My 2017

January came in on the beach on Rabbit Island (so called for its shape not its animal population) on the Gulf of Thailand, a short boat ride from the southern coast at Kep, where Cambodian families go at holiday times to dance in the water, fully clothed.

We’d slept in a tent on the sand, as there were no beach chalets left – as with most things in Cambodia, you can’t easily book in advance – and I woke at first light as I usually do, about 6 am here. Straight into the water (I still had my swimsuit on under my clothes from the night before, and modesty is a thing here) with a pink light on the ripples, and a boat rocking. Two little boys swimming and jumping around the boat. Plastic bottles in the water. The first time for me.

There is no winter here, only a time in December and January of breezy blue mornings and no rain, with a light coating of dust and dead insects on the faces of the tuktuk drivers on Monivong Boulevard. I think sometimes about the four years in the 1970s when Phnom Penh was empty. No people at all. They were driven out, and some were even pushed along the roads in hospital beds, with drip stands rattling at their sides. Money was burned in the streets. The people would have no need of it now. It was April, when the heat is like a punishment. The 17^th of April, which is my birthday. I cannot tell Khmer people when my birthday is, though they sometimes ask. The date is one of infamy and the deepest of bad fortune. It is also the date of the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954, the day I was born in fact, when the French lost their empire in Indochina. I am quite sure that Brother No. 1, Pol Pot, and his henchpeople chose this date for the boy soldiers in black pyjamas to go in and take the capital, as a deliberate reminder of the end of war and colonial bombing. Of course the Khmer Rouge were welcomed at first, which is how they were able to fan out and take over the city. The people were told at the beginning that they were being evacuated to protect them against American bombing. Some of them even believed it, at first, but none of them had a choice. Four years later people began coming back to the city, though a civil war of sorts dragged on until the 1990s. The people just moved into houses. Not necessarily their houses, any houses. They and their children and grandchildren still live in them today.

I have lived the expat life here this year, teaching English to Cambodian teenagers whose parents can afford to pay for lessons. The students have a fair knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary, but they cannot pronounce or speak in any way that someone who is not Khmer or resident in Cambodia can understand. This is not a problem for most, as very few have any intention of ever leaving Cambodia. As far as I can tell they mostly want to be web designers and YouTube billionaires. They also cannot get information from what they hear or read, as they are used to being told what to think by their teachers. They do not willingly ask questions, and given the opportunity they copy each other’s work and cheat in exams. But there are many compensations and rewards in this work despite all this. We have talked about Cambodian ghost stories, of which there are many, and some of the students have written wonderful (and very scary) ghost stories in English. We have learned songs, and even written some. And I can teach past modals like a BASTARD.

The expat life here is a good one. I define an expat as someone who goes to live in a country where the cost of living is lower than their income presupposes, and they are not obliged to learn the language. By contrast, a migrant worker is someone who is poorer than their income presupposes, and who is obliged to learn the language to survive. The latter was the situation of my companion in France, which is where we lived for nine and ten years respectively before coming to Cambodia. I have of course been trying to learn the language in Cambodia, with so far limited success. One difficulty is that Khmer people assume that if a foreigner is speaking to them it must be in English, and so they patiently try and decode what they hear. If the foreigner is actually speaking in Khmer, they fail, and so does communication.

This has been 2017. I left Cambodia in June, taking a term out to go to the UK and see family, especially Third Granddaughter, who was born in early July. I spent five weeks on the campus of Brunel University, Uxbridge, outer west London (a mile or two from where I was born and spent my first seven years), teaching multinational teenagers at summer school, and topped this off with a week in Bloomsbury for the same organisation. It was surprisingly good fun, and I made some new friends too. One of them is even coming to work in Cambodia next month! I hope to be back next year. The rest of the chilly English summer was spent travelling around the UK seeing various friends and spending time with family, all good. I like the peripatetic life, only wish I could afford to lead it permanently. I made a short visit to France with First Granddaughter. She is now my travelling companion of choice.

A general election in the UK came and went in June. I didn’t vote. I had a proxy arranged, but seeing my (Labour) MP posing with Nigel Farage, and seeing the racist Jew-hatred at the heart of the Labour Party, made me draw the line. Anyway, I have been out of the UK over ten years now, and as an overseas voter you have to vote in the last constituency you were registered in, an area I no longer feel any connection with. Well, the time difference meant I saw the exit poll, ‘Hung Parliament’, at 3.45 am, and was able to follow the results through the morning, overnight UK time. Ultimately the only two I connected with emotionally were ‘Con Hold Reading West’ – cue much glee at the confirmed political ineptitude of the corrupt group of men (still) running Reading Labour Party – and, even better, ‘Lab Gain Reading East’. I hope Matt Rodda has as good a time representing Reading East for Labour as I did, and I say so without irony. I also hope he is better at circumventing the corrupt bullies at the heart of Reading Labour than I was.

