texturbation

Those of you in the US may not have seen these yet.

Snotty, leaked emails from a Times journalist (actually, just a toff restaurant reviewer) to his copy editor. Media people will enjoy them.

I’m feeling all nostalgic now.

To: the Times subeditors
From: Coren, Giles

Chaps,
I am mightily pissed off … I don’t really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do … It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.

I wrote: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.” It appeared as: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh.”

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking, “I’ll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best.”

Well, you fucking don’t. This was shit, shit subediting for three reasons.

1) “Nosh”, as I’m sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German “naschen”. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, “nosh” means simply “food”. You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the “a”. I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, “nosh” means “a session of eating” …

2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as “sexually charged”. I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y. I have used the word “gaily” as a gentle nudge. And “looking for a nosh” has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. “looking for nosh” does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy?

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed “a” so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing … And, just out of interest, I’d like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.

Right, Sorry to go on. Anger, real steaming fucking anger can make a man verbose.

All the best

Giles

To: the Times subeditors
From: Coren, Giles

Sent: August 10 2002 16.41

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. how fucking difficult is that? it’s the sentence that bestrides the fucking book i reviewed for you. it is the sentence i wrote first in my fucking review. it is 35 fucking letters long, which is why i wrote that it was. and so some useless cunt subeditor decides to change it to “jumps over A lazy dog” can you fucking count? can you see that that makes it a 33 letter sentence? so it looks as if i can’t count, and the cunting author of the book, poor mr dunn, cannot count. the whole bastard book turns on the sentence being as i fucking wrote it. and that it is exactly 33 letters long. why do you meddle. what do you think you achieve with that kind of dumb-witted smart-arsery? why do you change things you do not understand without consulting. why do you believe you know best when you know fuck all. jack shit.

that is as bad as editing can be. fuck, i hope you’re proud. it will be small relief for the author that nobody reads your poxy magazine.

never ever ask me to write something for you. and don’t pay me. i’d rather take £400 quid for assassinating a crack whore’s only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal - my integrity would be less compromised.

jesus fucking wept i don’t know what else to say.

To: the London Paper’s restaurant critic
From: Coren, Giles

Sent: 09 July 2008 23:06

feargus,

I’m emailing to say that your review of osteria emilia, in most ways perfectly fine and good and spot on, pissed me off. i booked, as ever, under a pseudonym, that over made up italian bird did not have a fucking clue who i was (or even who baddiel was, who i ate with because he lives, like me, round the corner). Nor were there any kitchen staff peeking out of any porthole. i appreciate that you have to keep your column as lively as possible - and name dropping david i guess might be exciting for your readers (i’ll certainly be doing it in my column) - but in your froth to show how folksy and incognito you are, you did your readers and the restaurant an immense disservice: you suggested that i got some special dispensation in eating a la carte. But if you’d spent a bit more time looking at your lunch menu, and a bit less gawping at me, you’d have noticed that it said, “dishes from the evening a la carte menu are available at lunchtime, with some exceptions”.

You said “i didn’t have the brass neck to demand anything off the unavailable a la carte”. it makes you sound like an utter tit. you are not only a chippy fuck but a lazy journalist. ‘brass neck’. learn to write, and take your head out of your arse, you fucking twat.

all the best

giles coren

I actually mostly agree with him, on the first one at least.

Maybe I’m just being paranoid.

From: kev@kevinmurphy.info
Received: 7/17/08 7:10:57 AM CDT
To: children@children.org
Subject: My sponsor child?

Sir/Madam,

Re: Account# xxxxxxxx

I have been traveling for the last six months, unable to receive any mail Children International may have sent me.

But I logged into my account on Children.org today to discover that I now have a different sponsor child.

I originally sponsored an Indian girl named Raunak Wasi. Now, I appear to be sponsoring a child named Gulafsha Rahman.

Could you be so kind as to inform me why this change has occurred?

I hope that it is just some kind of technical problem, but I am concerned that something bad may have happened to Raunak.

Sincerely, with hope of a speedy response,

Kevin Murphy

Fishy reply:

Dear Mr. Murphy,

Thank you for contacting us.

We must advise you that Raunak has chosen not to continue to participate in sponsorship, and has chosen to withdraw from our program. We sent you information regarding this situation, along with information about a new child in need of assistance, Gulafsha Rahman. You should receive this information when you are able to collect your mail.

