Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Wangja]

from www.twochapstalking.com

The forthinghtly correspondence between two English chaps, one in London the other in New York (although at present in Hong King).

Fragrant Harbour . June 12th


My Dear Old Top,


Ever wanted to return to the good old days? The ones where of a Sunday we'd saunter off to the local beer garden and wait while our Mums/girlfriends/girlfriends' Mums/mates' girlfriends/mates girlfriends' Mums would put together a cracking roast? Well I do and today not less than most.


It's been a trying old time of late and my missing in action status aboard the good ship is the result. Now we both know that my fastening myself once more unto the skirts of the fickle mistress was never going to be pleasant. Well stout sons of Albion have to make such terrible sacrifices in order to keep the flag flying. Fair do's.


But oh how it does try us.


Take the last two weeks for example. Charged as I am with watching out for nastiness it fell to me to jet half way round this earth to cast my seasoned eye over a clusterfuck of five thousand hawkers of my wares. There to be schooled in the greatness that it is their privilege to gain a living from. Or something like that anyway.


Some might feel aghast at the prospect. Me? I take it on the chin. Bring it on I say. Let all and sundry come unto our temple and feed. Problem is the temple isn't exactly in a Teeming Metrop. Oh no. It isn't actually even near a TM. In fact if you pointed to this gawd-forsaken wilderness on a map, assuming you could find it, or wanted to, then with your other arm fully stretched you wouldn't be able to point to a bona fide TM.


Remote is, I think, the mot juste.


Now, you and I have lived in remote places. I once passed a few weeks in somewhere called Hack-ney so I understand the outer edges of civilisation. Don't care for 'em, but there you go. What was troubling about the locale in question wasn't so much its awfulness, though it had this aplenty, but the plane I had to fly on to get there.


I live, as you know, some way outside the M25. Indeed to get to The Coach and Horses for last orders on a Friday would mean leaving the house a-week-last-Sunday, or something. So I'm resigned to a life of being ministered to by LBFMs or whatever. And most of the time these ladies and left-footers do a reasonable enough job. So long as one avoids airlines from the Land of the 'Free' then one can be reasonably assured of courteous and adequate care.


Alas on this occasion my mission took me deep into the aforementioned Land and so after landing at a vaguely civilised airport (they'd recently cut down the lynching trees) I was required to board an aeroplane staffed by, well, I hardly know where to begin.


Shall we start by saying that the average size of the passenger's attire was similar to that of Mr Giant Haystacks (RIP). Some wore hats last seen on The High Chaparral. I won't swear to it but tobacco may have been chewed. That the car park at our destination would be crammed to the gun whales with pick-up trucks was a thousand to one dead cert. And yes of course they'd have gun racks, where else'd go them varmints they done shooted?


All right. Quite foul enough. At least, we assure ourselves, the aeroplane must be staffed by sentient bipeds able to navigate up and down the aisle?


Wrong.


Now I am full square behind equal rights for all. And frankly I'll even extend that to some Tories (no party - bless 'em) for the sake of argument. But surely, for the love of gawd, it is a pre-requisite that a person can actually fit into the space in which they are to work.


Pause for a moment and gurn as hard as you can. Twist your refined and chiselled features into the closest thing to a horror mask that you can achieve. Yes I realise you've just done a perfectly passable Steve McQueen impression but think of the rest of us. Think of someone who wasn't just hit with the ugly stick but truly embraced it and made it their own. Think of someone who, when hungry (not infrequently I'll wager) picks bits off themselves and manages to put together what many would consider a pretty square meal.


Take this person (gender non-specific) and inflate them to, oh I don't know, shall we say three hundred pounds? (Don't know how much that is in stones, and can't be fagged to work it out, sorry. Actually how many pounds in a stone? Always wondered.) Then squeeze them into a very small aeroplane and, and here's the actual problem (anything else would've been rise above-able), give them a really bad, superior, if-it-wasn't-for-us-you'd-be-speaking-German attitude. Make them xenophobic. Make them patronising. Make them grimace in a look-at-the-monkey way when they hear an accentless voice. Have them ignore the content and stare blankly when English is spoken. Give them lines like 'You! Wan' nu's?' Oh, and tease their hair, make it big, make it 'blonde' in places, load it with napalm-lacquer.


