Arrrrr me hearties, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. oiiil make ye walk the gangplank yer lillie livered land lubbers ye
View from Hilton window. Nice. No funny comment forthcoming.
Sinapore is more relaxed about allowing Jews into the country than Malaysia. Hence Jeff Goldblum made a dramatic entrance that nobody niticed (except the thousands crushed under his enormous insectiod eyes, for which there will be no memorial)
"This is a beer. I am happy" Cyborg man claims to be remebering times gone by and Tiger beers quaffed in memory, but really he is planning world domination with the aid of pint of beer. Exterminate. Exterminate.
(Footnote: technically footnotes are at the foot of the page, I just want to buck the trend here. That was not the footnote, this is. Wowee, I just looked at how much I typed in today’s entry. Well, there we have it, I’ve offloaded a lot of my pent up loquaciousness onto you poor, poor people. I would apologise for being so over the top in my descriptions of the last 2 weeks, but I’m not going to. It’s up to you if you want to read it or not.)
It’s hard to believe but 2 weeks have rocketed by, we’re now on our last full day in Langkawi – fly home tomorrow afternoon – and then on Saturday night mum and dad scoot back over the water to sunny (or should I say snowy) England.
OK, back to where I left off in the last post (doo doo, doo doo dooo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo)…….
M + P went on the “nice” bus down to Singapore, which leaves from the marvellous colonial grandeur of the old Kuala Lumpur train station (a building which sadly the government would absolutely love to fall down because it’s on valuable land and apparently history doesn’t make enough money; in fact it nearly fell down due to negligence about 7 years ago when it caught fire, and nobody will admit if it was state sponsored arson or not). They had a jolly little incident on the way down when the driver missed the highway exit to Singapore, slammed on the anchors and then reversed 400 meters up the hard shoulder – good old Malaysian drivers, they are very well trained over here, road safety is always their first priority. When they were there they went and met Ira (the quilt lady) who took them for dinner. They took a boat along the Singapore river (thus completing the set of transportation methods – aside from helicopter, motorbike, pushbike, hydrofoil, trishaw, bullock cart, and skis, OK so the almost complete set of plane, train, monorail, local bus, car, coach and boat). I know that mum decided to chose a restaurant one night and they ended up eating a big pile of utter crap, and very expensive crap as Singapore is no cheap cheap city – an event which dad has chuckled about ever since, as it was her one choice of eatery and the only bad meal they’ve had thus far. He has to rub it in of course, she would.
They went to Raffles hotel (bit too early for high tea sadly) but they wouldn’t let dad into the hotel proper cos his shorts were a few inches too short (above the regulation limit of below the knee – well, they do have to maintain some standards to keep out the riff-raff, after all they are Raffles, the pride of colonial Britishness.
That’s about all I know about their trip down to Singapore.
Thursday 24th Jan: (whilst m + p in Singapore)
My first day as a producer for adverts (oh no, sucked into the hideously deformed world of the devils work, yes it’s true I may be an atheist but I can sincerely say that I am now an agent of Satan peddling his dirty advertising wares to millions of unsuspecting brainless peons nationwide). This day was the hardest of the 2 as I had my good friend Tony Pietra as director. He’s a lovely lad and a good director, but can be a bit of a handful when trying to get him to be realistic about his desires onscreen. So we started early and had to shoot this ad in the style of various horror movies, done in a comedy mickey-take style. The first real problem (and in fact one of the only problems that threatened the shoot) was a fatal error on my fart. I put some trust in an actor. Now this lesson was one of the first lessons I ever learned in a theatre – YOU CAN NEVER TRUST AN ACTOR TO DO ANYTHING RIGHT ON HIS/HER OWN, NOTHING, THEY ARE WORSE THAN INFANTS, WORSE THAN RETARDS, THEY EVEN NEED HELP WIPING THEIR JACKSY, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER PUT THEM IN ANY POSITION OF RESPONSIBILITY.
