Identifying politically motivated language

Labelling and masking

Some years ago, reporters used the term female circumcision to describe a horrific medical procedure which teenage girls in West Africa were forced to undergo. When the media began reporting on the victims of this procedure, pressure groups insisted that they use the term genital mutilation instead. Why?

And why did 1970s President Jimmy Carter refer to the failed mission to rescue American hostages in Iran, as an incomplete success? 

We always have a choice over which words we use to describe a person, practice or thing; often the choice as to which words we do use comes down to how we feel about it. Linguists call this extra meaning in words “connotation” and talk about words carrying a “positive” or “negative” connotation. Writer and speech makers can exploit this property of words to mask their own weaknesses as well as label their opponents as weak themselves.

If you were leader of the “men are wonderful” party, what column would you choose to describe businesswomen? Can you think of any more word pairs you would use? Let’s get some pairs for the “women are wonderful” party describing football fans – positive and negative.

Independent	Distant
Determined	Stubborn
Assertive	Pushy
Sociable	Mouthy
Quick-tempered	Moody

Metaphorical transformation

Edward Bernays (1891 – 1995) is known as the father of modern marketing. The nephew of psychologist Sigmund Freud, Bernays revolutionised marketing by selling people what they wanted, not just what they needed. Before Bernays, most adverts focused on the practical advantages of owning the product, i.e. our motorcycle is reliable, cheap and easy to drive. Nowadays motorcycle adverts are full of middle-aged men escaping from the routine of family life, driving off into a desert sunset to the slogan: we sell freedom. The question is: “Does a middle-aged man want or need a motorcycle?” What do you think? Also, why is a motorcycle a metaphor for freedom?

Bernays’ greatest success was a campaign to break the taboo against women smoking in public. In the early twentieth century, smoking was seen as an inappropriate habit for women. However, in 1929 Bernays shattered this image when he re-marketed cigarettes as “torches of freedom”. To launch the campaign, he hired suffragettes  to march down 5th Avenue, New York on Easter Sunday, smoking and calling: “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” The result was dramatic. In 1923 women only purchased 5% of cigarettes sold, in 1929 it increased to 12%, in 1935 the percentage of cigarettes purchased by women was 18.1%.

Metaphor is a powerful tool for advertisers and newspaper writers because it highlights one set of characteristics while hiding another. For example, we do not think of cigarettes as being addictive or carcinogenic when we call them ‘torches of freedom’. Can you think of any more examples in which products are sold through metaphor? Which set of characteristics are being highlighted and which hidden?

Abstracting (or euphemism)

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote: "Evil is the product of man's ability to make abstract that which is concrete”. Sartre was writing at a time when the world had just learned the horrors of the Nazi’s campaign to murder European Jews. And what did the Nazis call this campaign? Not murder but The Final Solution, a term so abstract and far removed from the reality of gassing naked men, women and children to death that we can speak it without making the connection. 

Some words are more abstract than others. Animal is a higher-level abstraction than dog, which is a higher-level abstraction than labrador, which is a higher-level abstraction than my pet Rex. If we were to make an abstraction ladder, animal would be at the top and my pet Rex and perhaps even a photo would be at the bottom. The higher the level of abstraction, the farther we are from the real-life experience.

Bravery is an abstract concept. Can you make a ladder connecting it to a concrete real world action? Can you make the following more acceptable by creating an abstract ladder in the opposite direction?

a broken leg a lost mobile phone a failed history exam

Misleading 

This technique is commonly seen on packaging and labelling of food products in the supermarket. Here are some examples.

Company/Product	What they claim:	What they don’t mention:
Tetra Pak, a company which manufactures milk cartons	milk cartons are “easily recyclable”	few recycling programmes accept milk cartons
Breakfast Cereal	product “provides 25% of the daily-recommended amount of protein if taken with a glass of milk”	all or almost all of the protein is provided by the milk, not by the breakfast cereal
Lemonade	“authentic taste of lemons”	has no lemon juice, pulp or peel in it whatsoever
Healthy Choice yoghurt	“low in fat”	high in sugar and therefore fattening

Examples like these prompted American Secretary of Health Dr. Louis W. Sullivan to claim that consumers need to be “linguists, scientists and mind readers to understand the many labels they see”. Indeed, deceptive food labelling is so extensive that many governments have made it law that companies print nutrition tables on most food packaging giving a detailed breakdown of how much fat, sugar, calories, etc. the product contains. 

