Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 3 - Bangkok The plane touches down in, as I noted last time I was here, the hottest city in the world. It doesn't feel as hot anymore but then nothing does. It's an unfortunate side-effect of travel in my experience that the more you see the less there is to truly sweep you off your feet. The exotic becomes the familiar. It's a great pity to be sated even disillusioned by ornate golden temples but perhaps that's the way it goes. The SkyTrain whisks me over to the old town with discomforting ease. It's all smoother than I remember. Outside the hotel which is handily marked on Google maps (much like everything else) large buses drive past offering a street food experience, onboard. Try Bangkok's famous street food without setting foot on the street. Words fail me. I'm informed that my room isn't ready for another 3 hours so I have an iced tea in the café. Then a coffee. Then a sandwich. Then a lime juice. They'll be keeping to normal check-in tim...

Day 1 - Bahrain There is a, immature I admit, side to me that reacts to people's caution with an equal and opposite force of recklessness. If they were to employ a bit of reverse psychology I'd probably become the voice of reason. Like I said, immature. So with a long international flight ahead and people feverishly outbidding each other with how early one should get to the airport, "2 hours is enough", "hmm, 3 at least", "I always go the day before just to be safe", I decide that a day watching the rugby in the pub and arriving an hour before the gate closes is the correct course of action. And I nearly miss the flight. Not because a day of watching the rugby in the pub and arriving an hour before the gate closes is foolhardy (it is but more on that later) but because the Gulf Air information boards switch between 'Please Wait' and 'Gate Closing' with no 'Boarding' in between. Several Guinness hadn't dimmed my alertnes...

Day 0 Those are weighty words, For. Now. Unspoken and unintended, unreal and meaningless. They are sustaining me, for now. I can't seem to help but add them to the things I have to tell people. I am single, for now. I am leaving, for now. They dampen the despair of separation and the terror of flight. I am putting my affairs in order, for now. Not for death, mind, though given my track record in foreign lands and without a steadying hand to my innate recklessness it is a possibility. For and now are the mahouts shielding me from the immense, hulking reality that has stepped from the corner into the light. And the realities of my life have been tomorrow's problem for a very long time. Obscured by scaffolding and giant concrete walls or hidden behind a pyramid they eventually fill the horizon and I have no choice but to walk towards them with a grim, inevitable foreboding. My heart is drawn towards the darkness, for now. The desperate and doomed attempt to exert control of my li...