My name is "Mobi"; I'm an alcoholic

Jontien, 15th December, 2009

15 Dec 2009 3 Comments

by mobidark in MOBI'S DAILY PAGE

Today I have been sober for 107 days.

Yesterday I received a brief ‘business’ email from Bob in which he mentioned that he hadn’t been in touch with Dave for several days. So I decided to call Dave’s lady, to check on what was happening with him. She told me that Dave was currently on his way back from the hospital after a check–up, and that they had both had a few beers that morning. (Dave’s Lady is also a ‘sober alcoholic’). I asked her if Dave had been drinking regularly but I couldn’t get a straight answer, so I guess the answer was in the affirmative. She asked me when I was coming to Bangkok as she was planning to go to her home in the south of Thailand on 26^th December,  and he would be very  ‘vulnerable’ over New Year. I was in the process of telling her that I would not be coming, when she announced that Dave had just arrived back home and would I speak to him? I told her that I would not talk to him – not until he stopped drinking, and we concluded the conversation.

So that was that, and we’ll see how things develop over the next few weeks.

I have been feeling a bit ‘shaky’ of late, especially when I was in the middle of my dilemma as how to deal with Dave and Bob, and there were a number of times when I nearly decided :“fck..it,”and go out and lay one on.

I thought I had got over that little episode, but now this problem with my ‘live in’ is bothering me, and once more I am feeling like taking a drink. It seems that every time that I have an emotional or ‘difficult’ situation to deal with, my thoughts go immediately to solving (or forgetting) the problem with alcohol. I guess after forty odd years of using alcohol as a ‘crutch’ , it is a difficult habit to break.

Yesterday I resolved to talk to her after I returned home from my morning meeting. I got home, sat down, went over in my mind a dozen times what I was going to say – then I ‘chickened out’. I decided to postpone it. This lack of “balls” has put me in a permanent state of depression, and yesterday afternoon I went out and visited one of my alcoholic friends at his house, in East Pattaya, not far from where I used to live. It was about 4.30 p.m. when I arrived, and as ever, he was already half pissed – a bottle of beer on one side of him, and a very large glass of red wine on the other side. We caught up on all the ridiculous gossip and he updated me on all the happenings at the local bars which I hadn’t visited since I left my wife, some time ago.

I told him about my failed attempts to get rid of my girl friend, and we had some good laughs about my predicament and things in general. I started to unwind, and when he replenished his glass of wine, I came within an ace of telling him to pour me one as well. I thought: “what the hell? No one will know.”

Then I knew that if I did take that drink, I probably wouldn’t stop for many days, and everyone would know. And what is more, my sponsor would be very unhappy, and I really didn’t want to upset him, as he has been such a dear, supportive friend.

It probably wasn’t the best of reasons for not taking a drink, but any reason that works is probably O.K. and I resisted. Slowly, that burning desire to drink started to ease.

Today I shared what happened yesterday at my morning meeting, so at least I have got it off my chest.

I still don’t think I am out of the woods. Drinking is still very much on my mind, and I still haven’t gathered the courage to break the news to the young lady. She hasn’t really done anything wrong, and has been quite good to me, and as I have related before, in many ways she has some very good character traits.

But being of good character does not a relationship make.

She is too young, she doesn’t have any feelings for me, (I can sense it), she is making me unhappy, and of course she is only really in it for the money.

I am not ready for any kind of relationship – I know it now, and I just want to be alone.

I chickened out last night, I chickened out this morning – and this afternoon, but I must really try to talk to her tonight. In the old days, a few beers would have loosened my tongue, and if I don’t tell her soon, I will surely have that drink.

Jomtien, 13th December, 2009

13 Dec 2009 1 Comment

by mobidark in MOBI'S DAILY PAGE

Today I have been sober for 105 days.

Today, it’s not so much a question of ‘if’ rather than ‘when’.

The ‘if’ and the ‘when’ are connected to my ‘live-in’, who, I have decided has to go. It was a big mistake, which I now need to correct it before she becomes too entrenched.

I thought I really needed a woman to fill up the empty gaps in my life after I left my wife, but I now realise that in spite of the obvious problems in living alone (no ‘sex on tap’, no one to cook and housekeep), I am definitely better off alone at this point in my life.

She hasn’t even been with me for 2 months, yet we barely talk any more, and the constant daily whine of “no have money’ is driving me round the bend. Trust me, I am always have been and always will be a very generous man with my ladies, and she has been no exception.

Then, to top it all, a few days ago her younger brother arrived from up-country to take up a job. Well, I had no problem with him kipping on the couch for a couple of nights, but 2 nights stretched to three, then four, then five, so finally, yesterday morning, I asked her how long was he proposing to stay here? She replied that she didn’t know.

Didn’t know????!!!!

I lost my cool, (which I hate doing and is very bad for my peace and serenity), and she got the message.

Last night he was gone, thank God, but we are still barely talking, and I know that I have to undertake one very unpleasant conversation and move her out. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, we’ll see.

So I haven’t been a very happy camper over the past week or so, what with losing my life-long friends, and all this crap with my ‘live-in’.

As one of the senior members of our morning AA group said a few weeks ago: “We alcoholics have incredibly creative ways of turning our lives and relationships into an almighty mess.” Never was a truer word spoken.

Yesterday, I missed the morning meeting, but made the lunchtime meeting at Jomtien, and enjoyed the change in faces and venue. Today I slept in late again, no doubt due to these antihistamine tablets I am still taking, and plan to spend the day quietly at home, and maybe make the evening meeting.

I will not be going to the meeting tonight. I spent about two hours writing the next installment of “The Retirement Years” and something happened on my PC and I have lost the lot, as it wasn’t saved, and after 3 hours of trying to recover it, I have finally given up. I thought my system was full proof as I open a new draft file in Microsoft Word, and save the text as I go along. I even thought that if the system or ‘Word’ crashed it could still be recovered under the ‘auto recovery’ system, but I was wrong. I have lost all the text written since the first save.

I am now playing around with the auto recovery system to see why it doesn’t work, as all the options seem to have been set correctly, so I may or may not get back to blogging today. It is very upsetting when you lose a whole bunch of text and I very much doubt that I can reproduce anything than even vaguely resembles the the original ‘lost’ document.

MOBI’S STORY – (PART 22)

THE RETIREMENT YEARS (CONTINUED)

(This is the second time that I have had a go at writing this particular installment!! – maybe it was meant to be…)

The ‘big bang’ holiday across the North American continent did little to reassure me that I was embarking upon a happier stage of my life, and once I wasb back at our Essex home, cold reality set in,  and I realised  that I was in for a difficult and unhappy time.

The only brief periods of ‘light’ in an otherwise increasingly depressing and bleak existence, were my early morning, daily jogs across the Essex countryside, and my regular visits to the golf driving range, and even the odd venture onto a real golf course.

After a while, I re-established contact with an ex work colleague, who was also retired, lived in the same area, and was almost as bad a golfer as poor old Mobi. We fell into a routine of meeting once a week for a round at a local ‘par 3’ golf course, followed by lunch at a nearby country pub.

And of course there was my creative writing, which continued fitfully, despite my wife’s constant interference.

During that early period of my retirement, we owned and maintained two residences. Our main residence remained in Essex, and our new property in East Northamptonshire was used at weekends and on other convenient occasions. The two properties were around 100 miles apart, but thanks to the M11 motorway, and the A14 which ran through Cambridgeshire to Northants, the journey was not too arduous.

We kept the two places going for almost 2 years, mainly because I could not move my daughter from her grammar school in Essex until she had completed her GCSE examinations which she would take in the early summer of 2002. And of course we had to sell the Essex house at the best possible price. But I didn’t really want to go to the expense of furnishing two houses, and if I did, what would I do with the excess furniture, once we disposed of the Essex house?

Luckily, my older ex boss, who had been retired for some years, came to my rescue. He was in the process of ‘downsizing’ his home, from a large four bedroom executive house to a  luxury apartment, and none of his existing furniture would fit into his new home so he let me choose what I needed from his house at ‘knock down’ prices. Thus we were able to make our new home quite habitable, at little cost. But we had ambitious plans (or at least my wife did) for our new retirement ‘nest’ and we spent many months traipsing back and forth between the two houses, arranging painting, decorating, modifications, and building a large extension at the rear of the house from where we had full view of the back garden and the fields and woods beyond.

So although not relishing my new way of life as I was firmly under the thumb of my ‘control freak’ of a wife for much of the time, I was kept quite busy, what with my ‘personal’ activities together with the domestic obligations to help the wife with the shopping and daily chores. Then there were the constant trips up to our new place for a few days at a time to meet with builders, carpenters and decorators, and also to start working in the overgrown gardens, which had become a veritable jungle.

Occasionally, I actually got to make the journey alone, as my wife had commitments back in Essex, and those times were particularly enjoyable, despite all the tasks I had been instructed to carry out by ‘er who must be obeyed’. It was during this time that I became very friendly with two of my next door neighbours, Joe, and his wife Doris, who in time became extremely close friends, and remain so today. They are both are now in their early eighties and still are active and mentally alert, and I don’t know how I could have managed without their kindness and support through some very difficult times that I experienced during my few years as their neighbor.

What about my drinking during this period? To be honest, I don’t have many memories of major drunken episodes, although for sure I was still drinking on a daily basis. It is possible that my drinking during this period was more in the ‘medium to heavy’ drinker’s category, rather than the ‘hopeless alcoholic’ category. I had been drinking for many, many years – seriously since about twenty one years of age, so well over thirty years. No matter how much I drank I was usually able to ‘maintain’ -  behave in a reasonable manner and do what needed to be done, as I had proved through most of my working years. Though there were a few notable exceptions, (such as the time I came home from work so drunk, that I passed out in the downstairs toilet fully clothed and slept on the floor, much to the disgust and rage of my wife), for the most part I was able to function almost normally. My tolerance for alcohol was very high.

Once retired, I continued to drink, and whenever we had a few friends or family around for a barbeque or a dinner I would certainly seize the occasion to get right royally drunk, and of course my solo trips to the new house invariably resulted in some very drunken sessions, both at the local village pub, and also by courtesy of Joe and Doris, my new neighbors, who although they were a long way from being alcoholics, enjoyed an occasional tipple with great gusto, especially Joe.

