Someone started a thread on Thaivisa asking foreigners where they met their Thai wives. Such a question!

I was tempted just to leave a comment along the lines of mind your own bloody business but as in most such threads curiosity got the better of me leading to the complete waste of  several precious Nanaseconds – the universally accepted time taken for a bar girl in Sukhumvit to polish off a lady’s drink.

Despite frequenting bars as much as the next man in my Bangkok youth I rarely bought these drinks keeping a mental note of how many more houses or vehicles I would own in the future if I didn’t succumb.

It was easy really – my Thai has always been so cocky that women in Go-Go bars enjoyed a laugh even though they knew Cheap Rooster was not worth persevering with after their next shuffle on stage.

The question as to where one met one’s missus is a delicate one – meaning in English that it is the complete opposite – highly indelicate. Unless the information is freely offered it is better not to ask. Besides I wouldn’t attach any truth to any foreigner’s explanation in this regard unless I had introduced the couple to each other myself.

Even then there might be doubts.

There is an awful lot of snobbery displayed from men who believe they have got the remarkable catch of a “good girl” at a bus stop, university or serving in a shop. In these days of social media they will burble on about their online meeting trolling the other fashionable lie that they have never been asked for money and they have never parted with any.

How they sneer at men who married women they met working at night – Bernard Trink of Night Owl fame referred to them as the “demimondaines of the niterie entertainment field”. You can take the girl out of the bar but you can’t…..blah blah effing blah.

Rooster realized from my earliest days in Thailand aged just 20 that women who worked in bars carried a lot of baggage. I also accepted that women who worked in shops, women who sat in front of me learning English…. women who breathed air in fact….. all carried a lot of baggage.

I have always preferred to take my own luggage up to my room so it was no wonder that I took every woman (and man) I met as much with a pinch of salt as a whole pack of Saxa.

I tried to get to know them and ignored whether they were rich or poor, educated or not. I was far more interested if they were interesting and had potential. And I could sniff BS out while developing a straight Thai face that gave no indication that I had actually sampled the aroma of wafting “khee khwai”.

I met my first wife in Patpong and after seeing the error of my ways I got my second from Nana! My first wife – who was out in a disco kind of bar called Peppermint – was 13 years my senior and entrapped me hook line and plonker by leaving 20 baht in the morning for a phone call she had made at my place in Sukhumvit.

Spellbound by her generosity I married her two years later and we had a couple of wonderful children who are now Londoners. We split up when the pressure of an un-medicated schizophrenic living with a serial philanderer became too big a cross for either of us to bear. You can guess who was who…..

My second wife to be was also out at a disco and as she acted far less loony than the first missus I figured she was relatively normal. Famous last words but we found a mutual interest in playing competitive pool and both won trophies and tournaments over the years.

She was – and still is funnily enough – 16 years my junior. I never held it against her, if you know what I mean. We moved in together in 2004 after I found a condo big enough to accommodate a full size pool table and just five years ago we had a daughter and then another.

Amazingly, so long as the subject does not turn to money – my money,  the two wives get on quite amicably providing they don’t see each other too often. The first wife has put the dot in age (dotage) while the second dotes on the daughters that are the apples of everyone’s eyes.

My grown up daughter is a fine Asian child – she looks after her mum financially and keeps me in line when I open my gob too wide. On Thailand visits, she and my son split their time between their mum and Mrs Rooster and me. I count myself lucky that despite all my misdemeanors everyone seems to get on reasonably civilly.

The last thing I ever needed was The Farang Marriage Training Clinic that opened in Khon Kaen this week. That made me wince at the thought – I did all my marriage training “on the job” and feel I wrote the bloomin’ book on the subject.

I recount all this matrimonial nonsense for no particular reason other than possibly to entertain and explain why I care not for why anyone gets into bed with anyone else….. unless it impacts on the Thai news of course!

Apropos, word came on Wednesday that Thailand’s poster boy cop Surachate Hakpan – our darling Maj-Gen Big Joke – was becoming an assistant spokesman to none other than Deputy PM Prawit “Mr Watch” Wongsuwan.

Some posters called it a demotion, a slap down for stealing the RTP limelight.

The reality is that Surachate has done very little that is controversial. Busting call centers, seeing Nigerians off the premises, running tuk-tuk drivers out of Sanam Luang is hardly naming the corrupt.

