th still in Toulouse, I went out to buy a 20cl flask of pastis at the Casino shop on avenue de Lavaur to drink later that night and maybe the next day in the late hours at Orly. At 8pm, a Blagnac airport goon ‘confiscated’ it, claiming that only 10cl of ‘liquid’ was allowed. There is no 10cl pastis for sale. The stooge threatened me with arrest and detention when I uncorked the flask and poured some pastis into his water goblet. I had to let him have it. I thought too late I should have spit in it before relinquishing it.

The liquid rule absurdity was never more obvious than later in the trip, when I got a small plastic bottle of water on board the AA flight to KL, drank most of it and then slipped it into my bag, only to have it ‘confiscated’ prior to the AA connecting flight to Bangkok. There wasn’t even 10cl of liquid left in it. Plain, clear drinking water, for fuck’s sake!

In the long hours of waiting at Orly airport the next day, I befriended a French pastry cook based in the Langkawi and told him about the pastis flask, among many other anecdotes we exchanged about customs madness. He had paid through the nose for 30kg of baggage, he said, and besides had marzipan in his cabin luggage. I felt exultant when, meeting him again past the checkpoint, he told me that, upon his marzipan being ‘confiscated’, he had remembered my remark about spitting and deliberately dropped the marzipan to the floor and stepped on it before handing it over with a grin.
I do wish more would behave like him, and actively show their displeasure instead of behaving like sheep. It’s quite dispiriting witnessing crowds of travellers going hastily through the motions of shearing themselves of metal to get that silliness everyone resents over with a.s.a.p. or enduring the pilfering of their belongings without ever bleating. They are as complicit in their misery as those who, enjoying their modicum of power by the book, enforce it on them by claiming that these are the rules and there’s nothing they can do about it – which is what torturers big and small the world over always reply as if they had no mind of their own, no common sense and no humanity. Starting with drinking water, you end up with Buchenwald.

At Orly, the checking of my bag produced another item of contention: a three-year-old small tube of shaving cream which I was told was exactly the size of some terrorist device, but had been taken off the list of dangerous items only last month. Ah, then, those silly rules can be changed?

I’ve kept the height of drollery for the end: you may remember Chart Korbjitti’s and my cheese chokes at the hands of the Paris Roissy vulture the last time we ventured out (‘Une histoire de fromages’, 22.10.2009). This time, chat échaudé, I didn’t bother feeding the creatures. But only weeks earlier, my daughter had to face them.
Thanks to her end-of-year bonus, she had gone to see her grandfather for a week and left him one week before he died. On the return trip, she made the mistake of putting a hermetic translucent box of stinking cheese her father loves into her cabin luggage instead of her suitcases. There were four sorts of cheese: camembert, reblochon, maroilles and munster. At Roissy, the vultures lectured her on cheese. There were two sorts of cheese, they lied: firm cheese, allowed, and soft cheese, verboten. Whereupon they deemed camembert and reblochon soft cheeses and ‘confiscated’ them and let her (me) have the firm maroilles and munster. How kind of them! How humane! May they call their swindling Blagnac colleague, start on my pilfered pastis and rot their guts in hell!

At 3am on Thursday 4 January, my brother called from Toulouse to say our 94-year-old father had just died. Burial would take place as soon as I arrived. I immediately went on the net to try to book a seat on the Air France flight in the evening of the same day. No such thing. The first flight was on the next evening, which meant arriving in Toulouse Saturday morning.
(By the way, a single fare with an open return for Bangkok–Paris–Toulouse isn’t an option either; a single fare comes to over 1600 euros, whereas a two-week return fare is as low as a little over 1000 euros – go figure.)
By 10am, my resourceful daughter had booked me on an Air Asia round trip leaving Bangkok at 4pm for Kuala Lumpur and arriving at Paris Orly on Friday morning (local time) – for less than a thousand euros, including one dinner on the return trip (on ‘cheap’ Air Asia, one pays extra for meals, baggage, onboard entertainment, blanket and what-have-you, even water).

It turned out to be the most expensive, longest and lousiest return trip to France I’ve ever experienced.
One piece of advice: do not take Air Asia on long flights. (Actually, Air Asia flights to Europe and even to India from here are due to be phased out next month.)

