Mobi-Babble

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Of mad dogs and madder Brits….

It truly saddens me to report, yet again, that some of the worst dregs of British society seem to somehow end up in Pattaya and its environs.

Here’s what happened.

On most evenings, Noo and I take our 4 dogs for a walk around the lake and then  along  the village  streets, inside our estate, where we live. We have been doing this for about 3 years, and apart from one belligerent Brit who lived outside  our village who seemed convinced that the only place we took our dogs to walk was the public area in front of his house, (where, according to him, they all defecated ), and a maverick pit-bull who occasionally used to escape from his yard and spread fear and terror over all who ventured near him, our evening strolls have pretty much passed without incident.

(I should add that I subsequently explained to the aforementioned belligerent Brit that we were not targeting his house as a doggy toilet and that in fact his house was part of a long walk, lasting over 20 minutes, whereupon he backed off and apologised. The pit-bull has long since disappeared up its own snarling snout after my doughty Somchai, – the shih-tszu with the Mitzu – chased him away with blood curdling yaps….)

Fast forward to a few days back when we were walking with the dogs  past a house in our estate which we must have passed on hundreds of previous occasions, when we were suddenly assailed from within the garden by what I can only describe as a deranged, rabid Brit. (Sorry folks… truly, most of them are Brits…) He screamed and shouted at the top of his lungs, telling us to keep our dogs away from his house and to never bring them round that way again.

Shocked out of our sleepy somnolence, we stopped and looked at the red-faced, demented farang and asked him what his problem was. He accused us of shouting at his dogs every time we passed his house and that if we ever came that way again we would be sorry.

I should explain that the house boasted two of the most microscopic, non-descript dogs I have ever laid eyes on, and every time we pass his massively fortified iron gate, these little rats push their noses under the small gap at the bottom of the gate and bark their little heads off. The predictable result of this disturbance is to set off our own little pack of Mobi-pooches in a chorus of howls, whereupon we shout stern instructions to our own dogs to back off and desist, and  continue our walk past the house.

We tried in vain to explain to the spluttering, hate-consumed, mad-man that we were shouting at our own dogs, not his, but he wasn’t having it and continued to make dire threats to us and our dogs. In the end there was no point in continuing the exchange, as by this time, even my mild mannered little Noo was yelling words of abuse in English that I never knew existed  in her vocabulary.

Having delivered our dogs back  home, Noo and I resolved to return to the scene of the fracas and see if we couldn’t have it out with this nut case – man to mad-man.

We rang the bell at his front gate.

‘What do you want?’

‘Good evening, do you have a moment?’

After a few moments the guy appeared with one hand behind his back, obviously concealing something.

‘Can we have a chat and clear the air? Quite frankly, we have no idea what we have done to upset you.’

‘You come round here shouting at my dogs, and if you do that again you will regret it!’

‘We weren’t  shouting at your dogs – we were shouting at our own –why on earth would we shout at your dogs?’

‘If you bring your dogs around here again you’ll be sorry!’

‘Why, what will you do?’

‘You wait and see.’

‘Look, we came round here to try and resolve this issue with you like civilised people…’

‘There’s nothing to resolve – keep away from here or you will be sorry!’

And so it went on….  We were getting nowhere, so after telling the nutter that we had every intention of walking wherever we pleased with our dogs, we gave up trying to reason with him.

As we started to walk away, he revealed what he had been concealing  in his hand – none other than a large, black hand gun….which he waved at us and continued to make barely veiled  threats at the top of his voice.

We walked back home, pondering our next move. It is one thing to have a little local dispute over some barking dogs, but quite another when someone starts waving guns around.

For sure, there was no way that this Brit held a licence for a gun. Not knowing what else to do, we called the ‘Chairperson’ of the village who hurried round to the man’s house and confronted the would-be gunman. He told her that the gun was a fake and she told him that even if it was fake, (which we all doubt), he had no business waving at people who had done no wrong. He shouted at her that she was on our side and not his!

