Photographing Chiang Mai's "Soi-Art"

Last night I returned from a fortnight's holiday in northern Thailand, where I visited one of my closest friends who has just had given birth to a gorgeous baby girl. The trip provided a welcome opportunity to think about how to respond to the threat of impending redundancy whilst spending time with my new not-god daughter and exploring and photographing Chiang Mai's Old City.

Holiday photos can be a bit predictable - I have plenty of pictures of temples but after noticing the amount of street graffiti as I wandered between cafés and food shacks in the blazing heat of the day, I managed to spend an enjoyable afternoon taking photos of some of the city's "soi-art":

I'm also really pleased with this photo - at the Buddhist temple on the Doi Suthep mountain overlooking Chiang Mai, I noticed some workers knocking down the shell of a building with little regard for concerns about health and safety:
Anyway, it's good to be back, although I still don't know what is happening about my future employment. I hope to know a little more later this week.

Back From Travels To India

I haven't posted anything for a while because I have been away in India, visiting the Gilly Mundy memorial Community School in Haryana and spending a few days in Delhi: there was fairly limited internet access in the village and we were rushing around in the city.

The event that marked the fifth anniversary of Gilly's death in 2007 was huge, very emotional and it was great to see the school again after my first visit last October. It was also good to spend some time talking with the children, without the teachers present, to find out what they like about their school, what changes they would like to see and what hopes they have for the future - there are many aspiring teachers and engineers in this particular rural corner of India.

Delhi is a city that I have found it hard to warm to on previous visits, unlike Mumbai, which I love returning to. Having seen much of the vast number of incredible historical monuments in the city before, this time we were based in the more affluent south Delhi, staying in the Safdarjung Enclave and spending a lot of time in Haus Khas Village. I'll try and write more about this later, but the highlights were definitely weaving through the alleys leading up to the Nizamuddin Dargah to see the qawwali singers and being the only non-Punjabi male at a concert by the extremely popular singer Satinder Sataaj (although I missed some of it because I had to dash out with a dodgy stomach - inevitable in Delhi).

Meanwhile, here are some photos of the anniversary event:

Wandering Stratford upon Avon

After helping with the frantic response to the announcement by the DPP on Thursday morning, I finally had my day off and made it to the 'other' Stratford - the one in Warwickshire that's 'upon Avon' - with my good friend Maggie.

Visiting the town has turned into something of a mission, as I have been trying to get there for a couple of years whilst staying with friends in Leamington Spa and have always had to postpone. Here are a couple of pictures: there are more here.

Top: Anne Hathaway's Cottage
Middle: Shakespeare and Hamlet statues by the canal
Bottom: Holy Trinity Church

New Year's Resolution - No More Flights

There's a line in one of my favourite of Billy Bragg's thoughtful older songs that says, "you are judged by your actions and not by your pretensions" and in that spirit I'm making an announcement.

At the moment, I'm stuck in Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where I'll be for the next five hours. It's another two before I can even check-in, but still, I'm on my way home. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my return from Thailand today via Malaysia is tinged with sadness, for the following reason. I've concluded that it is impossible to care about catastrophic climate change and still continue fly unnecessarily, so my New Year's resolution is to give up heading off long-haul to sunnier climes.

That's it. Next Christmas I'll be in the UK and I hope not to see the inside of an airport terminal lounge after I arrive at Heathrow tomorrow morning, unless it's an absolute emergency or I'm forced to through work (which, given my job is in an east London community centre, is incredibly unlikely).

In theory this should have been a difficult decision to make, but in truth it has been easy. I didn’t have a great time between Christmas and New Year and this is the second holiday in a row where overall there was more that was wrong than was right. Chiang Mai was fun and I guess Pai is a place to visit for a weekend, but after twelve long, leaden days I was overjoyed to leave. The lack of transport for someone who doesn’t ride a scooter severely limited movement, which left the town, where everywhere sold little more than ‘Pai /ปาย’ branded tat – as though Thailand’s equivalent of Crest of London had taken overall control of the municipality. It’s one of the most boring places I have had the misfortune to be stuck in (despite its fairly recent notoriety) and at times I was thoroughly homesick and depressed.

Coupled with the disappointment I experienced on returning to Goa in 2008, I have come to realise that if I want to spend large amounts of time sleeping late into the day and doing very little, I don’t have to contribute around a year’s worth of carbon emissions to be able to do so. The same is possible in considerably more comfort, surrounded by tons of books, access to cinemas and London’s many delights, a consistent power supply that isn’t repeatedly choked off by the negative impact of tourism on undeveloped local infrastructure, 24-hour Wi-Fi and most importantly of all, my family and my wonderful friends. OK, so it’s freezing in December - at least in London, Brighton and Leamington Spa I won’t spend nearly so much time on my own.