All my life, a third of it as a reporter, I’ve prided myself on travelling the world with only one piece of hand luggage, which had me shun at some cost those functions where a three-piece suit was de rigueur. So, I packed a bag in a hurry, turned down the fellow who was arriving to install a toilet forthwith, locked the house and ran to the airport, to soon find out that, in this insane time and age, cabin luggage only is no longer an option: panicky post-7/11 regulations applied stupidly, whimsically and/or dishonestly make sure of that.

In the course of a 24-hour trip, I was treated to no fewer than four luggage checks and two body searches. (Only three luggage checks and no body search on the 48-hour return trip.) My bag was full of potentially murderous weapons, I discovered as I went along.
The fun started at the Bangkok checkpoint, by far the most stupidly thorough of them all (it’s the only one that had us take off our shoes, slippers included, for x-ray inspection – Malaysians didn’t bother; the French, reasonably enough given the weather, checked only high-heeled shoes).
Right away, three used items were ‘confiscated’, in the name of ‘international rules’: a bottle of doctor-prescribed shampoo, expensive and hard to replace; a flask of (cheap) after-shave lotion; and, believe it or not, a tube of Parodontax® toothpaste. No teeth-brushing for the next 24 hours.
(On the return trip, I made a point of introducing a new tube of toothpaste in my bag: it went totally unnoticed and surprisingly no plane exploded in mid-air.)
Somehow, there and elsewhere, I was allowed to keep a razor and its blades, my toothbrush and my faithful biro, with any of which I could definitely kill if I had a mind to.
If the next terrorist attack uses loaded underwear, will we be asked to strip or have ours ‘confiscated’?

In KL, entering the transit area straight after disembarking astonishingly required a new hand luggage search on top of the passport examination – and of course the same rigmarole before making it into the plane to Paris.

At Orly, I coughed up an extra 136 euros for ‘la navette’ to Toulouse – and was informed that there was no seat available in the early morning of the day I was due to return: I’d have to catch a flight the night before and book a room for the night in a hotel or spend the night in the TGV (actually, no such option). I can’t remember what it is they ‘confiscated’ for that flight – ah, yes, not quite: a bottle of water I was asked to drink up.

When I arrived in Toulouse, it was to learn that the burial would take place … on Monday.

And realise that, in my haste to leave, I’d forgotten the list of phone numbers of my friends in the EU. I definitely felt clandestine and castoff.
To top it all, warning me that some imposter was trying to use my messagerie from France, gmail locked me out! It took five days to convince them that the imposter was me.

For two weeks, hard labour offset the freezing cold: the burial in the village of my birth amid desiccated ghosts (‘Don’t you remember me? The last time I saw you you were nine, reading a book under the marronnier.’); the emptying of the dead man’s house, throwing away, giving away, stocking away; the scrubbing and reshaping of my brother’s much neglected house; and the kneading of my brother’s morale: he’d been on the receiving end of his insufferably ailing hence bellicose, incontinent father day and night for months and months and was suddenly back into his own skin and finding it empty.

I’ll spare you the house despairs – life without my own tap water until just a fortnight or so ago; dispiriting quarrels with kind souls so much willing to please one and all they’re unable to deliver in a timely fashion to anyone at all; finding out that termites have eaten an entire window frame or that the resident ghost is still working the (brand new) water pump; a toilet seat pipe leak turning into a bathroom WW1 trench battle scene, among other calamities.
I’ll just say that, for the first time in my life, I’ve (competently and proud of it) mixed and laid out cement, drilled holes into and installed a shelf on a wall with my very much gnarled hands
– and come to the conclusion I’m past DIY and the only thing to do in this country to keep one’s sanity is never to repair but throw away, buy new and have other people do the job for you. If you can find them, that is, and if you have the means.

State of the art: two doors and one window need replacing; so do the armchair and sofa; a new toilet seat is to be installed tomorrow; so is the water purifying gizmo a previous savvy team was unable to make work; the gate door needs welding; and the whole house new coats of paint.