Crushed as I was into the window seat of a small cigar shaped crate I endured the cross eyed stares of this creature for nigh on an hour and a half. Yes I could've entered the fray and put the person straight about a thing or two. But where's the pleasure in that? My mission is to educate and bring the great unwashed along with. Not poke fun at the sentiently-challenged. I bore the stares with the quiet dignity that our old Headmaster would've expected. I landed in the middle of nowhere, helped the assembled masses to understand what was what and then raced back to the OB&C and civilisation.


It was a bloody two weeks and I certainly faced challenges to the left of me and to the right of me. But then as ever (deo gratis and insh'allah) I stuck to the rules of engagement and when strong words had to be dished out I did so with a kindly smile and a tolerant demeanour. Neither reciprocated nor respected but that's not why we do it, is it?


And so here I am back in the study with a view out over the Harbour and a glass of Fuller's London's Finest. I know, hardly the Margaux one would expect but I need a shot of England, not bloody France.


I won't deny Old Top that I miss you and our pals immensely. And the same goes for my dearly beloveds in my most recent home (you remember, the last part of the New World to retain some degree of civility). But I shall carry on and I shall keep my Chin Up and Upper Lip Stiff.


It is the right thing to do.


Your Old Pal,
And that of others I hope,
S


P.S. Here's a funny thing that happened while I was away. Pal likes shoes with some sporty chap's name on so I bought him a pair. As I was handing over the readies who should beg my pardon for sliding by but none other than the chap who's name was on the shoes. Would've had him scrawl his sig. if I'd the foggiest who he was and what he did. Something to do with hoops and dunking I'm told. Reminds me of Rich Tea biscuits. Ah the youth of today. What.





London. May 28th



Dear Boy,


So the demolition crew have packed their equipment – their jackhammers, their steam strippers, prybars, sledges and inexplicable tins of smoked fish - and trooped off like disconsolate Eastern European gnomes. For a short few days I am back at the desk, sorting the idiotic builder��s quotes from the merely risible, picking a wary path through the slough of local planning application and enjoying a moment��s hiatus before the real battle begins.


I have scheduled a whole morning in which to reply to you and to allow my mind the leisure to wander far from purlins, boomerang ties and noggins, but I find my self drifting into dark philosophical mien, preoccupied like so many men of letters before me, with aging.


Don��t, please get the wrong idea. In spite of the number bandied in association with my forthcoming birthday, I am still in the full flush of manly vigour. There has been no dimunition in my ability to wield the mattock or carry the hod, my mind is ever sharp and, pace my cluttered inbox, I have, as yet, no need for interventions, pharmaceutical or surgical, in the operations of the Old Chap.


No, what throws me in to this brown study is the simple fact that I am planning a garden.


To my left, where once teetered a soaring pile of learned texts there is now a short stack of instructive tomes on horticulture, garden design and, God help me, lawncare.


And it is this latter which is the real cause of my weltschmertz. I fear the lawn.


My intended has suggested that I loathe greensward because of some long-buried psycho-sexual association with compulsory sport but, I believe, I have laid those ghosts to rest.


Neither is it some deep-seated class-terror of the suburban. Though any man who grew up in Bournemouth would have reason enough to run screaming at the mention of top-dressing, bents and fescues or pathologically anal parallel mown lines, I have grown through such fears and am the better for it.


No, for me the lawn represents the very lip of an unstoppable slide toward death: a slippery, one-way chute that runs clearly from the laying of the first sod to the patting down of the very last.


I am told that, because I am blessed with a toddler, it would be tantamount to child-abuse to deny her a lawn upon which to decoratively desport herself. I could argue that, Regent��s Park, a mere toddle from our door, has herbage aplenty. I could aver that, her generation looks likely to eschew all outdoor pleasures and merely jack their cerebella into VirtualGarden��. I could even offer an entirely organic vegetable patch as a better contribution to her health. But no, we must have lawn.