In retrospect, it is strange that my wife wasn’t more insistent that I keep my drinking under control. Of course I would get the constant nagging, and sometimes, when we would share a glass of wine together from a newly opened bottle, she would be horrified when she discovered an hour or so later that I had finished off the bottle alone – on top of a few beers and maybe a few ‘shorts’. Maybe her Thai upbringing had conditioned her to accept a certain level of drunkenness on the part of the men in her life, and also maybe the fact that I rarely let my drinking interfere with my ‘chores and duties’ meant that she didn’t have to concern herself about it too much.

We were spending more and more time at our new place, including the Christmas of 2000. The family duly came for dinner  on Christmas day and on Boxing Day I had some visitors from very far afield.

Quite how it happened I will never know, but during this period, Bob (from Australia, of whom I have written much about) was at that time working in London, and Dave, (yes, alcoholic Dave), was actually staying in England at his brother’s house near Birmingham.

Dave was in the early stages of recovery from a recent bout of liver failure and surgery in Bangkok, and his brother had insisted that he fly back to the UK for Christmas. He was still quite weak, but Bob drove up from London, picked up Dave from Birmingham, and together with another English friend, (who had lived in Bangkok for many years, but who was in the UK to spend Christmas with his family) the three of them descended on Mobi at his new home on Boxing Day 2000.

It was a strange time, that Boxing day. The first time the four of us had been  together for a great many years, One from Australia, two living in Thailand, and me living in a quiet little corner of rural England, all meeting up by more or less coincidence, for it wasn’t until a few days earlier that we had realised that we were all in England, and so set up this festive ‘get together’. Happy times, sad times (for Dave was so emaciated and weak that we feared he would last more than a few months), and, it goes without saying…. very drunken times. Even Noi seemed to be on her best behaviour.

2001 was spent alternating between the two houses, slowly getting things done in the new house to prepare us for a life of ‘eternal marital bliss’, and back to the old house to prepare it for sale.

I was clearly starting to feel the marital ‘heat’. In October, 2001 I put pen to paper about ‘my problem’ for the first time since The summer of 2000 when we were travelling across America:

“15/10/01

“It is now over a year since I last wrote about my problem.

“There have been good times, not so good times, and some very bad times. There have been days, even weeks when I have been quite happy.  But there have also been some terrible depressing days when I’m not sure how much longer I can take it.

“I have been quite busy, and that has helped. There has been my writing, which has gone quite well, and the jumping around from old house to new and also  to our house in Thailand.

“At the end of the day I don’t think she has any idea how unhappy she makes me most of the time. However hard I try, she will always find some reason to have a go at me, almost every day of my life, sometimes, several times in one day. Most of the time I say nothing, except for  the odd mumble under my breath. Occasionally I answer her back in a relatively mild fashion – which only makes matters worse. Once or twice I have completely ‘lost It’ with her. The last time this happened was a couple of months ago and I don’t think she talked to me properly for several weeks following that incident.  I’m still not sure that our relationship is back to where it was before my blow up.

“There have been so many incidences – every day almost – each one in themselves so trivial, but when I have to endure her intolerable behaviour, day in day out, it cannot remain trivial.  I have resolved that from now on I will keep a daily, or maybe a frequent diary of the ‘incidents’, so that I can review over a period of time and see just how trivial or otherwise these incidents really are.

“I will start with last night. She was getting ready to retire, and suddenly decided to tidy the lounge in her usual moody manner before bed. She then sat down at our shared desk and had a go at me because my computer was there and she had “no room to do anything”. Fairly trivial – except that it must have been the hundredth time she has moaned at me about my computer. It’s been there for over a year and I spend several hours on most days working on it – writing and using the internet etc. She only has very occasional use of the desk to do her monthly bank recording, and the odd miscellaneous need. I have told her that I can move it any time she wishes to use the desk, or she can just write on top of it. (It is a flat lap top). If she really had a problem I could set it up elsewhere – but she just wanted to have a go at me – and mumbled about ‘buying my own desk!’ Trivial but it just gets under my skin. When is it ever going to stop?

“Today there were 2 incidents. I woke up with a resolve to put everything behind me and have yet another fresh attempt at sorting out our relationship. The morning started well and I played with her and kissed her many times in a way I had not done for months. After breakfast, I sat down at my computer to do some writing, but she wanted me to go shopping with her. Keeping my good mood I told her that I would love to go shopping and we were almost out of the door when she snarled at me because I left an empty cereal wrapping on the kitchen work top. Now, I was the last one to eat breakfast, and in my customary manner I cleared up everything and left the kitchen spic and span. For some odd reason, I left a small wrapper on the work top that I had intended to dump in the outside bin.  A pretty minor sin one would think, but the way she had a go at me and told me sarcastically where the rubbish bin was, left a nasty taste in my mouth and destroyed my new found resolution.

“Tonight, she asked me where her battery charger was as she needed to charge her phone. I told her I thought it was in the drawer in the bedroom. She couldn’t find it, and had a’ mega go’ at me, slamming all the cupboards in the kitchen and telling me that she instructed me this morning to “watch when her phone had gone flat” and charge it up for her. Well it hadn’t gone flat until late this evening, so I couldn’t have done it anyway. She was really mad at me – this is the person who is always tucking things away and not remembering where she had put them. (She recently ‘made’ two perfectly good mobile phones, with their chargers, disappear permanently!) I went out to the garage and searched everywhere, as I thought I might have put them there by mistake. Remember this is 10 o’ clock at night – and she’s not in any way desperate for her phone – she hardly ever uses it. We have two landlines in the house. In desperation I checked the drawer in the bedroom – it was there all the time! I told her – she never apologised. SHE HAS NEVER, EVER APOLOGISED FOR ANYTHING!”

Then an undated note that must have been written a few weeks later:

“She’s been at our new house by herself  for 2 nights. She came back a couple of hours ago – I was so nervous about her return – yet I don’t know why. I’m just so scared all the time that she will find something I’ve done wrong, or something not cleaned properly, or something not tidy etc and have a go at me. It’s ridiculous really but I can’t help how I feel. I’m nervous nearly all the time she’s around – I guess that’s why I’m always chewing my knuckles and fingers.

“Anyway, she starts talking about the bathroom that was being tiled in the new house. We had bought a new bath with a shower attachment, so that it would double up as a shower. We have an en suite bathroom with a proper shower cubicle in our bedroom , but I wanted to have a shower in the ‘family’ bathroom, so that Samantha and anyone who stays with can have a shower without having to go through our bedroom. Of course they can still do that as it’s a better shower, but they can also have the alternative – (and for anyone else who may be visiting overnight and we don’t want walking through our bedroom!). She told me that she didn’t want to attach the showerhead to the wall, and didn’t want to have a shower rail or shower curtain, as it would spoil her beautiful bathroom. She said people could sit down in the bath and shower sitting down. I tried not to over react. I thought we had already agreed that another proper shower in the house would be a good idea – but thinking back on it – it was my idea – and in the end anything that I think of will be no good – if she hasn’t thought of it then it’s no good. I suppose I should have known better. It was all a bit petty, so after a few minutes I swallowed my irritation, I agreed with her plans.

“Well, although I had conceded, (yet again), she still had a go at me anyway, and said that if I didn’t want to have a beautiful bathroom, then she would change all the building plans for the rest of our house modifications, as we could save a lot of money and we could have a functional house rather than a beautiful house. I knew she was just leading me on as she would never give up her real plans for the house, but nothing less than my total capitulation would satisfy her – i.e. not only must I agree to her plans for the bathroom, but I must sound as though I meant it!  It was all completely ridiculous and I told her so – but as usual, I got nowhere.

“She reminded me about a previous argument a couple of weeks ago when she tried to persuade me that we didn’t need a large table in the kitchen (after we had always agreed to have one), claiming that it would get in the way and spoil the look of her beautiful kitchen. I told her (at the time) that I didn’t want a beautiful kitchen – just a comfortable family home, and I thought that a nice big table in the kitchen (which is already there) was great for all of us to sit at and eat and chat etc.

“It was all too much, so I tried to put more feeling into my agreement, and she finally let the matter drop.

“I can see endless problems ahead with this new house. She wants a show house to retire to – I want a comfy home. It’s not going to work – is it?”

Then, at around Midnight, on Boxing day, 2001, I wrote:

“26/12/01

“Its nearly midnight on Boxing Day. Hasn’t been a great Christmas – but there again I didn’t expect it to be. Usual moody behaviour – no one able to let their hair down for long – for fear she will get mad at something. Had one minor spat when I mumbled something under my breath and she heard me – so I told her what I had been mumbling. I shouldn’t mumble and what I said was petty, even though I was probably right. But as I told her – at least when I am wrong I admit it and apologise – which I have done on countless occasions – but I have yet to hear  an apology cross her lips.   Apart from that she has had long moody spells which have kept everyone on edge. The usual crap about having to do all the cooking – I offered to cook breakfast for us – but predictably, she refused saying I would make too much mess, which is the same line she was using 20 years ago! She just enjoys bitching and spreading this bloody moral blackmail around. If she doesn’t want to cook then don’t! Nobody would give a toss – we’d make out – we always do when she goes away.

“The ‘biggy’ came this morning – Boxing Day. In order to keep the peace over Xmas I have been doing my best to help out with helping her do the cooking and trying to be as helpful generally with all the housework etc. Every day I have made early morning tea etc and fed the cat. Today, when she finally got up, she went to the sink and shrieked that I was so disgusting! What on earth had I done? She was looking at the sink which contained one used tea bag and a few tiny  bits of cat meat which I had washed off the cat spoon I had used for the early feed. I had intended cleaning it up but she beat me to it. It was all perfectly normal. She is always leaving slops of all kinds in the sink – including tea bags and cat food from dishes – but I guess she had to have a go at me for some reason. Well I wasn’t having it and told her she was crazy and she was making a fuss over nothing and that my ‘crime’ was no more than she did all the time. I was pretty angry but I didn’t go over the top. She argued a bit but then shut up. Probably because my eldest daughter and her boyfriend were staying with us and she didn’t want a big scene in front of them. Anyway it all more or less settled down, but I think we’re both on edge and not very happy.

Such I pity because I was in really good mood first thing today and hoped we could all be so happy together for a few hours at Xmas. But she had to ruin it all as usual.”

In the late spring/early summer of 2002, the Essex house was finally sold, and we made the big move. We had so much stuff that it took two large removal trucks to move it all. I had spent the preceding weeks packing stuff from early morning to late night, and having fights with my wife over what should be kept and what should be dumped. Amongst all her other attributes, she was a tight fisted hoarder, and would never throw anything away, even though it would never be used again. Much of it would be simply moved from the loft in our Essex house to the loft in our new home.

