A Bangkok dairy diary

I was never very conscious of dairy in my diet until I came here. I suppose that might have been because I hadn’t given it a second thought. But when you’re served condensed milk with your tea it’s difficult not to fantasize about cow’s milk (skimmed, please) as an essential ingredient in your diet.

The Thai diet doesn’t include dairy products though thankfully - as I can’t imagine tea without milk in it - it’s purchasable in local supermarkets in all its variation: fat, semi and skinny. Condensed milk is popular over here; it lasts forever and nothing is too sweet for a Thai tooth. As time has passed, I’ve become more tolerant and if I’m out and about I’ll shrug and pour a tiny bit of condensed milk into my tea if that's all that's on offer. Still, it’s never going to become a habit, not even to avoid smelling like dairy. (I remember being mortified when I discovered that Thais think white westerners smell of cheese/milk. Actually…I’m still a bit ‘ewugh’ about that.)

Cheese is a staple too – particularly now there’s a vegetarian in the house. It’s so versatile but most of what we bought here was rubbery, bland and expensive. We met a French family when we arrived here. Son was a good friend of their elder boy and one day when I must have been withdrawing from the lack of decent cheese, I asked Son to enquire where they bought their cheese. They’re French, I thought, they’ll know some secret cheese emporium… Son came back with a French shrug… ‘France’ was the answer. They told Son they don’t bother… I still get a yearning now and again but it’s also so fattening unless it’s a corker, I won’t waste the calories.)

I grew up on good strong flavoured varieties like Stilton, Camembert and cheddar that could make your eyes sting. Limburger made an appearance too, mostly for the kudos of being able to get it in your mouth without being utterly repulsed by the smell. Still, I like mine ripe; knocking on the cupboard door if possible. Husband and Daughter are cheese wusses. Although I’ve tried to train Husband in the delights of the stinky foodstuff he still shudders at some of the memories he has of my family’s cheese plate. The anecdotes are unpublishable here.

Son and I were very pleased to discover, two weeks in a row, some particularly tasty Camembert in one of our local supermarkets.

We’ve had a lot of pleasure out of the cheese; a sneaky wedge here, a sandwich there. Even the necessity for me to eat it on rice cracker rather than bread hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm. We’ve also had quite a lot of peripheral enjoyment: watching Daughter’s expression when she opens the fridge because the Camembert shouts out its presence with a particular pungency. We’ve had endless amusement devising ways of getting her to inadvertently smell the cheese. ‘Hey, Daughter,’ we’ve said full of faux enthusiasm, ‘check this out.’ She turns around only for us to shove the tub under her nose: we’re rewarded with that face again. Such fun.

A tent is a tent, right?

Husband, having been a boy, loves camping. When we were students, our first holidays together were camping trips. For the first one, based in Hull, we borrowed a tiny tent and drove off to the Lake District in search of Roman artefacts. (I will never forget trying to find Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England. We stopped Marigold, my bright orange car, by a dry stone wall: ‘Do you think this is it?’)

Husband - or Boyfriend as he was at the time – wanted to ‘rough it.’ He longed to camp in the mountains, hunting and foraging for food to provide for me. There must be something deep in his psyche as this wasn’t particularly a feature of our relationship. Luckily I camped as a child and I’ve always despised campsites that have lots of facilities: a TV room, swimming pool, showers, a shop and a restaurant. That’s not proper camping! However I wasn’t willing to skin rabbits either.

We usually compromised on a farmer’s field with loo and a spidery shower by way of facilities. One campsite in the Isle of Wight was just a field and we had to walk to a local pub for anything more serious than a pee. This type of site just about fulfilled Husband’s yearning to be caveman. Back in the Lake District, another place was perfect - the farmer appeared early in the morning with fresh eggs. Oh joy. And Husband’s desire to provide meant that he got up to make breakfast (every time). No wonder I married him.

Once, we got complacent about our ability to find suitable sites and left it too late in the day. We couldn’t find a site anywhere so we had to beg a publican to let us camp in their garden. He wasn’t keen but we promised to be up and out early in the morning. Another great place was a cheese farm in Cheddar which we stayed in for several days: years later we took the children back to the same site for their first camping trip. One place, though I can’t remember where it was, one of the other idiots in the field left a gate open and our field filled with sheep during the night. We had our dog Pepper with us on that trip and she woke us by bouncing around inside the walls of the tiny two man tent at the sound of the sheep.

Anyway, memories of my camping holidays weren’t what I was going to tell you about. Ever since we came to Thailand, Husband has been espousing Thai campsites, which, he assured me, were luxurious. I’ve all but lost interest in camping. It’s true, it’s great fun but when you’re young but it’s hard work when you’re older and I need my comforts.

But that was how I found myself this last weekend in a hotel/campsite in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, and now I’ve run out of space. Tomorrow I’ll have to tell you about our tent, the wild elephants, how I won the worst mother of the year award and the trip to casualty for skull and spine x-rays.