I write this to the sound of jackhammers, which have been going since 8 a.m. because, hey, who wants to sleep in or do a bit of work on a Sunday morning? I am entirely fed up with construction noise, and with the alternative of wearing earplugs all day and night. I have been looking for a new, quieter apartment. It is hard to get away from construction or incipient construction in this area, so we might be moving farther afield.

Friday afternoon I met up with Alex for a wander in Chinatown. In one shop we found plastic bottles in the shape of superheroes, robots and monsters — including one that I thought was Spiderman with boobs, though as Alex said, they were probably his huge pectoral muscles — filled with coloured liquid. They looked so much like similar things we used to have at home when we were kids, which were cordial drinks, that I thought these ones were also drinks — until I noticed the label stating that they were bubble liquid. I managed to do this a second time at another shop where there was a display of what looked like the coloured balls of gelatin that feature in dessert concoctions here. It dawned belatedly on me that as these were brilliant blue and fluorescent pink, perhaps they were bath balls. Which they were. Having mistaken distinctly inedible things for food twice in ten minutes, I felt it was just as well that I don’t want children, since had I had any they probably wouldn’t have survived infancy.

It then started to rain, quite spectacularly. Although we had umbrellas, in uncovered alleys the ground was soon sloshing with dirty water, so we stuck to one long covered passage, then ducked up a random offshoot that yielded a surprise; the alley ran beside a canal lined with picturesquely ramshackle houses and crossed by rickety bridges with little makeshift coffee stalls on them. Banyan trees with their roots dug well into the canal walls overhung the water, with their thousands of fine aerial roots creating a weeping willow effect. Here, I thought, was perhaps a glimpse of old Bangkok; the scene merged in my mind with paintings of Asian canal and river life before the rise of the Concrete World, and I was able to imagine something visually idyllic, aided by the darkness and the rain sheeting off sloping roofs, which together helped to obfuscate present reality. By now we were into Little India, but most of the shops were closed, although by the canal we found a small restaurant where we were able to wait out the rain. The masala tea was really only average, but, cold and wet as I was, it tasted divine– and it was only 25bt, where the same average tea on Sukhumvit is 60-80bt.

Alex is out with her friend from Australia today, and I am about to take my computer down to the lovely Nielsen Hayes library and see if I can plug it in somewhere. The office says I can work there, for a 100bt fee, which I’m happy enough to pay, but they don’t know whether there’s a power point.  If not, I guess when my battery dies I’ll just head off to the less posh environs of work; there’s usually a spare classroom.