But unpacking is worse than packing, and not only was I the chief ‘unpacker’, but I was also responsible for doing heavy laboring work in the gardens. And in the middle of all this we had booked a month’s holiday in our house in Thailand, so it became a very mad scramble to get the house sufficiently sorted before we set off. Inevitably it wasn’t all done by the time it came for us to leave, and I will never forget the temper tantrums and recriminations she leveled at me, for of course it was all my fault.

I had a terrible holiday, was dragged all over the place ‘shopping for our new home’ and rarely had a day of peace. Upon our return to our unfinished home, it was all starting to catch up on me and I felt very tired and quite ill. My blood sugars were very high and my blood pressure was through the roof. But Noi didn’t give a hoot. She was still living on ‘Thai time’, and rose at the crack of dawn every morning and insisted that I too get up and help her get the house sorted.

It was a very depressing and trying period, and there were many days when I felt truly at the end of my tether, and even suicidal. But I had to maintain my composure because of my daughter, who had just started at her new school.

In October, 2002, I wrote the following:

“04/10/02

“I don’t know why I keep resolving to keep a more regular record, but in the end I  never do, and leave it for months and months. I was just looking at the last time I wrote, and it was way back at Christmas – so long ago – so much had happened! We moved into our new house permanently in July, went to Thailand for a month, came back to a nightmare of unpacked boxes and we are still settling in, but we are more or less sorted now.

“I suppose the reason I am  failing to keep a regular record is that I keep hoping that we can finally find a way to live happily together and resolve all these conflicts that exist between us. I guess I know deep down that I am expecting the impossible, but I really don’t want this marriage to break up. When I read what I have written before, it really scares me and makes me realise how unhappy I have been on so many occasions. Of course in between, things are not too bad, and there are times when I am fairly happy. At the end of the day it is all down to her moods. If she wants to be nice and cheerful and loving, then all is fine with the world – but when she turns on one of her moods – then it is very, very miserable and wretched.

“I really should try to write more often, as the individual incidents are so trivial, and soon forgotten, it’s just the accumulation that is so depressing and difficult to handle. I do so want to keep the family together – especially until Samantha  finishes her A levels, in two years time. After that we’ll just have to see – but it’s looking grimmer and grimmer at the moment.

“Well, what’s happened in the last few months? When we got back from Thailand, I think I went through one of the worst few weeks of my life. Her moods were so terrible, and she would have a go at me all day long as she was unpacking and sorting out. I had terrible jet lag for many days, and felt so ill, but she insisted on getting up at the crack of dawn and waking the whole house. I had so little sleep, and then had to put up with her terrible temper and moods all day long. I tried to stay quiet and do what I was told, hoping that it would all settle down once all the unpacking etc was finished – which it did. I didn’t want to upset Samantha who was under enough stress starting her new school, without having to put up with rows at home.

“So that sort of brings me up to date, although I’m sure much has been forgotten. I’m now going to try once again to record the daily trivialities. I note that on 9^th Sept she complained about me doing a bad job with nailing the TV cables to the outside wall. She also told me I was taking my shoes off in the wrong part of the garden decking.

“On 16^th Sept, she had ago at me because there was grass on the bottom of the laundry basket, which got there when I brought in the washing from the line on the lawn.  It was a complete accident, but I had to suffer a tirade. On 2^nd October she called me to see marks on the exterior decking made by wet shoes. I also had to see some coffee grounds on the floor, which were spilt when I made my coffee. The same evening I was sitting in the conservatory, and she came in and found that I had turned the radiator on. She told me to put a cardigan on if I was cold. I pointed out that the central heating was on in the rest of the house, and that I just released heat from the system, to warm up the room a bit. She got really upset and accused me of making ‘inappropriate comments’. The previous day, there was a burning smell in the conservatory – she asked me if I had tried the ceiling fan to see if it still worked – I said ‘yes I had’ – she said: ‘when?’ – I said: ‘just now’, with some irritation, as she never believes anything I tell her I have done – she still insisted on trying it herself – and had a go at me for being slightly irritated.

“I have just recalled an incident a week or so ago, when the culmination of some petty argument was that I lost my cool and accused her of being a ‘moody, moody bitch!’ She got really mad and smashed some plates and glasses in the kitchen before retiring to her bedroom. (This was in the morning). I calmed down, cleaned up all the mess, mopped the floor etc – it took me a couple of hours. Then I went to see her and told her she should go for her dentist appointment (She had been having a lot of dental problems as she got some bridge work done in Thailand on the cheap, which didn’t work out too well) She sulked, cried, said she wouldn’t go, would suffer the pain and never do anything again.  She said she had never sworn at me and that I was a terrible person to call her a ‘bitch’. I had to beg, plead and cry for half an hour before she allowed herself to be persuaded to go to the dentist.

“The other day, evening time, we had an argument about God knows what. She accused me of always using a ‘higher tone’ of voice with her – not shouting or speaking louder – just a higher tone. Well of course it was my irritation coming out.  With great self-control, I usually avoid shouting, but it is much harder to hide the tone of my feeling. Anyway the upshot was that she told me that she ‘wasn’t well’ (an old moral blackmail ‘chestnut’ – It’s funny because I thought I was the one being kept alive with drugs) – and that the next day she would be buying a ticket back to Thailand. I said nothing and refused to discuss anything with her. The next day, I tried to be as nice as possible, and the ‘crisis’ faded away.

“7^th Oct – a strange day really. No particular problems – the morning started in reasonably friendly manner, and then, suddenly when we were both sitting in the conservatory having breakfast, she suddenly mentioned that she still wanted to go to Thailand, in a couple of weeks time, after I had fulfilled a social commitment back in Essex. Since the previous occasion when I had begged her not to do anything stupid, I resolved never again to question any decision of this nature that she decides to tell me about. So I didn’t ask her ‘Why?’ or ‘What’s up?’ or even ‘Please don’t’, as firstly, I don’t care if she goes, and secondly I’m tired of playing her ‘games’ which will end up in her telling me why I am such a lousy, lazy husband, and expecting me to apologise and promise to ‘try harder’ in the future. So I just said in my politest tone, ‘Ok. Would you like me to book the ticket for you?’ She said ‘yes!’ somewhat dramatically, and in response to my request for a return date she said ‘open return’. So as not to appear too eager, I left it for an hour or so and got on with other matters, but when I eventually called the travel agent, I found that I could only get  a 3 month, six month or a 12 month return. I asked her which one she wanted and she said she would think about it and let me know. For the next few hours I could tell she was very upset. It is now 8 pm and she has become more friendly and things seemed to have settled down – except that she didn’t cook us any dinner- most unusual. (I bought us all some fish & chips). Anyhow at the moment a slightly uneasy peace. I am absolutely determined not to get drawn into any arguments or discussions about our relationship or about my behaviour – coz I know I can never win and I will only get very upset. I think she knows this now and I’m not sure that she likes it.

“4/11/02

“(She didn’t take up my offer of a ticket to Thailand.)

“Here we go again – nearly a month since my last entry. I have been thinking about this business of failing to write anything down. I think there are two main reasons. Firstly, it is very hard – after all it’s all emotional and it’s just not easy to sit down and put some of into words. It’s much easier just to let it all fade away and forget about it – pretend it never happened. And of course that is always made easier because, bad episodes are always followed by a comparative lull, when things are really not too bad. The second reason is probably more sinister. I think that by elucidating the problem, I am bringing it closer and closer to the point when I have to do something about it -–and I don’t want to. I want it all to go away and get better! But it won’t!

“Nothing too terrible has happened. Just the continual nagging and desire to control everything I do – pointing out my errors to me all day long – so trivial that I can never remember them but they go on all day every day. You would think she would get fed up with trying to tell me how to live my life – but she never seems to. I never say anything except ‘Yes’ or ‘Ok’ or nothing, if I can get away with it. There’s no point in debating any of it. It’s all so petty – and apart from a slight irritation when she has her latest go at me, I can more or less live with it. But what a sad life!

“Last weekend my brother and his wife came to stay. They stayed Saturday night and left on Sunday. Well I’m not particularly close to my brother and strangely it is she who always keeps the contact going. Anyhow, to cut a very long story short, he sort of invited himself up, and she had no particular objections so up they came and she did a bit of cooking and we had a few long chats and went for a drive on the Sunday. All pretty harmless, all be it boring. Anyway it was my family and we probably won’t do it again for a very long time. She gave me chapter and verse this morning. She can’t stand them – they are so selfish- she never wants them here again- if they come she’’ll go away, etc. etc, on and on. Then she told me that our house is better than their house – our rooms are bigger than their rooms – on and on. It was all too much – all over the top. It was just a bloody weekend with my brother for God’s sake!  What’s it all about??

“It’s all too sad. I couldn’t discuss it with her. The moment I open my mouth to offer any sort of opinion it would be ‘World War 3′.  What a depressing life! I’m not sure I can stand it another two years (when Samantha finishes school). I think sooner or later I’ll blow up and that would ruin everything. It’s much better to just make a quiet exit and hope that Samantha  is not damaged too much. I think she’s pretty strong. At the end of the day I think I’ll probably end up taking care of her – but there are many hoops to jump and mountains of bullshit to overcome before I reach that point.”

So things were getting ever closer to the end of my fourth attempt at married life.

Jomtien, 12th December 2009

13 Dec 2009 Comments Off

by mobidark in MOBI'S DAILY PAGE

Today I have been sober for 104 days.

Not much of a blog, I’m afraid.

My only excuse is that I have been taking some anti histamine tablets to control a severe outbreak of rhinitis (similar to hay fever but caused by dust, not pollen), and even though the medication leaflet claims that they do not cause drowsiness, I have been very sleepy ever since I started taking them, and last night I had the soundest seep I have had in a very long time. I took a nap at 3.30 this afternoon, slept for two hours, and I  still feel very sleepy and lethargic.

I’m sure it’s the tablets, as I recall friends saying the same thing about certain anti histamine tablets causing sleepiness, even though they are not supposed to.

So I will try to get back to some serious blogging tomorrow, folks.

Jomtien, 10th December, 2009

10 Dec 2009 2 Comments

by mobidark in MOBI'S DAILY PAGE

Today I have been sober for 102 days.

MOBI’S STORY – (PART 21)

THE RETIREMENT YEARS (CONTINUED)

Back in my home in South Essex, the real business of getting to grips with my retirement finally arrived.

As I recounted in my  previous ‘Mobi’s Story’ installment, my odyssey across North America with my wife and daughter was not an auspicious start to my new life.  It soon became clear that my wife was going to enjoy my retirement a lot more than I would.