So that’s my New Year’s resolution. It has one immediate and tough consequence, which is that this Easter I won’t be seeing as planned the school that the charity I am secretary of, the Buwan Kothi International Trust, has fundraised to build in northern India. I’d love to see it – but it'll survive without me and unlike getting time off to go and work there for a sustained period, a two week visit hardly counts as essential travel.

And at least I'd be able to attend the Climate Camp London neighbourhood meeting this month still firmly believing that actions really do matter more than pretensions.

The Bridge Over The River Pai

Zee left for home well before midnight and so, in the final fifteen minutes before the arrival of 2010, I found myself standing on the bridge that crosses the Pai River, which was full of young Thais lighting the floating lanterns that are so popular here.

As the candle at the base of these paper structures heats the air inside the lantern, it fills out until it is finally ready to launch. And, with the approach of the New Year, absolutely hundreds filled the sky, like flickering orange stars surrounding the full moon. It was really rather magical.

And really rather dangerous, too, for every thatched-roof building in the valley (including my own). Not every lantern burns out as it rises higher and higher - some are caught on overhead cables, trees or a sudden change of wind direction. Someone told me yesterday that, as a result, a local pizza restaurant near the bridge burnt to the ground last year. This morning, I looked out of my window and saw the almost-intact remains of a lantern lying at the edge of the pond beside my hut, like a beached jellyfish. It simply never managed to soar like the others.

Tomorrow we return to Chiang Mai by minibus along a road with more than 700 twisting curves through the mountains. I'm really not looking forward to it, but by about 4.30pm I'll be in a hotel near the Night Bazaar and one step closer to reality and home. There's a tinge of sadness about this: for reasons I'll explain later, this is probably the last time I'll be abroad over Christmas and New Year.

Pai: A Town Captured By Film Makers

If you walk around Pai, where I am staying at the moment, you soon notice that the street sellers are hawking some strange souvenirs: tiny red Thai postboxes, road mile-markers, tissue-paper floating lanterns, model Volkwagon vans. At the weekends, hundreds of young, smartly dressed, affluent Thais descend on the village from Chiang Mai to snap them up and to send a postcard to themselves, all because they feature prominently in a local film, an anthology of six apparently cheesy love stories that appear in Pai in Love (ปายอินเลิฟ).

I haven't as yet had the pleasure of seeing it (there's a review here and the trailer below) but seldom can one small, tranquil and fairly remote village felt such an impact as the result of one film. Today the streets have been blocked with silver minibuses and with day trippers and last night the night market was heaving - until there was a valley-wide power cut at around 9pm.

It reminds me of the impact that the children's TV programme Balamory has had on one small village in the Isle of Mull, but I'm struggling to identify whether there are any other towns, particularly in the UK, that have become so closely associated with a particular movie.

Suggestions - although not, in Pai's new custom, on a postcard - would be very welcome.

Day One in Chiang Mai

I've settled into Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, waiting for Zee's imminent arrival, and I really like it here. It is easy to explore on foot, far from frenetic and has none of the underlying sleaziness of Bangkok (which I avoided this time by coming via Kuala Lumpur) - and isn't overwhelmed with tourists. Apparently this is the busy period but you wouldn't know from looking.

Up and out early, I've spent most of today in one or other of the town's many temple, so here are a couple of photos. More on Flickr.

Sign of the Times

Coverage of the Signspotting Project, a collection of strange, funny and improbable signs collected by the American journalist Doug Lansky and currently on display at the Edinburgh Festival, has made me turn to some of my own collection of photographs of signs – as friends know, this is one of my favourite subjects too.

Here are a few of my own:

"Swimming Here is a Death Call", on Goubert Road, Pondicherry, India

forthright instruction at Leamington Peace Festival

sensible advice, near Kruger National Park, South Africa

extreme wishful thinking in Bombay

Bombay - 4477 miles from Green Street in Forest Gate, I stumble upon...

guidance for lost seafarers, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

Remembering Gilly

Ceremony organised by Debbie on 28 December 2008 on the beach in Mandrem, northern Goa, to remember Gilly.

Fleeing Reality in Goa

Having made it back from two weeks in Goa, with a stomach bug and chronic jetlag as souvenirs, it has been odd answering the question about how the holiday went. Unlike ‘travelling’, which is supposedly about finding out more about countries and cultures (a contentious definition, I know), holidays are a chance to get away from our hectic lives for just a short while, to relax and recharge. On that level, this latest trip has been a success and I don’t even mind that I wasn’t around for the massive protests against Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza. Even activists need a break.

