A New Dewsbury

From Tuesday's Guardian:

Town's troubles
The Yorkshire mill town of Dewsbury, just west of Wakefield, has been at the centre of far more news stories in the past few years than one might expect for a town with a population of just under 55,000. Just before he blew himself up on a tube train at Edgware Road in July 7 2005, Mohammad Sidique Khan had been living there. In June the same year, a girl of 12 was charged with causing grievous bodily harm following what was reported as the attempted hanging of a boy aged five at a housing estate to the east of the town. In February, Dewsbury again made headlines when nine-year-old Shannon Matthews disappeared after going for a swimming lesson in the town centre. Twenty-four days later she was found alive, hidden underneath a bed in a nearby flat. Her mother was charged with perverting the course of justice and child neglect. As well has having six Muslim councillors and Muslim MP Shahid Malik, Dewsbury has had a BNP councillor since 2006. This month, the councillor, Colin Auty, started campaigning to replace Nick Griffin as BNP leader.

It was tempting to love Dewsbury ironically for a while there much like one would wear a t-shirt with Stalin's face on it or claim to be a hardcore 'Going for Gold' fanatic. Yes, irony and my oft-derided hometown fit one another like two things that fit each other well. Alas, such harmless delights as the utterly pathetic Dewsbury-on-sea initiative (AKA Operation Dump Some Sand On Westgate) and a swift half of Stella in The Crimepiece (or Timewasters if you'd prefer) have been dumped into the background of my mental picture of Dewsbury in favour of fake kidnappings, terrorism and stabbings. Morbid fascination with this festering burg will soon grip the nation, as the national press cottons on to the fact that Dewsbury is filled with hate, smackheads, violence and more hate. The town is dirty and unpleasant, and the poorer areas are genuinely scary to walk though at night thanks to gangs of tracksuited teens who quite probably are carrying knives along with their bottles of cheap cider. I keep thinking that the only way is up from here, but if Dewsbury has taught me anything, it's that there's always more down to go.

So what next for Dewsbury? Race riots? The BNP's first MP? Jack D's opening a second venue? No. What I predict is an almost Madona-esque reinvention for Dews Vegas. Captialising on our anguish is the only way to go, and like Terry Waite we too can sell our suffering for a fistful of change. I predict one more news story, perhaps a twelve year-old crack addict will shoot someone in Asda? Maybe Maddie McCann will turn up in Chapel Town? Regardless something's going to tip Dewsbury's perception from a town getting more than its fair share of bad luck to a miserable basin of depression and poverty and when this happens, the good times wil surely follow.

I'm in Vietnam and it's booming, the former Yugoslavia is big with backpackers and even that former penal colony in the middle of nowhere Austraila seems to eb doing well for itself, so why can't The Dewsbronx cash in on this? Museums dedicated to popular local crimes, hostels in Chickenley providing that authentic ''war-torn dystopia'' feel and feel-good movies starring Robin Williams set in Dewsbury Moor! We can all write memoirs about our time in this misbegotten wasteland, where every drunken stroll home from the pub became a fight for our lives, and taxis were regularly shelled with half-eaten kebabs by yobs stinking of cheap lager. Display your mental scars with pride, as the smackhead on Sky News changes from a figure of fun to an inspirational story of hope and an Amnesty International campaign. All the tiny shining beaons of hope thrugh the darkness like Ali Baba's and that pound shop down the arcade will become huge retail giants thanks to the bonanza of sweet tourist's cash.

Yes, it's darkest before the dawn and surely the dawn in Dewsbury will shine all the brighter because of all we have endured. Maybe some time in the next six weeks?