The demotion notion is simplistic, quite possibly completely wrong, and feeds into a just-off-the-plane newbie narrative that he has been stepping on toes. The reality is that he is a personal friend of Prawit and his family. An interview earlier in the year said that he was a frequent visitor to his house.

It is far more likely that this is a promotion and a chance for BJ to prove himself in the political arena ahead of a future tilt at politics. And it could be win-win helping the embattled Prawit get an improvement in press coverage from his younger master who has shown adeptness in that sphere.

For let’s face it bad press has dogged fugly Prawit more than those pesky mutts in the sois and villages of Thailand.

The question remains whether BJ actually had much say in the matter and if he did, has he considered that he may be backing the wrong horse…

Or getting into bed with the wrong person?

I understand this could be seen as efforts to cunningly undermine the deputy commissioner of the tourist police but that idea would credit politicians and other top ranking members of the RTP with something that is as scarce as an honest policeman.

Intelligence.

Time will tell whether BJ has boobed but, as the news showed in another interesting  week on Thaivisa, there were plenty of others cocking-up left right and klang showing that whoever we get under the covers with might be the least of our worries.

Top billing in the last seven days went to the never ending subject of the Thai roads. Thankfully we were spared the usual carnage carping as recommendations and pipeline proposals gushed forth suggesting that drivers without licenses would soon be fined 50K or sent to jail or both.

Some forum posters took it at face value even suggesting it was a step in the right direction. It’s smoke and mirrors I am afraid. It helps to shift the attention away from the death toll while once again making it look like action is being taken. It is all highly irrelevant anyway given a police force who have absolutely no intention of upholding the law.

Many Thais screamed that extortion would increase. That is admittedly possible but I put more store by an unusually candid answer to a question from the constabulary’s  “Big Traffic”  or Bangkok’s C.O.G. – Chief of Gridlock.

He said that his men get half the fines and there is a 10,000 baht cap, balaclava if you will. If that is true they will probably just get their cut a few days before the end of the month rather than on the 31st as is usually the case.

The reality is that this will be just another initiative that will flounder on the back of a lack of enforcement, be thoroughly dumbed-down as compromise follows compromise until no one can remember why it was suggested in the first place and we can all go home for a plate of mashed papaya and BBQ chicken and a good old chin wag about who slapped who on last night’s soaps.

The Thais screaming indignantly stories were just media hype – the population know full well what will transpire while accepting that their own connivance in lawbreaking will continue unabated.

Much comment also surrounded the suggestion of separating “Big Bikers” from “Little Bikers” when doling out licenses. This inspired a lot of comment on what constituted a big bike.

Rooster – a biker on all sorts of machines from 125cc to 900cc with nearly half a million kilometers of experience in Thailand – would rather point out that all bikes are dangerous in the wrong hands, even push-bikes. I mean have you seen how fast a 125 can go?

Again it is (exhaust) smoke and (wing) mirrors. The real problem is 15 year olds and helmet-less drunks with no training whatsoever riding like they are immortal on up-country roads.

One woman who might be removed from vehicle ownership full time was the nutter at Chiang Mai airport who left her pick-up for an hour in the drop off zone then mowed down a security guard breaking his leg after she was angry she had been clamped and fined.

Dementia was subsequently mentioned – perhaps they could add an Alzheimer’s tick-box to  drivers’ medical tests.  It was also announced this week that the piece of paper you get from a doctor that says you don’t have syphilis and are thus suitable to drive would be upgraded.

Now, we were told, drivers would actually need to be able to see and hear. My goodness, this is truly 4.0. It is a wonderful move forward into the modern era – now all drivers will be able to fully appreciate the visual carnage going on around them without squinting their eyes and straining their ears to perceive the sounds of failing, screeching brakes and the cries of the fleeing and dying.

Progress.

What started as a “huge sex orgy” in a Pattaya hotel turned out to be a bit of simulated hanky- panky between a Brit called Smith and his Thai floozy. This smidgen of feigned naughtiness was not another example of people getting into bed with each other – it was in a pool with a 1000 other guests all behaving themselves.

But that didn’t stop the Thais getting their collective knickers in the mother of all self-righteous twists. AK 47 – Apichai Krobpetch the Pattaya Station chief – fired off several blanks from the hip as Bang Lamung district chief Naris Niramaiwong  looked as pathetic as he did on Valentine’s Day 2017 when he walked into a short time hotel room and caught an old Blighty tourist with his pants down.