But much as I love India, I’m not sure I want to spend time in Goa again anytime soon. Yes, it is beautiful and warm. But after four trips, three to Palolem in the south of the state, it seems like a really long way to go to do nothing and by the end of the 16 days I was there, I was desperate for any kind of intellectual stimulus.

Unfortunately, with the exception of my friends, the majority of the foreigners I met who are long-term residents in Goa are neither travelling or on holiday. They are just stuck - caught in a cycle of parties, 'therapy' of one kind or another, furious gossip, bad poetry and a insular detachment from the outside world.

I can see how even a a brief period of self-absorption can make even the best people incredibly selfish, but drawing this out into a permanent lifestyle choice really isn't appealing. I think the point when I was told, by an English guy with a guitar, that he hadn’t read the news for six years - a fact that he seemed intensely proud of - was the precise moment I knew it was time to come home. Or perhaps it was answering the question about what I do back in London and repeatedly seeing the disappointment in people’s faces when they discovered I wasn’t a reiki teacher, homoeopathist or on sort of spiritual journey…

The bad poetry was at Galgibag, a beautiful beach that unlike others in south Goa is protected for sea turtle breeding and therefore free of the endless beach shacks and bars. There is a poem I had read just before travelling to India that would have made the perfect response, by the Australian comedian Tim Minchin, but it was too long to commit to memory.

It’s about having to hold back for the sake of remaining polite, whilst a hippy called Storm “fires off clichés” at a north London dinner party “like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition.”

I met so many people like 'Storm' in Goa that it was always incredibly difficult to hold my tongue...

India in the imagination

People have asked me how I enjoyed my trip to India and the honest answer is that for the first time, I think I understand the country a little better.

For no matter how progressive your politics may be, there is always a first sense of excitement about the exotic idea of India. It’s a reflection of the Orientalism that Edward Said described so brilliantly, which is probably harder for someone raised on Kipling, Forster and the visible remnants of British India to ignore. It’s difficult not to become caught up in the thrill of finding everything unfamiliar and strange. For others, the mystical interpretation of the Indian sub-Continent, the focus on its ‘spirituality’ over other aspects of India’s cultural and social identity, is just another facet of this need to project a narrow vision on what India actually is.

Reading Amartya Sen’s excellent book The Argumentative Indian whilst on holiday, I was struck by the case he makes for comparing those who see the exoticness of India as somehow holding superior values, the people who attend the ashrams like the Osho international commune in Pune or who elevate some notion of ancient knowledge above post-Enlightenment reason and science, to the propaganda of the sectarian Hindutva organisations like the BJP or Bombay’s tiny but extreme Shiv Sena party, led by the loathsome Hitler-admirer Bal Thackeray. These extreme Hindu nationalists also reject everything modern for an entirely false reconstruction and revision of India’s history and culture, although their aim is very different from those on a personal and often very indulgent ‘journey’ of self-discovery. Too many times, I've heard visitors to India, seeking the mysticism of their imagination, disparage modern ideas in favour for the value of centuries-old 'wisdom' that is supposedly special simply because it is old and 'spiritual'. The BJP, in its brief period in government, was busy rewriting school textbooks based on a similar anti-intellectual pseudo-science.

Looking solely at any country's distant past is always liable to result in a wholly distorted view of its present. A visit to Britain that includes only Buckingham Palace, Stratford upon Avon and Canterbury Cathedral does the same to thousands of overseas visitors every year, but the difference is that Britain's historical, often turbulent religious controversies are not taken to have some particular bearing on modern Britain. The past is just the past. In India, however, the Victorian view that Indian culture is crude and incapable of embracing modernity still tends to persist. Amartya Sen argues that focusing almost exclusively on what India is perceived to be ‘good’ at – its religiosity – deliberately ignores a rich tradition of scepticism, invention and new ideas that continues to this day. And it’s fascinating that Sen’s book, along with Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’, are amongst the bestsellers in India at the moment.

Like every country, India is also constantly changing and, in the seven years since I first visited, I have noticed the changes most clearly in Bombay. The gap between the rich and the poor has grown and modern India has become more evident and more confident, but perhaps less fair. There are ATMs all over Colaba and expensive car show rooms in Bandra, but literacy rates outside of a few states like Kerala and West Bengal are alarmingly low and the Dharavi district of Bombay remains Asia's largest slum. During this trip, knowing my way around meant that I could stop rubber-necking, relax a little and appreciate that India is far more than an exotic destination, but a place where people live and work, a modern country with very modern concerns. I read the newspapers more this time and whether it was the problems of traffic congestion in Pune, or attacks by Hindutva activists on art exhibitions for ‘blasphemy’; or protests in Goa against unaccountable Special Economic Zones, or most notably the fears about India’s nuclear neighbour after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto (on my final day in Bombay), what is most interesting about India is what is happening now, not just India’s past.

