Patpong is Bangkok’s Red Light Dustrict, it’s London’s Soho. In the daytime it is simply a wide street between two major roads with nothing much going on. In the evening, as well as what a Thai friend describes as the ‘Hanky Panky Places’ on either side of the street, the street itself is transformed into a night market selling fake designer goods of every sort. There is also a food market with stalls and tables and chairs where you can sit and order a beer or soft drink and eat the food you’ve bought from the stalls.

Patpong is across the street from my hotel and, when I have been out with friends a in the evening, I usually pause there, sit at one of the tables, order a beer, and watch the world go by. It is one of my favourite occupations – people watching – and there are plenty of people, locals and tourists, to watch in Patpong.

The other evening as I watched it occurred to me how visually prejudiced I am. There was a middle aged couple who walked towards me and as I observed them I knew they were right wing, bigoted, disagreeable and probably American. I thought I could tell all that from what they looked like – both were overweight, she in inappropriately short shorts and a low cut top that showed her midriff, certainly dyed hair and a down turned mouth. He was in shorts too and wearing a baseball cap back to front. I could tell they disapproved of everything and everyone.

As they passed my table he said something to her, not in English. Her face lit up and for a moment she looked beautiful. She took his hand, he laughed, they went to the fake Gucci handbag stall and bargained cheerfully with the stall holder. They were not the people I had decided they were at all.

Then there was the beautiful young man who sat, with his back to me, at a table in front of me and to the right. He spent his time examining his face in the mirror of his camera. He inspected his skin for spots and found none. He smoothed his eyebrows with a finger and slightly rearranged his hair. He examined his jawline and seemed satisfied by what he saw. I knew he was a totally self absorbed narcissistic young man.

And then a frail elderly couple came to sit at the table next to him. The table directly in front of me. The young man leapt up to help them with the chairs. He called a waiter on their behalf and then he patiently listened to them, total strangers, as they asked him questions about what to do and where to go in Thailand. I was wrong again.

I realised, on reflection, that of course we all make judgements based on what we see. And so we should. It is when I make the negative, condemnatory judgements that I’m in danger. I remember a priest saying to me once that it is not the prejudice that is the problem. The problem is when we cease to allow that we may be wrong.

As well as my daily swim of 500 meters or so I try to keep up with my steps – minimum a modest 3,000 a day.

Of Tuesday’s 4,717 steps 900 were acquired doing the ritual triple circumabulation, a wian thian, in Bangkok at Wat Phra Chetuphon, popularly known as Wat Pho. It was Makha Bucha Day, a Buddhist festival celebrating the spontaneous coming together of 1,250 of the Lord Buddha’s disciples who were then taught, ordained as monks and sent out to spread his teaching.

Before the first step I took off my shoes as is the custom. It always reminds me of the injunction to Moses before the burning bush, ‘Take off your shoes for the place on which you stand is holy ground.’ Indian and Sri Lankan Christians often slip off their sandals before going up bare foot to receive Holy Communion. Be that as it may, I then set off, bare foot, for my three times around the great shrine at the heart of Wat Pho.

I was with two friends, both Buddhist, one of whom had been a monk for many years. He reminded me that we had first met thirty years ago when he was a novice monk. He is now married with two daughters. We were each holding incense sticks, a candle and a lotus flower which together symbolise the journey from darkness to light. The recurrence of symbols across religions always touches me. Incense, candles, flowers are common to many.

The number three is also very important in Buddhism as it is in Christianity. While I was doing my steps on Tuesday in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit my Buddhist friends may have been meditating on Buddhism’s Three Marks of Existence (impermanence, suffering, non-self) or the Three Root Evils (greed, hatred, delusion.) Or they may not. I didn’t ask and at dinner later at a noodle stall on a bridge over a canal we didn’t do theology but reminisced over old times.

Incidentally each circuit of the temple at Wat Pho was for me 300 steps but I don’t put too much store by that. It was the aspect of pilgrimage or journey that was symbolised by what so many of us were doing at Wat Pho that moved me. That I was bare foot, feeling the heat of the marble, made me very aware of my connection with the physical world.