Mr. Murphy, we understand it can be disappointing when a sponsored child leaves our program, but we hope you will consider accepting sponsorship of Gulafsha. Your support would make such a wonderful difference in her life!

Thank you again for contacting us. If you have any questions, please send an email to children@children.org or call our Sponsor Services department at 1-800-555-3089 and one of our representatives will be happy to assist you. Our hours of operation are Monday through Thursday 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and Friday 7:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Central time.

Sincerely,

XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX

Sponsor Services Representative

Dammit, my soap was gone again!

I’ve been diligently collecting miniature soap bars from every hotel I’ve stayed in that supplies them gratis for months.

Soap is important, particularly in crummy guesthouses like the $5 lakeside floating shithole I’m staying in right now – no bog roll, no bum gun, not even a wash basin.

When you have to wash your arse with your hand after every dump, you need your soap.

And that was my second to last piece, dammit!

Five bars gone, in five days!

Where the hell were they going?

This morning, as I laid cable and, annoyed, pulled my last hoarded bar from my bathroom bag, I hypothesised that perhaps, because I’d been leaving the soap on the floor – the only available surface, after all – that a drip from the shower was lubricating the soap sufficiently that it slowly slid right across the room and down the drain in the corner, over the course of the day.

It seemed like a reasonable hypothesis.

The only other explanation I could come up with was that somebody was coming into my room every day, stealing my soap, but ignoring my laptop and cameras. Absurd.

I put the wet soap on the floor, and watched to see if it slid.

After a couple of minutes, it still had not moved, not so much as a millimetre.

Hmm, I thought, so much for that theory.

Then a big fucking black rat walked in through the open bathroom door, ignored me, picked up my last bar of soap in its teeth, and departed, nonchalantly, through a hole in the wall.

Just don’t laugh at the dead kids, alright?

Smoking is permitted at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum, but laughing is not.

That’s certainly what’s suggested by the signs. There’s nothing on the walls forbidding smoking, drinking, dogs, littering, drug use, the wearing of shoes, skateboarding or heavy petting.

At first, I took the single warning sign – a man’s head, smiling, mouth wide open, inside a red circle with a line through it – as a prohibition of talking. Silence in the museum.

But Peter, the unlikely-named Khmer tuk-tuk guy who had taken it upon himself to be my tour guide for the afternoon, told me it was a warning for tourists not to laugh.

They need a sign for that?

It’s a genocide museum.

“But it’s okay,” Peter said, in his excellent English. “You can laugh if you want.”

It was such an absurd thing to say that I actually did laugh out loud, once and involuntarily, and immediately felt like the world’s biggest tool.

I’d selected Peter from the gang of tuk-tuk guys offering their services outside my Phnom Penh guesthouse because he looked the oldest of the pack.

Crowsfeet on his otherwise youthfully Asian face, and flecks of gray in his hair. Probably in his mid-forties. He’d be old enough to remember Pol Pot’s regime from maybe his early teens.

Since the main reason I decided to subject myself to Phnom Penh was to learn a little more about Cambodia’s most recent society-defining horrors, I figured somebody who was around to remember it first-hand might be my best bet for a driver.

I was not wrong.

Peter insisted on going above and beyond his tuk-tuk-driving duties, following me around the museum, explaining the story behind anything and everything I saw. Normally I would smell scam, or at the very least somebody trying to pump the tip, but Peter seemed genuinely enthusiastic about his chosen role.

Peter also always seemed terribly surprised and impressed when I understood what he was talking about perfectly. I guess many of his passengers also have English as a second language.

When I was umming and ahhing about whether to go to the shooting range, he told me point blank he’d only take me there BEFORE seeing any of the genocide stuff, despite that being the least convenient route.

“And I tell truth and warn you, it’s forty dollars US for AK-47 with 30 bullets,” he added. “A lot of foreigners say that is, what you say, bullshit? You understand ‘bullshit’, yes?”

“Oh, yeah, I think so.”

I guess the cow lives, for today.

Peter told me his doctor dad had been killed by Pol Pot, and that he’d been forced to work the rice paddies, gratis, as a ten-year-old. Chain gangs, more or less, judging from the photos. The only food he was allowed to eat were meagre portions of “porridge” and scavenged banana and papaya roots.