On the public side of my life, I’ve managed to keep afloat. Advance programming saw me through the floods, so that my bilingual blog was able to come out on time every fortnight with a short story, alternately contemporary and classic:
‘I just want to go out for a walk’ by Than Yutthachaibodin,
then ‘The lone sunflower’ by Seni Saowaphong,
and then ‘Jitra doesn’t go shopping’ by Boonchit Fakme,
and currently ‘Tags’ by Khamsing Srinawk.
I’ve spent quite some time in the last week or so trying to rebuild a ‘buffer’ of stories: as many as nine are now pre-formatted but the trouble is twofold: getting the Thai text in an electronic format and contacting the authors for permission to proceed.
Does anyone know who Sukamol Rungbun and Naruecha Mueanjai-ngarm are and how to contact them?
I’ll deal with ’Rong Wongsawan, Saowaree, Fa Punvoralak, Wuthisarn Charnwiboon and others myself.

Contacting the authors was also paramount in coming up on time after the flood hiatus with my end-of-year anthology, 11 Thai short stories – 2011, now available at thaifiction.com and soon at immateriel.fr. For this I received superb help from old friend Wiang Buason of Samanchon Publishing – don Wiang, as Siriworn calls him tongue-in-sheik.
Unlike the first anthology in 2009, the stories in that book have never been published in English before, and I dare say that half of them are really top level. Guess which:

Meanwhile, I’ve also endeavoured to read short stories e-mailed by various young authors, taken time to assess a historical saga of sorts about one sideline actor in the Boworadet rebellion of the 1930s (hello again, Khun Nat) and am currently going through three novels kindly sent by Sakorn Pulsuk, whom I find more successful in short story mode.

So, while hundreds are being ritually slaughtered on the roads in this most jolly season, I’m keeping to the grind – and my fingers crossed, as I may have to go and bury the dead in the dead of French winter.

Saturday 19: the best news of all is that that obnoxious loutish family is gone: the new townhouse owner allowed them to stay in it only for the duration of the flood.
My daughter comes over in her car, bringing in more food, cigarettes, pastis, and the big bottle of detergent I had asked for. No bottles of water on sale at Macro.
Lung Pratheep talks to me normally. He’s even instrumental in helping me out with the camping gas problem: when a man comes to deliver a similar gas tank to his house, I go over and tell the man about my problem with the defective head. ‘Show it to him,’ Pratheep tells me. The man lights it and it works normally. I’m baffled. The fellow unscrews the top: the neck is half blocked by dry gunk, which was obstructing the tiny gas exit hole. He cleans it and the camping gas works fine. Why couldn’t I have figured this out by myself?

Sunday 20: a powerful (and leaky) water hose run the length of it wipes the lane clean, but for those leprous houses whose owners are still absent. Most of us pitch in with brooms and then there’s lunch for all round the corner. Garbage keeps piling up at the mouth to the lane – not just the usual refuse but all those things (doors, wooden furniture, garments, cardboard boxes, etc.) damaged by the foul waters.
I reconnect the phones, bring down the components of television, computer and printer and sound system, put them on the table, try to sort out the cables, fail, then manage to restart the TV set all by myself: I get the Laotian channel, the Cambodian channel, all of the Thai educational channels – and nothing else.

Monday 21: the door of the metallic front gate is broken, its lower hinge bitten to death by rust. In the house, three water-swollen doors refuse to close shut; at least one of them will have to be replaced. All kitchen cupboard doors are off their hinges too. There are a few white stains on the parquet as if some chemical had leaked there. The living room air-con is as dead as the water pump outdoors. Sofa and armchair will have to go: their foam keeps retaining water, which surfaces as soon as you sit down…
Wafts of acrid smoke in late morning from the Khong Tharn community at the back of our townhouses: they are fumigating their slum area against mosquitoes – and maggots. Excellent handling of the flood crisis all along by these people.
Karoon comes by in the evening: he unplugs and re-plugs a TV cable, presses a few buttons and all the channels are back! It takes him less than five minutes to put the PC back together. How humbling! He’s amazed at how good the parquet looks: his is in a dreadful state.

Tuesday 22: the Bangkok Post resumes delivery after a one-month interruption. Things must be back to normal, then – well, almost. I empty the underground water tank of its foul content and clean it best I can with a long-handled broom I keep to catch cobwebs on ceilings with. A dose of detergent in the almost clear water at the bottom Karoon’s portable pump won’t suck out, and that should deter mosquitoes from breeding there.
My daughter comes by in the evening, to borrow my laptop: hers has expired in her arms. We watch some movie on TV for a while.