Well, it doesn’t much matter what I think or feel about UK politics in 2017. I do hope though that something good can come out of all the crap, even Brexit. But it’s hard to be optimistic. I would say too that Theresa May is doing an almost impossible job not badly. I did know her when in politics – we represented neighbouring constituencies and went to some of the same functions.

I started learning Khmer (pronounced K’my), the language spoken by the overwhelming majority of Cambodia’s 13-million population, in January. I unashamedly plug the school, Gateway to Khmer, who do not know I am writing this. They use the CELTA method (those who know, know) and the teachers, all native speakers of Khmer, are not allowed to speak English to the students, even absolute beginners as I was in January. There is a strong emphasis on phonics and phonetics, a Very Good Thing in my view. It means I can PRONOUNCE yay! Well, trying to speak Khmer when all Khmer people seem to assume that if a foreigner is speaking to them it must be in English, and patiently try to decode your Khmer into the English they don’t know, has its moments of misery and frustration. But I am keeping on. It has been striking that ALL my fellow students so far, almost all USians, with the occasional Australian and Brit, have been Christian missionaries. Because all those people have it as a rule that you have to learn the language before you can do the missioning, so that is where the market is. I’ve learned a lot from them. My failings as a language learner so far are however all my responsibility.

September to December, back teaching in Phnom Penh. Also going to the gym and having adventures in sobriety, all part of my preparation for being old, which some would say I am already. Some days in Penang, Malaysia (go there! it's fab!), when term ended in December, followed by a lovely laid-back Australian Christmas with Andrew’s family. Thanks to them all for their kind and generous hospitality, and for the opportunity for Andrew to get to know his niece and nephew. Now we’re back, and I’m still here, still negotiating the Phnom Penh traffic on my bike with what I hope is aplomb.

See you in 2018.

I didn't think I could

Two years ago I was working in Strasbourg. France, for an international organisation, a job I found interesting, and was reasonably happy with my life. I wasn't especially looking to change things. We owned an apartment, and under the rules I was going to have to retire in 2019 (which is still the case). I didn't especially want to live in France after retirement. Not in Strasbourg anyway, beautiful though it is, because the weather is crap. Nobody should live in a cold dark place after retirement if they don't have to. It was tempting to stay in France, but somewhere warmer - the Rhine Valley is dank - for the sake of French healthcare, which has to be the best in the world. But France is hardly the cheapest country to live in, and one's pension goes a lot further elsewhere. What to do? Well, no need to decide right now. Cyprus is the island of my heart, and I dreamed of living out my old age there. But Brexit. Yes, a tragedy, and we will see.

Then, suddenly, we decided to sell the apartment, to make ourselves free. No sooner had we made that decision than significant other (this was in 2015) got a job in Cambodia. Someone, somewhere, was putting a rocket underneath us and saying, get up, move on, change your lives. So we did. To cut a long story short, sig other has been working in Cambodia since 2015, the apartment was sold in January 2016, and I took sabbatical from Strasbourg and joined him in Phnom Penh in October 2016. I even got a teaching job there, so not requiring another income to support me in Cambodia. Providential or what?

Living in tropical South-East Asia, for the first time in my life at age 62, learning Khmer, teaching. Sig other teaching, developing academically by studying for a Master's, which I had thought he should do a long time ago but only now is he galvanised to do it. Both of us doing things we thought we couldn't do, or would never do. My personal possessions and our household goods savagely culled. Sig other is a hoarder and will not cull his, so has a storage unit in Strasbourg all to himself, which is another story, and he will be the one to end it. We live the expat life in Phnom Penh, an easy city to live in. Teachers are not rich, but life is good. Mostly.

Both of us have been picked up roughly and set down in another part of the world to do different things. Where will it all end? We don't know. I thought I was having a gap year at 62, and sig other thought he was taking a job in Cambodia to get Asia experience to help him to develop his work in his field in the UK. But it isn't quite like that. There's more to it than that.

