East of Croydon

by Sue Perkins

  Q: You are producing a Reality Medieval Re-Enactment and Jousting Show. During filming, one of the contributors is gored by a jousting pole (non-serious). This footage, however, was crucially not captured on film. Do you:

  (a) Ask the injured party if they would mind recreating the accident, only this time with the cameras rolling?

  (b) Show the aftermath of the accident and explain what happened in voiceover?

  (c) Recast your contributor and re-shoot the jousting scene?

  Silly, isn’t it? However, I did learn a few things – such as getting an injured person to be re-stabbed by an outsized knitting needle is not the right answer. That’s why I’m not a producer. I’m just here for the jazz-hands, folks.

  I’m digressing – but, hey, you’re familiar with that by now.

  So. I’m in a cashew forest, surrounded by the women of the Kreung, all pointing frantically towards their breasts and shouting at me. This carries on for some time before it dawns on me what’s going on.

  ME: Oh, I see! You want another English lesson!

  An image flashes into my mind. I am with the director general. He is crying. I am crying. Bulldozers begin demolishing New Broadcasting House as we weep in each other’s arms.

  I’d better check I’m right before I continue.

  ME: These?

  I pop an index finger on each nipple, just for emphasis.

  They murmur.

  ME: You want to know the English for these?

  The entire gang nod vigorously in agreement.

  ME: THEY’RE BOOBS!

  I realize this may have come across as too gleeful a response. I try again, this time at a more appropriate pitch.

  ME: They’re boobs.

  ‘Pooooobs,’ reply the Kreung, in an awed unison. ‘Poooooobs.’ They sound not dissimilar to the aliens at the Pizza Planet Restaurant in Toy Story.

  KREUNG: Poooooobs! Pooooobs!

  ME: Yes, that’s right. Excellent.

  If I’d thought that the anatomy lesson was over then, boy, was I in for a surprise. On learning the correct word for boobs, Mrs Pipe proceeded to bring her hands down below her waist, and start manically pointing at her crotch.

  ME: Oh, God.

  There was a crunch of dry leaves as Matt moved towards me, giving me a salutary reminder that the next few minutes of my life were being committed to film.

  At this point, in this situation, most normal people would have said ‘Vagina’, and that would be that. Job done. Not me. I am never knowingly under-thought. Why answer spontaneously when you can spend hours, even days, painstakingly analysing and angsting over the minutiae?

  Here’s what my brain made of that simple request:

  SUBCONSCIOUS: Well, the first word that comes to mind is vagina.

  CONSCIOUS: That’s rather clinical, isn’t it? This isn’t a clinical environment. These women are women of the world, they’re savvy. They need something more colloquial.

  SUBCONSCIOUS: But it’s the obvious word …

  CONSCIOUS: You’re not thinking of your audience.

  SUBCONSCIOUS: What?

  CONSCIOUS: Think! Vagina is SO BBC4 and we’re going out on BBC2 at 9 p.m.

  SUBCONSCIOUS: God, I hadn’t thought of that.

  CONSCIOUS: Plus, you’ve got to factor in that certain units of sound, or phonemes …

  SUBCONSCIOUS: I know what a phoneme is. Don’t patronize me.

  CONSCIOUS: Certain sounds don’t travel well. For instance, in Cambodia, the V phoneme is often made into a W.

  SUBCONSCIOUS: Oh, OK. That’s a good point. So ‘vagina’ will sound like …

  BOTH: Wagina.

  CONSCIOUS: Mmm. That’s no good.

  SUBCONSCIOUS: Wagina. Perfect if Wayne Sleep and Angelina Jolie ever get together, though. Hang on, I know what word you can use …

  CONSCIOUS: What?

  SUBCONSCIOUS: C—

  CONSCIOUS: No!

  SUBCONSCIOUS: Why not? Hard Cs work well in Khmer.

  CONSCIOUS: Don’t go there.

  SUBCONSCIOUS: You’re post watershed!

  CONSCIOUS: I could probably say it. Once – and if there was a continuity announcement warning before the programme. But who wants that? It’s a divisive word.

  SUBCONSCIOUS: Fanny?

  CONSCIOUS: It’s so BBC2.