Wednesday 23: I venture out to the office for a communal lunch of noodles (‘What’s with the beard, sia?’ says Sondhi; I gesture noncommittally) then proceed to two supermarkets where I usually shop; neither has bottled water. I start boiling some to drink: the municipal water Karun says is safe to drink carries too much dubious debris. I bought an electric plug and can now put the fridge back in place. I find those stains on the parquet can be scraped out and waxed away.
The main roads are dry and clean, but girdled with mountains of festering garbage which teams of municipal workers are trying to lift and truck away – a Sisyphean task.
Meanwhile, elsewhere north of town, whole suburban communities under stagnant water for weeks and weeks are getting increasingly frustrated and taking the problem into their own hands. There are still masses of water to flow through. And today the sea tide has begun rising again and will gain another metre by the end of the week.

Thursday 24: Karoon is home and sort of beginning to clear his front porch of stuff before hosing it down. Although I feel abnormally tired and out of sorts, I offer repeatedly to give him a hand, but he keeps saying he can manage on his own.
He says he’ll help me with the purchase across town and installation of a new pump and water tank, but it’ll have to wait until his van is repaired. Meanwhile, tomorrow he’ll go and spend the weekend with the boumacs of Koh Kut.

- Yesterday Karoon and I went out in his van for lunch and sundry purchases at a superstore two miles away. Apart from about four hundred yards long of road still under drivable water, the whole area was dry, but what a sorry leprous sight of thick dirt, piles of garbage bags and those pathetic, useless rows of sandbags in front of almost every abode!
In the blinking red lights at crossings, the few vehicles around looked drunk, their drivers changing lanes and direction as they weighed up the chances of more water stretches ahead.
Somehow, this light traffic put me in mind of the first few ominously quiet days of those episodic military pastimes Thailand is known for: karnratthapraharn (seizures of state power) recurrent itching which the man in the street mistakenly calls karnpathiwat (revolutions). I’ve seen a few of those in my half-of-a-lifetime here. Now the soldiers are the heroes of the day, substituting themselves to police and a failed civilian administrative structure to bring succour and convenience to the ordinary folk. (For more gushing praise, see Army-owned Channel 5.)

- Today, a phalanx of BMA garbage ladies, suitably if garishly plastic garbed, carted the garbage bags at the bottom of our blind alley to its mouth, where a garbage lorry thrice came to take some away, still leaving two huge piles of them for the morrow. I hastened to add my own five bags of sorted out refuse to the common dung. Tomorrow, we are told, a high-pressure water lorry will whoosh the lane dirt away. Food and water are still being handed out free, round the corner in the Khong Tharn slum community. This neck of the woods is really well organised.

- With all this in mind, there is revolting news on TV tonight, of those Lam Luk Ka residents, a northern Bangkok suburb, still hip-to-chest-high in stagnant smelly water after one full month, basically ignored by the powers that be and their own minders. No wonder that yesterday they went after the sandbag barriers that were erected to protect the precious heart of Bangkok’s heart which are keeping them in a pickle. Expert Seree Supradit just now predicts them and those in a vast area around them another three weeks of torment, la-di-da: pumps don’t work to full capacity or are badly placed; garbage and buildings clog up the flow…

- Meanwhile, back in my ranch, it’s still scraping and scrubbing. What with all the genuflexion and pediflexion to reach unreachable places where my elbows are too long and too many, my shoulders too large and my head too prone to bumps, my left flat foot keeps reminding me one of its bones was broken not long ago. My legs, fingers and wrists bear a few blood-red badges of curetage but nothing that a few drops of alcohol and iodine can’t fix.
And nothing compared to what friend Karoon brought back from his Koh Kut (Trat province) beach retreat: plentiful telltale marks of bodily assault by what we, veterans of the 1960s Cambodian beaches, used to know as boumacs – blister-providing sand creatures that marred our weekends in Sihanoukville and beyond. It’s all right: the second time around, you’re immune.
Karoon waxes eloquent on that particular beach: its owner doesn’t want to sell but is pressed for money so is looking for investors, to the tune of thirty million baht (about 700 000 euros) for ten years; Karoon will find some for him. From Nepal, he says – where boumacs, I believe, are unknown. My friend regretfully has a knack for half-baked schemes.

