Sometime in the early hours of this morning, I undertook an incredible journey to many parts of the world where I prepared the ground for the arrival of a very special event that only my family were privy to, battled for my life against evil forces that threatened to destroy the coming of paradise and forged an intense bond with a child-princess who I suspect was the incarnate of everything that was, is, and will ever be. My aunts, uncles, and cousins, even my own mother, had kept from me an immense family secret (through reasons of safety; the less you know the better). They all appeared to me to be members of an ancient and obscure cult that had passed on their traditions and preparations through the generations in readiness for the great arrival and I, the last one to know, was assigned the status of emissary to the princess. Although I was unaware of her credentials at the time, I now realize that my purpose in this journey was to meet, befriend and protect her arrival from saboteurs who would do everything they could to destroy her (for reasons that were never divulged. To me anyway).

She was almost divine. A mere child by physical stature, she contained a passionate beauty and a fierce wisdom that caused anyone in her presence to shed tears of appreciation and praise. In my dream, I often found myself cowering in front of her, weeping unabashedly, or gazing into her serene features with streaming eyes. She never left my sight, not for a moment. I held her tightly with a conviction that I didn’t understand until the sleep drifted away and I woke to an immense feeling of sadness and loss. We ran through abandoned shipyards of Indian cities at night, hiding in alleyways and shopfront doorways as our pursuers searched in vain. In Bangkok, we ran through a shantytown, me holding the child tightly against my chest with both arms, in a desperate (and, as it turned out, fruitless) attempt to make the secret family rendezvous in a dilapidated guest house. A muezzin chanted calls to prayer from the minaret of a grand and opulent Jerusalem mosque as we ran and ran, my chest heaving from both my exhaustion and an unfathomable, overwhelming love for the child that I carried.

My mission was a success. In the end, the child lived to fulfil her destiny, but there was a terrible price to pay. She was the sole survivor of the expedition and all my family, with myself the last to succumb, died a violent (but not meaningless) death. My last action in life was to release her like a bird into the air; I watched her fly as the life ebbed from my limp body.

Today I am sad. Sad that the journey ended in such a tragic manner, and sad that I have lost a love so deep and so pure that I fear I will never love again.

As I shut down my computer before I left for London last month, I got a message embedded in the window that suggested I download ‘vital updates’ and that Windows would shut down once they are completed. Now, as default, I have automatic updates switched off due to the fact that my OS is not exactly off-the-shelf, and I see no reason to alert them to this fact by allowing them to download software onto my machine which is probably designed to weed out pirates like me. But this time, because I was in a rush to catch my train to Taipei perhaps, or because my computer had been running slow of late and I thought maybe filling up my drive with additional software would solve the problem, or just because I thought to myself that they are hardly going to send the thought police over here to a little Taiwanese city thousands of miles away from nasty old Amurca, I hit ‘OK’ and forgot about it for two weeks.

When I got home, I switched on the computer and it immediately barked out a noisy, continuous warning beep. After a few seconds, I rebooted her but the same thing happened. I even smacked her a couple of times like you would a bad dog, but the beep wouldn’t stop. Then the realization hit me. Microsoft had detected the electronic theft of one of their products and had infiltrated my computer to sabotage it and emit a horrible sound that doesn’t go away even if you unplug all the audio devices (the sound came from the machine itslf, not through the audio software). I panicked, and unplugged everything; including the ADSL lines. After a kind of jibberish process of deduction, I realised that I would need a new IP address urgently because, the way my paranoia-riddled mind was beginning to work, if I didn’t, the next attack could mean a total loss of my hard drive. Or worse; the god squad could actually be sent over from New Washington to make an example of what will happen to people who try to pirate their products. And that would probably mean deportation. …Or worse…

So, I went to the yellow shop on Beimen and bought a godfearing, gates-licked, spanking brand-new Asus notebook, on which I make this post. And with Vista shipped as standard too (although I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing). As I lovingly lay her down on my dining table and gently open her up, I gaze reminiscently over at my ex and I notice, for the first time, that a book has fallen from the shelf and lays silently across her now-disconnected keyboard. Causing, when connected, a high-pitched beep from the drive.