So silly old me here, when I was trying to organise this whole thing and co-ordinate the structure of the day made a grave mistake. I hire a girl called Syazlina, she’s not that bad an actress and moderately good looking in a kind of not very good looking way (looks better on camera than in real life for sure, especially if you avoid her face, and we didn’t need a stunner or I wouldn’t have called her). Her problem is that she’s been in a couple of crappy Malay TV programs and is a spoiled little rich girl, so she seems to think that she’s right up there with Madonna and Halle Berry. Hmm, methinks not dear. I thought I was doing her a favour by getting her onscreen but she seemed to think otherwise. Anyway, slagging aside, she says she didn’t need to be collected by the runner, she could make her own way, and also she lives near the lead male actor Usamah Rohner. She offered me a marvellous option of picking him up and bringing him onset. This seemed a golden opportunity when I was stressing over the schedule, cos at that point the runner had to be on the other side of town and I could figure out how to get him to be in 2 places at once. Herein lay my error and a great lesson to me. Now my schedule required that we shoot their scenes in an office, an office which is in use by normal office people and full of normal office noise in office hours. So we had to be out of there by 9am. I called them for 7am to get it all done and dusted. Now, because I wasn’t paying amazingly well (for an advert for sure, but the budget was pathetic) Syaz obviously thought a 7am call for beyond her superstar glam image (something akin to “I won’t take a crap for less than 500rm darling”) and thus she casually failed to wake up on time, thus wise belaying Usamah, thus wise delaying my shoot, so all of us had arrived at work at 5.30am to do nothing but stand around cupping our balls until she casually swanned onset at 8.45am. Great, thanks a lot. Then she had the audacity to bug me all day about whether she was going to get paid today or later, try and be all diva diva about it. Well, there we go, that taught me 2 lessons, NEVER TRUST AN ACTOR and NEVER HIRE SYAZLINA EVER AGAIN.
The unpaid extras were amazing however, despite Tony’s insane demands that we all do a hundred meter sprint, several times, in the baking midday sunshine (no shelter, as for some reason the big shady side of the street just wasn’t blisteringly hot for slave-driver Tony. I can directly testify for how rancidly hideous this part of the day was, as I was one of those extras being made to run mini marathons in 35 degree direct sun on tarmac for bugger all money. Many blessings and joyous hugs of gratitude to all the extras and their patience. Ps.: don’t ask me to cover the medical expenses of your skin cancer treatment, got no budget lah.
Anyhoo, it all went well and only ran 10 minutes over schedule (which is a good job I slipped in 2 hours for cockups isn’t it)
Friday 25TH Jan: (M+P get back from S’pore tonight)
More shooting, but this time with nowhere near as many actors and nowhere near as much stress. Or so I hoped.The day started badly, with the runner oversleeping by several hours, leaving me stranded and the wardrobe girl also stranded. I very stressed because I realised I had all the DV tapes in my bag, as well as the runner van having all the lighting and grip kit inside it. But lucky, lucky, lucky, the cameraman made sure he had hold of the camera and also had a spare tape on his person (good job really, it made him worth the exorbitant fee he charged). So my ass was saved – because we were filming DJs doing their morning show live and if we’d had to come in an extra day it would have burst the seam of the budget severely. Lucky also for Pakot the runner, cos if we had had a major setup (requiring lights etc) then I would have said “Pakots fault” and left the crew and director who arrived at 5am do what they desired to him whilst I walked away. Lucky, lucky, lucky all round.
The rest of the day uneventful, except I did break my shoe when I had to shoot my scene with me going mental and smashing up a mobile phone into million pieces, got a bit carried away jumping up and down on it in flimsy sandals, ah well.
Mum and dad got back in the afternoon, and myself and Vanessa’s mother planned mums day of pampering for tomorrow.
Saturday:
Went to Hilton to meet mum and dad quite early this morning, as mother had a day of pampering arranged by Vanessa’s mum. In typical mum style she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown because she had no control over the proceedings. All I knew was “driver picks you up at 10.15, go to salon, driver bring you back after”. So mother all like, “where do I sit, front or back? Do I talk to the driver? Do I have to pay him??” Anyway, I got her in the car and bid her farewell. Dad and I decided to go and have a trip into Bukit Bintang and try to get hold of these Nintendo DS card reader thingies for Jonathan. So the obvious stop was Plaza Low Yat, land of real and dodgy technologies. Took dad on his first trip on a commuter monorail (his only other experiences being on novelty ones like from the car park at Alton Towers, not one jammed to bursting with ignorant scurrying shoppaholics). He seemed to be in train geeks heaven, getting exited about the way its power is distributed, the doors, the windows, the points and the control systems on the tracks – however the monorail is driver operated, not automatic like the LRT or the KLIA ekspres. Glad to see him having fun. We popped into Low Yat and got a hold of what we needed, not much cheaper than the UK, but a little bit discounted, so got them anyway. It still baffles me how technology in the UK is so cheap, when everything else is shockingly expensive. How do we do it?
After I took dad to a nice outdoor bar on a street-side to have a few beers and talk about the colonial histories and wartime wotnots of Malaya and Singapore. Cor not that old chestnut I hear you roar, when will you get bored of that. We possibly talked about rugby for a bit. Then I got to wax vitriolic about local politics. This is one political subject which won’t draw dad and me into an argument, cos he doesn’t know much about the shocking degree of Malaysian political corruption and murderous police brutality, so therefore can’t agree with me whilst saying “no no no” at the same time. I may have to dig this one out again in the future.
