Bruce Lawson’s personal site

Nongyow and I had a lovely Xmas break in Khao Lak, Thailand, in 1997, with a big group of friends. We had to get back to Bangkok early, and stood in the sun waiting for the local bus to Takua Pa, where we could pick up the aircon bus to Bangkok. We waited, and waited, and after about 20 minutes a pick-up truck pulled up, with a young family inside it - a guy of maybe 25, dark brown skin, and wiry like most Southern Thais, his wife with a headscarf and shorts on, and their two smiling kids, a boy of seven and a girl of five.

They asked where we were going, and offered us a lift. The mother and children began to move to the back of the pick-up, but I asked to sit there, preferring the cool breeze to the heat of the enclosed driver’s compartment. The kids elected to sit with me in the back, in order to sit nearer the big-nosed foreigner.

Twenty minutes later, we arrived at our mutual destination; the family were off to the Taku Pa market in order to buy food for their small beach-side restaurant. As is customary, we offered them a couple of dollars, but the husband refused: "Mai Pen Rai" [It doesn't matter]; we were coming here anyway".
Mindful of the offence caused by refusing hospitality, I didn’t press the point. "We’ll buy you dinner next time we’re here", I said as we waved them goodbye and entered the bus station.

We didn’t go back, and now the place is flattened - and that kind family is almost certainly dead.

I love Holland - it’s the nearest place to the UK that you feel you’re in Europe. OK, so there’s France, and I love Paris, but it always seems to me to be a Gauloise-scented Jean-Paul Satre museum, with its carefully curated skyline. Holland is a place where people like Lisa and Aldrick live; people who speak 6 languages, travel Holland, France, Spain, Bulgaria with equal ease and the equal feeling of being at home anywhere in the continent.

So it was with great delight that I went to speak on accessibility and web standards at mediaelements in Enschede. The hotel and hospitality was great, and the other speakers were coolness personified; Ola Bergner, Guy Watson, Sam Wan, Shane Tanner, Craig Swann, Billy Bussey, Keith Peters, Danny Franzreb, Sas Jacobs, Rob Chiu … Everyone got along well, which is great when you’re a long way from home and in each others’ pockets. We had a billion beers together at the Dancelements party (where I shook hands with a robot), congratulated each other over our sessions, swapped coding war stories and travelled around the Twente district of Holland in a hospitality bus the day after the conference.

And the conference itself? A couple of minor technical hiccups, a good crowd and I did a video interview for some glam Dutch students, and all was fine. I got pretty nervous, having never spoken at length before, and was rather worried that my rather dry and corporate presentation about separating structure and presentation with web standards would be pretty dull compared with sessions on Ola’s new film, Craig’s crazy sounds, or Keith’s funky maths. But the talk went well; twenty minutes of really probing questions at the end and a gratifyingly warm reception for my talk.

Feel free to download the zipped up pdfs of the powerpoint presentations. (yeah, yeah, pdf and powerpoint from a standards geek. So sue me). Feel even freer to send me money or pictures of yourself in a state of undress.

And thanks to all who came to watch me, all the other speakers who were veteran speakers and gave me encouragement, and to the organisers. At the top is a picture (taken by Lisa Petrova) of some of the cast at Twickle Castle in Holland. See you next year!

It’s my thirty-eighth birthday, and I’m in Holland without the family, though had a really great time. You’d think that being of such advanced years, I’d recall many past birthdays, but only a few stick in my mind. Most notably, these were:

• 13/11/82: my sixteenth: I got laid. By a red-head.
• 13/11/84: my eighteenth: likewise, by Helen, of the fabulous figure.
• 13/11/87: my twenty-first, at university in Hull, when my brother and best mate Matt came to visit and we tried to drink 21 beers that day. I believe we succeeded, although were not pretty sights. I certainly recall proposing marriage in a crowded bar to a gorgeous Indian woman named Dhillum with the best breasts I had ever seen. She declined with a good deal more politeness than I deserved, give that we’d never spoken before, and I was slurring my words so much it took three attempts before any degree of coherence could be achieved.
• 13/11/91: my twenty-fifth when I woke up next to the barmaid from my local pub, and the listened to one of my presents: a CD of My Bloody Valentine’s "Loveless", one of my all-time top 5 albums.
• 13/11/93: in Istanbul, with Lucy, Yeşim and other colleagues. That night, I met Zeynab, my first muslim girlfriend, who was so gorgeous and intelligent she was breathtaking.
• 13/11/94: (See photo) In India, on the roof of a hostel in Sudder Street, Calcutta, smoking giggly weed and drinking Rosy Pelican beer. (I always swore I’d call a daughter of mine Rosy Pelican Lawson, but Nongyow vetoed that.)
• 13/11/95: in London: seduced by The Big Boss’s secretary, 10 years older than me and a busty Mauritian hindu. Hurrah!
• 13/11/96: in Bangkok; my first birthday with Nongyow and having recently had my diagnosis of a brain tumour retracted (though the next year revised to MS). Nongyow, me, Stephanie and Richie went to an enormous restaurant where the waiters came round on roller skates, and we gorged ourselves on seafood and Thai curry.