Whenever Brits ask me where I am from, and in Taiwan they always do, I say ‘London’; not because it’s true, but because it is easier to say than the truth. The truth is that I spent some of my formative years in a picturesque farmhouse of a quaint British village in the Midlands, riding horses and surrounded by wonderful animal shit all day (I am not being sarcastic), but I don’t feel like it is my home because I hardly ever go back there. I went to school in a nondescript London overflow-town comprehensive, but I dont consider it to be home because it was just a period of time between moves (albeit quite a long one). After that I rented rooms in various places, including london; none of which I would call home. I am painfully aware that I am conforming to a horrible English-teacher stereotype, but I think I really don’t have any place I could say is my home. Home to me, these days, is just people. At the moment, home is a town in Essex because it’s where my mother is and where I know people, and Bristol is also home, even though I have only been there about once, because my sister lives there. But Taiwan is my home too because *I* live there. Here, I mean.

I have mixed feelings about going home, which I will do in a couple of weeks. It is a visit to see people. I will see my mother, my sister and my aunty Elaine. I will check up on some old friends, buy something from Tesco, eat greasy breakfasts and sleep in late. But it’s England that is bothering me. Last time we spoke was in anger and I cursed her and what she had become as my flight left Heathrow two-and-a-half years ago. I can’t forgive her, this contortion, but I will agree to a temporary ceasefire for the sake of ‘home-anity’ (hey, not bad! I forgive you for the next sentence…..ed) . I will swallow my contempt for this nanny-state, surveillance-ridden, postempiricist, exorbitantly overpriced, overnutritioned, and overbadweathered island of congenital stoops, and simply enjoy the company of family and friends. Because thats all home is. Remember that, my children, and thou will be fine.

Talking of home, I finished my move this weekend. There are advantages and disadvantages; one big disadvantage is that, although both old and new apartments are exactly the same size in terms of ‘ping’ and physical space, my new place is only 1-bedroomed (although it has plenty of space for a spare bed) instead of 2 and-a-half in the old place. Of course, this is also an advantage because the lounge is huge and has doors onto the balcony that are as big as two tall people lying down on the floor toe-to-toe. Actually, from now on there are only advantages; no crazy xenophobic neighbour (in fact, no neighbout at all -it is empty for the moment), and its only 5,000nt per month (about 75 quid I think).

I had one of those frustrating traffic light conversations today. There was no escape. Scooter in front, car behind, and motorbike to my left. I clocked his approach in my mirror and contemplated weaving out of the box and jumping the red lights; the never-ending afternoon traffic crossing the Junghua/Chong-de intersection would have surely finished me off, but for a brief moment, it seemed to me to be the lesser of two evils. I didn’t do it though. Didn’t have the guts. He pulled up beside me, and the conversation began immediately, even though my gaze remained purposefully fixed on some distant point ahead.

Him: ‘Hey, how you doing?’

Me: ‘Oh, ok thanks’

Him: ‘Where you from?’

Me: ‘Iran’ (he either did not hear me correctly over the traffic noise, chose to ignore my churlishness, or just didn’t absorb it due to his preordained set of possible potential answers)

Him: ‘You a bushiban teacher?’

Me: ‘yep’

Him: ‘How’s your Chinese?’

Me: ‘mm’

Him: ‘do you meet very many missionaries?’

Me: (irritated not only by him, his religion, his clothes, his bicycle, his accent, his presence, his youth and his blind arrogance, but more by this scripted mantra they must teach, word-for-word, in Mormon school) ‘more than I would like’

Preliminaries. Always the same. He was like a bad lover, sticking a finger up a cavity and tweaking a nipple just because it is expected. He wasn’t interested in me at all; he didn’t care where I was from or what I was doing, or whether I could speak Chinese or not. He just wanted to get down to business, and once his token verbal foreplay was over and done with, he unzipped his pants and delivered the adolescent sweaty pounding that I knew was coming (no pun intended this time). ‘So’, he said with a smug, self-assured bucket of misplaced confidence in his own immortality, ‘do you have any special beliefs?’.

