That surprised you, didn't it? There are lots more surprises in my little new book of sonnets, a must-have for every locked-down home. Rush while stocks last. Meanwhile, here's a lip-smacking taster called, er, Kiss.

Who’s certain when a kiss becomes a kiss?
While one mouth reaches up the other dips
And all the space between is certain bliss,
The sense that lips have of approaching lips.
The eyes are certain of the mouth’s approach;
The movement’s slow, it moves at measured pace.
The lips part slowly, wary to encroach
On what lies hidden in the trembling space.
Unwary eyes, to like eyes, now reveal –
Which once with other lovers hid too much –
The time is right for trembling lips to feel
The disappearing space as lovers touch.
When all the space between is certain bliss,
Who’s certain when a kiss becomes a kiss?

This month's sonnet is a tribute to health workers everywhere who risk their lives just by going to the office. Let's hope the new appreciation of their services will remain after the plague subsides.

I wrote this in hospital when they were poking around in my eye. That's my bed.

In here you’re changed to infantile or old;
The simplest tasks are done on your behalf.
You quickly learn to do as you are told
And not attempt to second-guess the staff.
No matter that your legs are strong and fit,
Your journey down the hall is in a chair,
And if you have the nerve to question it,
You learn each pill is vital for your care.
Quips may relieve the stresses you endure
But doctors have no time for puerile jokes;
You’re just a body looking for a cure –
Their favourites are the ones struck dumb by strokes.
In bed, attention rains down from above;
For you, but not for them, it feels like love.

In these days when people find it difficult to find a second subject to talk about, here's a diversionary poem to take your mind off things. And a picture to go with it. Who can tell me where this statue is situated, in all its luxuriant glory?

Whether it's familiar or not, focus on the bit in the middle as you read this sonnet:

Meat and two veg

Intelligent design is meant to be
The means by which a supernatural hand
Guides evolution to the life we see –
So everything is purposeful and planned.
This may explain the beauty of an eye
And how a nest is organised by ants,
But rather leaves us stranded high and dry
Explaining what a man keeps in his pants.
As men sought game to griddle on the fire –
Before they even thought of wearing threads –
They must have stridden through both thorn and briar
And ripped their soft and dangly parts to shreds.
If this is right, men now know who to blame:
That smart designer, smiling, is a dame.

Like fearsome battle colours, breathing masks
Distinguish my assassins from my friends.
While undertakers busy at their tasks,
I wonder now: is this the way it ends?
We’re cuckoos in a nest the size of Earth
And jostle out all rivals for their space.
With macrofauna gone, we’ve made a dearth
Of every other beast at startling pace.
What hero from the jungle will come out
To rid the Earth of this destructive yob?
Coronavirus steps from its redoubt
In bat’s blood; is it equal to the job?
Like Spanish flu and Sars, it’s just a test,
As nature picks the weapon she likes best.

I'm indebted to www.phuketwan.com for the photo for this month's sonnet. It rewards careful inspection.

Tsunamis happen centuries apart,
Too long for any memory to survive
Of how the sea retreats before they start­ –
So fast that fish are picked up still alive.
If memory then could offer us no aid,
Today we’re surely better placed to warn,
To notify the errors that we made
To our descendants who are not yet born.
But have we learned the lessons of the past?
Are plans in place to show them where to go?
Or when they see the ocean sinking fast
Will they, as we did, stop to watch the show?
The horn of the loudspeaker’s blocked by vines;
And rust grows on the muster-station signs.

Gosh. No posts on my blog for over a year. Now it is resurrected in a slightly different form: New for 2020 it's...a sonnet a month. This will last for as long as I can manage. To kick things off and set the tone for what might follow, here's one about belching cows.

To Burp is Human; to Eructate, Bovine
To dairy cows the news comes with a thud,
Providing much for them to ruminate:
For ages they have blithely chewed the cud,
Yet now we lay our problems at their gate.
While human halitosis can spell death
To moments of romance when love is near,
At least when we exhale our torrid breath
It’s not death for the actual atmosphere.
Across our verdant meadows cows may range,
Dispensing methane as they puff and wheeze,
Yet we can’t sense the climate or its change
In air-conned delis where we buy our cheese.
Bucolic pleasures, vital to our past,
When claimed by hordes of humans cannot last.