Mum had a lovely time getting pampered and rubbed down at the Menard salon. She had a proper facial, full massage, and god knows what else (add that to last weeks massage and pedicure and she’s had a good work over since being here. She met Vanessa’s mum briefly, who gave her a big bag of free goodies to take back. Mum feels a bit like she’s living in hogs heaven here I reckon, as a half hour massage back home is about 50 quid and she got 3 hours of proper nice spa treatment and facials for not much more than that.
Tonight is the big night, the grand meeting of the Chia and Doughty families, the first introductions (softened slightly by mum meeting Mrs Chia when slightly incapacitated in the middle of having her pores examined by a macro camera skin camera thingy.
So Vanessa drove to the Hitlon to pick up ma and pa (we got lost on the way somehow and I had a bit of a go at Vanessa cos we went into the most savage jam KL has to offer for no real reason). We got them and then headed off to Mid Valley where we were having dinner. After picking up mum and dad I tried to direct Vanessa to mid valley (a way we hadn’t been before, but I had seem the signboards repeatedly and figured I could direct us. The weather was awful, nasty rain, which then became torrential as we went on. We somehow missed the turning, namely because KLs roads and signboards are beyond spastic, in fact spastic would be a compliment to the city’s road planning department, so I tried to take us a way that I knew for sure and thought would lead us around the jam. We took this large detour (which brought us past our house) but the problem was that I’d been this way in the daytime and didn’t realise that there were no streetlights there, which is bad enough on a normal night but by now it was torrential. We got to just outside our apartment and the road had turned quite literally into a river in the storm, being around a foot deep for about 50 meters. Vanessa bravely ploughed through this new ford, and we made it out to the other side. By now visibility was, well, the windscreen, so we pulled over by the hospital to wait it out a bit. I thought Vanessa knew the way to Mid Valley from our place, as she had driven me there before saying “we’re going the Mid Valley way”, so I got a little bit over exasperated when (apparently due to my bad directions, but, well, we’ve already had this argument several times since so lets not go into it, I’ll just say “it’s my fault” cos that makes life much easier all round. It was my fault.
So, long story short, we took the exit before the one we should have done, which led us smack bang into, yes, you guessed it, the same jam that we’d joined for no reason less than 40 minutes previously, only now it was even worse (ie: static) because of the rain. I stupidly shouted at Vanessa and made her upset, which I know wasn’t fair but I bloody hate traffic jams, especially the same traffic jam twice in an hour and both times for no reason at all. But never mind, I was wrong to shout, she did very well at piloting our car/boat through the river rapids obstacle course and it affected her ability to navigate.
So, dinner. Brilliant, Chinese food, which is always a winner. Our respective mothers and fathers got along very well. Jack and Julie (friends of the Chias) came along as moral support and to provide us all with topics of conversation when the words ran dry (I think Vanessa’s dad was a little nervous about what to talk about, I imagine he’s been having awful nightmares about sitting at a table with 2 carbon copies of me and him contemplating suicide if he had to engage in yet more controversial/generally crass topics such as I am want to come out with (yes my curse of verbal diahorea and lack of choosing the right moment for certain topics has still not abated, I fear it never will). So I think he must have breathed a sigh of relief to find that my dad is quite mature and able to chew the fat about a variety of things, and not my usual drivel (also that dad isn’t as smelly, messy or vulgar as I am – well not in polite company anyway). Mum and Mrs C got along very well I reckon, they seemed to have plenty to talk about. Mother kept going “oh my god this is DELICIOUS” at most things, having a try of everything (including Jellyfish and may I add these little knots of orange stuff, which looked like pasta or noodles, but Julie pointed out, after the first bite, that it was actually small intestine… “mmm, that’s lovely” said I, as I tried discreetly not to vomit Aah those crazy Chinese, is there anything that isn’t on the menu?).
Afterwards we all went back to the Chia house for whiskey, but one car (Mr and Mrs Chia, Stanley and Ah kong) got stuff in traffic leaving Mid Valley and didn’t get home for over an hour, which was a bit of a bummer. All got to bed around 1ish and a good night all round.