Can you think of any more examples of misleading packaging from your home culture?

Covert evaluations

Covert means ‘hidden’, and this strategy is a way that writers can give you a hidden evaluation of a situation while pretending to give you the facts. For example, when a writer says that “an accurate assessment of the situation was made by the Pentagon” or that “businesses gave the president  trustworthy advice on the state of the economy” he or she is making judgments for you, telling you that an assessment is accurate or suggesting that businesses know what is best for the economy. There are always those in the media who are ready to give us the right view, the correct opinion, trustworthy advice or reliable information. Beware of such language. It indicates people are less interested in reporting what happened than in having you think as they do.

Many so-called “attitude adverbs” can also be used to make covert value judgements. What extra meaning do the attitude adverbs in bold add to each sentence? What questions would you like to ask the author to find out more about his or her opinions in each case?

1. As Sullivan rightly noted, it would have been a mistake to limit the freedom of the press following 9/11.

2. The American government has regrettably decided to limit trade with Russia.

3. The United Kingdom Independence Party has said that they will hopefully pull the UK out of Europe if they are elected.

4. Despite the recent rumours of heated arguments between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, the Labour party are apparently united in their aim to continue the war in Iraq. 

Vague language

Monica Lewinsky

In 1998, American president Bill Clinton was accused of having an affair with White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. When confronted with the accusation Lewinsky denied it swearing: “I have never had a sexual relationship with the president”. Clinton then swore that what she said was “absolutely true”. Later, she admitted to having oral sex with the president, and Clinton responded by saying that he “did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate”. It looked for a while that Clinton might have to resign, but in his defence he argued that there is a difference between having a sexual relationship and engaging in sexual acts. Later, in his address to the people on August 17, 1998, he claimed that his previous “answers were legally accurate,” and he admitted only that he had “misled people.” 

Donald Rumsfeld

As a former lawyer, Clinton knew that his initial use of the term sexual relationship was vague enough to ensure that if the real truth ever came out, he would be able to make this important distinction. Another famous example of how vague language has been exploited by politicians comes from US Secretary of State during the Iraq invasion, Donald Rumsfeld. When asked the question: “Why have American troops failed to find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?” Rumsfeld famously answered:

Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know. 

What do you think this means? If you had been at this press conference, how would you have reacted?

Homeric Values

The poet Homer is said to have lived during the eighth century BC just after the Dark Age. To him we attribute two great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which helped shape the Greek identity. For centuries, Greek youngsters grew up reciting the Homeric epics and admiring the Homeric heroes, who strove for honour and faced suffering and death with courage.

For centuries in the West, it was believed that Homer was a great poet, and that his epic tales were just that: stories with no basis in historical fact. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, archaeologists began to uncover evidence that the civilisations Homer described might actually have existed. In 1868 a German archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann claimed to have found the ancient city of Troy, location for the Iliad, on a hilltop on the Turkish coast near Istanbul. Later, he uncovered a vast walled city, a palace and a wealth of treasures at another site in the south of Greece which he claimed was the palace of Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army in the Iliad.

The significance of Schliemann’s discoveries, though undeniably dramatic, have yet fully to be explored by modern scholars, and there is no final decision on whether Homer was poet or historian. For the ancient Greeks, however, the answer would have been clear: Homer was both an individual speaking to them about their great and glorious past while simultaneously revealing their deepest thoughts, feelings, and conflicts in a few brilliant lines. For this reason, Homer's poetry became not simply a treasury of ancient history but also a vital source of moral instruction for the Greeks. Achilles and Odysseus, the two heroes of the two epics, became the great role models in traditional Greek thinking about how one should live one's life.