He showed me some scars on his belly he said were from diarrhoea, a scar above his eye he said was from taking a beating with a bamboo cane, and some cracks on his tongue he said was from some other form of abuse I didn’t quite understand.

Frankly, he could have been making any or all of that shit up. I have no idea. I didn’t think diarrhoea did that to a person. If it did, I expect most of the surface area of my body would be a single patch of luminous pink scar tissue, the last few months I’ve had.

Building A at Tuol Sleng contains the interrogation chambers. Thousands of people were tortured horribly there in the late 1970s, before being carted off to Killing Fields to be beaten to death.

There’s a metal bed in the centre of each room. On each bed, some manacles, and a metal ammunition case that the torture victims had to use as a toilet.

Each room also has a single blown-up monochrome photograph of the room’s final occupant, chained to the bed, in whatever condition they were found when the facility was liberated.

That is: dead, and fucked up beyond recognition.

“The stains on the floor, you’re standing on,” Peter said, “are blood.”

I almost called bullshit – it’s been 30 years, for crying out loud – but the faded brownish smears on the tiles seemed to match closely the patterns of those in the photographs.

In one room, on the bed was the rusted blade of a small garden shovel.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“Look at the photo, and tell me,” Peter said.

The photo was low-quality, black-and-white, angled wrong and blurred slightly by the blow-up, but I could tell there was something terribly wrong with the man’s head.

“They used it to cut off his face,” Peter said. “He was Australian journalist. You understand ‘journalist’, yes?”

“Yeah.”

Building B is filled with mugshots of the guards and prisoners. A lot of them are children – on both sides. Guards and prisoners significantly under the age of majority.

At the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, a little south of town, I learned that the younger kids were mostly killed by swinging them against a tree. The adults were either beheaded, stabbed, or beaten to death with big bamboo. Often, the women and kids were raped first – their bodies were almost all exhumed naked.

A handful of the photos at the museum showed some of the results of the tortures and killings. People with all or part of their faces or heads beaten to jelly, or with bits sliced off.

Choeung Ek also has a massive, yet perversely rather tasteful, yellow-grey stupa, set amid disturbingly serene grounds, which is filled to the brim with the skulls of many of the thousands of local victims

It’s rather macabre. I asked Peter why the bones had not been reburied, or burned, or subjected to whatever passed for a funeral rite in this culture. It seemed wrong, given that this all happened in my lifetime. Some of these skulls will have living relatives.

“So nobody forget,” was all Peter would say.

Building D at Tuol Sleng has more photographs, and some artistic representations of the various tortures carried out at this former primary school building.

One of the paintings depicts waterboarding. The original wooden waterboard itself, resembling a tilted medieval rack, is right there in the middle of the room.

I listened, bemused, while Peter explained in detail how it was used.

“You do realise,” I said, when he had finished, “that they’re doing this exact same thing right now to unconvicted terrorist suspects in America?”

He shook his head.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You don’t understand. This is from Pol Pot time. Not now. Not any more.”

“Peter, mate, trust me,” I said. “They really are still doing this shit in America.”

He looked at me like I was smoking crack.

It’s been a while since I dwelt upon the intersection of ancient religion and cocks, but a visit to Angkor Wat a couple weeks back gave me cause to revisit the topic.

If you’re British, and enjoy a good knob gag, you can see phallic imagery, ripe for puns and innuendo, in just about anything.

Show us a picture of anything and we’ll be able to make a cock joke out of it.

Anything, I tell you!

Show me a vagina, and I’ll show you something phallic in it.

(Geddit?)

But the ancient Hindus were so brazen, their legacy doesn’t even give me a chance to get my creative juices flowing.

(Geddit? He might mean semen!)

The temples of Angkor Wat, for example…

(Wanker what? What did he say?)

…turns out was a Hindu site, originally, before the Buddhists penetrated its defences.

(Pfnar!)

So a couple of the temples there have Shiva Linga – which is literally God’s cock, you may remember from my previous sarcastic textual abuses of eastern tradition – as their centrepieces.

(Hah! He said “cock”! And he said “piece”. And “abuse”, which could mean “self-abuse”! And “textual” sounds a bit like “sexual”, so that would be “sexual abuse”, which is hilarious!)