You know, these arseholes, they are so god-damned nice. Their shirts are so crisp and clean and nice, their hair is always neatly combed and never out of place even underneath their bicycle safety helmets and, even on the hottest, most stifling of Taiwanese summer days, there is never so much as a wet patch under their armpits, or a single bead of perspiration dripping from their well-formed, impressive, nice noses. The amount of times I have bitten my tongue, smiled and nodded politely out of respect and some kind of vague admiration for the mormon work ethic, is uncountable. But, my rage is always there; steaming just below the surface of my skin. It is a rage of intellectualism over faith, of good guest behaviour over arrogant superiority, and of a pure and unbridled nihilism over a bent, inconceivable theism. But, it’s more than that; it’s not only the improbability and fakery of institutional religious dogma that riles me, but the fact that it is only Christianity (a mere cult by historical measures) and it’s subsidiaries that behave in such an evangelical, pious, arrogant and elitist manner. How many times have you been approached by a Buddhist on the streets, extolling the value of transcendental meditation? How many Muslims have attempted to convert you into the Islamic life? How many Janists, Sikhs, Taoists, or even Jews come knocking on your door in the middle of your Sunday lunch? Not fucking many I would say. How many atheists, for that matter, go on rallying crusades to bolster their numbers? It’s Christianity and Christianity alone (with the possible exception of the Hare Krishnas); they are the cancer of institutional religion. An ugly, undesirable manifestation of a bloated, self-satisfied egomanical Western culture.

Those missionaries. It’s ok to hate them you know; it’s not like hating race, gender or sexuality for example. Missionaries are, by default, pious, arrogant, narrowminded and self-righteous without a single exception. Those qualities are the prerequisites of missionaryhood; if you do not embody these adjectives, then you are not missionary (in effect, you must believe that your religion is the best, your culture is the superior, and your language is the greatest, and you must be willing to inflict this on innocent people who are generally quite fond of their own culture to begin with). This kind of mind is very similar to the kind of mind that starts wars and erases generations, and, due to the nature of religious groups, all members must share this attitude. In their case, the stereotype is absolute and, because ‘tolerance’ is largely based on the fact that stereotypes are not manifest of a group, I can say ‘I hate them’, and it is beyond any kind of moral, liberal, or philospohical reproach.

I meant to reply with a bland and meaningless noncomittal answer to his question. Something not too direct, but carrying enough weight for him to get my implicit suggestion. But he caught me on a busy Tuesday on my way to the dentist, so I was already filled with a whole bag of Freudian dread at the prospect of some white-coated sonofabitch sticking a long pointy thing into my mouth. That poor fucker. I feel bad, ipso facto. Bad because I replied to his question on my beliefs by telling him pretty much what I just told you these last couple of paragraphs, except that my language was a little more colourful and suggestive.

When the lights turned to green, I revved my engine and screeched (as much as it is possible to screech on a gas bike) across the intersection. I clocked him again in my mirror; and this time, to make matters far, far worse, that nice, polite, articulate goddam niceguy fucking Mormon was smiling warmly and waving cheerfully.

Welcome, refugees of the Cold Goat regime. It is here that you will find your new home. I have a thousand sentinels casting their watchful gaze upon the flowers and plants of the lip-kissers, and yet more footsoldiers of the old regime patrolling the dirty streets and the dank alleyways of the eternal night. So, make yourself comfortable; you are in safe hands here. For you, I will cause the rain to hammer the sand like gunfire and I will hold always an umbrella over your delicate scalp. I will whip up a bowlful of cruel storm and cold biting wind, and I will cause the thin air to draw the last breath from the guts of your enemies. And when the rains cease, I will paint a rainbow in the sky and name it in honour of you.

I lived in London for a little over two years in the late eighties. I had many problems with my father at home and by the age of seventeen, I needed to get as far away from him as possible. I rented a room above a Methodist mission on Commericial Road, in the heart of the East End, which was, in those days, going through a kind of a transition period. Most of the big Fleet Street newspapers were transferring their facilities out to Wapping and the area was a big picket line where you could take a wander to in the small hours of the morning to read the early editions and drink hot tea. The docklands were in the middle of a huge facelift and the Yuppie generation were invading the wharfs and the old East India trading grounds, pushing the stereotypical ‘orlrite mate ow about a bag of cockney cockles?’ old Eastenders out and dispersing them over the city.