Pilgrimage is a common practice across the religions. I like to think that my few steps at Wat Pho take their place alongside those who travel to Mecca and Jerusalem and Lourdes and Varanasi and Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury and wherever and whenever people go knowing there is more to discover and that we have not yet arrived.

They Almost Spoilt My Evening

It is almost a week ago that I flew from Bangkok to board the Seabourn Encore for my cruise from Hong Kong to Singapore. The memory of that day is beginning to fade.

The flight from Bangkok was awful. The departure time of 3:20 in the morning was my choice. I must have been mad. At Suvarnabhumi Airport I was in the longest queue I’ve ever seen in any airport. Economy class. My own choice.

I asked an official, ‘Why does everyone want to go to Hong Kong Kong at 3:20 am?’ They don’t. They were queueing for Guangzhou. He helped me find the right desk. No queue. The seat was fine but I was not.

I’m old. I like my comfort. I was unhappy: ‘Why isn’t someone looking after me?’ Space tight, sleep snatched, I survived.

Arriving at  6:50 a.m I stagger along walkways. Next on to and off a train but still not at immigration; and when I am it’s all mechanical, electronic, high-tech. It all worked perfectly well. I found that even more irritating.

Out into the world. Time to fill in. They don’t want me at Ocean Terminal until midday so I breakfast at a Japanese Ramen place. The waiter takes me by the hand and settles me down and organises my luggage. He plugs my hearing aid charger into something somewhere and brings lemon and honey tea, a glass of warm water and then noodles and pork gyoza. He almost improves my mood: Almost.

Next a taxi to Ocean terminal; except it’s not. It’s the ferry terminal. The driver doesn’t know Ocean Terminal. No one knows Ocean Terminal.  Even when I go inside to level one, then level two, they don’t know and I don’t know.

Back at the taxi. I refuse to pay until I am at the Ocean Terminal. I go through all my papers. Hong Kong Ocean Terminal. No address, No one knows.

A stranger types into his mobile phone. In English or Chinese I don’t know. And there it is. With a map. He shows it to the driver. They talk and nod and smile. Off we go.

Check in takes two hours. Group one. Group two. On board to the Grand Salon. Visas are required for Cambodia! We have to show ourselves in person. We’re not in Cambodia for another week but we cannot sail until checked. Where is my suitcase? I did not watch to see it labelled. It may be left behind. It has’t been. It is delivered to my suite at 6.15. Everything has taken far too long.  

To dinner, early. I am by the window. My view is a blank wall of the Hong Kong Ocean Terminal. Everything is reasonably familiar, the restaurant and my corner table. Yet somehow it’s not. This has been a dreadful twenty four hours; horrible, terrible, awful.

There is a couple at a nearby table. The man turns and says,

“You’re alone. Would you like to join us?”

And I must reply.

“I am feeling sorry for myself. Do you really want to spoil my evening?”

We smile and laugh and they leave me to the full enjoyment of my bad mood.

A thought for today, attributed to Gustav Mahler: ‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes but of keeping the flame alive.’

Last Sunday after mass at the Catholic Cathedral in Bangkok I met three friends, two of them English the other Australian, for lunch. I mentioned that I was particularly struck by a paragraph in a piece by Bishop Erik Varden printed on the front of the Order of Service.

I had never heard of Bishop Varden. It turned out than one of my friends had met him briefly at a concert at the Wigmore Hall in London just three weeks before. The other had had dinner with him in Norway a month or so ago. The piece had been chosen by the Australian, a priest who had presided at the mass.

The coincidence does not affect the importance or not of the piece of writing. However I never dismiss coincidence as ‘mere’. So here is that small part of Bishop Varden’s writing that I noted and was in some way endorsed by those who had met the man who wrote it.

The piece was entitled, The Pain of ‘Why’. The second paragraph read:

A secular logic tells us that we ought not to suffer; and that if we do it is unfair. This can make us angry and bitter. We think things ought to be okay. When they’re not we feel we have been cheated. The Christian narrative is different. It sets out from the conviction that things in the world are not okay. God became man to heal our nature from within. The New Testament tells us that Christ healed the world, not by some wonder remedy, but by suffering through our wounds , investing them with his grace in love, making them glorious. Even death is relieved of its terror. Experiences that seem to us, humanly speaking, as dead ends reveal themselves to be passages, open doors, ways forward.