Homer’s Humanity

As an account of war, much of the Iliad is devoted to descriptions of combat. However, interspersed between these scenes of action and drama, Homer includes scenes of simple domesticity which serve to remind us of our shared human values. One of the most famous takes place as Trojan warrior Hector and Greek warrior Achilles prepare to do hand-to-hand combat outside the city walls. Hector is well aware that the time has come for him to fight and die and Homer includes a long scene in which Hector says a final farewell to his wife and child. Another scene takes place during a large scale battle between the Greek and Trojan armies in which two opposing soldiers discover that their grandfathers enjoyed a friendship. Laying down their weapons, they each swear to continue their ancestors’ bond.

Such depictions of humanity are typical of Homer’s style, which often lingers on the simple, sensual pleasures of being human. As one commentator observes: “Just how much of this poem is taken up with eating, drinking, storytelling, listening to music, intimate conversations, warm beds, perfumed baths, dancing, beautiful architecture and silverware—all the sensuous detail that transforms everyday events into something joyful and worthwhile.”

Strife and Conflict

As the Iliad begins, the Greeks have just destroyed a town allied to Troy. Achilles has taken a woman, Briseis as his lover but his commander Agamemnon claims her for his own. Angry with his commander, Achilles refuses to fight. It may seem odd to devote the opening scene of an epic account of war to what amounts to a petty argument, but strife and conflict are central to the Greek worldview world and play a symbolic role at the heart of the Iliad itself.

Achilles' life begins with an unsuccessful attempt to avoid strife. His parents, the goddess Thetis and the mortal Peleus, invite all the gods to their wedding except Eris, the goddess of strife. Eris, however, like the evil witch in fairy tales, attends anyway and throws out a golden apple marked, "For the Fairest." The introduction of the apple has the desired effect and the three major goddesses, Aphrodite, Hera and Athena argue over who should be allowed to keep it. In the end, they consult future prince of Troy, Paris, who at this early stage is a lowly shepherd boy. Each goddess offers him a bribe to win his favour, and in the end Paris is won over by Aphrodite’s promise to give him the most beautiful woman in the world. Unfortunately, the woman in question, Helen, is already married to Menelaus, King of the Greek city of Sparta. In helping Paris to steal Helen away from the Greeks, one can argue that it was Aphrodite who started the Trojan war. However, it was Eris the goddess of strife who originally set the story in motion.

For the Greeks, to live in the real world was to accept the inevitability of strife and conflict: to try to avoid strife was to avoid life itself. It should therefore come as no surprise that although the Iliad begins 10 years after the abduction of Helen, it nevertheless begins with another argument.

Arête, or Human Excellence

In ancient and classical Greece, a hero was something quite specific. The interest for these heroes was not the common man, but themselves. They lived for a single moment to prove their status, an instant where they could stand out from the rest. The word for this moment, in Greek, is arête, and it is perhaps the strongest and clearest value of Homeric Greek culture. Translated as "virtue" the word actually means something closer to "being the best you can be", or "reaching your highest human potential". It also has strong associations with effectiveness, or getting the job done. As Homer shows us through the two contrasting heroes of Achilles and Odysseus, intelligence and cunning as much as strength, bravery can be effective means of meeting with success. The importance of arête implies that the Greeks saw their universe as one in which human actions are of extreme importance – that the world is a place of conflict and difficulty, and human value and meaning are measured against how effective each individual is in the world.

Oh, deliver us from the virulent, pathogenicity of cliche: In praise of "Synecdoche, New York"

Last nite I had the pleasure of watching 'Synecdoche, New York' at the Univeristy of York's World Cinema Society. While I can appreciate it won't be everyone's cup of tea, it did get me reflecting on some fairly big questions about the function of abstract or surreal art.

I would stick my neck on the line and say this is primarily a self-referential flick in the sense that it takes for its subject matter the making of a piece of theatre. As such it enters into the deeper questions of the status and function of the dramatic mode.

Watching this film feels like you are swimming in a dream. Why the surrealism?

