Note from Bangkok

Big Brother Gerald writes that he's in Bangkok! Timing, huh! And they've just declared a State of Emergency and he can't leave because they've shut down the airports.

Honestly, Gerald has a gift for these things, forever turning up in countries just before stuff happens. But he's always alright and I'm counting on that this time too.

Actually, I could tell you a great many funny stories about stuff that's happened to Gerald on his travels, only I won't because he definitely wouldn't like it.

However, I will tell you one because this is a Baby Jane story:

Many years ago, Baby Jane was traveling around Turkey with a gaggle of Kiwi nurses, when they heard there had been a massive earthquake in Nepal, and so, like good caring Kiwis always do, and inspired by their very own Sir Edmund Hillary, they immediately flew up to see what they could do to help ... and the old Air India plane they were traveling on dropped two engines and the trip was unbelievably fraught with the plane within inches of the mountains and within seconds of crashing, leaving all of them with post-traumatic stress disorder, terrified of air travel, and with the conviction that god has a very strange sense of irony.

Anyway, the nurses finally rock up into Katmandu where folks are glad to see them and they're told they have to register as volunteers at X - whereever - and thusly they turn up to discover there's already a whole pile of volunteers, and the fellow organising them ... "That looks like my brother" Baby Jane says to the others. "Dun't be sully. Whut wud ya brutha be dun hua!" say the other nurses. "Oh, hi Jane!" says the guy in charge, totally casual and, like, not at all surprised. And lo and behold, it's Gerald.

Turns out, unbeknownst to any of us, he'd been white water rafting on the Arun River - the doctor on an expedition that was the first ever film made by that Mark guy who's now Executive Producer and creator of "The Survivor Series" - when they stopped off for a scheduled night in a local village ... only to discover everyone in the village was dead and being torn apart by wild dogs (which never made it into the finished film, by the way, which shows Mark Whoevers remarkable good taste.) The sherpas with them had been saying all day "Something is wrong with the water. It doesn't usually behave like this." but the rest of them, all on the water, hadn't even noticed the earthquake.

Anyway, Gerald, as a doctor who, as is so rarely done these days, had taken the Hypocratic Oath, felt obliged to help so had left the Expedition and walked/hitched through the night to Katmandu, and, when he got there, realised no one was co-ordinating the relief effort and so just took charge.

That's my brother. But he's a lot older now and so I hope he doesn't attempt to "step up to the plate" in Bangkok. Keep your head down, Gerald! And stay away from anyone in a yellow T-shirt. No wait, everyone there wears yellow T-shirts!

Well, at least he's not in Mumbai.