One of the perennial topics of conversation among the old expat codgers who do such a good job of propping up the bars of Pattaya is being ripped off. No-one likes to be taken for a ride.

Do Westerners get charged more for things than locals? Do they cheat us because we’re rich and stupid? Do they short-change us? Do they inflate their prices for the slightly larger, paler customer, reserving the discounts for his somewhat smaller, browner equivalent?

Discuss. Then have another beer and discuss again.

The topic can provide nutritious conversational fodder between bottles of ice-cold San Miguel Light. The theory is quite reasonable: you would perhaps expect such practice to be commonplace. But the experience is otherwise. Actually, the old codgers admit, it doesn’t happen that often.

‘Funnily enough, it doesn’t. Another San Mig, please. Manao krap.’

When I send Mrs Pobaan, a brownish and somewhat diminutive person, into a place of business to check the price I have just been quoted, she invariably comes out with the same figure. What’s sauce for the gander is sauce for my little goose, if you will excuse the romantic flimflam.

Mathematical skills not being very finely honed in these parts, you’re as likely to be long-changed as you are to be slipped too few banknotes. The codgers shake their heads in wonderment and take another swig.

I am surprised by how often I am offered a discount on a purchase even after I have agreed the higher price. In our local pet shop, the chap always rounds up the change he gives me. Perhaps I look as if my need is greater than his.

In Pattaya, the street vendor, the market-stall holder and the shop keeper are fair-minded, honest folk who play clean. They may be at the narrower end of the economic wedge, but they want to improve their lot by honest means.

That agreed, the codgers then turn their attention to a practice that Westerners here hate with a universal passion: official dual pricing. Enter one of Thailand’s magnificent national parks, or queue for tickets for what’s known as a ‘visitor attraction’, and you will often find that there are two prices for admission. The price for foreigners can be ten times that for locals. At national park ticket offices they try to conceal this fact by quoting the local price in Thai numerals—figures which are rarely used in other contexts—which foreigners are not meant to understand. You want to keep the lambs calm as they queue for the slaughter.

Expats hate this duality; many Pattaya residents of my acqaintance refuse to go to venues which espouse the practice, on principle. To the Pobaan mind, if the asset in question belongs to the nation—eg, a national park—then there is an argument for offering a discount to a Thai national. After all, he does own the place.

But this argument cannot be made to apply to commercial enterprises such as privately-owned parks and gardens, where dual pricing, the codgers agree, is much closer to racism. Whites ฿300; browns ฿40, simple as that. Some places allow foreign residents in at the local price, on presentation of a local driving licence for example. In these cases the practice is not racist so much as ripping off the tourists. And who cares about them?

A recent experience reminds me that the other glaring example of sharp practice in Thailand is provided by our private hospitals. While you are safe from exploitation by people at the leaner end of the economic scale, at the richer end you are likely to lose your shirt. Hospitals here are the killing fields of financial exploitation. Enter one of those glass-walled medical atria and you are unlikely to leave until your wallet has been anaesthetised, slit open and emptied before being neatly sewn up as you are delivered in a wheelchair back to your car.

Kuhn Pobaan, as regular disciples of this column will be aware, is the very picture of health, but I have had recourse, in the last few years, to yield once or twice to the surgeon’s knife. We’re not talking triple bypasses here; not even roundabouts.

For the first one, I attended Hospital 1 (I won’t name it in case they sue me for libel), a well known Pattaya establishment. Having agreed the price for the op, I was given an invoice which showed a considerably higher figure.

‘Extras,’ I was told.

I quickly exited Hospital 1 and had the operation done at Hospital 2. I’m not being taken for a mug. Fast-forward a couple of years and we get to last week, when again I need some minor medical attention. I go back to Hospital 2 and agree a price for the intervention with the doctor.

‘Does that include extras?’ I enquire, being now an experienced patient.

‘Yes, everything; maximum price,’ the smiling physician replies.

We agree a time for the surgery. I am escorted to the cashier’s window. The bill comes to considerably more than the agreed sum.

‘Extras,’ the fierce cashier informs me.

I get on the phone to the doctor. ‘You said no extras,’ I complain.