- Food and water are still being distributed, but no longer door to door. One neighbour goes and gets them for his friends in the lane. Today, I qualify. That neighbour hasn’t talked to me – hasn’t seen me – in more than ten years, though I’ve all along exchanged a few polite words on occasion with his wife and sons: upon my word, they are my direct vis-à-vis across the lane.
After insulting me publicly at noon (pressed by another neighbour I’ve helped all morning clear the lane of muck while he didn’t lift a finger – ‘Don’t forget Khun Marcel’, she keeps repeating –, ‘Give one to tua farang duay’, he instructs his son who comes back with lunches and bottles of water – tua, the qualifier for animals, isn’t exactly nice when applied to a person), in late afternoon, as I sprinkle some washing powder in front of my gate to keep mosquitoes away from the almost stagnant water, he, loaded with food and water, actually walks up to me and says ‘Choose one set and take one bottle as well.’ Amazed, I wai him before picking up one bag of rice, rejecting something that looks like boiled greens and selecting a bag of orange curry, and add a ‘Khopkhun mark khrap’ (Thank you very much indeed) for good measure.
That man, Lung (Uncle) Pratheep – whom I used to call Phee (Big brother) in the early years when, an early retired jack-of-all-trades from upcountry who used to raise dogs he hates and catch snakes barehanded and repair cars, he fought boredom by seeking my company every day –, once took mortal offence at one of my sallies.
The front of my house at the time had a clump of bamboos I had planted myself. Very romantic, but they shed leaves worse than I dandruff and, day after day, I’d have to sweep the area clean. More often than not, a hundred yards deeper into the impasse Ms Whose-name-I-don’t-know (a divorcee with a would-be-drummer son, she had then the most beautiful breasts of the entire precincts, but the rambling voice and face of a horse and she wears neither skirts nor trousers but ghastly-coloured culottes (krapraeng in Thai) exclusively, which is why I never bothered to learn her name or her bra-size) would be out with a broom as well, and we’d engage in neighbourly small talk. One day, I told her, ‘I don’t understand why no one but you and I comes out and cleans in front of their houses once in a while. After all, we aren’t dogs or pigs, right?’ I don’t know how she reported that to her good friend, Pratheep’s wife, but obviously the fellow must have taken it as a personal slur – as well he should – and from then on no longer sauntered over to bother me. I soon grew weary of asking his embarrassed wife whether Phee Pratheep was sick. Later, I saw him and heard him, behaving as if I didn’t exist. And this has gone on for over ten years, until today. Let’s see what’s next.

- The post woman on her moped has indeed resumed her rounds. Yesterday she made waves to bring me an issue of the New York Review of Books and the latest Gavroche. Old habits die hard: I spent a couple of hours cursorily covering the latter’s issue in blue – hundreds of punctuation and language mistakes, none as glaring as the inch-tall main title on the cover: ‘Quand la pillule passe mal’. Pillule, libellule, c’est la faute à the pill, tiens donc. Anglais, quand tu nous tiens.

- I was tickled green by the TLS issue of November 4 2011. The page 1-cover has three human heads emerging from green jars (Beckett’s Play); flip it and page 3 has three Buddha heads (more in the blurred background) half immerged in dubious water. Thanks for the thought. Too bad that under the mysterious title ‘1.1.11 Bangkok’ (that far back?) the text is wishy-washy. Even at the time of writing, ‘some have questioned whether [PM and Bangkok governor] are presenting a unified front in the crisis’ is quaint: there’s been no wondering about it. And, take it from me, these human-sized statues of the Buddha are not ‘from the amulet market’ but from one of the shops specialised in such idolatry-mongering.

- Just now, the news on the telly tells me how lucky we are here: in this and that district, the water is hip-high, the water is chest-high; in central Bangkok, the Chao Phraya water today runs 30cm below banks; further south, 70cm above. Seree Supradit, speaking now in English after his round in Thai, says this spot on the map will be dry in two days, but that one over there, sorry, one month.