It was the year 2000 and I had already been with her for some 17 years; my youngest daughter was 14, and my eldest (adopted) daughter was 24. My wife had been the controlling and dominating influence in our lives for a very long time, although I had mitigated the problem by spending so much of my time at work.

My eldest daughter had already “fled the nest” and had taken out a mortgage for a small house in the town centre, and was living there happily with her latest “live in” and worked in the city for her dear old dad’s company. (Yes, nepotism was alive and well in the city of London). In her teen years she had been quite rebellious, and had suffered the wrath of a mother “scorned” and had fled home when she was barely 18.

When all the fuss died down, we continued to help her financially as she worked her way through college, and eventually, when she was around 21, she actually returned to the family fold, a very different and mature person to the one who had left. In fact, she had ‘morphed’ into a very lovely, kind and caring person, and one who has remained the same to this day.

After a year or so, when she had obtained full time employment, she took advantage of a dip in the housing market, to pick up a lovely little ex council house for a “song” and once again she moved away from us and reasserted her independence. Since then she has been fiercely protective of her territory and seems to have developed a natural gift for knowing how to deal with and “handle” her mother. For the most part she keeps her mother at “arms length” (to the never ending chagrin of ‘Mum’), but nevertheless, keeps her in her life and regularly calls and encourages reciprocal visits, especially at Christmas and high days and holidays. She is soooo….. sensible.

Unlike her father, and indeed her younger sister who were left at home to suffer the tempers, mood swings  and conniving, controlling behaviour of a very difficult wife and mother.

Within days of our return from America, my wife had tried to impose a routine on me which included helping her share the household duties, do the gardening, going shopping with her on an almost daily basis, and a multitude of other domestic chores which were either going to be shared or to be jointly undertaken. I still recall to this day her early attempts to allocate the window cleaning duties to me, and how she showed me precisely how to go about it, and then sat and watched me carry out this task, continually chiding me when I didn’t execute the work according to her exacting requirements.

In principal, I had no objections to sharing the duties. I wasn’t a male chauvinist, and was quite prepared to do my bit, now that I had a lot of free time. But I also wanted  to put a bit of structure into my retirement years and had some things I planned to do, the two prime activities being learning to play golf and creative writing. I could have easily pulled my weight around the home and still found time for my “other” activities if she hadn’t insisted on us doing nearly everything together. One particular bone of contention was shopping. She insisted that I accompany her, and essentially act as her lackey, while she strode ahead and made all the decisions on what to buy. Well, after all, this was “her world”, where she was “Queen of all she surveyed” and I was this stupid, compliant idiot who knew nothing.

So the battles and unpleasantness started from day one. The holiday was a bit of a disaster, and as soon as we tried to settle in back home, the daily clashes commenced as to when I would be “allowed” to go the golf driving range, and whether she could manage to do a bit of shopping alone because “budding author Mobi”, wished to pound away at his keyboard. Sometimes I got my way; and she would take off in an enormous sulk that on occasion would last for days; but for the most part, I caved in – anything for a quite life.

One of the few things that I succeeded in doing alone; with little or no interference from “she who must be obeyed”, was my early morning exercise. I have known very few Thai women who enjoy getting up early in the morning and wife No. 4 was no exception. As it was, when she struggled out of bed some time between eight and nine in the morning, she would always be at her moodiest.

So I would set my alarm for 7 a.m; get up and be out for my early morning calisthenics, before she had even woken up. Initially, this consisted of a thirty minute brisk walk along the roads that led out of my homely cul-de sac into the pleasant, semi-rural areas of South Essex. I was fifty four years old and I don’t think I had taken any serious exercise since I was a teenager, and even then I don’t think I did too much as many was  the time I would skive off when I was supposed to have been participating in sporting activities. So I was very overweight and extremely unfit.

After all those years of total physical lethargy it was an uphill struggle. However, I stuck at it, although in the early days there was no noticeable change in either my physical condition or weight. I liked it and hated it. I liked it because it was the one time during the day when I was alone, away from the critical and complaining whine of my wife’s voice and I could enjoy the fresh air, enjoy pleasant thoughts, and go where I wanted, without having to ask permission or be lectured on the right direction to take. I hated it because it was bloody hard work and I really didn’t enjoy the physical side of it. I had pains in my chest and my leg muscles and feet would ache and get blisters.

But after a few weeks I seemed to get stronger and one day I tried a one minute jog in between the fast walking. I made the full minute and then had to revert to walking due to breathlessness. So even after a month or so of walking, I couldn’t even slowly jog for one minute before almost collapsing through lack of ability to breathe. What a poor specimen of manhood was I! But I persevered, and every day I would do ‘one-minute jogs’, every ten minutes or so, and as time went by, I was able to increase the jogging periods, from one minute to two and then to three and so on. I ended up doing what I had learned in my Boy Scout days to be the “Scout’s Pace”. Running and walking alternately for periods of around 5-6 minutes, and I was finally starting to reap the benefits in terms of a slow but sure reduction in my girth and a few pounds dropping off my overall weight.

I cannot recall the precise time scale, but it was certainly several months before one day I was surprised and delighted to discover that I could actually jog continuously for period of 25 minutes and more, and from then on, I never looked back. Of course I had set backs, when I developed plantar fasciitis (very painful bone spurs in the heels), muscle strains and so on, but my calf muscles developed and became hard and strong, and eventually I was able to jog at will for virtually as long as I desired. I became pretty fit and in all, I lost some 11-12 kilos (about 25 pounds) and became “lean and mean”. (even   possibly a little too lean).

So the exercise routine was one of my early retirement successes, and it was with great pleasure that I went on my 6 monthly round of diabetic and cardiac specialists appointments where I was informed  that I was credit to myself and an example to all as to what could be accomplished with the right dedication. In particular my cardiac specialist was very pleased, as it was he who had warned me that I would be dead in six  years if I didn’t take immediate steps  to radically change my lifestyle. These positive medical results were to continue for a couple more years before things started to deteriorate once again.

Despite the obstacles put in the way by my dear wife, I was also getting out on the golf course and to driving ranges on a more or less regular basis, and my creative writing was coming on a pace. Apart from my dogged determination to make a go of both of these pursuits, I was actually helped in an unexpected ways.

My wife, bless her! She came to the conclusion that if she couldn’t beat me she’d better join me, which meant that she would take up golf; so for a while she accompanied me to the driving range and we also took lessons together. She never actually made it to a golf course during that period, as she was so self critical that she could never measure up to her own expectations and refused to let anyone see that she was less than perfect. Over a period of time, she gradually lost any enthusiasm she may have had for golf, and eventually she declined my offers to accompany me to either the range or the course – thank God!!

On the writing front, I decided to write short stories based on my earlier years in Thailand. This attracted my wife’s attention, and she effectively became my technical advisor and critic, which meant that it became an “approved activity”. But that didn’t stop her confronting me, rowing with me and dragging me off to accompany her on a shopping errand whenever I had my head down on the laptop and creative juices were flowing with much fervor. She had absolutely no sensitivity to the activity I was engaged in, and thought nothing about disturbing me whenever the mood took her.

My collection of short stories based in Thailand was eventually completed, and after so many rejections I can’t even begin to tell you about, I eventually found a very small, almost unknown publisher who agreed to publish my volume under the title: “Tales from Thailand” by Mobi D’Ark.

The book never took off because it was never promoted, and now many years later, I am probably happy that it died a natural death, as it was my first attempts at writing, and when I read it today, I realise that although it may have  “promise”, it is a long way from the finished product, and frankly would embarrass me if it were to suddenly resurface.

I did continue to write for the rest of the time that I lived in England, and I completed a few more short stories, (that were not Thailand related) and then a full length novel, (which was), and  which was written when I moved to my new home in East Northants, and remains unpublished to this day. Again, if I read it today, although it certainly has promise, it is flawed and would require much revision and editing. For the past 7 years, since I have been back in Thailand, I have not written anything, except a lot of nonsense on internet forums, and now, at long last, this blog.

But at least I have been published, and there is a book out there with my own ISBN number on it, and what’s more, I am an accredited author, am a member of the prestigious British “Society of Authors” which has all the famous British authors as members, and I even receive minuscule, occasional royalties by way of some sort of ‘collective arrangements’ whereby all published authors are entitled to share in the receipts of such collections.

In my next trip down memory lane, amongst other things, I will get back to my drinking career during this period, which while under more control than it had been in years, was still progressing in the wrong direction, and would catch up and overtake my life again in the very near future.

Jomtien, 8th December, 2009

08 Dec 2009 5 Comments

by mobidark in MOBI'S DAILY PAGE

Today I am 100 days sober.

As I said to the meeting this morning, at one hundred days, I am now breaking new ground in terms of my sobriety.

The previous time around, I made it to just over ninety days and then lapsed, but this time I have to say I feel a lot more confident and feel sure I have taken my last drink.

In recent times I seem to have spent a lot of time falling out with friends, making up again, and then falling out with others. One of the friends I did fall out with some ninety odd days ago was a good friend in Chiang Mai who chaired the AA meeting I attended when I blew up and stormed out and started drinking. I behaved like an arsehole, and who could blame him for “keeping his distance”.

Anyway I am delighted to report that within the last couple of weeks we have started corresponding again, and today, on my 100 day ‘celebration’, we “text chatted” for a while on Skype. I can’t tell you how pleased I was that we seem to have finally put all that bad stuff behind us, and it made me feel really good, as I do value him so much as a friend. Furthermore we’re both ‘newcomers’ in AA terms – less than 1 year’s sobriety – and I think we can support each other in our strivings to remain sober for the long haul.

So my Chiang Mai friend is back in the “Mobi fold”, but  I am now grieving the loss of Dave and Bob, two of my very oldest friends, and of course, I am having guilt trips over whether or not I have done the right thing.

Dave didn’t help yesterday, when he sent me the following email:

“Such a time ago.

Such unlikely a meeting.

Such unlikely occurrence: Unlike minds, yet we remain together even though I at least have probably never been (and you’ve certainly never asked me to be) anything like you might’ve wanted me to be.But times change and you ask me to join you in an exercise which is too far from me. An exercise that (please allow me to express it this way) is so far from me it would, in my mind, require becoming what nature dictated we aren’t – like minds.

Such a time ago . . .

Miniscule street bar with seats for three customers. Or a hotel room. Or a bar at the end of some narrow Sukhumvit access gap. Mobile ringing. Mine. Wee hours. Abed. Asleep. A voice. A need. Has he been abandoned? Or has he walked out? Doesn’t matter.