  SUBCONSCIOUS: Twat?

  CONSCIOUS: Harsh. Feels too pejorative. Reminds me of teen comedies of the late nineties or mockney cop shows of the early 2000s.

  SUBCONSCIOUS: Minge.

  CONSCIOUS: Too youth. Bit BBC3.

  SUBCONSCIOUS: Foof? Minnie?

  CONSCIOUS: What? Is this CBeebies?

  SUBCONSCIOUS: Tuppence?

  CONSCIOUS: I’m not listening to you now.

  And so it went on. Welcome to my Vagina Mind Palace, where all words for the female anatomy are stored; technical, medical, and just plain colloquial. If you’re interested in my list, it ran as follows:

  BBC1

  (broad brushstrokes, mass appeal)

  – Crotch

  – Privates

  BBC2

  (strong content, still approachable)

  – Duff

  – Bonnet

  – Front bottom

  – Noo-noo

  BBC3

  (more urban, youthful, and direct)

  – Gash

  – Clunge

  – Minge

  – Nipper

  – Parking lot

  – Growler

  – Kid shitter

  BBC4

  (serious-minded, detailed, historical)

  – Nature’s Tufted Treasure

  – Daisy Den

  – Mrs Fubb’s Parlour

  – The Ivory Gate

  – Cupid’s Warehouse

  – Chuck Hole

  – Chapel of Ease

  – Bluebeard’s Closet

  While I wrangled with this meaty minefield, the Kreung women waited patiently. Mrs Pipe kept rhythmically pointing to her genitals by way of an aide-memoire, as if somehow I might have forgotten the word they needed translating.

  I’d just settled on either ‘love-box’ or ‘fun hatch’ (inclusive, warm, with a hint of anatomical rigour) when I realized I’d made the classic presenter mistake. I had failed to be Nations and Regions inclusive. Here’s me with my metropolitan media elite mind-set having not even considered ‘quim’ (possibly derived from the Welsh cwm, meaning ‘hollow’ or ‘valley’) or ‘gee’ (from the ancient Irish Síle na Gig) or –

  ‘FUD,’ I blurted out. I don’t know why. I was thinking of Scotland. I am always thinking of Scotland.

  ‘FUD,’ said the ladies, mesmerized. ‘FUD. FUD. Fud, fud, fud, fud, fud.’

  And so it was set in stone. There endeth the lesson. You’ve learned numbers one through to ten, boobs and fud. You can now negotiate most social situations in the United Kingdom. Job done.

  The ladies resumed their walk, intoning, every other step, ‘FUD’. It became like a mantra. Two steps, ‘FUD’, another two steps, ‘FUD’.

  At the end of the long boulevard of cashews was an open, undulating space, loosely bounded by makeshift wooden fencing. It took a while to realize it was their vegetable garden. There was no Western cultivation here, no orderly lines of brassicas, legumes and alliums. This was the haphazard bounty of Mother Nature.

  ‘What’s this? Ooh, what’s this? Oh, is that …?’ I blethered, like a six-year-old, while the adults wandered silently through the patch, plucking shoots from the dry soil and throwing them into their panniers. I followed behind, occasionally prodding at a rogue stem.

  ME: What’s this?

  A translator had now miraculously appeared, called, no doubt, by Claire – who had started to despair at the direction the film was taking. We’d learned a word for vagina, and it was still only 10 in the morning. Who knows what vocabulary we’d get to by midday.

  I stumbled over a plant.

  ME: What’s this?

  TRANSLATOR:
That? It’s garlic.

  What a muppet – I couldn’t even recognize garlic here. I fired it backwards into my pannier. A shout went up behind me.

  ME: And this?

  TRANSLATOR: It’s lemongrass.

  I plucked it and tossed it over my shoulder. A second shout went up.

  ME: What’s this?

  TRANSLATOR: Galangal.

  I threw again. Yet another shout.

  It took me ten minutes to connect the act of throwing the veg into the basket and the cry coming from behind me – but when I did, I turned round to see Mrs Pipe covered with mud and dust from where I had mis-aimed my harvest.

  She laughed. And all of them followed. All of them. They just laughed.