- A reprieve? Deliverance? Sunday 1pm: no water inside, but it’s just under the parquet. As I lunch grandly in the front porch rocking chair of canned sardines, some cheese and a banana, I watch a small fish (flat, not quite four inches long, with two ‘whiskers’ almost as long) familiarising itself with the huge aquarium of my small garden. It obviously prefers it to the immense garage lake, which I sprinkled with washing powder the night before.

- Monday 9am: it’s action stations in the lane when I wake up. Low tide has left about 10cm of water out there, with clusters of garbage bags and other rubbish floating about, and people are busy cleaning and drying what can be cleaned and dried. So do I, mindful of that little fish I see once as I bail out most of the water from the garage area. Getting rid of muck and cleaning with dirty water is an art, and great exercise. The garden is uniformly dark grey, drying. I let the backyard water flow out, only to stopper the evacuation hole again two hours later, as the water is rising again.
High tide, I find, will go down until the 23^rd (from 3.77m today to 3.07m) and then rise again to 4.08m on the 27^th. More Thon Buri districts are still being evacuated…

- Karoon and wife have spent the weekend … on a beach in Trat, near the Cambodian border. They have yet to make it back here. ‘Narm thuam chaihart thee nan dooey rue plao?’ Is the beach there also under water?

- Astonishingly, I find three issues of TLS (two only slightly soggy) and two of LRB in my mailbox. Kudos to Thai Post.

- 3pm: Hello again. Short time no see. All sides, and even unnoticed holes in the parquet, leaking at once, enough to turn most of the living space downstairs into a shadow lake. To hell with cleaning walls and cupboards, I’m bone tired as it is.
My valiant daughter, now with lovely boots, arrives with a backpack, and a black garbage bag in a large black plastic pail she pulls with a string: backpack and garbage bag (the US-made model, reusable, zippable, the works) hold basic victuals for her stranded dad for the week to come. Before nightfall, there is a distribution of food and water. ‘It’s a bit spicy, OK?’ Seeing my face, they favour me with an extra ration of rice and sundried chicken bits. When my daughter is back to her still dry home, I learn from her that on her way out she met an army lorry unloading those rations at the entrance to my street – and accepted with thanks one foam container of rice and spicy stuff…

- The governor today promises ‘dry roads in Bangkok as a New Year present’. Don’t get him wrong: he means Bangkok, the eastern side of the river, not Thon Buri. The PM says ‘it’s too early’ to say whether we are in for a second round of flooding. One particularly reassuring expert on the government channel tonight purrs that the situation will definitely improve by the 20^th, ‘when the tides begin to go down’ – he should consult and memorise the tide chart. What pisses me off most is that all Thai channels have been bleating for days that, ‘things are improving: Ayutthaya and Nakhon Sawan are getting dry’. They forget to say that those two provinces north of Bangkok have been under water for two to three months. It’s about time they got dry – and a good indicator of how long ‘their’ waters will be drowning us in turn.

- To enlarge the picture: I’ve stopped watching TV. From one day to the next, the same scenes of invading flood – only the names of districts and sub-districts change. The northern waters are still massively coming south, with little patience for obstacles, aberrant Big Bags or not. The jackasses in charge shunt these waters east and west to avoid the shrinking heart of Bangkok and work the Chao Phraya to maximum flow: hence its utter dependence on sea tides, and my neighbourhood’s predicament. The populist FROC says nine days from now Bangkok will be dry and the pigs will fly; the aristocratic governor of Bangkok, up for reelection next year, takes the longer view with misery written all over his face.

For my money, the most credible expert has proved to be Seri Suparathit, who keeps warning that neither the Bangkok nor the Thon Buri sides have seen the half of it; and, as parliament is in be-suited session to bankroll the powers that be under the guise of sweetening the flood’s bitter aftermath while the rest of us go wading, the best satirist is MP Choowit Kamolwisit.

- Have I answered your question, Jojo?
Christopher, you may have a magnificent and protected view of the river on the 28^th floor of your condo, but you’re too close to heaven there to see what’s going on down below. I’ll let you know when the road is navigable and read that novelette [sorry, sir, slip of the pen:] novella of yours in the meantime, in between sessions of Mr Muscle® and Magiclean® frenzy.
Saves me two emails, this. I’m beat.