Cold Blooded Yet Delicious Murder

It seems to me that I've been doing a lot of eating out lately. Easy jokes aside, it's kinda liberating not having a kitchen because it takes a lot of the decision making away from me. Do I want to cook tonight? No! Beccause every time I go into the shared kitchen my landlady is there and she gives me funny looks! Since she's responsible for keeping me in clean underthings I usually leave well enough alone and slide on outta the guesthouse and into the city. Every street (this is probably an exagerration, it's more like every other) has at least one street vendor on it. They'll have a gas ring and then probably soom rice or noodles or bread. The rice is usually fried and a little spicy, so that's a safe bet. The noodles are either chewy and yellow, like they'd go well with some textured soya pieces and chicken and mushroom flavouring. Maybe in some kinda pot? They're good. The other choice is the thin white ones and they're a but more common, especially as a part of pho. Pho is what haoppens when you boil a cow's bones into a broth and then flinging some noodles in to boil. Then some fairly raw meat gets added on the way to your table, so it cooks in the boiling liquid. Oh, and it's the piled high with my arch nemesis: lots of coriander! Serve with beansprouts and something green to taste. That's the national dish, and it's wholly unsuitable for breakfast. Naturally it's at its best before ten am, because they cook it before any sane person should be out of bed. Also naturally I pretty much avoid it. Unlike these uncivilised folks I've been conditioned to think that bone marrow is best given to dogs and since dogs are two rungs below child molesters on my list, then I'm not touching no marrowbone jelly. I don't care how gloddy my coat would be.

Failing a street chappie, I could visit one of the city's fine fast food outlets I suppose. The number one chain is Lotteria, Korea's answer to McDonalds with grey meats and the oddly popular 'shrimp burger'. Not as tasty as it could be, and the 'Happy Meal' doesn't come with a toy. Fail. There's also KFC (and they still call it Kentucky Fried Chicken on the signage, or the Vietnamese for it anyway) and they do mashed potatoes! Crazy! Once was enough there, because they don't do hash browns in the burgers. Pretty sure they're losing out there.

So what this was all building up to is what I did on Saturday night. One of the ladies from work was leaving for Thailand (and then teaching Austrailians to speak correctly in Melbourne) so a few of us went out for a meal. A Vietnamese BBQ meal! Cue the pictures:

Here we see the table, festooned with beers, bowls, dipping salt and two big ol' griddle plate affairs. Heated from beneath by a gas tank (that I kept kicking by mistake, almost dooming us all to a fiery end) they get mighty hot. Probably best not to drink when using them...
So from the menu you pick out your dead animal of choice from a list going from mundane old cow and chicken to frog and eel. All the best weird animals were pricy (Frogs are tiny dammit, they should be cheap) so it was satay squid (pictured on the plate to the left) and dipping shrimp for me.
So the plate covered in squid and peanut ooze was brought to me, along with a lot of nice sticky rice and a couple of things to dip in it. Soy sauce is almost always served with a chilli in it, to give it more kick and this is a good thing. There was also a lime and some salt, but this was less random than I thought. It's pretty good for making the shrimp squirm...


Oh yeah, they squirm. You'd squirm too if you were plucked from your tank and impaled on a wooden stick. You'd squirm too if you were basted with chili and pepper while you were alive, and you'd certainly squirm if your final moments were on a very hot metal plate next to some aubergine and pieces of goat. You'd squirm too if your final legacy wasn't a family, a memorial bench or a three-volume-novel. You'd squirm if your last act on this Earth was being peeled and eaten. Personally, I think the squirming just made them tastier.

I could do without the eyes popping and tiny high pitched pleas for mercy though.

So I gave it my best. I negotiated the pieces o' squid onto the hot plate using my chopsticks. I plucked them off using the same chopsticks and then I shoveled them into my mouth along with plenty of rice using the same chopsticks again. One pair for the whole affair was pretty good going I thought. The rice does break apart when exposed to any stress though, so the more beer I necked the less rice made the trip safely from bowl to mouth. It was carnage.