“Dave, you doing anything?”

“I’ll be right there.”

I’ve always been there, mobi.

I always will.”

My main reaction to this email was one of hurt. Dave is effectively telling me that he was there for me, so I should be there for him.

I have to stretch my memory to recall the occasions when he was there for me – a few months ago when I was in relapse and he came by my hotel in Bangkok and gave me some pills that made me so woozy and I felt so divorced from reality that I stopped taking them after 1 day, and the only other occasion was around 8 years ago when I was ripped of by one of the many ladies in my life, and he kindly arranged for his assistant to help me, who in turn proceeded to also rip me off.  Thank you Dave. If that’s what “being there for you” is all about, I’d rather you stayed away.

On the other hand, I cannot recall a time when I haven’t devoted a great deal of time, and often money to help Dave through his countless medical crises, and also in various attempts through the years to get him back on his feet and into a situation where he could earn a living. From the days long ago when  tried to help him run his recording studio, through to the eighties and early nineties when I spent a great deal of time, and not little expense in preparing and sending off excerpts of his dairy to agents, publishers, (in the forlorn hope that someone may agree to public and provide Dave with an income), to the setting up of a Limited partnership and other work I did to enable Dave to run an export business, (which failed due to his lethargy, drinking and for some strange reason, his expectation that I would do all the work for him), to all the times I have rushed to his help when he has had yet another drinking/medical crisis. I have recounted in detail my recent efforts, but the reality is that the help and support I have given him this year is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is the first time I have really thought about what I have done for Dave over the past thirty years in these terms. I did it because he was my  friend, and I wanted to help him. I never sought or expected anything in return, and frankly, never received anything.

But now he seems to be suggesting that I have deserted him.

Well I suppose I have, and probably should have done a long time ago. But he is “putting it on me” I guess that’s pretty much par for the course for a chronic alcoholic.

Alcoholics are dominated by their egos, and everything in their lives is all about them. So I suppose the couple of times that he thinks he has helped me are far more dominant in his mind that anything I have done for him. OK that’s fine, I understand that.

But his ego must be close to bursting when he tries to tell me that the “exercise” (going to AA) is too far from him… that his mind is “too far removed from such things”. To me this is so egotistical, (And Bob is very similar – must be a trait amongst musicians),

He (Dave) is the special one. All this AA common to garden stuff is not for him. He would never demean himself by being among such ordinary mortals.

Yet I have told him over and over, (and it just shows how much he listens to what I say), that the folk I have met in AA are amongst the brightest, most erudite and deepest thinkers that I have met anywhere. They are from all walks of life, some highly educated and some had very successful careers until the booze got the better of them. Although many, it has to be admitted ended up in the gutter, and some ended up in jail, (including me!). But even those at the bottom of the pile have somehow pulled themselves out of that gutter and have succeeded in their sobriety to lead useful, happy lives, some with very successful jobs and businesses.

And they are all characters – funny, interesting, tragic, crazy, lovely, generous and kind characters. Every single one of them will try to help you, if you let them. Dave and Bob don’t know what they are missing.

What reasonable person, who by his own admittance at the point of death, wouldn’t at least give AA a go? Or just go to a couple of meetings to humour one of his lifelong friends? All he has to do is sit in a room , with a cup of coffee, for one hour and listen. He doesn’t have to say a single word, either in the meeting, or before or after it. Not that hard is it?

Or is it all about his reluctance to look at his spiritual side? Probably – but again, to me, there is so much arrogance in his refusal to even consider that there may be ‘another way’.

Well that’s got that off my chest.

Tomorrow, (God willing),  back to the “Retirement Years”.

Jomtien, 6th December, 2009

06 Dec 2009 Comments Off

by mobidark in MOBI'S DAILY PAGE

Today I have been sober for 98 days.

There is a postscript to my “falling out” with my two friends of over 30 years standing.

I received an email from Bob in which he was effusive in his thanks to me for my so-called ‘help and support’ in keeping him sober during the past few months. I replied to the effect that I felt he was being very Machiavellian in the way he had behaved towards me and indeed, was continuing to behave to Dave. He replied to say that he was shocked that I should think such a thing. Well he would wouldn’t he?

Anyway for the time being, and quite likely forever more, that chapter in my life is now closed and the new, “unshackled Mobi”, will set forth to tilt at a few new windmills.

Yesterday I went to my regular morning meeting and then did some food shopping with my latest “nearest and dearest” – most domestic of me. Then I went for my daily walk along the beach at sunset, and topped it off with the ultimate in domestic bliss -   a dinner out with my lady togthere with a friend and his wife. It was by away of a ‘thank you’ to the couple who have been negotiating with my wife regarding the sale of my house. We dined at a lovely little steak house in Jomtien, which was air conditioned, had real cloth table cloths, classy menus, soft background music and excellent service. The prices – even for imported meat (although the local meat was equally as tender), were very reasonable and very tasty. My guests had a couple of glasses of wine served in coffee cups (as it was HM’s birthday) and my lady and I just had sodas. My lady enchanted both of my guests by her beauty, intelligence, and her sensible discourse. My friend wondered at my ability to find such a gem!!

Today I decided to take a day off from AA meetings, and have spent the day at home doing a number of chores that were overdue, and also an hour or so teaching my lady how to download photos from her camera and copy them onto CD’s, and also how to burn music CD’s. She picked it up first time, and is no doubt a pretty smart cookie.

MOBI’S STORY – (PART 20)

THE RETIREMENT YEARS.

It is a truism that one tends to remember the happy times in the past rather than the miserable times, and often our schooldays, long ago holidays and other memorable occasions in our lives are recalled through “rose tinted glasses”. To a certain extent I am no exception to this, but I find that the more I start to put my brain to the task of recalling those days detail, the more I recall not only the fun times but also the bad times as though in  stark relief.

My family’s North American adventure, which we embarked upon within days of my retirement, is a case in point. It was about this time that I made the first inroads into my amateur writing career, and I decided to keep a detailed diary of our holiday, which would serve as a useful memento in years to come, as we would surely never do anything like that again.

If you were to read my diary of that trip, apart from a few subtle comments made in jest, you would never realise that although, on the whole, I managed to enjoy the holiday, my wife seemed to have done her very best to spoil it for both me and my daughter by her  unbelievably  bad and disturbing behaviour.

I wrote some 21,000 words in that journey diary, yet barely a whisper was written of the troubles my 14 year old daughter and I experienced from my wretched wife.

Here is what I wrote to wrap up the account:

“Under our own steam we drove over 3000 miles in Canada and exceeded 4000 in America. Then there was the five day coach trip through the Eastern USA.

The weather had been very kind to us, only a few hours rain during the whole trip. Once, just before we walked up the glacier in the Canadian Rockies and a stormy afternoon in Salt Lake City (where we spent most of the time pretending to buy a piano). Apart from that, mostly sunshine, with temperatures ranging from well over 100 degrees in the deserts of Arizona and Nevada, to the somewhat cooler 60’s in San Francisco.

Our favourite people and places?

I think we would agree that in general we preferred the Canadians to the Yanks. More polite and friendly, not so brash.

We loved the Canadian Rockies, and Samantha thought New Orleans was magical. I agree with her sentiments, but there was also something very special about the deserts and wilderness of Nevada and Arizona that caught my imagination. The Grand Canyon was unbelievable and the town called ‘Joshua Tree’ was mystical. New York was New York – The original BIG APPLE – a crazy fun city – much better than London in my opinion.

A great, once in a lifetime experience. Will we go back again? Samantha probably will, as she has her whole life ahead of her. I guess one day we may return to Florida with our Grand Children!!!  Canada deserves a return visit – so who knows – there’s still a lot of the world we haven’t seen.

We’ve brought home so many memories – some good, some not so good. In any event, definitely a holiday we’ll not forget in a hurry.”

Of course, my “then wife” also read my travelogue, so even if I wanted to be a bit more adventurous in saying what was really going on, I valued my sanity and life itself too highly.

It was during this holiday that I started writing a very private account on my laptop of some of the flare ups I had been having with my wife. It was the first time I had put “pen to paper” to record details of her insuffereable behaviour, and it was something I was to continue to do intermittently over the next three years, at which time  I edited extracts of  some of the more extreme accounts of her unacceptable behaviour, and presented them to my lawyer as grounds for divorce.

Here is an early excerpt that I have uncovered, that was written during our 2-3 nights in San Francisco:

“My problem

This is the first time I have attempted to put my big problem into written words.

I could probably write forever on this but let’s just take one day at a time and take today (more or less).

We’ve been on holiday for about 18 days. Things have gone pretty well all considered and not too many rows.

Mainly the rows concern the navigating/driving. I am doing all the driving because if she drives and I navigate, every time I make a tiny mistake in directions I will get it in the neck – big time. So the logic is as long as I obey directions whilst driving I should pretty much avoid argument.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work quite like that. As she will never accept that she is at fault or wrong, every time she makes even a tiny mistake she finds a way to blame it on me and hence a row. Incredibly, even though I am driving, it is my fault if we take a wrong turning.

This happened a lot when we were in Los Angeles a couple of days ago and the atmosphere got quite bad.

Today we arrived in Oakland, about 15 miles from San Francisco. After checking in to a motel, we went into town to eat and a “ drive around”. San Francisco is a nightmare – what with tramways, one way systems, interspersed with two way systems, traffic lights everywhere, etc etc. After parking to eat, we tried to drive to Union Square. After going wrong a few times she totally blew her top and blamed it all on me, went into a huge sulk and refused to navigate any more. Poor Samantha had to take over but even then SHE tried to interfere again and then blew her top for the second time in as many minutes). She then went into one of her really sulky moods, and when we finally reached our destination, SHE refused to get out of the car.

The following may sound trivial:   Today, when I ordered my eggs “Over easy” she accused me of being stupid and saying it the wrong way round. I assured her I was correct. She wouldn’t have it. Finally got the tour ‘phrase’  book out and showed her I was right. She never acknowledged she was wrong or apologised. Then as we drove back to the Motel from San Francisco she insisted that we should take a particular turning off the main highway and I very politely pointed out that she was mistaken. Again I was proved to be right, and her wrong. No acknowledgement, no apology.

I think she probably hates me. She always puts me down and tries to make out how stupid I am. Most of the time I go along with it and agree with her – anything for an easy life.

At the end of the day I don’t really care if she doesn’t apologise, or if she derives some kind of diverse pleasure in putting me down – what I can’t stand is the never ending, moody, aggressive behaviour. I’m constantly on edge waiting for the next tantrum. How can we ever be happy when her moods are so unpredictable?