I don’t know the next time I’ll be in India, but I know it won’t be for anything as pointless as trying to discover myself - I can do that anywhere if I really wanted to. Don't get me wrong, I love ruined forts, temples and India’s history but India is much more than its distant past, more than its religious heritage. I hope next time it will be to discover more about what India is gradually becoming, what matters today.

But first, I'm going to have to start saving. Three continents in a year has taken its toll on my travelling funds!

Christmas in Goa

Today, I saw Santa, on the back of a truck. And standing behind him was a woman in full hijab. Christmas is a little different in Goa than back at home.

For starters, its far to hot to be wearing a big red costume and a false beard - it was around 32 degrees today. Secondly, my Christmas celebrations look like they'll involve dinner on a deserted beach a little further south from Palolem, where I am now. It's be surprisingly good arriving here after a frantic wedding in Pune, with the pace of things much slower, even more than the last time I was here after Gilly & Debbie's wedding in 2005.

I'm told that the number of visitors is down, apart from today when the day trippers arrived from out of state. This may be because the police have clamped down on the all night parties and loud music has to stop at 10pm. Tomorrow night - Christmas Eve - is one day when parties until the early hours are allowed. The other is 31st December (obviously) but it seems likely that these will be nothing like the big raves of the past, with thousands of people in attendance. But despite the restrictions, party organisers will always find a way around them. I met a guy today who has 200 headphones in customs in Bombay, and once they arrive, the plan is to arrange a 'silent party', with the music sent wirelessly to each participant. Imagine a party where everyone dances in apparent silence to their own groove. It should be quite a night.

Sadly, there have been other changes. The island at the far right of Palolem beach has been bought, so I'm told, by the Russian mafia, who plan to build a luxury property on it. They also have bought the whole of Colom village, which has been effectively squatted for four generations, so the villagers worried about their future. All this information in 24 hours. If I was here for longer, I think I'd be as expert in the gossip as some of the regulars I've met today.

I'm back before New Year and I'm told that it's chilly in London, but that there's little prospect of snow for Christmas Day. Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without some certainties like a lack of snow and crap TV. But not this year for me. It's a quarter to midnight and I'm still baking...

India again - overwhelmed again

Fort, Bombay...

Have arrived in India and feel frazzled after the flight. Made the mistake of not trying to get some sleep before plunging into Bombay's busy streets and had to snooze in the afternoon.

Woke up feeling like an worker ant in a giant anthill, but without the sense of purpose - utterly overwhelmed. Momentarily it was terrifying. There were so many choices to make that it was all I could do to stop myself from doing nothing.

Bombay is not a city you really want to visit on your own. It's too frenzied not to have others around to wander into a bar with and forget about the madness outside. But still. I do love it here. Couldn't live in Bombay, but love coming here.

Sick Day

I've been off work today - the 24-hour knock-out cold bug has found me. And there's something very odd about staying home in the middle of the week, half-dazed; it's like a flashback to student life - only this time with central heating that works and a fridge that contains fresh vegetables.

It's hard to believe that in three days time, December will have arrived. Perhaps that old trope about time speeding up on the slip road towards 40 is true. Yesterday I told my friend Estelle that this year had been the worst of my life, but if that is true, how come it has flown by? Shouldn't it have dragged along, painfully, like waiting in the queue at the Indian High Commission for a visa?

Instead, since the turn of the year, there has been this and that and a great birthday party in February. And since Gilly's passing, there have been events to organise and things to do, and I managed to get by without having to take time off work. Plus two, soon to be three, trips abroad to three different continents. I have what can best be described as a wretched carbon footprint...

The reason is simple - I realised today that I can barely remember any of it.

Seriously. Don't ask me for anything detailed that happened this year and expect an instant answer. I just have random memories.

Getting a lift from Naz through south London at eleven in the morning after a long flight from Houston, heading to the Royal Free Hospital to see Gilly for one last time.

Checking into the Copthorne Hotel near Gatwick and then out again about three hours later because of a severely delayed flight to South Africa, knowing that in the space of 12 hours we had managed to travel no more than ten miles.

The last hill on the road to Southend.

Coming back on the train from Leamington Spa with a clammy whisky-hangover and stopping at Wembley Stadium's new station - before the stadium had even opened. Unsurprisingly, no-one got out.

I seem to have travel memories. Actually, no, I seem to mainly have airport memories. And in a couple of weeks, I can add some more.

So tell me again... who exactly are you?