None of this comes free. I have no home, and no real legal identity any more. I miss my family. I hope some of them will visit. I'll be seeing most of them this summer, and expect to be teaching for six weeks in darkest Uxbridge, which will help to finance a summer in the UK. Then - well, anything could happen.

new year travelling: Year Zero in the Khmer lands

as I have posted previously, changes gonna come. Be careful what you wish for ... in spring last year I was thinking that my life was in a bit of a rut and I needed to make some kind of change, but could not think what. The cancer scare that turned out not to be, but likely to be within five years, was part but not all of that thinking. I didn't know then that significant other was thinking just the same thing, and wishing for something to change. He didn't have the quantity or quality of work he wanted to do in Strasbourg, and I did but was feeling trapped and hoping to do something different before retirement and consequent loss of income and/or health problems caught up with me. Well, with that, significant other was offered and accepted a job in Cambodia. He went off in June to do the summer work at a UK university he has done for the past few years, came back in September for three days, and went off again to Cambodia for a year. At least. He left all his possessions for me to sort out and put into storage, without even mentioning them before he left - and he is a hoarder and I am very much not - but that is another matter. So I put our place on the market - we had discussed this - and asked to work at 90% of contract instead of full time for 2016. This was agreed, so I carry on working as normal, except that I get another 21 days' holiday for this year. I took 31 days' leave, starting on 8th January, and flew off to join him in Cambodia. I have always wanted to be a trailing spouse, and this is as close as I am going to get at my age.

I had never been to South-East Asia at all before coming here. Er, it's hot. Cambodia is tropical. Half the year in an oven and half in a sauna, they say. This is the oven half. I chose this time of the year to travel here because (1) the Alsace winter is no fun; it's more the dark than the cold that's hard to bear (2) in January and February there's nothing much to do on the allotment. Our place is sold - the keys were handed over 48 hours before I left, and the last three days in Strasbourg spent in a hotel - so with no housing or utility costs for the next few weeks, and significant other with his own flat, it was feasible for me to travel and stay there for a while. So, hey, a big change.

We know the history of Cambodia, or we think we do. The Killing Fields, the Khmer Rouge. It was 40 years ago, thus in living memory. In Phnom Penh, and elsewhere, you quite often see people with no foot, no leg, or no arm. They are all, pretty much, or appear to be, fifty-something. You don't see many others that age at all. About a quarter of the population was lost to starvation, murder and death by forced labour. Genocide, let's not mince our words. The effects are still felt now, as the intellectuals were killed first and the universities closed, meaning that when it all reopened there was no one much left to do the teaching. If you were alive and could read and write after that you could teach, so quality education is only starting to be available now.

Anyway, enough of the history. Others have written it better than I could. I'm currently reading Ben Kiernan's 'How Pol Pot Came To Power' (pub. 1985, updated 2004 - an academic history which is readable and a good source book) and in the first few days I was here I re-read Margaret Drabble's 'The Gates of Ivory' (pub. 1991 - the Kiernan is in the bibliography: a novel which is full of great stuff and picks up most of the characters from the earlier two in her trilogy 'The Radiant Way'). Recommended. The late Doris Lessing wrote somewhere that her generation (born in the 1920s and 30s, the one before the boomers, with the war babies' mini-generation slotted in between, what has been called the Greatest Generation, though not by me) was the first to go primarily to works of fiction for information about the world. And so it is and has continued.

The Khmer Rouge wore uniforms like these. They wanted the purest communist land, starting at Year Zero. They left behind - well, not much really. And the Khmers picked themselves up and started rebuilding their country. What was left of it.

photo taken by me at Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, Phnom Penh

And here is a survivor. I met him today near Battambang, Cambodia's second city. He speaks OK English and better French. His name is Suon Som and I was pleased to hear some things about his life. He says he is 74 years old. He says he was a general in the army - careful not to say which army or exactly when; the framed picture of him in uniform he showed me is very hard to date, and you can't see the uniform properly. He also showed me a certificate authorising him to be an election observer in the Cambodian National Assembly election of 2003, an observation mission partly funded by DFID. He also says that Johnny Hallyday came to see him in Cambodia. Well, maybe he did. Though so far I can't verify that Johnny ever went to Cambodia, but why would he not, he has many fans there, or had. I'd love to go back and talk with Suon Som again.

Suon Som.photo taken by me 22nd January 2016

downsizing life

a lot of people downsize some time after their children are grown and gone. Move to a smaller house, move away from where their children grew up, perhaps take early retirement. That last is less likely for my generation - we are fitter and healthier than our parents were at our age, for the most part, because we were better nourished as children than they were. We boomers were pre junk food, remember, and we played out unsupervised for hours every day in almost any weather. Our own children (I had mine when I was young, and they are in their 30s now) were more supervised than we were, and their physical activity was more organised - things like swimming club and gym club, which my siblings and I did not have. Mine played out, and rode bikes on the road on their own, but a lot of their friends did not, and of course we lived an urban life. Even then rural children were less likely to be physically active than urban ones, and more likely to be driven everywhere. It's much more so now. My two granddaughters are in outer London, and are lucky enough (because their parents were committed to the idea) to live in a housing development where there are safe places for them to play more or less unsupervised.