The Brit at the party was fined 5,000 baht for letting the obscene side down while the poster of the clip faces jail for a much more serious misdemeanor – damaging the image of Pattaya.

Bless! I wouldn’t jail him -  I’d give him an award for pulling off the seemingly impossible.

Better news for the Pattaya area came when it was announced that “Mr Fat” the Phuket bar-owning thug behind the killings of young Spy and Fos at Buddha Mountain had been extradited from his lair in Cambodia.

Panya Yingdang said he had been freaked out when national police chief Chakthip Chaijinda said he would be taken dead or alive. Panya was promptly whisked off for a reenactment where he was shown pointing the gun before he requested to “graap” the Buddha image on the side of the hill. I don’t think that show of religiousness will get him leniency on this occasion.

Of course all this is par for the course for the eagle-eyed who know the lie of Thailand’s 19 holes but expats and tourists who think they have come to the LOS for a round of Eastern Magic must suspect they have actually been driven back in time to the rough Wild West.

That sense of crazy crime was exemplified by two other cases that caught Rooster’s beady eye. One was the horrific attack by an 84 year old man on his 74 year old common law wife who had ditched him. While this begged the question “Will they ever learn?” it paled alongside the case of the Burmese woman who came back from Myanmar to be told by her daughter that she had been raped by a male relative meant to be caring for her.

After biding her time the man was battered in his sleep, strangled with an electrical cord and weighed down and dumped in a nearby lake. The victim’s genitals were missing prompting the local police chief to calmly explain that the woman now in custody was not responsible for feeding these to the ducks.

It appears that a water monitor was to blame for having a meat and two veg snack. Though, such are Thailand’s defamation laws,  the “Pol Col” stopped short of naming the “tua hia” perhaps imagining he would wind up in jail for slandering the monitor lizard.

Nary a day goes by in which lawyer Ratchaphon “Baldy Brief” Sirisakhon doesn’t give us the benefit of his legal knowledge. Recently we have been exhorted to refrain from saying “hia”, told not to tell Thai women they have small norks, warned against defaming the cops and reminded of the real fine for tossing cigarette butts.

This week Baldy Brief joined in with the chorus of boos about the driving licenses and informed us sagely that we could get 1,200 baht back for delayed domestic flights. Tell that to the judge…….in this case the airlines.

And so to this week’s Rooster awards. The “Avoiding the Issue” prize goes to Koh Tao for concentrating on the scandal of plastic bags at 7/11 instead of rape, murder and the general disappearance of the human race who visit the island.

The “Gold Medal for Services to Thai Sport and Culture” goes to the boxing promoters of a slugfest between two five year olds beating their Muay Thai brains out for the pleasure of a baying crowd of adults. Bloody disgusting if you ask me.

While the “Actually I DID Inhale Award” goes to the thousand or so Thais who agreed in a poll that medical marijuana would be a good start on the way to a more liberal (read sensible) treatment of one of the world’s friendliest weeds.

Lastly my “Best Post” award goes to “Crossy” who was commenting on the plan to separate big bike licences. He said: “An excellent move, now let bikes over, say, 500cc on the expressways”.

Here, here! If that ever came in Rooster would trade in his two 250s in a heartbeat!

Finally, following the recent storms we were told that nearly two hundred Thai and foreign tourists daily were now swelling the coffers of the Kaeng Krachan national park by visiting Pa La-U waterfall near Hua Hin. They were about half Thai and half foreign so out of the 35,000 baht collected on Wednesday that would mean about 3,000 collected from the locals and 32K from the foreigners.

In the old days we called it double pricing now, inevitably, it is called dual pricing!

I have a story told before but worth repeating especially given the theme of who one gets into bed with….

During a visit by car to a nearby area years before I gained my residency – something that can usually be utilized to get the Thai price – I was asked to pay many times the wife and kids’ price at a National Park entrance.

I grinned my best inscrutable Thai smile reasoning that argument would spoil my day, reversed out and drove a couple of kilometers back round the corner. I then requested the wife to drive while I would get in the boot of the car to enter the park rather in the manner of the Trojan Horse.

Perhaps fortunately for Rooster, this fleecing avoidance skulduggery was all Greek to her. She called me childish and demanded we all go back to the hotel for tea.

To this day I think I may have dodged a bullet there.

Rooster