There is a qualitative difference between the randomness say of the numbers which follow the decimal point in the mathematical constant 'pi' and the theatre of the surreal. That difference is the presence of intention, a fundamentally human category. There is a pure green painting in Leeds Art Gallery that you cannot stop looking at, precisely because it has not been made by painters and decorators but by an artist of sufficient worth that their work is hung in a public space. In this way, all art is framed in that we come to it with certain fundamental assumptions, chief among which are its origin in complex human intentions and its wider social and economic value. Standing in front of the Victorian moonscapes of that same gallery, these categories are  effaced in the illusion of reality. Which explains both the origin and the function of abstract or surreal art: it arises from the need to bring to the fore these assumptions and encourage that mood of contemplation necessary to explore them.

Why the theme of doubleness?

All representational art seeks to perform the mimetic function, and in this sense is grounded in observation of the world. However, it is difficult truly to "see" when you have looked at the same thing day in day out for 37 years. As creatures of habit, our neurological hardware is so set up that the processing of repetitive and familiar stimuli migrates from the neo- to the sub-cortex, disappearing from the radar of consciousness. While this might make us very efficient machines, capable of multi-tasking without distraction, we lose a great deal in terms of the sensation of a life lived. As William Blake reminds us, we humans are perhaps at our happiest when we pause long enough to re-kindle that quality of fascination that characterised our first encounters with the world:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
(William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence", c. 1803)

There is then the very real danger that art will fail to move us. Indeed, what is a cliche but a story told once to often?

How to regain this sensation of a life lived? Well, in his essay 'Art as Technique' (1925), Soviet literary critic Viktor Shklovsky called this dulling of the senses 'habitualisation' and describes it as if it were a ravenous monster "devouring work, clothes, furniture, one's wife" and even "the fear of war". For Shklovsky, the redeeming power of art was that it allowed one to "recover the sensation of life" by imparting "the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known". "Art exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony".

Shklovsky's great theoretical contribution to art criticism was the concept of "defamiliarisation", or the representation of a slightly warped reality for the purpose of effecting us with that sensation of fascination and curiosity for a life lived. Whether the post-impressionistic brush strokes of van Gogh, Stravinsky's dissonant textures of sound, or a movie representing reality at one step removed: all these forms of art exist to deliver us from the virulent, pathogenicity of cliche and into the arms of an intimate, authentic and reactive proximity to the world.

Organising an ultralight backpacking trip. Responses to some FAQs

UL Backpacking on the HRP trail in the Pyrenees, 2012.

Today I was asked a few practical questions about how I go about organising an ultralight backpacking trip. I thought I would share the response more widely for anyone who is interested in taking up this activity. It should be mentioned that the inquiry was made in response to this kind of video on my youtube page.

How do you find these treks?

I basically like 2 kinds of environment: the high Alpine zone and the rocky limestone coastal regions of the eastern Mediterranean. As you can see from my youtube page, most of my treks are in these regions, with the majority in the Alps, the Pyrenees or Greece. There are many classic long distance treks in these areas, and I always check out the route and trip reports on the internet before I make up my mind to go.This page is especially useful.

For the alpine region, I am looking to spend as much time as possible above the tree line, with the possibility of covering about 25 km horizontally and 2000 m vertically per day. This is a good website to use to find out what long-distance alpine trails are available.

For the eastern Mediterranean, the choice is more limited. There are few long distance trails in Greece, but Kate Clow's series of books about walking in Turkey are worth exploring.

How do you navigate?

In the Alps there are many good maps you can use. However, if you are a long distance walker, you end up buying a lot of these and they are surprisingly expensive and heavy! Best I have found is to use a GPS and load the maps and waymarks onto to it before you go. A simple handheld GPS unit (like my Garmin eTrex Vista) weighs the same as a map or two actually so it makes sense.

How do you preplan everything? How do you know what kind of clothes you need or how much food/water you need?

Most alpine regions in Europe have the same weather and the same terrain for any particular time of year. So in the summer walking season no matter where you are you can expect the odd thunder storm and burning sun when up above the tree line on a clear day (suncream ESSENTIAL). For me, I walk for 10 to 12 hours a day, so I always keep moving. This means that I only really need to make sure that I have enough equipment to keep warm at night. Most days, I walk with a long sleeved synthetic baselayer, summer pants and a light rain jacket to act as a windbreaker when up high (Outdoor Research Helium Rainjacket is my current favourite: 192 grams). At the end of the day in camp. I will add a down insulating layer under my windbreaker (Montbell UL Down Jacket 218 grams) and a buff head band if I am sitting outside. But mostly, I get into my sleeping bag (Alpkit Pipedream 400, 750 grams) which has kept me toasty warm even at minus 2. That was one night in high wind at 2,700 m under a glacier and I do not think that I will ever experience anything colder than this in the summer walking season. 