I am likely to be forced to retire in three or four years' time. I don't want to. I want to work until I really need a rest, and/or until health problems force me to stop. But I work for an international institution that is not subject to EU law and has a fixed retirement age. This is pernicious, but is how it is.

The cancer I had a scare about a few months ago may become a reality: my French gastroenterologist has told me he thinks it will, in that cheery way they have, and if it does I may have five years maximum from that point. But if, as I think is more likely, it does not (oesophagus, since you ask, caused by smoking), I may have getting on for 40 more years to live. As I now have arthritis, kicked off by the accident I had last year (nobody knows why this happens, but it nearly always does), the quality of that life may deteriorate unpleasantly as time goes on - or I may have one joint replaced after another as technology improves, and still be riding my bike when I am 100.

Whatever happens, one lesson I have learned in recent years (I learned it from my daughter, but that is another story) is that if you are going to make a change in your life, make it when you choose to and when you can control the process - don't make it when you are in a cleft stick and have no other choice. This applies to the ending of a relationship or a marriage (and no one says "bravo" to  you about that one, no matter what the outcome or prior situation) and to moving house/changing the way you live. Move from a house with stairs to a flat on one level before you start falling down the stairs and breaking your hips. Move to within walking distance of shops and public transport before you are forced by health problems to stop driving. End a bad relationship before it damages you so much that you're no longer capable of positive action of any kind, and don't worry about "whose fault" it is that the relationship is bad. Become an accomplished online shopper and consumer of services before health problems make you housebound.

All this means that you will often be seen as doing things "too soon", or that those around you will be bemused as to why you are doing them at all. I am currently in the process of selling my home. Well, I think I am, but you know how these things are. I know that some around me think I am crazy for doing this. I intend, not to buy another place, but to rent, at least until I have the retirement plans I am being forced to make firmly in place. In any event the place I live in after this will be smaller than my current place, which is too big to live alone in. Why live with rooms you don't use but have to clean?

Alone. Yes. Significant other has departed. Not from me, but from Europe, to work in Cambodia for at least a year. This has been part of the inspiration for me to make these changes. But not the whole of it. It's time to do it. Live in a clean, clear, smaller space, and use the income I have to do things rather than to have things. As part of this I will be working 90% instead of full-time from 1st January, which will give me enough time (I'm using the pay cut to buy more holiday) to travel. First, of course, to Cambodia, where I have never been. I'll be there in January and will stay for six weeks. Part-time, but keeping up full pension contributions. I'm not THAT daft.

No one was ever on their deathbed saying they wished they'd spent more time scrubbing the skirting boards.

I'm 62 next birthday. It's time to live.   

life for Holocaust perpetrator

Duch

Kaing Guek Ev (this is the French rendering of his name), known as Duch, on Friday lost his appeal and was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, by judges of the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.  This is indeed an extraordinary body.  It took 30 years after the crimes in question to set it up, and unlike other courts of the kind it is situated in the country where those crimes took place.  Half its judges are Cambodian, and it operates in English, Khmer and French.  Essentially it has been set up to bring five people, all of whom are at least 80 years old, to justice, and it needs to get a move on if it is going to do so before the Grim Reaper does its work for it.  It's arguable that what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s was not genocide, arguable too that it was.   What is not disputable is that Cambodia was rescued in 1979 by the wrong people, namely the Vietnamese communists, and that therefore, disgracefully, the Cambodia seat at the UN was retained by the Khmer Rouge at the US' behest for many more years, until 1993 and the Paris conference.

This tribunal is working slowly and in difficult circumstances.  But I believe it should be supported.  It is an example of the UN, a body which is useless most of the time, supporting some work which is actually for the good of humanity.

Holocaust denial.  I have often wondered why those who are inclined to deny that such an event took place are also those who hold the view that a Holocaust, especially of Jews, would be rather a Good Thing.  This view is of course widely held in parts of the Middle East, and tacitly supported by many on the stupid left today.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "We Are All Hezbollah Now".

It's good to retain some hope for the future.  The Duch verdict (there is no death penalty, and Cambodians will no longer kill their own people) does give some hope.  Elsewhere in the world (Syria, parts of the Labour Party) it's harder to find it.  Russia and China are happy to see the Syrian people killed in huge numbers.  Let them pay the price for that.  And make the killing stop.