At madam chairperson’s instigation, we decided to report him and his gun at the local police station. The station officer recorded all the details in his little book and gave us a copy of the police report.

Noo then asked him if he would send some cops  to the house to find out if the man had a licence for the gun and to arrest him for using it in an unlawful manner.

‘No’, said the officer, ‘we can only take action if he shoots someone.’

Well, we have continued to walk past his house every day with our dogs, and his two little rats have continued to bark at us as we pass his gate,  but sad to say, so far, no one has been shot.  So there’s little more we can do…

What is it about Pattaya that attracts such arseholes?

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‘A Lust For Life’

I advised in last week’s blog that I had completed the revision of my novel, ‘A Lust for Life’, and I have now posted the latest version onto the blog. The revised novel is now written as a single, continuous  story of 39 chapters, and replaces the four-part novel that I previously posted.

As ever, all comments are welcome.

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‘There and back’ – a trip to ye olde country… Part 3 (the nuclear option?)

After our first trip to London on 27^th July, we returned to Sid’s house in Tonbridge, Kent, where we would stay for another week.

The wonderful and strangely beautiful  20 year-old Manu was still providing us with endless moggy-poses. After surviving 20 years of Sid’s tender loving care, Manu wasn’t about to fluff it while we were on the case.

I wouldn’t claim that Sid’s little street is  the most picturesque suburb I’ve ever seen, but it  has a certain charm.

Graced by the lovely Noo, his house and pretty  little back garden  evoke  memories of an era that I sense is slowly disappearing in modern, digitally-obsessed England.

Note that Noo continues to be  drawn to cherries and fauna.

On Sunday 28^th July, we had a grand family reunion and barbecue at Sid’s house.

Cousins, aunts, nieces and nephews and my own daughters turned up from the  far corners of the land to welcome the prodigal Mobi and his lovely partner to the old country. The weather was lovely and a good day was had by one an’ all.

To say that Sid is a train fanatic would be an understatement.

He suddenly had this crazy idea that it would make a great day out to go to Dungeness  for the day and take pics of one of Britain’s Nuclear Power Stations. It didn’t sound very exciting to me, but I soon discovered why he wanted to go there….to ride on little trains of course.

So on Monday we set of early and drove to Hythe where we boarded the only fully ‘working’ miniature railway in the UK – possibly the whole world, for the longish trip to the Dungeness coast.

I can’t claim it was the most comfortable hour or so I’ve ever spent on a choo-choo – but it was certainly different!

There they are, in all their glory???  A ‘brace’ of Nuclear power stations. 

Dungeness A is a legacy Magnox power station that was connected to the National Grid in 1965 and was de-commissioned in 2006.

Dungeness B is an advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) power station and is still churning out power for our TV’s, microwaves, fridges, and smart phone chargers. It consists of two 615 MW reactors, which began operations in 1983 and 1985 respectively. They have undergone a number of scheduled and unscheduled shut downs over the years and the station’s final closure date is set at 2018, 35 years after they first went on-line.

Dungeness C??? In 2009, Dungeness was included in a list of 11 potential sites for new nuclear power stations, at the request of the operators of Dungeness B. What say you? At least they are safe from tsunamis…but they said we were safe from hurricanes!

I confess that I was more than pleasantly surprised by what I found at Dungeness. Sure it’s a bit bleak and wild, and I’m not too sure I would like to be out there on a cold, wet, wintry day, but the weather was glorious and there was something very magical about it all. The whole area is nature reserve.

 I hope that my humble photographs do justice to the beauty and remoteness of this unusual headland.

It never ceases to amaze me that wherever you may go in the British Isles, and no matter how isolated or inhospitable, you will invariably  find a few hardy souls who put down their roots and make it their home.

Just what the hell they find to do in a place like Dungeness beats the heck out of me…

And course no community, however remote,  would be complete without a typical British pub, where we all enjoyed a tasty pub lunch, before making the cramped choo-choo journey back to Hythe and thence to Tonbridge and civilisation…

More pics of ye olde country next week