Full details of my summer alpine equipment here.

One thing I should add: I do not carry a spare set of clothes. I watch the weather very carefully and always think about where the nearest shelter is. If I get stuck in bad weather, I know that I can always put up my tent, take off wet clothes, dry myself with a towel, get into my sleeping bag and sit it out.

Trekking in the European mountain ranges you are never more than half a day from some form of habitation: a refuge, a village a farm. Also, the lighter you are, the faster you can move and the more frequently you come across such places. Normally, I carry oats and sugar which I mix with water and eat for breakfast and lunch. I never carry a stove. Water is available EVERYWHERE. After all, the terrestrial half of the water cycle begins in the mountains with rainfall as well as melting snow and ice. Nevertheless, I always bring chloride tablets to purify water when I cannot see the source from which it has come. 

Almost every day I will come across a refuge or town and pick up something nice like a sandwich or cake to go. This will be my evening's treat. Naturally I tend to pig out when I find a shop: food seldom tastes so good than when you are hungry and exhausted!

More careful planning is needed in Turkey or the Moroccan Atlas which are wilder locations. Still, I have never needed to carry more than 3 days food even there.

I hope this helps to answer your questions. Just let me know if there is anything else I can help you with!

I miss the Greek soul...

I miss the Greek soul...

It is the endless openness and readiness to suffer, the strength to stand tall on the edge of an uncertain moment and mock the fates that would conspire to lock you out of experience; it is hurling yourself with the laughter of a lion into the ocean of the moment only because you refuse to stoop to a limit that you yourself have not striven to reach; and it is defiance and daring even as the enemy is bearing down, bent on your utter annihilation, the refusal ever to bend your neck to a hostile will.

There is wisdom in this, the wisdom of selflessness, of openness, of impulse, wit and cunning; and the kind of extravagant poetry which no page can contain.

Some observations on the tourist trail in South East Asia...

When I first started travelling in my early 20s, I quickly received the impression that I was somehow out of step with my fellow travellers. While the majority of my peers were following a prescribed route, connecting up the top ten sights by the most efficient means possible, I often found myself going against the grain of the human traffic: heading north when most were heading south, beginning in the middle of the tourist trail only to double back or skipping whole sections altogether with a series of long and tiresome bus rides through dusty provincial towns.

Naturally this often made life on the road extremely uncomfortable for me, but on balance, I felt that I was getting the better deal. Unlike most of my fellow travellers, my itinerary was always put together on the basis of what I felt I wanted to see and do rather than what was generally seen and done. More to the point, it was flexible enough to reflect the simple truth that the experience of travelling changes you, instilling in you new goals and interests that you would never have been able to anticipate only hours before.

But perhaps the greatest advantage of this ad hoc approach is that it allows, or perhaps requires, you to create your own narrative. Step outside of the route prescribed by your guidebook and sanctioned by the masses of earnest young men and women all moving in unison, and you soon experience the exhilirating yet terrifying truth that you are free to choose whatever bold and onward path you like. At times your mood alone will carry you forward in confidence. But far from the madding crowd, when every decision carries the weight of personal responsibility, you would do well to construct an ongoing story to provide permanent sanction to the path you have taken. For through the alchemy of storytelling, even the most haphazard and disastrous sequence of events is retroactively configured into a coherent, necessary and inevitable tale. Your present circumstances are justified as the only possible outcome, and even as you sleep you are already oriented toward tomorrow's goals. ln short, narrative has a momentum, purpose and internal logic that make it a tool well-suited to those who are forging their own path. And of course, when you eventually reach your journey's end you will emerge with a polished tale never before told.

