PARIJAH DIARIES 9 An old acquaintance of mine has opened a new bar down by Rawai Beach. The Phuket Pirates, he calls it. I met him on an obscure beach about six years ago. It was early in the morning, and I’d had my swim and was mooching around bagging up today’s plastic from the […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 2 April 18 2020 Kriminalvården Anstalten Tygelsjö Skiftesvägen 10 218 74 Tygelsjö Sweden Attn: Xxxxx Xxxxxx Hallo my friend Well shit, if you had to go away for ten months for growing indoor plants, you chose the right time! We’re all in prison now. I don’t mean to minimise what you’re going through, […]
It was a sliding doors moment, though not so slick, so finely calibrated. Slow motion — but still a matter of timing. I was coming to a decision to leave Thailand — must have been early to mid March I think — and to go back to Europe to look for alternatives to my plan […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 1 It’s not very common in conversation, not in its original sense at least. People stick to ‘weird’, which is a whole other story, coming from Old English wyrð, meaning fate or destiny. You generally only see it when some hack journalist has been detailed to put down the latest outbreak of truth […]
The boys had gone swimming and Red wanted to go too, but her mother wouldn’t let her. She was too young and didn’t know how to swim. So she waited for a while and then sneaked away, following the path to the pond. As she approached through the trees, she could see their backs, five […]
Sometime during the Eocene Era, India collided into Asia, hurling the Himalayas high into the sky, lifting up the Tibetan plateau, and giving birth to an unruly spirit called monsoon. Fifty million years later, I arrived exhausted in Bangkok, the City of Angels. I was met at the airport by a muscular white man […]
Apsara was returning from the market, walking to the end of the street where the motorcycle taxis wait, when she heard crying. Deep, heart-broken sobbing, coming from somewhere nearby. Curious, she turned into a side street. She was going in the right direction, though now, strangely, the crying sounded further away. The street had a […]
I found the place by accident, like everybody does. I’d stayed in Phuket longer than planned, to keep an eye on Apsara’s kids while she finished up in Bangkok and got ready to move down here. I was living in a simple holiday bungalow and had rented another one for them. It was around the beginning […]
“There’s an understanding that is not desired to exist” It was 1970, and Eric Dollard was sleeping rough at the RCA-Marconi Wireless Station at Bolinas, California, where he had worked from the age of seventeen until it was closed down. He’d started sleeping on site in an effort to protect his property — the 25 […]
COFFEE WITH GIOVANNI BRIXTON, 2014 I’m sitting outside the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, one of the few places in London I enjoy. I lived here in the eighties, when the immigrant population was still predominantly Caribbean and Portuguese. Forty years on, I’m waiting for my daughter, all grown up and successful now. She slept at […]