‘Oh, that’s the hospital for you,’ he explains.

I walk out. It’s the principle of the thing. Who likes being cheated by a bunch of rich medics, desperate to pocket your cash and depart for the golf course?

Does anyone know a good hospital where, as at a squid stall in the market or a pork barbecue on the street, they won’t try to rip me off?

A bit of culture this month - a sonnet about a monkey. The photo was taken at a hotel in Lopburi which is adorned by enormous simian statues. Anyway, here's the sonnet.

A pocketful of genes is all it took,
A few lines from the chapters of a book,
A stroke of fortune that we can’t take back,
To make me man and you a mere macaque.
Yet we are so alike in some respects,
Your hands are just like mine, as are your eyes.
Your gaze is steady as your mind reflects
On why you lost, and I received the prize.
The jungle was your home but now the street
Provides you with an easy place to eat.
Are you alright with being what you are?
Do I think that my species went too far?
Which is content, the monkey or the man?
Define ‘content’, if anybody can.

I am indebted to my friends Michel Gauthier and Ben Charlier for the following translation of that poem. Michel did the main translation and Ben the subsequent editing. It's not easy to translate verse and I'd be interested to have your comments on the results.

Il a suffi d’une pincée de gènes,
D’un traité, de quelques lignes à peine,
D’un hasard en somme que rien n’inverse,
Pour que moi je sois un homme et toi, toi.
Qui nous regarde nous voit semblables,
Tes mains, tes yeux sont aux miens pareils.
Ton regard est calme mais ton esprit médite
Ta perte et pourquoi moi j’ai eu le prix.
La jungle était ton gîte, puis ma rue
T’es devenue une demeure hospitalière.
Es-tu heureux de ton sort de macaque ?
Crois-tu les hommes aventurés trop loin ?
Qui de nous est content, le singe ou l’homme ?
Dis-moi si tu peux, que veut-dire content.

Now here's a challenge. Below is another sonnet on a Thai theme. If there are any linguists out there who would like to have a crack at translating it into the language of their choice, I'll post their efforts next month. We'll keep the zoological theme; this one is called 'Elephant' - in Thai, chang.

They named two islands after you, my friend,
A brand of lager and a pier for boats.
Albino babies you must always lend
The king, though young white mice or even goats
Would strain royal budgets less than elephants.
Dear Chang, my friend, great processor of plants,
Your power when shifting tons of teak with ease
Impresses more when I see how you strip
The finest morsel with just trunk and lip.
Though making you play football is to tease
A noble beast who’s way above all that,
You make the circus ring your habitat.
The question, like your presence in the room,
Is whether tricks can save you, Chang, from doom.

There are more where that came from, in fact I'm working up to a slim volume packed to bursting with sonnets about Thailand. Start saving now. More news as it comes in...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of his faculties, when vacationing in Pattaya, will take a walk on Walking Street.

The Pobaans happen to have a vacationer staying with them right now. As is my habit with visitors from other lands, I give our guest my standard lecture on the history and economy of Pattaya, my intention being to orientate him in the cultural milieu, to help him latch on to the zeitgeist and allow him to make sense of observations which otherwise might lead to confusion. Why, for example, when meeting a mutual friend for a drink and conversation last week, did we find our party unexpectedly expanded to four persons, the interloper being an attractive lady none of us had laid eyes on before? Each of my friends thought she was with me, while I knew she wanted to be with any one of us, it didn’t really matter. It took an obvious shortage of drink to pare our group back down to three.

As such things go, the lecture is brief, but no less useful for all that. Actually, if you’re interested, it wouldn’t take a moment to run though it for you here.

Oh you’d like that? All right then. The lecture is normally delivered in two sections with a break in between for informal discussion and the serving of tea and biscuits. Perhaps you could ensure such refreshments are available where you are before we proceed.

Quiet please.

The History and Economy of Pattaya.
Part 1. The History of Pattaya
Town with beach + GIs = Fleshpots.

Two sugars for you? I’m afraid we have no Hobnobs; a chocolate digestive perhaps? If we could now return to the auditorium...

Part 2. The Economy of Pattaya
Fleshpots + Tourists = Cashflow.