The tourist trail in South East Asia goes something like this. Bangkok is your point of entry to the region, and from there most travellers head to northern Thailand, then east into northern Laos. From Houay Xai at the extreme north western point of Laos, you take either a bus or boat ride down the Mekong to the temple city of Luang Prabang. That box ticked, you bus down to Vang Vieng to go tubing and drink a skinful, before pitching up at the capital Ventiane where you catch a cheap flight or overnight bus to Hanoi in northern Vietnam. There, the adventurous can buy a motorbike to assist them in traversing the country north to south, or simply bus it all the way down to Ho Chi Minh city. Either way, your next destination is Cambodia and a long westward tramp through that country taking in at least Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville and Angkor Wat. After that, and if you have any money or stamina left, you can relax on Thaliand's southern islands -- but only after either a long hot bus ride or an expensive flight.

On the road in South East Asia I met so many gap year students who were undertaking just this route. Through the accumulated pressure of numerous encounters, I began to notice their most salient characteristics: early twenties, soft-skinned or bearded, vested, logoed, accessorised, loud, sociable, optimistic, but with an unfortunate tendency to talk in cliches as if these were the most poignant and original of insights. In short, they were young, wealthy and well-adjusted as I was not. And while my better half understood that their platitudes were only the result of a life lived without suffering, all that was evil in me could not help but wish them a healthy dose of what they were missing.

You might think this judgement harsh, and clearly I have written to raise a smile as much as an eyebrow. But consider for a moment how these conspicuous kids of privilege must appear in the eyes of the bus driver, the chambermaid or the waiting staff of the rural towns through which they pass en masse. How odd must it appear to them that by far the greatest number of tourists to their region have not yet drawn a salary, nevermind accumulated the personal savings necessary for long-term intercontinental travel? And in any case, is there not something unsavoury about middle-aged men and women struggling to make ends meet in a developing nation by providing tube rides to groups of footloose and well-groomed western students?

Suffice it to say that my aims in visiting South East Asia differed from the standard demographic. Having spent one month in the Himalayas, I now wanted to get intimate with the jungle, and in particular the culture and practices of some of the hill tribes still living in the remoter parts of northern Laos. Besides this, I was also interested to see those three sights of Cambodia already mentioned. The temples of Angkor are of course a must for any visitor to the region. As for Sihanoukville, my interest here lay in finding out how Cambodia was managing its potential for beach-side tourism along the lines of the Thai model, particularly in terms of the tension between short-term profiteering and long-term sustainability. With Phnom Penh my intentions were rather more idiosyncratic. Yes I wished to reflect upon the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge regime, but I also wanted to visit the city which gave birth to South East Asia's 60s surf pop scene, recently revived by one of my favourite bands, Dengue Fever.

How on earth I managed to wrap a story around such a mix, you will soon find out...

Two nights in Bangkok make a tired man humble

My experience of most Asian cities follows an established pattern. At first there is the thrill of expectation: all that humanity and culture cooking under the pressure of intense cohabitation in the heat of the tropical sun. Even on the airport shuttle bus, I still feel ready and willing to embrace the hellish traffic, the constantly unreliable public transport and the cryptic dance of bartering as a sign that here in this land, it is still possible to lead the simple, the authentic, the deregulated life.

Sooner or later though the grain of my nature asserts itself, and I am faced with the incontrovertible truth that cities drain all my energy. Naturally inclined towards observation, reflection and empathy, I sorely need downtime to process the torrent of new impressions which cities present. Without this, each looming face on a potholed pavement, each motorcycle horn or hawker's cry falls like a hammer blow on already bruised and broken skin, and slowly but surely I am beaten down into a numb and ragged stupor.

...which is pretty much how I felt when I left Kathmandu, in desperate need of some downtime among the jungled karsts and lazy rivers of northern Laos. But international airports are seldom located in sparsely populated areas of outstanding natural beauty and so my only real option was to connect from one maddening metropolis to another. Like it or not, I was headed for a layover in Bangkok and felt duty bound in spite of my city fatigue to explore its sights.