I did some work for the minister of the mission, a dodgy old preacherman known as David Sheriff who had a great dane called Sebastian that was as big as a horse. I studied Sociology and Theology with him (the preacher, not the dog. It was an official, accredited ‘A’ level course, but only in name) and he taught me how to smoke, cheat the dole system, and how to read such decidedly non-christian thinkers as Marx and Bertrand Russell (I read a story about him in a national newspaper, a few years after I left London, that reported his arrest by the police for running a brothel from the basement of the church) . My classes were a Donna Tartt-esque mixture of the divine and the debaucherous and at weekends we (a small group of just 7 students) would take the tube ‘up west’ where we drank Dubonet from the bottle, tried some strange drugs and talked to prostitutes and homeless alcoholics in Soho Square as the sun came up.

I think we are born many times in a life, and those days were one of those births; riding the underground and the newly-opened Docklands Light Railway from Shadwell to Whitechapel East or Aldgate, or down to Island Gardens to walk the tunnel beneath the Thames to Greenwich, or straight to Picadilly, Tottenham Court Road or Leicester Square at the weekends. These platforms were sinister places where you avoided eye contact with groups of cigarette-smoking, knife-carrying males and dodged foul-smelling bums and disease-ridden rats.
A cold wind sweeps through the dark tunnels, blowing old newspapers around the tracks, and late at night, when there are only a handful of shifty-looking vagrants and anonymous shadows lurking about, your footsteps echo too loudly against the damp walls.

Taipei though, God bless ‘er, is something very different. I spent last weekend in the big city, and walking the below-ground shopping mall at night, between Zhongshan and Shuanglian MRT stations was a lesson in the idiosyncratic differences in subterranean human behaviour. We don’t have any public transport to speak of here in Tainan and although I had spent a few days in Taipei eighteen months ago, I slept most of the time after the 24 hour journey from London. Back then I was in a daze so, unofficially, this was my first trip to the capital. The Tube is the arsehole of London, if you don’t count Victoria Bus Station, but on the MRT I felt like I was in some kind of monumental 1980’s generation-defining movie.
Interspersed along the narrow tunnel were groups of teenagers; not just one or two, but pack after pack, all gathered around a portable stereo. But they weren’t smoking, there were no drugs, no alcohol, no knife-weilding maniacs, no homeless mentalists, no schizophrenic loners talking to themselves, there was nothing of that threatening (but gripping) moody atmosphere that permeates every London station from Tottenham Hale to Bermondsey.
They were dancing. All of them. Some were breakdancing and body-popping while others were doing that Britney Spears-like choreographed newfangled sexually aggresive spandex routine. They all seemed to be rehearsing for some high school show or because of aspirations of fame and fortune.
Dancing I tell you.

Of course, there is always that part of me that is fatally attracted to ’seediness’ and all of the consequences that it brings; dimly lit basement bars where business types conduct their clandestine affairs beneath a thin cloud of cigarette smoke, narrow doorways guarded by shifty looking men, and hookers parading up and down the streets in skirts that barely cover their ample arses. Hotels that operate above brothels where rooms are already inhabited by thin lizards and cockroaches and the hum that permeates the air; a blend of the speakers of a distant, or not so distant, sound system, the turning engines of kerb-crawlers and a conversational monotone that includes everything from drunken boastings to the patois mantras of hawkers and street peddlers. Pattaya has long since surpassed this stage. To be seedy, something must be vague, or hinted-at. In the same way that the female form becomes more erotic and desirable when veiled in some flimsy lingerie, the seediness of a city becomes more esoteric and attractive when it’s depravities are only suggested; where you must, perhaps, make a bit of an effort to discover them. In Pattaya, the seediness finds you and it is altogether more obvious and cheap for my tastes. In fact, it is a vile and despicable place where katoeys roam the esplanade and dealers of all dealings lurk in doorways to accost you as you walk past them. Everything is obtainable and convenient. Even worse, the proto-human, shaven-headed British ‘lout’ has, it seems, discovered Pattaya. He is quite easy to spot; he will be wearing jeans or some football shorts and will be bare chested because his football t-shirt will be tucked in the back of his belt. He will strut around, this simian abortion, dragging his knuckles on the ground and bumping into people on purpose in order to assert his masculinity and territorial rights. Later, when so pissed he can barely stand, he will revert to his beastial id and urinate outside his door.