And one of the more impressive reliefs…

(Relief! Like in masturbatory relief!)

…in Angkor Wat proper…

(Wanker! I thought he said “wanker”! In Pig Latin, it would definitely be “wanker”!)

is the depiction of the Churning Of The Sea Of Milk.

(?)

The Churning Of The Sea Of Milk relief runs along a long corridor. It depicts a couple hundred guys holding onto a massive snake, which is attached to a mountain that sits within a sea of milk.

(Too… Much… Input…)

Tradition has it that as the demons pull on their collective snake, the mountain turns, churning the sea of milk into the delicious life-giving cream of creation.

(Too… Much… Input… Must… Reboot… Must… Reboot…)

And Thus was the Universe Created.

Great big daisy-chain.

I took a wrong turn, looking for breakfast at 7am. Wound up walking through a Phnom Penh market.

Only a block or so from the pricey waterfront hotels, but this was none of your souvenir, tourist, antique, Same Same T-shirt nonsense.

Proper, full-on, bustling, squawking-chicken Cambodian market.

Trays of snails. Flattened chicken. Unidentifiable, hairy fruit. Leathery fish. Grilled grasshoppers. Flies circling huge hanging hewn hunks of bleeding meat.

One old woman was sitting on the kerb, idly dismembering living skinned frogs with her hands while she chatted to a young girl.

She had a transparent plastic bag full of them, by her side.

Quite a lot of them were still alive, trying to climb out of the bag, pink and skinless.

Their limbs came away as easily as pulling flesh from a chicken leg.

Once dismembered, she tossed their twitching remains into a tray.

Put me in mind of something out of a Giger painting, or a Clive Barker novel.

I ended up skipping breakfast.

“Hello,” said the dog, walking into the beach bar.

I was the only customer in there.

“Oh, hi,” I said, absently. I reached down to pat its flank.

The dog backed away cautiously.

“You’re not going to hurt me are you?” it said, only a little fear in his voice.

“No, of course not,” I said.

“Good,” it said, wagging its tail. “You must be a tourist. I like tourists.”

I took a quick gander between its legs. His legs.

“You looking at my cock?” he said.

“Sorry,” I laughed. “Just checking. Now I know to call you a ‘good boy’, see?”

The dog wagged his tail.

“I like it when people call me that,” he said, smiling.

I patted his head.

“You speak pretty good English,” I said. “For Cambodia.”

The dog cocked his head.

“And, presumably, for a dog,” he said.

“That too.”

“I don’t suppose you have any steak, do you?” the dog said, sniffing at my trouser legs.

“No, sorry.”

“Oh, okay,” the dog said sadly.

Then he sniffed my leg again.

“You smell good,” he said. “Have you been eating bacon?”

“No,” I said. “I was with somebody who was eating bacon, but that was hours ago.”

“Oh… I have a pretty good sense of smell, you know,” the dog said. “I can even smell cancer! Did you know that?”

“I had heard that, yes.” I said. “I don’t suppose…?”

“Don’t worry, not yet,” he said.

Then, almost shyly, he added: “Did you keep any of your friend’s bacon, by any chance? Maybe you stole a bit and slipped it into your pocket to eat later?”

“Fraid not.”

“Just curious,” the dog said. “No particular reason.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Don’t have one,” the dog sniffed. “Nobody looks after me.”

“Shame,” I said. “Perhaps I could give you a name.”

The dog thought about it for a moment.

“Sadly, I fail to see what that would achieve,” he said eventually.

“I have a couple of left-over onion rings,” I said, changing the subject. “You could have those if you like.”

“Really?! That would be great!” the dog said, wagging his tail.

I tossed him an onion ring. He caught it in his mouth, then peered down his snout at it for a few moments, as if unsure what to do with it. Then, it was gone, swallowed in one gulp.

“How was that?”

“Okay, bit cold. Can I have the other?”

“Sure,” I tossed him the last ring, and it was gone before it hit the floor.

“You know what would go really well with these?” he said, enthusiastically licking his jowls. “Some steak!”

“I’m very sorry, but as I already told you, I don’t have any steak,” I said.

“Oh, right, yeah,” said the dog. “My memory isn’t as good as my sense of smell.”