Please leave by the doors clearly marked ‘Exit’.

After the lecture I suggest to our guest that, for the practical work, we take a walk on Walking Street one evening.

‘I don’t think so.’

Our visitor is a single man. By all accounts he has red blood in his veins and can stand upright, at least at the start of an evening, so has all the characteristics usual in the sort of human who would usually jump at the chance of a stroll on Pattaya’s most famous thoroughfare.

‘I’m quite content as I am.’

Mr Pobaan’s mouth drops open like the doors of a roll-on roll-off ferry. How can being quite content as you are be an argument against experiencing the wonders of Walking Street? Would the same chap decline a free visit to Easter Island, the Taj Mahal, Sydney Opera House, the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China or the Sir John Soane Museum on the same grounds? These are sites that represent significant levels of achievement by our species. They transcend contentment by expanding the mind and elevating the soul.

Just like Walking Street.

‘No, I’m fine.’

He’s beginning to remind me of Father Stone, that famously boring character in an episode of Father Ted, whose main script line was ‘I’m fine’ repeated so many times that you began to hope it wasn’t true.

I clearly need to go further, so in desperation I snatch a quote from the archway through which people pass to enter Walking Street from the Beach Road end: ‘But Walking Street is the Passion of Colourful Paradise,’ I say, trying to hide the embarrassment I feel in reciting these tragic words.

Our guest sees right through that. ‘All the same,’ he says, ‘I’d rather not bother.’

After a few more days of teasing him with the experiential possibilities being missed, he eventually capitulates and we cadge a lift to Bali Hai, with a view to wandering north along Pattaya’s most notable traffic-free avenue.

We play a game of pool in one of those cavernous bar areas where small groups of girls scream at you to come to their little pens. They remind me of gangs of schoolgirls at a netball match.

Grasping the nettle, we then proceed to Baccara where we sit at the bar and drink a beer. The feet of the dancing girls come quite close to our bottles, but my friend doesn’t flinch. I’m sure he can see the platform soles because he moves his bottle a couple of times to prevent an accident, but he doesn’t look up at the rest of the dancers.

‘There’s another stage upstairs,’ I point out. ‘It has a glass floor so you can see up their skirts.’

‘Really?’

We finish our beer more quickly than is strictly healthy and return to the street. Next stop is the Iron Bar. This is a big barn of a place, which doesn’t make for an intimate atmosphere, but it does allow for some trapeze work by skilled performers. One of these combines soaping herself with swinging about on chains attached to the ceiling. There are times when she is passing overhead that suds fall from her person and fall on my friend.

He doesn’t seem impressed. A glistening, naked woman is looping the loop a metre or two above his head and he’s not impressed.

‘She must get quite clean by the end of the evening,’ he remarks.

I realise that the evening calls for desperate measures, so we repair to the Windmill. How could anyone fail to be impressed by the enthusiastic staff in this justifiably-renowned Pattaya watering hole? The girls put on a good show and I occasionally have to remind myself of my duties as a guide. But the ice in the heart of my friend refuses to melt.

‘They look bored,’ at last he announces, though I think he is projecting his own feelings on to him. I give up and we walk out.

As we make our way back home, I ask about his reaction to the best that our funny little town has to offer.

‘I just wish I were fifty years younger,’ he says, quite meaningfully, I think.

Veteran readers of these trivial bits of drivel will readily recall the construction of the pond at Khao Talo Towers, which a few years back transformed an innocent patch of grass into a lush aquatic ecosystem to the delight of every thirsty, and indeed hungry, bird in the neighbourhood. Well, it’s still there and is now inhabited by two large terrapins, innumerable fish and a meringue.

A meringue?

That’s what it looks like. One of those ones you buy in pairs and put whipped cream in between that then oozes out down your chin.

Made of egg white.

Got it now?

Let’s move on with the story.

I say to Mrs Pobaan, ‘There’s something floating in the pond that looks like a meringue. Do you know what it is?’