Two days is not enough to get a handle on a city and its occupants, especially if you are already battling fatigue and wading through the broiling heat and thick humidity of the early rainy season. No. The best one can do in such circumstances is to plunge into the torrent of impressions with eyes wide open in the hope that some few encounters, by virtue of their gravity, will linger long enough to aid reflection.

For my part, whenever I think of those days in Bangkok, one encounter in particular stands out as a kind of metonym affording some modest insight into Thai culture. Whether my conclusions are accurate or not, I will leave to the judgement of those who have a more profound understanding of the country and its people.

Day one in Bangkok began early with the search for some sunglasses to replace the sorry fragments of cracked plastic and super glue that my current pair had become. En route to the Golden Mount, I spy a rack of sunglasses outside a shop and cross the road to spin the display stand. As usual, my only criterion was to find a pair that were cheap enough for me to bear their loss when I eventually stood on them, as I inevitably would, yet of sufficient quality not to fall apart in a high wind.

Soon enough I found some that would do and entered the shop to pay. As I did so, two things instantly struck me, the first being the welcome embrace of the near omnipresent Bangkok air con -- ruthlessly efficient and instantly refreshing. Less welcome however was the realisation that the only other merchandise on offer here was the tackier end of the Hello Kitty range. From floor to ceiling the orange walls were full of shelves stacking the kind of kitsch and lurid polyurethane accessories that would make even the most girlie of Japanese schoolgirls wince.

There followed a moment's hesitation in which my masculinity seemed to deflate like some Hindenburg wrecked upon the thorns of Kitty's rose garden. Puffing myself up, I approached the teenage girl behind the counter who was already flashing me a mouthful of expensive corrective dental work in place of a smile. The sunglasses, she informed me, were actually on sale and 100 baht cheaper than the advertised price -- a most welcome little victory for my pocket given the countless times I had been overcharged in the past month. Sadly however I was not able fully to savour this triumph, for now that I had increased my proximity to those elaborately caged teeth I found myself staring into a set of milky blue eyes, the peculiar lustre of which seemed to suggest an origin beyond our solar system.

'Contact lenses', it suddenly dawned on me as I unfroze and handed over the note. 'Of course: nothing in this shop is real, but a comic-book homage to all that is cute and kitsch.'

But just then when I thought I had her pegged, she goes and changes shape. Raising her hands in response to my khop khun krap, she clasps them together in prayer front of her face, closes her eyes, and bows with such consummate grace and gravity that I am genuinely moved by the gesture.

Frequent visitors to Thailand will no doubt be able to state this in far better terms, but it seems to me that wrapped up in the heart of this simple encounter lies a kernel of truth about Thai culture. Time and again I saw grace and gravity cheek by jowl with a wacky exuberance and certain fondness for all things kitsch. Turn on a TV or radio at any moment in Thailand and you stand a good chance of catching either a solemn rendition of the national anthem, during which you are expected to drop what you are doing and stand to attention, or an advert in which the familiar narrative of problem - solution is punctuated by kitschy cartoon jingles. Seriously, adverts in Thailand are all muted trumpet and bugle fanfares. And if anyone should fall victim to a banana skin, you can be sure their fall from grace will be marked with a glissando upon one of those sliding whistles.

My purchase complete, I continued on my way to the Golden Mount, using my GPS to guide me through delightful old-style Bangkok neighbourhoods -- all alleyways and canals. More than once I was led to question the onward path as the device blithely urged me onward through latched iron gates and into narrow concrete canyons in which sleeping Thais lay strewn around on hammocks and mattresses, their limbs contorted as if dropped from a great height. But in the end it was a journey worth making, if only for the the sight that greeted me as I made my final approach to the temple. Near the entrance at street level, a group of kids were dressed to the nines in traditional Thai costume, even though they were karaoke-busking to what sounded like the losing entries to Latvia's quest for a song for Europe. After the events of my morning, I saw something familiar in this curious prospect, and so joined the thin crowd of listless onlookers to marvel at the wondrous juxtapositions... In the background a teenage girl in emerald Buddha green was performing a slow and elegant swan neck gesture while out in front, a fat little boy in a golden jacket bounced around the stage screaming flatly into a cheap microphone.

An encounter in my book worth more than a thousand golden Buddhas.