23rd April, 2010

As we took the first of what proved to be many glugs of Gavi di Gavi yesterday evening at dinner, the person sitting next to me leaned over conspiratorially and said “I was told to ask you about the Jam Boy.” It’s quite an opening line and I have to admit it somewhat took me aback. However I admit that it only took one more word, GOLF, to remind me of one of the more bizarre things I have seen.

I have banged on quite a bit recently about Thailand, but it is a whacky place. I had a tough old time when I lived there between 1996 and 1998. The SET index was in the process of falling 90% in US$ terms, so making the best of a bad situation, I got my golf handicap, briefly, down to 4 or 5. I had time on my hands it is fair to say. Consequently most lunchtimes would involve 9 holes at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, a bowl of roast pork and noodles washed down with an ice cold bottle of Singha. So I got lots of practice, plus I had every conceivable prop to support me on the golf course. A round of golf was no lonely affair at the Sports Club, where Bangkok’s elite made sure every need was catered for. There was, naturally, the caddie carrying one’s bag, another loping along behind with a chair in the event of a hold up and prepared to give tired shoulders a massage on demand. Then there was a troupe of klong boys who, on the very rare instance my ball ended up in the water, would dive into the brown muddy cess pits and miraculously, the appropriate amount of baht having changed hands, I would find my ball lying safely on the fairway. But we should not forget another, albeit rather forlorn figure, who trailed around the course with us on days when the skies were grey and overcast, at a respectful distance, wearing rubber wellington boots and holding a tall metal pole above him. He performed the role of a human lightening conductor. Marvellous. Is what is happening just now in Bangkok any surprise really?

So where does the Jam Boy come into this? Well, my dinner companion has yet to revert, having told me he would have a quiet chat with the gentleman who had told him to probe me about the Jam Boy because he clearly has a rather warped imagination. He claims, but I can assure you he had completely invented this, that I invariably had another companion on my jaunts round the Bangkok Sports Club golf course. A naked man, smeared with jam from head to toe, whose role in life was to attract flies and wasps away from the golfers??? I mean....where did that come from?!