From what you know of the angel in my Angel Delight, you’re probably not that confident that Mrs Pobaan is the right person to turn to with such a technical question. Mrs Pobaan has been known to become indignant when she has screwed a 12-volt bulb into a 220-volt socket and got nothing but a dull pop. She seems determined to repeat the exercise with another 12-volt bulb when I explain to her that this is sure to result in a similar outcome. No amount of classwork on the essential nature of the volt can dissuade her from such actions. In the end, the solution we reach is that Around Here, Mr Pobaan Does The Electrics while Mrs Pobaan Makes The Moo Krapao.

Someone that doesn’t know an amp from a watt is unlikely, you’re thinking, to be able to explain the appearance of a meringue in a pond, but I have more faith in the value of experience gained in one field of human endeavour when applied to another. Mrs Pobaan, you see, is a jungle girl, the Mowgli of South Thailand. If there was a choice between a liana and walking to the end of the street, she’d swing there. A gnarled tree trunk v. a staircase? She’d shin it. By all accounts she was brought up in the jungle in conditions of some poverty. Consequently, she knows how to extract nourishment and water from the least promising of environments.

When we walk in Thailand’s mighty national parks, as we occasionally do, it is not uncommon for her to identify one parched-looking tree as a good source of drinking water, if you know where to cut it; or another dangerously poisonous-looking bunch of berries as great for elevenses. I defer absolutely to her judgement in matters of venom. If she tells me not to touch a certain centipede or to steer clear of the back end of such-and-such a toad, then steer clear I surely will, lest it project some vile liquid into my eyes. A jungle girl survives on applied knowledge of this type and Mrs Pobaan’s continuing presence among us is testament to her wily understanding of the perils to be encountered in the natural world here in the tropics.

Thus, having made my enquiry, I am expecting chapter and verse on the meringue, in particular, perhaps, its culinary possibilities.

‘A frog,’ she says.

‘A frog?’

‘Eggs.’

‘Eggs? Where?’

‘Inside.’

‘So where’s the frog?’

‘Gone.’

‘How did it make the meringue?’

She shrugs. That’s the kind of thing a jungle girl doesn’t need to know.

‘How could a frog get out of the pond?’

Mrs Pobaan looks nonplussed. In retrospect I realise that this is because the two of us have in our minds different characterisations of a frog. I’m thinking of a big, green, lumbering European frog that couldn’t climb out of our pond if you gave it a marble staircase. Mrs Pobaan is thinking of a lithe, lissom Asian frog with sticky feet, which can leap from leaf to leaf like a small glossy Tinkerbell and could spring effortlessly from the pond like a bejewelled amphibian freerunner.

‘No problem,’ she avers, ‘for a frog.’

‘What will happen to the meringue?’

‘The turtles are gonna eat the eggs for sure. Wouldn’t you?’

I’m not that sure that I would, though a thought rushes through my mind that the jungle girl in Mrs Pobaan is only waiting for a second meringue to appear before slapping the two together around a filling of whipped cream.

How to save the eggs from certain oblivion? I have to think fast. Adopt them; it’s their only chance.

I place the meringue in a glass bowl on the dining table. In there I can see its underside and, after a day or two, I notice tiny creatures dropping down from the fluffy white billows like a squadron of paratroopers falling from a cloud.

Tadpoles. The Pobaans hug each other like proud grandparents.

The days pass. Now, tadpoles are diffident creatures who don’t readily share their emotions, but the skittish way they swim around their little world makes me think they’re reasonably happy.

After a couple of weeks, they grow legs back and front, absorb their tails and, before you know it, they’re little frogs.

‘What are we going to do with all these frogs?’ I ask lamely, realising that I have taken on duties for which I am not equipped. Somehow I have become involved in the natural world of the tropics, but on the wrong side. I am used to being the victim of its various appetites. I have been eaten by its leeches and mosquitoes, stung by its bees, threatened by its monkeys and lacerated by its thorny bamboos, but never before have I been placed in the position of life-giving nourisher to its infant members. I feel empowered, yet humbled by my responsibility.

Where should I deposit my young charges? What receptive glade should I seek for their release? How can I ease their transition from the comfort of captivity back to the savage natural world? What further aid can I offer my froggy offspring to increase their chances of survival when they leave my care?

But nature is ruthless, life in the jungle is tough and jungle girls are not sentimental.

‘Stick ‘em back in the pond,’ says Mrs Pobaan. ‘They were beginning to stink out the dining room anyway.’