I could never discuss this with her. She would never accept anything I say and would always twist it round to make her the innocent party and everything my fault.

I know I’m not perfect but I don’t believe I deserve to live a life of misery waiting for her next outburst or nasty put down.

I know I can’t take much more but will try to make it to the end of the holiday.”

In fact, I made it for another three years, but more of that, later.

As for my drinking during this trip? Well, it was probably more controlled than it had been for a long time. I made absolutely no attempt to drink and drive while I was over there, but did try and make up for it in the evenings when I would invariably buy a six-pack or two from the local convenience store. On some days I drove anything from five hundred to even a thousand miles, and it didn’t take too many beers to put me to sleep at the end of very long days.

Of course my wonderful wife, being Thai, slept in the car, and then fell asleep as soon as we checked in a motel, be it afternoon or evening, and slept as long as she felt like, and Samantha and I had to await our “lady’s awakening” before we could go out to eat. And then she would return to her bed and sleep all night.

So now, nine years later, I can honestly say that I do have some fond memories of that holiday – after all we travelled to some wonderful places and saw some incredible sights, so even with a moody, selfish and spiteful wife accompanying me, I still managed to enjoy myself.

I am not too sure about Samantha. Maybe next time I see her, I will ask her.

Jomtien, 4th December, 2009

04 Dec 2009 1 Comment

by mobidark in MOBI'S DAILY PAGE

Today I have been sober for 96 days.

The disagreement with Bob that I wrote about yesterday has escalated to the point of no return.

In essence, Bob says he is convinced that Dave will never agree to go to AA and that he will die very soon. He holds out no hope that Dave will finally hit rock bottom and seek appropriate help.

On this basis, he insists on talking to Dave, sometimes 2 – 3 times a day, his prime motive being to get the work finished on Bob’s music tapes that Dave has been working on for him for some time.

Back in the 70’s, at the height of the Vietnam war, Bob and Dave were musicians together in a band that used to tour the American air bases throughout Thailand. They also had stints in Pattaya as well as clubs in Bangkok.  Even in those far off Dave was very interested in the recording side and he made many live recordings of the band on reel to reel tape recorders. Dave has already “willed” all these tapes to Bob when he dies, but has been trying to sort them out for quite a while now, which includes cataloging them and digitalizing them – transferring them in to modern digital sound format. Dave has also being doing similar work for other people, including his elderly doctor friend (now in his eighties), who used to play in a jazz band that played in the Napoleon Bar in Patpong many years back. The doctor also has countless reel to reel tapes, as well as a huge library of rare vinyl records, which he is getting Dave to transfer into digital format.

All this “studio Work” has been keeping Dave busy for quite a while now, and has been therapeutic in terms of keeping him occupied and giving him a purpose in life, plus of course a little cash for the work done. It has been obvious that for a long time the Doctor has just been getting Dave to do this work in order to give him a small income and keep him occupied, as it is unlikely that any use will ever be made of the finished product.

In my humble opinion, the same could be said for the work he is doing on his and Bob’s tapes. Of course, both being musicians, they are in raptures about all this old music, some of it original, but frankly, it just sounds like a load of dated rubbish to me (and I do know a bit about music). There can be no possible use for this music, once the digitalising job comes to an end, other than for Bob and Dave to play it to themselves and reminisce about the time when they were long haired, handsome youths, who drank and smoked pot like there was no tomorrow, and could pull any girl they wanted. The world is full of retired, unknown musicians who never quite made the ‘big time’ and more than ever these days, the world is also full of singer-song writers who have written and recorded their own music in home recording studios.

Bob is trying to justify his stance with Dave by saying that he is going to die anyway, so he might as well get him to finish his tapes before he pegs out.

I found his position extremely disturbing on several counts. Firstly we can never know for sure that Dave will die soon – God knows he has survived enough crises already; we also cannot be sure that he won’t finally come to his senses and seek proper help if he is forced to reach “rock bottom”; Bob’s behaviour goes against all the combined wisdom of the elders of AA (many of whom he has met and respects), Dave’s Doctor and even his brother; and finally I believe Bob is putting his own interests in front of the well being of a life long friend. (And to start with he didn’t even try to deny this).

Later, after I tried over and over to try and make him see sense and change his mind, he started to squirm and change the rational for his behaviour, including the excuse that: “Well Dave is chatting to other friends in Bangkok every day, so I might as well chat to him as well.”

I finally realised that Bob was going to be very stubborn on this, and also realised that Bob is not the true recovering alcoholic he claimed to be. After all, he has only ever been to three meetings in Pattaya when I more or less forced him to go, he has never been to a meeting anywhere else, he has already lapsed once, (and I now believe lied to me about how big an lapse it was), and last but not least, he claims to be spiritual, but has no faith that a “Higher Power” may come along and show Dave the error of his ways and bring him back from the brink.

So today I have had my final round of conversations with Bob and told him the same as I told Dave: “Let me know when you really are ready to embrace AA. Until then I am very sorry, but I can no longer be a close friend. My sponsor advises me that I should try to stick with friends who either have never drunk, or are recovering alcoholics who attend AA meetings on a regular basis. That way I will keep my peace and serenity. Good luck and take care.”

I am now relatively free from my emotional encumbrances of the past and will make a determined effort to get my new life on course. Today I attended two AA meetings, the regular 9 a.m. meeting, and then again at the noon meeting. I felt a bit “frayed” and the second meeting helped me a lot to get my mental state in order.

Fourth step work is now high on the agenda, and I shall try to get this under way over the next few days.

Today, for only the third time since I moved into my condo, I took a long, fast walk along the beach, and the pain in my chest and arm told me that I was really in bad physical shape and that need to take urgent remedial action to rectify the situation.

My physical shortcomings take me back to the year 2000 when I took early retirement, due to bad health. At that time I was over ninety kilos, had a bloated, round face and was certainly a “walking heart attack”. I have still not reverted to that point, as I’m a much trimmer eighty four kilos, and my face is unrecognizable in appearance to the one that I sported nine years ago, but nevertheless, if I am not careful I will start to have serious problems once more.

Back then, I did manage to get fit – very fit, and got my weight down to a remarkable seventy eight kilos, bearing in mind I am just over six feet tall. How this was achieved, along with all my other adventures during the past nine years, will be recounted over the coming week, as I continue my story of “The Retirement years”.

Jomtien, 3rd December, 2009

03 Dec 2009 1 Comment

by mobidark in MOBI'S DAILY PAGE

Today I have been sober for 95 days.

Today has been punctuated by a serious disagreement with Bob on the best way to handle Dave and his recent relapse. More on this tomorrow.

By way of a little light diversion, I will digress slightly, and post a comment I received from “Big Skippy”, and my lengthy reply thereto.

Submitted on 2009/12/03 at 5:17pm

Mobi, you write a hell of a story. In fact, I think it might be genetic – the English have quite a talent, even the amateurs.

I have to disagree with one small generalization you make about Thai bar girls and “respectable” girls. Although there are no absolutes, you are far less likely to meet a conniving, lying, cheating type if you dip in the respectable pool than if you dip in the bar girl pool. In fact, it sounds like Noi gave you fair warning at the beginning by telling you “You don’t know me. I’m not really like this – you don’t know what you’re getting into”

Congratulations on 94 days – I wish you continued success, Mobi.

Submitted on 2009/12/03 at 11:18pm

Thanks for your comments.

Yes, I was expecting that my “generalistion” would cause a bit of a kerfuffle.

It is often a very sensitive subject amongst the farang community in Thailand, and is frequently subject to heated and unpleasant debate in forums and suchlike.

There are those farangs who are so defensive as to the origins of their spouse, that they will go to any lengths to hide the fact that the met her in a “house of ill repute”, and then there are others who proudly declare from the rooftops the facts of their spouse’s unsavoury origins, swearing by all that is holy that they make the best and most faithful wives you could ever dream of having.

Then there is the third category who really did manage to find a Thai bride who was untainted by exposure to the seedy side of life, and of course those farangs are usually the most vociferous in protesting that their wives are as pure, well educated and untainted as any you may find anywhere, and the proud husbands will often direct disparaging and hurtful remarks towards those who found their companions in less than salubrious circumstances.

Of course, no one would dispute the fact that you are more likely to hit the jackpot in terms of good wifely behaviour from a girl of respectable background than one from the bar girl pool. The point I was trying to make that is by no means a guarantee that a respectable girl will behave in a respectable way, no more than every bar girl will behave in a dis-respectable way.

What I was trying to say was that many so-called respectable girls, often from very good families, will sometimes behave like bar girls when married to farangs. There are many who would claim that the percentage of Thai women who suffer from some kind of bi-polar condition is extraordinarily high, and I have no idea if this is true, but I have certainly seen some extraordinary and frankly, some just plain scary behavior by so-called well educated, respectable girls in family situations. We all decry the Thai Soaps where there is so much screaming and fighting amongst the female stars, but I sometimes wonder if they are that far from reality. Obviously exaggerated, certainly not in every family, but possibly more common than most would like to believe.

As to the subject of fidelity. Well I have told you the story of Noi, my fourth wife, who decided to sell her body to get together a little nest egg. She was certainly a complex and very difficult person, but I can say that once we moved to England, there was never any hint that she was in any way interested in repeating this kind of behaviour, and I truly believe that for the remaining 20 odd years of our marriage, she was completely faithful.

There is one other anecdote I would like to share.

When I was working in Soi Asoke, back in the seventies, with Dave, the alcoholic ‘muso’ and recording engineer, we somehow acquired a secretary who, while not hi-so herself, had a wide circle of hi-so friends. I always remember the day she arrived for the interview, as she pretty much interviewed herself, and told us what she would do and how much to pay her. She was an extremely extrovert, bubbly and crazy lady, came from a good, but not hi- so family, but such was the power of her outgoing personality, that she had been accepted into highest social spheres. She wasn’t interested in the money we paid her ( which was a pittance) but she seemed to gain some status from working for a farang recording studio who recorded some of the young Thai pop bands of the day and had many major advertising agents as clients. Her English was excellent, and just like the girls of today, many of her working hours were spent glued to the telephone. Of course no mobiles in those days, so maybe that was another reason she wanted to work for us. She had free use of the office phone all day long, and she wasted no time in calling all her friends to discuss the previous nights escapades and planning her forthcoming social activities.