I am not an unreasonable man and I will comply but I know that the women in my life will never understand the awful ramifications of their request.


Once a week, the damned thing has to be attended to. Raked, scarified, weeded, de-thatched, cleared of leaves in autumn, catshit in the spring and, the seasons round, mowed.


If there is to be a lawn, there must be a lawnmower. I don��t begrudge the contemplative half-hour spent walking behind the damned thing – God knows I get little enough chance to let the mind wander. I don��t mind the scheduled rows about whether the bloody mowing has been done, the tutting of the neighbours at a lawn too long, too short or a mower too loud. I don��t mind having to deal with a huge, stinking mound of festering clippings that stubbornly refuse to turn into a rich compost and instead smell like mangrove swamp. What I do mind is this��


If there is a lawnmower, there must be a shed.


Oh Christ, I��m not ready for a shed. I��m not quite forty-two. I��ve got some hair. I imagined burning bright and short. I wanted to die when, momentarily distracted at the wheel of my speeding Ferrari by the exceptionally competent blowjob I was receiving from a lascivious countess, I hurtled off the hairpin outside Monte and collided with an oncoming police truck containing four tons of recently seized foie-gras, Billecart Salmon rosé, high-grade cocaine and pornography. I was destined for better things.


Orwell was wrong. It isn��t the ��baby carriage in the hall�� that is the enemy of great genius – though God knows that��s difficult enough to work round – it��s the garden bloody shed. A vile, sagging poison-filled, creosote-stinking sepulchre, yawning at the end of my own bloody garden.


I will not die mouldering in a garden shed, sitting, surrounded by mole smokes, pea netting and soiled copies of the Sunday sport. If I am forced to have a lawn, a mower and a shed, this is what I propose to do.


I shall stock the thing with turps, thinner, 3-in-one, WD-40, barbecue firelighters, charcoal and a half-ton of dry straw mulch. I shall lay in store of fireworks in preparation for of November the 5th. I will fully fuel the mower, oil its blades and park it carefully. I will don my best tweeds, a small flask of absinthe and a briar pipe and walk, for one last time the long, green 72yds of the garden path before blowing, shed, mower and self to ratshit in one last, glorious conflagration.


Do not go gentle into that good night��


Tx

[joe_doufu]

Whoa! Too long, and I (American) can't make heads or tails of what they're talking about. Is he insulting Hong Kong, the greatest city on earth?

[Ya-ta Boy]

[sid]

Well I read it all and thought it was rather funny. Thanks Wangja!

[Sleepy in Seoul]

That's great . The way English should be written... I wish I could write like that.

[keithinkorea]

Funny stuff indeed. I think he wasn't insulting the Chinese folks in Hong Kong but rather rednecks in the US.

Good job Wangja for bringing this funny stuff to the board. I guess the Americans don't get the "Britishness" of it. For our American friends it must be an education but unfortunately most of them wont get it 'cos half of them seem to have a pretty inferior one

In all honesty to genaeralise a bit British people seem to know a lot more about the US than they do about us Brits. I just wish some British people would stop watching horrible American sitcoms and that our American cousins would stop going on about how superior they are and that they are the cradle of civilisation when most of their stuff is borrowed-stolen anyway.

Good writing indeed.

[jajdude]

That was an enjoyable read. Reminded me a bit of some old British lit./letters I had the happenstance to peruse upon back in the day.

P.S. I'd venture almost everybody knows more about the US than the US knows about everybody. They are the big kids on the block.

[Emu Bitter]

I would have thought that too Ja Jude until I came to Korea.
The most ignorant people in the world surely(maybe remote Papuan tribes can beat them on this) about other countries.
Attn Koreans : California & Texas are not the only states in America.
Sydney is not the only city in Australia.
London is not the only city in England.
Why the hell do I know that Chon ju is the capital of North Cholla Province & you insular idiots don't know that Munich is the capital of Bavaria?