Indeed, it was the pre-service skewering that made the shrimp the easiest to cook, albeit perhaps not from a moral standpoint. One of the teachers assured me that they didn't feel pain and, while this was wholly unbelievable since I'm sure they increase in twitching and squirming coinciding with the application of heat was less than coincidental, I clunk to it like Leo clang to that raft at the end of Titanic. Not even death would pry my icy hands of the comforting lies and without that bitch Winslet to push me off I kept my head throughout. Pictured above is the carnage I left in my wake.

Between us we ate a lot of goat, beef, chicken, squid, shrimp and rice. An awful lot. The table looked like the somme if the somme had been fought by delicious, tender animals instead of bland, stringy people. Hell, I'll say it now: the world would be a better place if all war was fought by meat. Someone get Cheney on the phone, and find me a chicken that can defuse a roadside bomb...

Rainy season! Duck season! Rainy season!

Cripes, it's been a month. A month since I rolled out of the pub and onto a train and out of the country and into this ridiculous sentence. Cripes indeed.

While it's nice not to be in a country that could elect Boris Johnson to high office (you morons) it'd be nice not to live in constant fear of whatever bacteria it is that've given my digestive system a quick once over this week. That, however, has been but a blot on the (no longer literally) sunny skies of life here in 'nam. Did I slip a quick 'no longer literally' in there? Did I do so because it's rainy season? Do I ask too many rehtoric questions? Do my students assume all my questions are rhetorical or are they just slow? Will I ever get to the point?

So my sweet little guesthouse is down a scrappy little alley (home to late night cockfights and a guy chasing off spirits with incessant clacking throughout the night. Being slightly off from the main road means we don't enjoy the privilege of huge open drains. Initially I thought these were disgusting and smelly and while these things remain true, I can in fact see the genius of their design. Much like the slanted curbs on pavements allow bikes to hop on and off the pavement easily (boon or bane? depends on where I'm walking) the huge open drains allow the copious amounts of rainwater to pour off the roads. Without them one finds oneself up to one's ankles in a very dark murky liquid that cotains almost as much rat shit and dirt as it does rainwater. This sludge first sloshed into my life over a couple of days off, so not leaving the hotel was OK. I consumed all my supplies (a few coconut cakes, some smints and six litres of water) and was feeling a lot like Noah (I have two lizards now!) when the rains receded and I could repopulate the Earth with my sons. Oh, the Bible, how may ways can I make you sound weird? So I goes out, I stocks up and I comes back. All is well.

Friday started with a very wet bang when after a shower, a shave, and a third sh sound I had to roll up my stylish trousers, remove my stylish shoes and slosh my way to a motorbike taxi through the potentially toxic breakwaters of the back alley I call home. It was pretty awful, but what you can't see can't hurt you and that water was far too murky for me to see any dirty needles or sea witches. The plumes of filth flying behind the bike, even at low speeds, were reward enough for this ordeal. Oh to have seen the faces we surely soaked as we sped swiftly schoolwards! Oh to gaze on their glares, glances and gawps as we (sort of) gallop away. Oh yeah!

To a western pig devil, the rain is about as predictable as a woman is to a man. To a loyal Vietnamese comrade the rain is as easy to read as a man is to a woman. They get this twinge or something and every bike in the city pulls in to the side of the road to put on a plastic sheet. Every street vendor ducks into a doorway and emerges with their wares magically changed into a variety of anoraks ponchos and umbrellas. Every westerner smiles obliviously, ensconsed in a fortress of blissful ignorance. Then they morph instantly into the drowned rats, scurrying for cover. See how they cower in fear! Bwahahaha!! I'm not excluding myself at all here, I just like to be all omniscient and third persony sometimes.

So that's about it for the rain. It comes twice a day or so and like the scene in Forrest Gump taught us all there is no limit to the number of forms it will take. I've yet to see it hit sideways because any kind of wind is rare here. This is where I'd put a tasteless Burma joke, but I think I know my friends (and Dad) well enough to let them do it themselves. On that ill-advised note...