Inevitably, some of her friends started to drop by for a chat and coffee, and it became clear, very early on that most of these friends were the genuine article; hi-so ladies in their late twenties to mid thirties, dressed in original “designer – fashion” clothes and accessories, dripping with gold, and the obligatory Mercedes Benz, often complete with uniformed chauffeurs, waiting outside . Upon introduction, many turned out to be minor royalty, “Mom Luangs” and the like..

Well I can assure you that during the months that these ladies were passing though our office, I came to learn about their private lives, and in particular, their frequent infidelities. Indeed the office even occasionally acted as a rendezvous for an illicit affair or two. I forgot to mention that all these ladies were married to hi-so men, many leading businessmen. As a rule the affairs would take place outside of Bangkok – sometimes on shopping trips to places such as Hong Kong, and on other occasions when they took off for a few days up-country. But any suggestions that these well educated, well raised ladies, (many in English public schools ) were faithful wives, belied the behaviour that I witnessed with my own eyes. Of course the husbands were no bastions of virtue either, and many had ‘mia nois” and spent their spare time in up-market massage parlours, and the like. I guess these ladies decided that what’s good for the goose….

So all this, my dear Big Skippy, is why I regard the suggestion that “good Thai ladies” don’t play around , with a healthy degree of skepticism.

But we are all entitled to our opinions….

On December 8th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

Big Skippy Says:

“Dear Mobi:

“Thank you for the very clear and thorough reply to my observation. I don’t think our opinions on this matter are really any different – it’s fair to say that girls from both ends of the social strata (with bar girls on one end to the hi-so types you describe on the other end) can have shocking mores. I guess the “good Thai ladies” I’m referring to are the middle class office gals (usually Chinese or Chinese-Thai), although there are loads of exceptions here as well.

“Although a perfectly western-compatable girl is probably impossible to find in Thailand (thank goodness), most success stories I hear of usually involve a middle-class “good Thai lady” with a university education and with some exposure and interest to western societies. No surprises there though I suppose.”

Jomtien, 2nd December, 2009

02 Dec 2009 3 Comments

by mobidark in MOBI'S DAILY PAGE

Today I have been sober for 94 days.

I almost missed my meeting this morning. I woke up late, as once again I had difficulty getting to sleep, and then compounded it by forgetting to set my alarm. Anyway, I should have made it with minutes to spare, had it not been for a small incident on the way to Second Road. I was taking a left turn from a small Soi into a major traffic route, waited for a gap in the traffic, and as I turned a speeding bike came out of nowhere, and shot past me on the outside of my car. He looked back at me and then slowed down and let me overtake him. Then he stuck along close behind me, before coming alongside and trying to look at me through the darkened side window, and then once more overtaking to get a good look through the front windscreen. He continued to “circle” my car, and it was pretty obvious that he was planning some retaliation for the assumed slight to him when I supposedly cut him off.

I am the first to admit that I may have cut him off, but I did look right and I did wait while a number of bikes passed, and I certainly did not see this biker who was without doubt travelling at considerable speed. So it certainly wasn’t deliberate. As he continued to circle me, it occurred to me that in my drinking days, I would have undoubtedly stopped and had it out with him, whether I was drunk or hung-over, for either way I had no fear and easily became outraged at what I perceived to be outrageous behavior. After all motorcycle riders aren’t exactly paragons of the Highway Code on the highways and byways of Thailand, and by the looks of this youth, I doubt whether he had obeyed many road traffic laws in his driving career. So why the desire to “get me”? Probably because he could see I was a farang, and the more I observed him, the more I realised that he was probably high on ‘yaba’ or some other substance.

It was only a  few days previously that I had been driving along Thepprasit Road towards Sukhumvit Road, when, literally out of nowhere, a motorcycle came speeding out of a gas station on the left side of the road and shot straight across Thepprasit in front of my car, missing my front bumper by millimeters. I was a bit shocked at the closeness of what would have been a terrible accident – possibly fatal, but soon calmed down and continued on my way. For that is what you do here – take life as it comes – and never get too upset about things. It’s the only way to stay peaceful and serene.

So instead of confronting my potential assailant, the new, sober Mobi decided to drive on in the hope that he would give up. But he didn’t, and I suddenly became conscious of the fact that I was approaching some red traffic lights and would be obliged to stop. Maybe this guy had a gun – not at all unusual in this “Deadwood” City of Pattaya. It is almost a daily occurrence for Thai youths to shoot and even kill each other, and I doubt whether many of them would have any scruples about shooting a farang – for nothing much would happen to them in this lawless town, where the police are merely organised mafia.

As soon as I realised my possible danger, I immediately took a left turn into a side Soi in the hope of shaking the youth off. To my horror I then realised I had turned into a cul-de-sac, and I would have to stop barely a few meters down the road. I looked behind me and breathed a sigh of relief as there was no sign of my pursuer. So I drove down a bit, did a three point turn and slowly made it back out to the main road. For whatever reason the guy had given up and disappeared and I was able to continue on my way to the meeting, albeit a few minutes after the meeting had started.

But better late than dead.

The previous evening I had eventually had a long chat with Bob in Australia on Skype and Bob related to me the details of two telephone conversations he had had with Dave earlier in the day. He told me that Dave was quite drunk on both occasions, but that he was very distraught, even broke down and cried, said that he expected to die soon but then assured Bob that he really wanted to stop and really wanted help. Bob said that Dave, not Bob, brought up the subject of AA and Dave said that he would now think seriously about going to a meeting.

However, Bob told me that he wasn’t convinced that Dave was finally at “rock bottom’, and that he would really go to AA. He felt that Dave was still holding back. We left it that I would call Dave the following morning when he should have sobered up, and see whether his resolve to try out the AA route was still there. Knowing Dave as we do, we both had severe misgivings.

After this morning’s meeting I called Dave’s lady and she told me that Dave and her  were at that very moment on their way back home from the hospital, and that Dave was sober and feeling much better.

So when I arrived home I called Dave and had a long chat with him. He did indeed sound sober, maybe a little woozy, but perfectly coherent. He told me that his drinking spree started a week ago when he went to his monthly cheese and wine club lunch, and one of his old friends prevailed on him to just have a glass of wine, as surely one glass couldn’t do him any harm!

Well for those out there who are familiar with alcoholics and AA will know that just one glass is all that it takes. The first drink will be the start of something big. I suggested to Dave that he avoid such gatherings until he had at least twelve months of sobriety under his belt or he would continue to lapse, when faced with similar circumstances. This sort of behaviour has been well documented over and over, and I don’t think that Dave is any exception to the wisdom of “never take that first drink”.

We talked for quite a while, mainly about his alcoholism and the experiences and successes of other alcoholics, but Dave never once mentioned AA. So finally I told him that I doubted whether he would ever succeed in staying permanently sober without the help of AA. Dave just said “Hmm” and immediately followed with, “I have to go now”.

That was the end of the conversation, and, I guess that will be the end of my involvement with Dave until he accepts the help of AA. I simply cannot sit by and watch him slowly kill himself, and I cannot spend the rest of my life trying to support him and advise him so that he either won’t drink, or when he does lapse, help in getting him dried out again.

This evening I sent the following SMS to Dave:

“Hi Dave, good to speak to u today and happy u r sober. I wanted to talk to you about AA, but as soon as I mentioned the subject you finished the call. U clearly r not ready to reach out to AA. So it is with much sorrow that I tell you that I give up and will let u go your own way. I know you will lapse again – without AA it’s only a matter of time, and I cannot stand by and see u destroy your life. It is too painful. U will not hear from me again, unless U R ready to give AA a go. It doesn’t have to be thru me. I can get strangers to take u if u prefer. Call AA on 02 2318300  www.aathailand.org Good luck. M.”

MOBI’S STORY – (PART 19)

THE RETIREMENT YEARS.

Some background relationship detail is needed before I continue with my story.

I had been with my current wife, the fourth, since 1976 when I had met her in Thailand. Let’s  call her “Noi”. Noi was born in Bangkok of  Thai/Chinese parentage, and much of her secondary education had been in Singapore, and even before that she had attended a Christian School in Bangkok, so her English was quite exceptional. To this day I do not know all the details regarding her life before I met her, or how it was that her family had the money to send her to Singapore. Her father, although ethnic Chinese, (many of whom are extremely wealthy), was a market trader in Patunam market, and certainly in the years that I knew him, struggled mightily to make ends meet and worked all the hours God created, slaving away in the market.

Noi’s mother was a Thai, a sort of “foundling” who to this day has no date of birth on her Thai identity papers, and was “adopted” by royalty. So she grew up in a rich household and was clearly a beautiful woman when young. Again, by the time I had come into their lives she was still assuming the airs and graces of her adoptive family, but was living in a basic, rented shop house near Patunam Market, and had very little money. There was clearly no love lost between father and mother, and, I was to find out much later, Noi’s elder, ethnic Chinese “sister” turned out to be her father’s “live in” mistress, as he no longer had any discernible relationship with his wife. I gathered that the mother was rather stupid and had gone through countless wads of money that had come her way via some of her husband’s better off relations and also from her rich adoptive family.

In spite of Noi’s father’s unofficial “bigamy”, he was a good man and took care of his family the best he knew how, including various waifs and strays that were dumped on him by errant relatives and family friends.

Noi had had a previous relationship with a rich Chinese man when she was in her teens, and when she was twenty, gave birth to a baby daughter. I met her when she was 23, had broken up with her common law husband and was working in a department store as a sales rep for a children’s clothes manufacturer. Her daughter was living at the family home, but she was living alone in a rented, very cheap, basic room near Victory Monument. Her job required her to move all over the country and work for periods of time in different department stores, although her salary for this was very meagre. One thing led to another, and of course her excellent English and love of western music drew us together, as I was able to copy music cassettes for her to listen to on her Walkman.

She clearly set her cap at me, and it wasn’t long before she quit her job and moved in to live with me at my rented apartment off Soi 24, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok.

Shortly after we set up home together, one of her father’s friends had seen us out somewhere in Bangkok and duly reported it to her father. He was very angry as he looked down on farangs and especially farangs who took his daughter to their home to live with. (I assume they thought that I was one of those “low class” tourists, who were even around in those far off days.)

Our first meeting, at her father’s house, was a very nervous affair for both of us, and her father clearly didn’t approve of the relationship, particularly as I learned that both parents suffered “loss of face” by their daughter shacking up with a long haired farang.

Over time, my relationship with Noi’s family thawed, and her mother came to visit us, and Noi’s daughter started to spend a lot of time with us. We then took Noi’s daughter to live with us and rented a small flat owned by one of Noi’s ‘cousins’. One day, Noi suggested that we move to a property her mother owned at Saphan Kwai, a two storey shop house that her mother had been renting, but was now vacant but in very bad decorative state. To cut a long story short, we spent a fair amount of money making the house habitable, and then moved in there. At this time I was still working with Dave in his recording Studio at Soi Asoke.