Yes, it is a shithole, Pattaya. No doubt. If I had my way, I would have gone straight through it last night and not stopped until I reached Ban Phe (which is the point at which one must catch the boat to Koh Samet), but by the time I got through customs at Bangkok, it was well past 7pm and the last boat would have departed to the island by then. So, I broke up the journey by spending a night in dirty stinking Pattaya where fat bastards from Germany parade their barely pubescant ‘girlfriends’ around like cheap saurkraut. It is a goddam joke, and by the time you see it for the millionth time, it leaves you feeling slightly jaded and pessimistic for the entirity of the human race, not just the Ayran one. It fucking stinks, Pattaya, I’m telling you. I checked into a shitty hotel on a shitty road, next door to one of the shittiest restaurants (menu all in German) in all of shitty Pattaya, drank some beer in a bar, ate sme food, faught off about a hundred different whores (man, woman, child, and those inbetween) and went to bed with a headache that continued throughout the night and was still over my eyebrows this morning, as I awoke to the tranquil and serene sounds of a JCB on the piece of wasteland (that I had’nt noticed the night before in the darkness) adjacent to the hotel, moving large pieces of metal about for no apparent reason. I checked-out at 8am (something I don’t believe I have ever done before in my life) and took the first transport out of the city I could find.

Some indigenous tribes of North America believe that dreams are the spiritual journeys of the soul. I think this is mostly bullshit, but every now and again I have one of those wonderful, vivid, cinematic dreams that are so lucid and recollectable that they must be precisely that. Last night I went on a very strange and beautiful journey and, unlike most dreams, when I awoke I had total recall. Even now, at 3pm, the details are crystal clear.
It started back in the time when I flew fighter jets in the Gulf war (the first one, that is). Except that I was flying over the plains of England, tracking a stray nuclear missile that had somehow escaped from a military facility and was heading on a deathly trajectory toward some nondescript British town. My expertise in such matters allowed me to disarm the warhead remotely from the console in my cockpit, and also to stall the propulsion system -which meant that it spluttered to a halt in mid-flight and fell harmlessly to the ground below. I quickly landed and jumped out to check if it had landed on anyone, but as I arrived at the scene an articulated lorry carrying tons of corrosive liquid swerved to avoid the now-latent weapon (which looked much bigger on the ground than it did in the air) and overturned as the wheels locked. Just like in Terminator II, it skidded on it’s side for a few metres before wrapping itself around a stone pillar that stood near the foyer of the train station, and spewed the load out of the twisted and gashed metal of the massive container. Being a quick-witted and agile fighter pilot, I immediately sensed the danger that this posed and I made my escape, clambering over turnstiles, parked cars and, bizarrely, the headless torso of my Geography teacher Mr Rudkin (I recognised his jacket, in case you were wondering. I was quite glad to see him dead as the bastard had shot me in another of my dreams years ago, firing a bullet straight through my chest at point blank range. In that dream, I collapsed to the ground and died from a wound that shed no blood). As the horrible corrosive liquid gushed out of the station concourse and onto the busy street, I ran and ran, as fast as I could possibly go. I didn’t stop running until I reached Hong Kong which I figured should be far enough away from the spillage for me to be quite safe. I decided to pay a visit to my mother, who works in the bar of a very plush and opulent five-star hotel in Kowloon. I sat at one of the spotless tables and sipped a cocktail as I waited for her to finish her shift and soon fell into a conversation with the famous British comedian Ronnie Corbett who was dressed in a 3-piece pin-striped suit and was smoking a cigar that was as thick as my arm. As we talked, I noticed that I addressed him as Mr Corbett (which is a little strange as I do not have any particular reverence for the man) and I soon discovered he was neither amusing nor funny. Later on, I remarked upon this to my mother as we walked out of the bar, but she was not the least bit interested as she was feeling a little nauseous and sickly. After a moment she abruptly took off on her heels to find a toilet in which to vomit. I spent many hours chasing my mother around the luxurious hotel with a mop and bucket, stopping to clean patches of carpet where she had thrown-up, or politely enquiring of the porter staff where I could find a toilet for her. At one point, the hotel was the business section of a large airliner, high above the pacific, with Corbett sitting at the back, puffing on his cigar (despite it being a non-smoking flight) and chatting with the dead actor and musical ‘variety’ star, Howard Keel (he played Miss Ellie’s husband in ‘Dallas’, I think). Back in the grounds of the hotel, I realised that I had lost my mother. Up to this point, I had been following the droplets of sick on the ground but of late they seemed to had dried-up and I had lost the trail. From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a Buddhist monk and took him to be my mother in some kind of disguise. I ran after her, and after a few minutes she stopped dead and struck a giant gong that hung from a sycamore tree. She looked directly at me and I realised that it wasn’t my mother after all, but a toothless old man who was less than five feet tall. As if it wasn’t bad enough dreaming about one’s mother (especially if you subscribe to Freudian psychology), I was mildly alarmed to catch sight of my father who appeared to be leading this Buddhist parade that my pseudo-mother was taking part in. He was dressed in tights, a poncho and a strange triangular hat that made him look like an Inca, or an Aztec perhaps. He beckoned me to join him but I ignored him because I had to look for my mother to make sure she was ok, and anyway, I haven’t seen my father in ten years so I had no particular inclination to meet up with him in my dreaming life either. Eventually, I found my mother back in the bar talking to Corbett, who said he hated Hong Kong (except he called it ‘King Kong’). When I asked her if she was feeling better, she looked at me like I was crazy and said she had never been ill in her whole life.