This birthday, on a trip round the Twente district of Holland with cool people, beer and some weed has proved pretty cool, too.

On Saturday morning, we went to North Birmingham, to a Thai friend named Geow’s house, for a religious ceremony. It was her sixth wedding anniversary, and she was having her marriage and home blessed by three monks from the local Thai temple. Three pleasant Thai 30 year olds with shaven heads and Saffron robes (but sensible socks and vests; it is Britain!) arrived and began an hour-long session of chanting in Pali, the source language of Thai, but one which is as alien to Thai as Latin is to English today. None of the Thais I know can understand Pali; it’s just memorised and chanted at religious occasions.

I’ve been interested in Buddhism for a long time; after a period in India, one of my reasons for visiting Thailand was to find out more about Buddhism, but I was shocked at how corrupted the philosophy was in Thailand. Most people eat meat (on the spurious grounds that it isn’t sinful if they don’t actually do the killing); Buddha images are sacred, as if he were a god, when he was only a man; many monks openly smoke, get rich and have many wives; many "Buddhist" Thais also worship Hindu gods like Ganesh and Shiva and animist traditions like spirit houses continue. Not that there’s anything wrong with these things - it makes Thailand the wonderful, unique place that I love - but it certainly didn’t match what I’d learned in India about the religion.

So it was great to be able to ask these English-speaking Thai monks about such matters. (I couldn’t in Thailand, because my conversational Thai is fluent, but it doesn’t stretch to theological debate, and it would’ve been unseemly for me to interrogate a man of the cloth there.) The boss monk explained that
he agreed that spirit-worship, and praying to Buddha to intercede in a devotee’s life were corruptions of Buddhism, which is not a religion, as it believes in no god. Dharma and Karma are natural laws like gravity, and there is no deity to intervene on your behalf, no matter how hard you pray or how much money you give to the temple.

To my mind, though, it’s easy to see why it got so corrupted. The godless, "pure" Buddhism is pretty austere and intellectual, and for uneducated people at the whim of the monsoon and the burning sun, it must have been tempting to believe in gods and spirits that can be mollified and cajoled. It also seems
to me that, as long as Thai Buddhism continues to chant in a dead language that even the monks admitted to not understanding, it’s never going to supplant animism in the everyday lives of the simpler farmers, up in the mountains, miles away from Bangkok. In many ways I was put in mind of medieval Catholics, chanting away in Latin, with celibate monks whose lives were totally out of sync with the people they minister to.

Ten years ago this week, my brother and I found ourselves in the sleepy Himalayan village of Hatkoti.
We decided to go off the beaten track, and the guidebooks raved about places to the north, south and west, but there was "nothing of interest" to the East - so we took the first bus eastwards from Shimla, and 6 hours later as darkness fell, decided to get off in Hatkoti. We We asked someone where we could stay and they pointed to a temple, down in a valley below. We hadn’t realised just how dark the mountains are, and ended up walking down a mountain, with backpacks on, in the dark with a tiny keyring torch to check that we weren’t going to fall into an abyss.

So it was with great relief when we reached the temple, and a very startled temple keeper told us we could sleep there for free (but blanket rental was 1 rupee a night!) but we must leave our leather belts and shoes outside the complex. And, totally by accident, we realised that we had stumbled upon a beautiful ancient temple, built 1200 years ago. The temple keeper and local policeman came to help us unpack - and talk (they’d never met english people before) and they showed great interest in my packet of Marlboro, so I offered them one. The temple keeper then produced an index-finger sized lump of marijuana resin and gave it to us - so we quickly gave him a whole pack of smokes - and the rest of the night disappeared into a haze.

The next morning, my bro and I were washing in the river, and realised why the temple keeper had been so generous with his ganja. The whole of the beautiful valley was green - with mature marijuana plants! Even the cows were munching it. As we washed, a troupe of neatly-groomed schoolboys wandered past. Hatkoti, in the valley, was a central residential college for all the surrounding area. The boys invited us to visit their school, so we tagged along with them and met the principal. He insisted we smoke a joint with him, then showed us through a door which led us directly onto a stage, around which the whole school - maybe 300 boys and 200 girls - were expectantly sitting.

"Sing us a song", commanded the principal. "Not a slow one; a fast one". Now, I’d just spent a whole summer as a singer in a restaurant in Turkey, but acapella singing ain’t my forte. In a ganja-induced flash of genius, I had everyone clapping rhythmically as bro and I began with the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine: "In the town [clap clap] where I was born [clap clap]…".

Then it was question time; we gave advice on how one addresses the Queen, an explanation of the UK post code system, tips on how to date American girls (like I’d know!) and then, the ubiquitous question of travellers in India: "Why are you visiting India?". In a flash of ganja-induced stupidity, I replied "I’m looking for an Indian girl to marry". Stupid, stupid me. As we left the auditorium, there was a line of beautiful Indian schoolgirls (a perennial fantasy of mine, I freely confess). The principal introduced them one by one to me.

Now, Hatkoti seems well-established on the tourist map, and has a flourishing trade in dowry-free marriages which are a wonderful idea. But to me, it’s the place where I almost got an accidental Indian bride.