  I retired to the edge of the vegetable garden and watched Seebagh and her mates clawing at the dirt, gathering their food for the night. It was clear that things were very different for women here. It starts in childhood, of course. Kreung girls are empowered to love their bodies and to enjoy sex as part of romantic love. Their fathers even build them ‘love huts’ once they hit puberty, and they can choose whether or not to let boys come in to visit them. They are in charge of who is allowed to touch them. Men are taught from birth to respect the agency and choices of women. Sexual violence is rare, rape is unheard of, and couples don’t divorce. Of all the places I visited in South East Asia, this felt the most open and tolerant. I didn’t feel afraid. Gangs of men didn’t follow me around, staring at me. Judging me. For the first time in a long time, I could relax and be myself.

  It was time for my end-piece to camera. Time to sum up this beautiful, fragile place and its wonderful people.

  ‘Speed,’ said Matt.

  As I opened my mouth, a gentle breeze hit my face, bringing with it two distinct sounds. First Seebagh, singing as she gathered up the long stalks of lemongrass, and then, more faint at first, but growing in intensity, the crunch of metal teeth chewing through forest. Men were coming. Men with chainsaws. I wanted to explode with the pain of it all.

  When I’m doing a sum-up, I try to be in the moment, to simply say what I feel – but sometimes, at the end of a film, you need a little structure in your head, a peg on which to hang the odd thought or feeling. During my reading on the region, I’d come across a quote from a former American ambassador, Joseph Mussomeli. When I came to speak, that was what came out of my mouth because, borrowed as it was, it felt like the truest thing to say.

  ‘Cambodia is the most dangerous place on earth. You will fall in love with it and it will break your heart.’

  I loved it. I couldn’t wait to leave. I hated it. I can’t wait to go back.

  It took nearly eight hours to get to the airport, but even inside the cool neutrality of the terminal I could feel Cambodia hanging over me, like a curse. I sat on a plastic moulded chair waiting for our flight to be called, and rang a friend.

  ‘Some places stick,’ she said. ‘They just hang off you. And over time, the heaviness weighs you down. You need to shake it off. You need to come home, to the things you love.’

  And I did come home. I came home to find my darling dog Pickle was dying.

  LAOS

  * * *

  15. The Lost Souls

  The piece to camera at the start of a new film is always hard to get right. Essentially, you’re listing the stereotypical expectations of a place you’ve not been to yet, in the hope that, once you arrive, your preconceptions might get shaken and redefined. Thankfully for my viewers, the Mekong greets Laos at the top of a large mountain, where it roars down the side in a furious, beautiful waterfall. This meant that most of my on-screen banalities were, thankfully, swallowed up by the sound of the torrent.

  Laotians are famously mellow folk. Some say the Lao PDR (People’s Democratic Republic) actually stands for Please Don’t Rush. Their favourite phrase ‘bor pen nyang’, even translates as ‘no worries’ or ‘no problem’.

  If ‘no worries’ is the mantra of Laos, then, on reflection, our crew motto would be: Don’t order the milkshake.

  South East Asia is home to many culinary gems – green papaya salad, pad Ga pao, laap, pho – but despite their French colonial past, they’re not big on cow-juice. Because we Westerners love a bit of dairy, local restaurant owners try their very best to replicate creamy classics for the tourist population. Sometimes however, their very best gives you e.coli.

  Next tip, and this one is key: if you go ahead, regardless of my warnings, and order the strawberry milkshake and it happens to taste of strawberries and fish, stop drinking right there. Just at the point where the taste-buds are going ‘Mmm, that’s wonderfully creamy – but is that a back-note of mackerel I’m detecting?’ that’s the time to put the glass down and walk away. Always remember: hope is not enough of a reason to continue drinking something that tastes of something other than it should.

  I speak from bitter experience, because the first thing Matt, Olly and I like to do on arriving at a new place is to get food poisoning. En masse. You know, get it all over and done with.

  That night, we chose to have a drink in a spit-and-sawdust bar on the riverbank, decked with a neon sign that intermittently fizzed on and off. From far away, it looked magical. But, then, so does the Death Star – and you wouldn’t necessarily want to order from its cafeteria.

