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.