Holiday over and I am now in Birmingham staying with Viv. My train didn't quite reach Birmingham. As I left London there was a sprinkling of snow driven by by a bitterly cold wind but the further north I traveled the covering of snow got deeper and the temperature dropped so much that they had trouble opening the train doors to let the passengers off. Why they chose to abandon us only about two or three miles from our destination I don't know. If they'd asked we could have all got out and pushed the train into Birmingham. I'm sure they do that sort of thing all the time in Russia. We were first put on one train and then moved to another before we finally covered those last few miles. With typical British good humour the weak, the old, children and those too well brought up to brawl in public were trampled in the rush to squeeze aboard, in what was way beyond a Tokyo rush hour frenzy. If the windows on the train had opened I am sure we would have scrambled through them in Indonesian lebaran style and then dragged in the old, infirm and the children.
I picked up a copy of a Brunai newspaper in Malay at the airport and was pleased to see the front page headline translated as, Mother and Child Slightly Injured in Car Crash. It makes you think Brunai might be a very pleasant place to live. Unless the story,100 Filipino Refugees Shot Trying To Enter Country had been passed over for to make room for the more important one.
Dark, coarse and bitter are good.
In Vientienne I bought some toothpaste. Most imported brands were comparatively expensive so I chose the local one. I didn't actually use it until last night. I squeezed it out onto my toothbrush and it was brown. One is so used to toothpaste being white that the brown extrusion sitting on by brush looked rather unpleasant. Pushing aside such cultural prejudices I cleaned my teeth and the toothpaste actually tasted worse than it looked. I then began to wonder if it had not been originally pure white toothpaste that had somehow 'gone off'. I looked at the tube and read the reassuring words
Dark, coarse and bitter are good, is made from herbs.
The ingredients among other things included toothbrush tree and cuttlefish bone.
Only partially reassured I have given the toothpaste to Viv's lodger who likes that sort of thing. She is from New Zealand.
Sorry about the title for this entry but it had to be written.
I picked up a copy of a Brunai newspaper in Malay at the airport and was pleased to see the front page headline translated as, Mother and Child Slightly Injured in Car Crash. It makes you think Brunai might be a very pleasant place to live. Unless the story,100 Filipino Refugees Shot Trying To Enter Country had been passed over for to make room for the more important one.
Dark, coarse and bitter are good.
In Vientienne I bought some toothpaste. Most imported brands were comparatively expensive so I chose the local one. I didn't actually use it until last night. I squeezed it out onto my toothbrush and it was brown. One is so used to toothpaste being white that the brown extrusion sitting on by brush looked rather unpleasant. Pushing aside such cultural prejudices I cleaned my teeth and the toothpaste actually tasted worse than it looked. I then began to wonder if it had not been originally pure white toothpaste that had somehow 'gone off'. I looked at the tube and read the reassuring words
Dark, coarse and bitter are good, is made from herbs.
The ingredients among other things included toothbrush tree and cuttlefish bone.
Only partially reassured I have given the toothpaste to Viv's lodger who likes that sort of thing. She is from New Zealand.
Sorry about the title for this entry but it had to be written.