Advertise here from only 40 baht per week
to hull
and back
Mags Meanderings:
From Som Tam
To Mushy Peas
suck it up!
A word of caution for any expats who are planning on
returning to the UK in the near future. You may want to
ask family or friends to snap up a new powerful vacuum
cleaner for you pending your arrival back home. Because
you will be returning to a land where - from September
1st - vacuum cleaners of over 1600 watts will no longer
be manufactured or imported.
One of the great things about life in Thailand is that
carpets are surplus to requirements. Unless you really
have a thing about them it is much more practical to go
with tiled, or even teak wood flooring. A quick sweep
with a cheap broom, and a few swipes with a string mop
are all that is needed to keep floors clean.
Indeed wood and laminate floorings have taken off big
style in recent years in the UK, but good hardwood
is too expensive here for most people, and laminate
doesn’t wear well when subjected to frequent washing.
In addition to which some of us who live in first floor
flats (or apartments) aren’t allowed hard flooring due
to the noise factor. Which is fine by me - in this climate
carpets are more cosy, and as luck would have it I had
to replace my vacuum cleaner last month anyway - with
a new super charged model.
So why the pendng ban on high powered cleaners?
Yet another European Union directive, which aims to
reduce the consumption of power and thereby help to
save the planet.
In a political climate which is already turning against
EU membership this one really takes the biscuit. We can
tolerate straight cucumbers and recycling bins. We can
even live with the excess food packaging which helps to
fill our recycling bins. But taking away our super suction
Hepa filtered dust busters could be the final straw. No
doubt domestic goddesses all over the UK will vote for
UKIP, (the UK Independence Party, who’s only policy so
far is to get us out of Europe.)
It all brought back a distant memory of life - and cleaning
rituals - in Thailand. At the turn of the Millenium a Dutch
couple who owned the Pattana Guest House tipped me
off about a stock of roller mop buckets on sale in HuaHin
Cheap room for rent
from just 350 baht
0915094729 Th/Eng 0805626735 Swe/Eng
Soi 94 (1st left after 7-11)
Shopping Mall. This was indeed good news. The string
mops are fine, but my ladies who cleaned used ordinary
buckets for the job, and had to wring out the mops by
hand all the time. A roller bucket would surely make life
a little easier, especially on their hands.
So off I went to the Mall. With hindsight I should have
realised the error of my ways when the lady on the
checkout asked me what the strange looking item was
for. But undeterred I bore it home, and proceeded to
give a training session on its’ use.
To be fair to her, MamaSan did make the right noises and
conceded that it was indeed a great invention. She even
tried to persuade the other girls to use it - or at least I think
she did. But in the end it proved to be a technological
step too far. Clearly the old manual wringing out ways
were the best, and I should have invested in supplies of
staff hand cream instead.
If this weeks word sounds painful, it’s because it probably
was. ‘Castrato’ was the term for a male singer who was
castrated before puberty so that he kept a soprano or
alto voice. Nowadays budding singing stars only have
to sacrifice themselves to the judges on TV talent shows.
17
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