Mary Poppins fights Freaky Realistic

Bangkok, Thailand
Made it to Bangkok on Monday after a rather rude early start in Hanoi. At HQ BKK - Ros & Dan's house, my SE Asian home from home, all was eerily quiet on account of the absent Ros & Ruby who are back in the UK.

First priority of course was for me and Dan to sport our matching swimmers and get to work on our synchronised swimming routine. It went very well. Expect to see more of us on obscure satellite sports channels over the coming months building up to Beijing '08.

Secondly, a traditional Thai meal was needed. So we had a terrific Lebanese mezze.

Job done. Now all that remained was for us to pick up our favourite line of conversation when left to our own devices - 'Where are the band members of Freaky Realistic now and what are they up to?' In the background tunes from their wonderful only album, Frealism, were playing of course.

I get periodic updates from The Badger as to what Justin 'Liquid' Anderson is working on since the 1993 evaporation of FR.

Checking out the FR website, that's still running after all these years, there was a certain amount of initial disappointment over the fact that the Ask Aki [Omori] A Question section on their website threw back a 'Sorry, Aki cannot answer your question' message. Come on, it's only been 14 years since the band dissolved, surely Aki must still be there in cyberspace waiting to answer all the Freaky yet Realistic questions that must flood in daily.

Still, there was this good quote from Alan Anderson (Justin's brother) regarding their 1993 appearance on The Word:

"I was in the audience watching them perform on The Word. Bob Holness was dressed as a hippie for some reason. They had lent him a dog to complete the image and it bit me."

Actually you can view their entire performance on The Word from their website. Worth checking out, especially if you've just learnt you're immortal so have some spare time on your hands.


Here's a rather blurry snap of Dan doing some cyber detective work. The drink to his right is what we have named a Mary Poppins - gin (or vodka...or indeed any white spirit...in fact you could use actual white spirit if you like), guava juice, a splash of tonic and some fresh limes. The reason for the name is it lessens the pain of having to endure Ruby's obsession with and endless need to watch Mary Poppins on DVD. Obviously the two year old Ruby wasn't around but that didn't mean we shouldn't immunise ourselves (heavily) with the Mary Poppins antivenin. And we did.

And then BINGO, we struck FR pay dirt! Aki has a blog. Right here on Blogger in fact. She's now a yoga teacher living in north London. I'm not sure how far we got to tracking down the erstwhile rapper MPL, Mary Poppins had clearly given my a thorough shoeing and I had to retire.

The farewel to Bangkok
Dan was leaving Bangkok today and I'm going to Hong Kong tomorrow so we had a farewell 'bash' last night. This involved very swanky cocktails at an open air bar called Breeze on the 57th floor of the State Tower. Bangkok is a phenomenal sight from 600ft, at sunset, with a Negroni in hand. The conversation didn't swing round to Freaky Realistic this time.

Chit Lom BTS Skytrain station towards sunset.


Dan, cocktail in hand, sunsetting behind and the lights of Bangkok coming alive below. Smashing. Doesn't Dan look snap in his John Smedley top. Like Paul Weller's younger brother.


You may notice that I've had a haircut. Can't say it's the best I've ever had. My Thai haircut vocab only stretches to nit noi, which means 'a little bit'. I had clearly pronounced it incorrectly.




And of course, a couple of cocktails to the fore and all the sophistication goes out of the window and I get a chuckle out of the name of this tailor's shop. Oh dear.

Right, next stop Hong Kong, the final foreign destination on my global meanderings. See you there.