Babylon the Great

[Oliver2]

Last night I chanced upon a distressing Youtube clip of a crumbling and empty Boyztown. All that it needed was tumble- weed to mirror a Sergio Leone spaghetti western.

And then an old memory hit me. In 1995, on one of my early visits, I was in Panorama in the late afternoon when a deranged falang appeared in front of us and started haranguing us in Biblical terms. " All this," he said pointing to my favourite bars, "all this will soon be gone. The time is coming. It will fall!" And other inanities. Eventually, another customer told him leave. Not in those words of course. I laughed then but no longer.

My next thought was of the Biblical story of Belshazzar's Feast and the Fall of Babylon, which I, as a pious Sunday School student, knew well. Remember "the Writing on the Wall ?" God's message to Belshazzar: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." And the subsequent destruction of a mighty city. That phrase has stayed with us.

Well, you can see where I'm going with the writing on the wall; we've all being seeing that for years. Written not by a deity but by changing social, and economic circumstances. Now given the coup de grace by Covid.

And then a final thought. Babylon may have been " a wicked city". The empire may well have been bloodthirsty but it had its virtues; arts, science, mathematics, agricultural experiment. In short, it was, sort of, civilised. A lot of learning died with its destruction.

Our fanatical preacher may have seen Boyztown's sexual license (or more likely imagined it) but our Pattaya Babylon gave many of us a particular source of pleasure - something that had been denied to some of us until our arrival.

Along with the casualties, and I know there were many, there were also young Thai men who benefitted enormously from their times there, attaining life-styles unimaginable before they saw Pattaya.

And I think of one in particular, now nearly thirty-eight, ensconced on the farm of which he'd always dreamt, with all the mod cons he missed as a boy, and two beautiful dogs. to love.

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