  At the entrance way, a sumo-sized lady was standing at a large wooden block, steel cleavers in each hand, alternating left and right as she pounded up and down on a pile of raw chicken flesh. She was making the famed national dish, laap. As she hurled the blades downwards, I noticed several beetles and the odd mosquito getting minced alongside the meat. Still, it’s all protein, I suppose – and I’d long since given up being fussy.

  We sat down and browsed the laminated menus, greasy with a thousand fingerprints. I noticed a cluster of black flies now milling around the work surface. In retrospect, they were obviously returning to what was a habitual breeding ground. We plumped for the strawberry milkshakes, but it was only after placing the order that I noticed the fridge door was hanging off its hinges, the warm air wafting within.

  The first gulp was as refreshingly rich and filling as you could want. It was only then, after that initial mouthful, that I registered the somewhat piscatorial twang. Matt noticed it, Olly too, both smacking their lips up and down in the vain hope their initial perceptions had been wrong. And yet, despite the oceanic after-burn, we carried on drinking. After all, what was the worst that could happen?

  Bor pen nyang.

  Bor pen nyang.

  The sun started to melt into the river, casting an eerie yellow light across the water. We retired for the night. Home was, that evening, a row of wooden shacks on jetties connected, like fairy lights, one to another. From every window, all you could see was the river. How romantic. In reality, it was like being individually spoon-fed to the mosquitoes. I was in the Malaria Suite. Olly and Matt were either side in the Chikungunya and Dengue Rooms respectively. Because each pod was connected, every step you took, every move you made, the entire structure rocked from side to side, like a creaky boat. If Olly got up for a wee, my bed vibrated. If Matt leant over to switch his light off I felt a faint tremor in the walls.

  My stomach had begun to feel decidedly sour, but I decided not to dwell on it. Instead I got into bed, turned the lights out and tried to sleep it off.

  I was woken at around 3 a.m. by a rhythmic juddering coming from my left. Matt’s room. What could it be? Minutes later, it was accompanied by a lurching sensation coming from the right. Olly. The boys had started vomiting, and I was party to each and every heave. The floor shook violently with each motion.

  This was shortly followed by a more subtle shimmering sensation. I figured it was the aftershock from a chunder further down the row, possibly emanating from Lucy’s room.fn1

  Then it was my turn. Without warning, I was violently sick. The lampshade fell to the floor. I was sick again. My mobile phone slipped off the bed. Now we were all at it, every heave creating ripples alon
g the row, until it felt like we were all on some kind of giant puker’s Power Plate.

  Three hours later, I returned to bed with the taste of river fish still heavy on my palate. Ten minutes after that and the light fitting started vibrating as poor Fred, two doors down, stepped up to the bowl.

  Fred was our assistant producer and is the nicest man on earth: mild-mannered, polite – the quintessential English gentleman. Weighing in at around ten stone, he was also the lightest in the group, very much in the helium-weight category. Fred got really sick. In fact, he was green for a week. He woke up green. He went to bed green. He spent his days meeting and greeting hill tribes green. For some of these remote communities, this was the first time they’d ever met a Westerner, so they assumed, after seeing Fred’s nauseous chops, that we were all that colour. They seemed genuinely surprised when some pink folk followed on behind.

  What made it worse was that most of this episode was filmed on the water – day after day spent on boats, rocking in the intense heat, with only one basic toilet between us. Poor Fred. Poor bloody Fred.

  It turns out that television doesn’t care whether you’ve been up all night rocked by the vigour of your neighbour’s regurgitations. Television has a schedule to follow. And so, at seven o’clock the next morning, we began our journey to Si Phan Don and the Four Thousand Islands, a river archipelago where the Mekong is at its widest. The water winds its way round thousands of little islands (hence the name), some disappearing and reappearing with the rainy and dry seasons, others inhabitable all year round. This place, this little paradise, is the Asia that people hold in their imagination, that they dream of when they buy their tickets east, with its promise of soft skies, white sands, and an easy pace of life.

  It’s true, everything happens slowly here. Your muscles relax, your senses dull, all sense of urgency leaves the building. Everything in the world achieves a sudden and perfect perspective.