It was an amazing time to be in Moscow in 1993. Although I was there only 2 days, I got a great impressionist swirl of a nation in flux. I remember distinctly the rudeness of people in the service industry (I guess because, until very recently, they’d all been state employees where there was no reason to be polite to comrades; salaries were guaranteed).

Teams of ancient babushkas behind trestle tables sold coupons for the Metro, rather than automatic ticket machines, because the recent communist government wanted full employment, no matter how menial - and no matter that the recent currency crash meant that I could buy 400 metro tickets for one pound. Someone told me that no-one could use public telephones any more, as they all used 1 kopek coins, which were unavailable as people were melting them down: the value of the scrap metal was greater than the face value of the coins.

I remember walking round Red Square for hours, feeling hungry and realising that I had seen nowhere to eat at all - and ended up at the new McDonalds, filthy food though it is, simply because I had seen nowhere that I could identify as being a restaurant.

I recall being amazed that people would still carry banners of Stalin - but I guess the certainties, however evil, of the past were better than the craziness of the present.

In contrast to the “never change” brigade were the punks that I met, posing in front of a graffti-covered bust of Marx. They invited me to go and see Iron Maiden, who were playing somewhere on the opposite side of the city, but I didn’t fancy a solo ride across Moscow in an unlicensed taxi cab back to my cheap hotel near the airport, even thought the collapse of the USSR was so new that the mafia hadn’t completely taken over. And the fact that Iron Maiden are shit, of course.

It was an extraordinary two days, though I wasn’t sorry to leave - and get some food. For someone who’d been a member of various far-left parties as a student, it was odd to see socialism being so comprehensively rejected, except for a few old people and diehards. I’d be tempted to go back, though, especially after seeing the Commie Chicks on the National Bolshevik Party web site.

On 4 June 1993, I flew into Moscow from Malaysia for a 3 day explore (I was flying to London on Aeroflot, so had to change planes in Moscow anyway). Here’s a discoloured Polaroid taken by a local entrepreneur of me looking rather camp in front of St Basils’s, Red Square. Little did I know that, as Boris Yeltsin had just called conference to discuss the new Russian constitution, there was going to be an anti-government demo, and I was unable to resist the chance to take photos of communists demonstrating against the Russian government.

Everything was going swimmingly; I had my Russian hat that I’d bought earlier with a CCCP design (the one in the picture, bought for camouflage rather than devotion to the Pet Shop Boys), so people assumed I was a leftie too and let me take pictures (some of which will appear on this site once I can be arsed).

And then .. disaster! I pointed my camera at Mr Big Russian military big nob (guy on the left) who came over and tried to take my camera off me. I protested in English, and presented my passport causing him consternation and panic in me when I was led to the back of an army lorry. "Film!", General Boris demanded. I opened up my wallet and produced a fake BBC press photographer’s card that I’d had made 3 months earlier for £3 in Bangkok.

You could see the General’s mental cogs going round; a couple of years ago, and he could’ve had me in a saltmine for spying, but now (curse that glasnost!) Russia was a democracy and Western journalists were to be respected. Seeing him looking from the press card, to my camera, to my passport and back again, I thought this might be the right time to produce a packet of decadent capitalist Marlboro Lights, and offer him one. He took the whole packet, and said "You go back to Hotel now". I went straight back, stopping only for a big bottle of vodka.

Masako and Tong cementing Japan/ Thai relations.

It was on this day 5 years ago that I saw the only death I’ve witnessed
(and hopefully ever will have to see). I was just turning the corner on
my way to school when I heard a scream of car brakes and a bang, and as
I turned, I saw a bareheaded motorcyclist landing on his head on the pavement.
His head cracked like a watermelon, spraying blood and brain for a surprising
distance.

He was still twitching when I walked into the now grid-locked
road to go round him, and as I turned into the school to teach my class
of 6 year olds, a policemen from the station next door was already putting
a copy of the Thai Daily News over the poor guy’s face. That’s why "reading
the newspaper" is
Bangkok slang for a motorcycle traffic fatality, which are an daily occurrence
in Bangkok (see the
short film "Bangkok Traffic Ballet" by Thomas
Riddle to see why motorcycles are so dangerous). The Thai people walking
next to me were unperturbed; in Thailand, graphic images of death are
all around - there’s even a temple where the noticeboard is covered in
grisly pictures of accidents and crime scenes as a memento mori. Whilst
death is
taboo in the West, sexual images are taboo in the East.

Bangkok is a mass of homogenous concrete, having been built largely in the last 30 years and subject to two property speculation bubbles when buildings were thrown up as fast as the architects could scribble. It’s metaphorically a very colourful city, but physically drab and grey. When you travel by bus as a newbie, it’s terribly difficult to orient yourself, as all but the old Rattanakosin area looks exactly the same.

But the Bangkok that our students at Amnuay Silpa School made from cardboard and Plasticine is much more vibrant:

Note the BTS skytrain in rakish purple running above the road, and the daringly pink Baiyoke
Tower with its tinfoil satellite dish. Wish it had really been like that ….