Sunday:
Stanley’s 13th birthday, and at my suggestion we all went paint-balling at a local spot inside an old multi-storey car park. Brilliant fun, except for the point when I accidentally shot the birthday boy 3 times on the top of his head from only a metre or 2 away. Yes, you mat ask how I “accidentally shot him 3 times” – as Dad did, and Vanessa's mother, and Vanessa, and Jess, and Stanley already did. Well, can I coin my own personal catchphrase and say “it wasn’t my fault”? Well it was my fault, I didn’t mean to shoot him in the head even once, let alone 3 times, and it did look painful, all blood in his hair and lumps and stuff. Oh god, why me???? After all my hard work I go and try to kill the only son, and on his birthday. Oh Christ, why have you forsaken me??? Oh that’s right, cos you don’t exist. Erm, well, scratch the Christ part. Oh clumsy misfortune, why have you stuck yourself to me like superglue all my life??? Yes. Never mind though, lucky for me, no brain damage and he’s not likely to forget it next time I ask him to come paint-balling with me. Stanley's friends have now been firmly re-assured in what their parents taught them, namely “all white people are utter callous bastards who can’t be trusted in the least”. It is true though.
Vanessa’s mum helped me out though, by pointing out that at least it was only Stanley and not one of his friends cos then I’d have to explain to their mums and dads why this very tall nearly 30 white stranger shot their 12 year old “accidentally in the head 3 times at point blank range”. Yes, try explaining my way out of that one. So see good in bad eh.
In the afternoon we all went for a kind of birthday tea – I also got to walk the dog for the first time all week – and mum and dad came away laden with gifts, which I think made them feel that my suggestions of wine and chocolate were a bit crap, well I didn’t know they we gonna get nearly a whole suitcase full of presents now did I!!!! No bugger told me anything.
Monday 28th Jan – until now: A lovely relaxing time at Pulau Langkawi
We flew up to the north to enjoy 4 days of lovely relaxing in the sun. It’s a bit of a shame that we had to come to Langkawi cos I don’t really like to support such a bad idea of destroying a beautiful ecosystem in the name of making money, but it’s just the easiest place to bring mum and dad to enjoy some tropical loveliness. I’ll take them to Thailand or the east coast next time. The hotel is very nice indeed, however when we first got here they stuck us in a crappy room with bird poo all over the balcony. Dad didn’t want to complain, “complain, cheap hotel, british, grumble” but mum took the initiative (with a little push from me) and had a moan, so we got bumped up to a very nice suite with a balcony sans avian dung.
We’ve had a fine old time eating, swimming, drinking, eating, going around in a taxi to various places, shopping, eating, relaxing and swimming. Yesterday we had quite a hectic day, and somehow managed to fit in all our touristy ness into one day. We hired a taxi and went to the cable car, which mum very wisely didn’t attempt to endure cos we’d never have got her down as she’s have glued herself to a rockface. That was proper good, as the last leg of the cable run goes practically vertical for about 300 meters up. Very impressive, if not a little bit trouser browning. The platforms on top offer an amazing view of the unspoiled virgin jungle that covers most of the island, interspersed with the nasty scars of government clearfelling. At least the platforms of the cable car and viewing pints weren’t too destructive, but that’s obvious enough because it wasn’t done by shoddy cowboy Malaysian contractors – as evidenced by the lack of deaths so far, in fact it was made by Austrians. At least the government are not so stupid (I won’t say intelligent enough, because they really are thick) as to go killing tourists when they’re trying to bleed as much dollar as possible from them. Yeah, the cable cars were great, then we took a trip out to a beautiful stretch of beach (where we all swam in the sea and got repeatedly stung by hydrozoans, the mosquitoes of the ocean) ate some nice food and got fairly badly sunburned. After that we ended up going to the Padi museum (nothing to do with diving, but padi as in rice padi fields and coolies). Mum was mesmerised and got taken around by a lovely guide who kept giving her herbs to smell (she literally filled her, no not pants dirty minded buggers, hat. She filled her hat with the stuff the guy gave her, frangipani, lemongrass, some flower that smelled of cooked rice (and the local translation is "flower that smells like cooked rice" imaginative in it's nomeclature and no mistake), curry leaf, turmeric root, cinnamon, rice grains and god only knows what else). Dad was reet tired after going up a whole load of steps to walk over the wobbly bridge that you get to after the cable cars – a very hairy bridge, but it looked cool, and he didn’t really have the energy to find out about the history of rice cultivation, but mum had a whale of a time and now feels very well informed on the subject.
All in all this trip to Langkawi has been a resounding success – they’re bobbing around in the pool as I write this, occasionally calling to me when the great big sea-eagles come flying over so I can get a photo with dads new telephoto lens, but the blasted creatures keep vanishing as soon as I bring the camera to bare. Swinehund. I’m going to join them now, as it’s taken over 3 hours to write this and my bum has gone numb.
More to come at a loater date when I can be bothered.
Me and mother at the Rice Padi museum, Langkawi. Marvellous place
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View from the cable car as we went up. 
Hairy