I have always considered myself to be immortal and indestructable, a hangover from adolescance that has persisted for a decade or two longer than it should. This illusion was strengthened a while ago when I first moved into my house. I was standing on my new sofa, hanging a new picture on my wall when I leant back to check on the alignment and fell off, right onto my new glass-topped coffee table that I just bought from Poya. As an instinctual reaction, I thrust out my arm to break the fall and my hand went straight through the glass, shattering it and leaving several viciously-sharp protuding triangles. I closed my eyes for a second and imagined the scene of sliced arteries and blood pumping out all over the floor. In that second I was sure of my own death, because I was alone at the time and I would surely lose conciousness at any moment, before collapsing onto the glass shards as my blood seeped out all over the floor and all over the new rug I had just bought, also from Poya (I was only a little dissapointed to realise that my final thoughts would be of how I should have moved the coffee table and that the rug, because it was red, might not be too badly stained). When I opened my eyes, though, there was no blood, and no gaping holes in my arm where my flesh had been slit open like a sack of rice. I had a small crescent-shaped scratch on my arm (it didnt even scar) and a bruise just below my elbow where it hit the steel frame. I gingerly pulled my miracled limb from the glass carnage and for the next half an hour I examined it from finger-tips to armpits, several times, quietly marvelling at my godlike powers and superhuman strength. I thought of myself as a kind of comic-book hero, like the Bruce Willis character (in a film I cant remember and dont have the motivation to look-up) I have never got ill in my life and never even so much as broke a bone.

These days though, it seems that my body is trying to tell me that my feelings of invincibility are misplaced and that I should perhaps be pondering the notion that I, just like all you peasant-human, inomniscient, inomnipotent paupers that are reading this post, am a mere mortal. It is not an idea that I have accepted completely, not yet, but I think that it will happen sooner rather than later. Yes. I’m not young anymore. Yes, my hair is going grey, yes, I am slowly growing man-tits that I can feel bouncing slightly as I run down a flight of stairs (I’ve started taking the lift to avoid this unpleasant sensation) and yes, I feel that my immortality is slipping slowly and silently away; as unoticeable as a continental drift but real enough, nonetheless. These last two weeks or so have seen me chained to the khazi with a violent bout of the shits, a gum infection on one side of my mouth that makes eating very painful, and a severe toothache on the other that is just about the most painful experience I have ever had, and pretty much made my whole mouth off-limits to any kind of food except soup which I hate at the best of times. I have blisters on my feet because my sandals fell apart and I had to wear my boots that I hadnt worn for a year and they made my feet too hot. I had some kind of bizarre swelling on my neck that came and went and my ears continue to be a constant source of irritation with their itching and aching.

It is occuring to me, bit-by-bit, that I am not a god. Yet I am reluctant to let go because once you believe that you are mortal, then you begin the (very slow) process of dying.