Happy Holidays, dear reader! In the dying embers of 2018, it is a good time to look back to consider all our achievements and "life lessons" (what we used call "failures") over the last 12 months.
It's also a good time to look inward, to see how one has changed in the short space of a year.
I had a recent epiphany in that regard I'd like to tell you about.
Last Saturday night, had you been strolling through trendy Paradise Park shopping complex around 7pm, you would have spotted your columnist enjoying a pizza washed down with a screwdriver or two at a popular restaurant chain on the ground floor.
Looking bewildered.
Skip any consternation over the screwdriver part, dear reader. I'd been exercising prior to the dinner, so I deserved it, and while pizza aficionados may point out, pedantically, that there is no "screwdriver" on either Pizza Hut or Pizza Company's menus, I stand by what I said. The waitress had no reason to believe the clear odourless liquid in my runner's flask was anything but water.
I looked bewildered because I had one of those moments where you suddenly stop and realise a change has crept up on you without your even noticing.
I glanced down at my plate and saw it: I was eating my pizza with a knife and fork.
How did that happen? When did that happen?
There was a time when I would have looked upon another person eating like that with scorn.
"Look at that big, bald, though strangely attractive Western guy over there eating his pizza with a knife and fork," I would have prodded my eating companion at a nearby table, having seen me. "What a dork."
"Dork" is polite. There are other words I would have used to describe me, sitting in my running gear, sipping on a spiked orange juice as I foppishly sent triangles of Meat Lover's Pizza into my mouth via a knife and fork.
But that isn't the half of it.
A year ago a 24-hour KFC opened at the end of my soi. I took my 21-year-old niece there to celebrate the end of her university exams. Without thinking -- absolutely no cognitive process whatsoever -- I ate friend chicken using a knife and fork.
A knife and fork at KFC?
Imagine doing that in my hometown of Brisbane, Australia, when I was growing up. I would have been bashed up and not just by the bullies. Yet I did it, in full view of everybody. I sat there primly, plunging my fork into pieces of breast meat while my niece explained, in perhaps a little too fine a detail, each question on her final test. I sat there nodding, sipping on an orange juice and clear odourless liquid.
This is not the first time I have been seriously disturbed by my table habits in Thailand.
When did I begin not giving a second glance at toilet rolls on dinner tables? It certainly upset me in the early days. After getting over the initial shock of something so inextricably bound to anal discharges right there next to my green curry and tom yum gai, I deluded myself into thinking it was there for another reason.
I believed that because Thai food was so spicy, one sometimes had to run quickly to the bathroom, and so the friendly, practical Thais kept a roll of toilet paper on the table in case of sudden emergency.
How young and foolish I was.
Nowadays I don't give it a second thought. Once I even purchased a light-pink-and-lime-green plastic toilet paper holder for the table. Was I on drugs at the time?
Did you know there are entire factories on the outskirts of Bangkok churning out such tableware? The West has tea cosies; Thailand has toilet paper cosies, and indeed, it may well be a hub for such a product.
But back to the knife and fork. It took a while for Thais to get used to Western cutlery. Back in the dark old days, when a Thai was presented with a steak along with a knife and fork, I had to shield my eyes.
He or she would pick up the fork with the right fist and stab it into the steak. Think of the shower scene from Psycho. Then, with that fist and fork riveted to the spot, he would pick up the knife with his left hand and cut the steak into little pieces. Miss Manners would have had kittens; there were times I myself had to excuse myself and go to the bathroom.
You could never have eaten like that when I was a kid.
My parents drilled my siblings and me on how to eat properly.
"Imagine if the Queen of England came unexpectedly to dinner here," my mother would threaten us as she showed us the correct way to use a soup spoon, pushing it toward the back of the bowl, because Lizzie apparently feels more comfortable doing it that way.
We weren't even allowed to turn our forks upside down to scoop up peas. They had to be squashed onto the top of the fork. Another Buckingham Palace edict, I figured.
There were non-cutlery rules, too. Absolutely no television during dinner time, with the exception of the ABC Weather Report my father just had to watch. That portion of the news somehow didn't adversely affect one's digestion, or table manners, or unscheduled royal visits.
And the most bizarre of all: Don't sing at the table.
I thought this rule was just another brush stroke on the neurotic canvas of our family portrait, until I learned there were other families who instigated this rule as well.
What's so terrible about singing at the dinner table? A song would have been a welcome diversion from the fights our family had when we were forced to sit down together. Fights were allowed, but the latest Abba hit? Never.
Thailand has had a great influence on me, opening me up to a whole new world of dining rules and regulations.
I can now drink chilled red wine without any consternation. I have forgotten the taste of scotch whiskey on its own -- without ice and half a bottle of soda water mixed in.
In restaurants, a waitress fills up my beer glass with ice cubes. Ice in beer is enough to get you murdered in north Queensland. But this is Thailand, and here is an admission: I like my beer with ice now. I know, I know; why don't I just go get a dress and parasol?
Manners, like culture and customs, often don't travel. I admire the Thais for the practicality of their eating habits. I don't quite get how eating pizza with a knife and fork is more practical, but it is a little less messy, and Thais are into looking good in all scenarios.
Thailand that taught me that I can still appear well-bred despite forward-spooning my soup, or watching the whole damn news report, not just the weather, with my pad Thai on my lap.
Thank you, Thailand, for making me more worldly and tolerant. And just to prove it, tonight as I plonk a toilet roll down on the dinner table and tuck into my som tam and sticky rice with my bare hands, my voice will resonate throughout the dining room:
"I've been cheated by you since I don't know when ..."
I only pray Queen Elizabeth doesn't ring the doorbell.
