Two: Shrubs in the Fall
Photo: Paula Hill
“Most of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, I have done in the Fall,” recounts Julie Powell in her fascinating ‘romp’ Julie and Julia, which those of you who made it to chapter two may recall.
My mate Andrew Biggs and I have lived life the same way, or so he tried to convince me before the inaugural CRAIG & RAY task degenerated into a boozy spectacle last week.
“Craig, do you realize that most of the stupidest things we’ve done together we’ve done in the Fall? It’s uncanny,” he remarked, swigging from his bush goblet and carving a slice of Camembert from his bush platter while reclining on my balcony divan, resplendent in his smart new bush slacks.
“You’re so full of shit,” I reply as we collapse into Shiraz-spitting bush guffaws.
My friendship with Andrew is a delicious mix of wit, sardonic asides, wine and song.
When I’m with him I laugh my ass off. He often does too.
Andrew is one the sharpest, funniest, most entertaining individuals I’ve ever met, control issues aside.
We’ve been through a lot together over the years: Clashing party outfits, malfunctioning teleprompters, heartbreakingly incompetent domestic staff.
But can our friendship make room for Ray? Will it withstand Monsieur Mears’ challenging bush tasks and our occasionally rancorous competitive streak? We’ll find out after the break….
Welcome back to Alcoholic Afternoons, where it would appear that Andrew is more adept at “improvising a drinking straw from a hollow non-poisonous shrub” than me.
How can this be? Cheating, that’s how.
“You’ve deliberately chosen the easiest shrub on the balcony. Anyone could make a straw out of a fucking elephant-ear fern,” I screech, struggling with the disintegrating stalk of a potted miniature orange tree that was supposed to form the base of my own pathetic effort.
“Yours looks like a shoehorn,” he retorts.
“It’s absurdist,” I scream.
“Actually, I think you are both disqualified,” interjects Paula, my gorgeous neighbour and recently appointed bush-task photographer. “They are held together with rubber bands. Ray would never allow rubber bands. This is farcical.”
Paula has a point.
We haven’t strictly adhered to the Ray Mears Essential Bushcraft: A Handbook of Survival Skills From Around the World instructions. In fact we’ve been rather loose in our interpretation. This was due to time constraints, apathy and unnecessary complications on Ray’s part.
“On a journey downhill water may become trapped in naturally occurring bowls such as hollow logs or sumps formed in impermeable rock,” writes Ray. “If you cannot access it by mopping, improvise a drinking straw from an available grass stalk or another non-poisonous hollow shrub.”
As neither Andrew nor I have ever used a mop, and given we have no idea what a ‘sump’ is, we’ve had to jump straight to part two where we encounter yet more obstacles from didactic, ungay Ray.
“If possible, sterilize the water before drinking it. Avoid water trapped in the trunks of poisonous trees or tea-coloured water that has become badly stained by tannins leaching out of bark.”
“This is tedious, let’s use wine instead,” suggests Andrew and before you know it we’re leaching gallons of tannins from bottles of Merlot -- which my dear maid Sanom has carted all the way from Villa Supermarket despite her bad back – and drunkenly crooning old Air Supply hits at the top of our lungs.
As bush boys we make fabulous media professionals. But the list of candidates was limited. Despite prompting, most of my friends simply couldn’t make the connection between ‘straw’, ‘mouth’ and ‘drinking,’ associating the implement with ‘nose’, ‘snorting’ and ‘party drugs.’
Andrew and I met at The Nation Media Group in 1992. I was producing an abominably awful television show called Good Morning Thailand, he was editing the entertaining Nation Junior Magazine. NJ magazine was targeted at Thai teenagers wanting to improve their English skills.
Andrew had taught himself to speak, read and write Thai and the magazine became a huge success, largely because he imbued it with the Thai concept of “Sanuk”, or fun, along with his personality.
Management decided to do a TV version. NJTV was our first collaboration, Andrew’s debut in front of the camera and a spectacular flop.
It featured a cast of ridiculous characters, badly acted by friends who would work for free, among them bawdy slapper Crystal Ball – the greatest fortuneteller of them all -- her g-stringed assistant Lek and the Idiom Idiot, played by a temperamental, substance-abusing queen who worked on the features desk and who, at one point, demanded his own trailer.
The show’s production values screamed early Gilligan’s Island. Its set design and lighting resulted in a dismaying Muppets on Acid sort of look. NJTV aired in the middle of the night on a government-run station and was watched by an estimated 37 viewers across 76 provinces.
So it was on the buses, not the box, where Andrew took off. The Microbuses, to be exact.
In Bangkok’s pre-skytrain days, people spent hours commuting to work. It was a hair-raising ordeal. The Microbus was an air-conditioned, private alternative to the city’s hellishly hot public rust buckets. They even had TV screens, which featured “Andrew Biggs’ ‘learn English’ vignettes on high-rotation.
“It was a captive audience,” he recalls.
The rest, as they say, is history. Andrew has gone on to write books, host numerous television and radio shows, open his own English Language Academy and won numerous awards. These days he has millions of fans and is in huge demand on the public speaking circuit. Not bad for a boy from Sunnybank, Brisbane – I can’t believe I just wrote that!
Despite being the most famous farang (foreigner) in Thailand, Andrew Biggs is no tantrum-throwing diva (except when the House of Cheesecake runs out of cheesecake, but that’s another story along with the unfortunate incident at the Emporium Department Store’s sock sale fiasco which I’m not allowed to talk about).
But enough about him. What have we learned from our little Ray foray?
Ahem, that bushcraft isn’t our forte; that unlike Julie Powell, Andrew and I don’t confine our stupidity to “The Fall” -- we’re hot, dry and monsoon season fools.
And on a mawkishly personal note, it has affirmed that laughter is such a large part of my life and that good friends to laugh loudly with, like Andrew, are as rare as naturally occurring impermeable sump frocks. I mean rocks. Whatever. Moreover, it has left me secure in the knowledge that ‘shrub’ is a fabulous fucking word. Don’t you think?