It was also around this time that Noi decided that she wanted to become a Thai singer, (i.e. a singer of Thai songs). She could barely sing in tune, had no discernable singing voice, but took lessons and eventually sang well enough to get a job in a Thai night club. This was in addition to her day job which, through my contacts, she had obtained at as a production secretary at an advertising agency.

At that time my relationship with Noi was quite good, although she had already given me some grief, in the only way that Thai women can, by being moody and controlling. Once, soon after we shacked up together, and during a period when she was being extremely charming, she had an unguarded moment and she warned me. I remember to this day her saying: “You don’t know me. I’m not really like this – you don’t know what you’re getting into” (Or words to that effect). Never was a truer word spoken.

I was still young, very naïve and an alcoholic, so it took a very long time for me to realise that being a night club singer didn’t only involve singing. It was only after I started to get phone calls from various Thais on my home phone for her in the evenings when she wasn’t home, that I started to wonder what was going on.

By this time we had moved to Patunam and had rented a place opposite her family home. Her daughter continued to live with us, but I had now started a new job in Siam Square as GM of the a New English language radio station, (working all kinds of crazy hours), and Noi was becoming ever more conspicuous by her absence, which meant that the daughter had to stay with the family across the road for much of the time. Noi’s absences became longer, and many a night she wouldn’t come home at all. Then one day we had a big row over something I cannot remember and she walked out and left me. Not the first time I had been left by a Thai lady and had her kid dumped on me.

Noi’s mother was distraught, and I vividly recall her coming up to my room with her granddaughter (who loved me to bits) and cried for hours over what her daughter had done. The family continued to cook for me when I was home, and the daughter also stayed with me when I was there. Noi came home occasionally in the day time and collected clothes and tidied up a bit, but never came when I was there.

In spite of her so called “respectable” background, Noi reverted to type and was clearly sleeping around with rich Thai men for money. It is this experience that has helped convince me that nearly all Thai women are completely amoral, and many think nothing of having casual partners, either for money, or just for fun, whenever and wherever the opportunity arises. Those who believe there is a fundamental difference between bar girls and “respectable” girls are one day often sadly disillusioned. I have seen it over and over again through the past 35 odd years.

I should add that by this time we were legally married, although no wedding was held and no sin sod given. It was purely a legal, administrative process to formalise and cement our state of cohabitation.

Anyway, my wife’s behaviour didn’t really bother me. I was having a great time in my new job, as recounted earlier in Mobi’s story, I was enjoying myself running the radio station, drinking myself to oblivion, and having the occasional girl on the side to satisfy my basic urges.

In all I was with Noi for some twenty seven years, and apart from a brief infatuation when I first knew her, she was the only wife that I never truly loved. She just controlled me, like someone may control a compliant dog.

I suppose in a way she did me a big favour. If it wasn’t for her I would have never left Thailand, I would never have had my insurance career in the UK and made enough money to see me through. Who knows what may have happened if I had stayed where I was and continued to drink myself to oblivion every day? As it was, I was doing very little work, and rarely showed up at the office before lunch time. The lifestyle and temptations were too attractive and destructive for a budding alcoholic in his late thirties.

Eventually, after a few months, Noi returned home. I suspect she thought I would give up and move out, but as I have said, I didn’t really care what she did, and I was quite comfortable where I was, not far from my office, her family taking care of my cleaning, laundry and food and the rent very cheap. Besides, I was either too drunk or hung-over to find the energy to do anything as momentous as to move out and leave my wife.

When she returned home, she started working hard  to persuade me to move back home to England. I didn’t want to go, but I tacitly agreed, just to get her off my back and stop the nagging.

At the time I had no intention of keeping my promise, and assumed that something would come up to give me an excuse to stay in Thailand , or that something would occur to convince her to change her mind. But she never gave up, and I clearly recall the  day when she confronted me at home in the afternoon, and wanted to know if I had set the date for our departure. I tried to persuade her to change her mind about going, and she went completely berserk – the first of many violent and intimidating tantrums to come over the next 25 years or so. She screamed and shouted at me and started throwing my things all over the room, including my precious cassette radio, which was smashed to bits. I was terrified, and quickly assured her that we would indeed go – very soon.

And go we did, in September, 1983, and so began an unhappy home life for me and my future family with a moody, vain, lying, conniving, controlling bitch, who had such a violent temper that despite her size, she could put the fear of god into almost anyone, well… me anyway.

I have had to write all this background so that you can understand the reason I devoted myself to my work for so many years, and when I took early retirement, I was heading for trouble in a big way.

Jomtien, 1st December, 2009

01 Dec 2009 Comments Off

by mobidark in MOBI'S DAILY PAGE

Today I have been sober for 93 days.

Yesterday was not a good day.

I am still preoccupied with Dave’s situation, and I know that it is not doing me any good.

Yesterday morning I called Dave’s ‘ex’ and found that she was still there. In fact at the time I called she said to me, in English, “Yes, I am still here, and I am cleaning up all the piss and shit in his bedroom!”

I asked if he was still drinking, and she replied in the affirmative and said at the moment he was in the toilet where she had helped him to stagger to a few minutes earlier.

She asked me why Dave had lost control of his bodily functions and why was he shitting so much? I had no idea, but said that I would call his doctor and try to find out.

It transpired that the doctor had gone to Chiang Mai and Dave’s ex then called me in the afternoon and said that she needed Bob’s mobile number in Australia as Dave wanted to call him.

I asked her if Dave wanted to call me, and she said: “No he is too scared to call you”. Anyway I gave her Bob’s number, and an hour or so later I was “text chatting” to Bob on Skype when he told me that Dave was on the phone. Bob spoke to Dave for about thirty minutes. Dave was completely drunk and barely coherent. He was crying and apologising and said that he needed help. He told Bob that he expected to die and said that he wanted to call me. I passed back the message, via Bob,  that I would not speak to him as long as he was drunk.

This may sound harsh, but on every previous occasion that I have spoken to him when he was drunk, he has subsequently had no recollection of the conversation, and certainly no recollection of anything that was discussed. So it is a complete waste of time.

Bob reiterated to Dave essentially the same thing that I had told him, and when Dave tried to call me later in the day – three times – I did not answer the phone, but sent him an sms which said:

“Hi Dave, I know you tried to call me but I cannot talk to you when you are drunk. When you are sober, please call me back and I promise to   answer the phone and chat to you. Please stop drinking. We all love you but you must stop now. Take care, Mobi.”

Last night I read the “Big Book” in bed, hoping for inspiration, but as I read the chapter entitled “More about Alcoholism” the more I read, the more I wanted to take a drink. I finally put the book down, but my musings about Dave and his condition also made me want a drink, but I did nothing further about these feelings and eventually drifted off to sleep.

I heard nothing more yesterday, and today I went to my regular morning AA meeting. I said nothing more about my problems with Dave and the meeting attendees discussed the twelfth step, which says:

“Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

One of the senior and highly respected members of our group shared to the effect that our prime duty as recovering alcoholics is to carry the MESSAGE to other alcoholics, and not to carry the ALCOHOLICS. Our job was to pass the message along whenever and wherever we could, and it was up to the receivers of the message as to whether they heeded it and acted upon it. The sharer was not directing his words of wisdom to me, but I felt that it fitted in very well with what was happening with Dave and me, and that I was right to leave him alone to make the decision on whether he was ready to accept the help of AA. As you can imagine, I am still having nightmares and attacks of conscience regarding my chosen course of action.

I called Dave’s lady after my meeting and she said that he was still drinking and still in a very bad state, possibly getting worse. Then in the afternoon she called me back to say that she had just got home from taking Dave to hospital. He had started vomiting on top of all his other medical problems, and he had allowed his lady to take him back to the ICU. She told me that he had his phone next to him and that I could call him. I said that I would wait until tomorrow as it was no use talking to him when he was still drunk, and now clearly very ill.

Dave’s Lady then told me that Dave’s sister-in-law had called, obviously in response to my call to his brother a couple of days ago. I haven’t mentioned previously that Dave’s brother has had Parkinson’s disease for most of his life and is severely handicapped. His wife, Dave’s sister-in- law, is not too crazy about Dave, to put it lightly and considers him a drunken bum who is a blight on her husband’s family. (Maybe not too far from the truth).

Anyway, Dave’s brother must have been very concerned about him following my call a couple of days ago, so he must have asked his wife to call, or maybe he just told his wife, and she took it upon herself to call. Anyway, Rob told his sister-in-law that he was not drinking, and then passed the phone over to his ‘ex’ and asked her to lie  and confirm that he was sober.  The poor lady was intimidated, duly complied and lied to Dave’s sister-in-law. Then later she told me what had happened over the phone, and said that she felt very bad for lying.

It is a nasty and nefarious web that these alcoholics weave, not only destroying themselves, but also entrapping all those who are nearest and dearest to them in their lies and deceipt.

Later I received an sms from Bob in Australia informing of what I already knew – that Dave was in hospital. He suggested we chat when I got home, but most unusually, when I arrived home at 7 p.m. Bob was not logged into Skype, and I could not get hold of him.  I sent him an sms but he hasn’t replied. I hope he is Ok and nothing is wrong.

I have also called Dave’s lady but she hasn’t answered her phone, even though she said I could call her any time of the day or night.

I have an uneasy feeling about all this. I hope that I am wrong.

(Update – I am wrong. All is well with Bob, although I still haven’t heard from Dave’s ‘ex’ this evening. Bob has spoken to Dave twice today, and I will recount what transpired tomorrow.)

Today I had a number of errands to run in the afternoon, but the most important was a meeting with an agent as at long last I have the go ahead to put my house on the market. I had met with him on a couple of previous occasions when I thought I might be almost ready to sell. So he was already very familiar with the property and knew the builder and admired then quality of his work. I have set up a provisional appointment for the agent to visit the house tomorrow and meet with my wife and my intermediary to familiarise himself more with the details, take some photos, and agree an initial sale price.

I know this is going to be a very long haul, and I will probably end up having to accept a greatly reduced price, but at least the process has started and the wife seems to be on board.  According to my intermediary, the wife has been “all business” at the meetings she has held with her, and also that she has accepted that the marriage is over and it is time for both of us to move on.

Fingers crossed.

Tomorrow I hope to get back to Mobi’s Story – The Retirement Years.