“And besides,” I said. “I’m vegetarian. I haven’t eaten steak in seventeen years.”

The dog frowned.

“You’re lucky,” he said, as he started to lick his balls. “At least you’ve had some steak. I’m three, and I’ve never had any. My own bollocks are the closest I get.”

“The bartender’s got a plate of barbecued cockroaches she’s been nibbling on,” I suggested. “I’m sure you could have a few if you begged politely.”

“Come off it, pal,” said the dog, chewing happily on his own scrotal sack. “I may be a dog, but I have to draw the line somewhere.”

“Good boy,” I said. “Good boy.”

The first thing I saw was a dead woman.

Dead, or dying.

“You might not want your son to see this,” I said to the woman sitting in front of me on the bus, and, after a glance out the window, she held her kid’s head tightly into her chest.

A middle-aged Khmer woman was lying motionless, on her back, in the road, in the middle of traffic, a few people standing around, vehicles creeping around her perimeter.

She’d come off her bike.

Her face was covered in blood, and her helmet was lying a few feet away.

A man was pressing hard on her chest, and blood was bubbling out of her mouth by the litre.

It seemed unlikely that an ambulance, assuming they have such things, would have been able to make it through the traffic in time.

This city is, apparently, notorious for this kind of thing.

In backpacker neighbourhoods, in low season, in Cambodia and some places in Thailand, there are only usually two or three bars open late.

Often, the most popular one is the one that has the most “Ladies”.

Personally, if I’m alone, I go to hang out in the one with the best pool tables.

Sometimes, that’s the same thing.

In Siem Reap, the prostitutes have turned that fact into a minor scam.

There’s a bar there called The Temple. It’s a pretty good bar, though the Angkor What? across the street is far, far nicer.

The Temple has three pool tables. Next to each is a sign saying something along the lines of:

POOL TABLE

WRITE YOUR NAME
ON THE BOARD
WAIT WHEN IT IS YOUR TURN
THEN YOU CAN PLAY
THE WINNER

Basically, explaining the normal Winner Stays On rule common to most civilised American bars.

In The Temple bar, each of the three pool tables has three or four Ladies playing it.

These tables belong to these chicks.

Not because they’re good, although they’re usually pretty good. Each Lady puts her or his name, or pseudonym, or just random scribbles, on the whiteboard, in Khmer, three or four times each, in various combinations, designed to confuse westerners who want to play pool.

If you want a game, you have to either put your name up and then wait around for fifteen games, or just hang out near the tables until one of the Ladies adopts you as their doubles partner.

That takes about three minutes.

These girls seemingly use pool as a way to acquire Johns.

It is impossible to have a game, unless you’re willing to play doubles with a hooker, another hooker, and another clueless whiteboy.

I’ve never seen people leaving with them, so I don’t know if it works. But I expect it does, otherwise the sex workers wouldn’t hang out there in the first place.

You just have to endure the sales pitches, while you’re playing.

“Yay! Good shot! Double-combo into the corner! You want massage?”

“No, thanks, I just want to play pool.”

“Okay! Pool is good! You play pool good! You want massage later?”

The Pool God surely does not smile upon these women.

Sometimes, very late, in these kind of bars, the whiteboard is sufficiently empty that I feel confident enough to be a little bit mischievous.

I can beat these girls one-handed, I think.

Sometimes, I try.

Sometimes, I succeed.

I sometimes turn to the nearest English-speaking person. There’s usually one nearby.

“I’m beating a ladyboy,” I say. “At one-handed pool.”

“You’re playing one-handed pool with a lady-boy?” they say. “What are you trying to say?”

It should be a euphemism.

But it isn’t.

Don’t give money to beggars, is what they say.

It only encourages begging.

Elsewhere, I generally agree with that sentiment.

In Cambodia, I have cause to question it.

Why, I ask, is it bad to encourage begging, here?

With kids, whether they’re begging or touting crappy string necklaces, the argument is clear.

These kids generally earn more per day than the average Cambodian, which almost certainly discourages them from attending school, and could discourage their parents from finding work.

I agree with this argument.

Sure, the kids learn a lot working the beaches. Their English is not bad, and they have a better command of geography than the average American or British kid.

Overheard:

“You buy necklace from me?”

“No thanks.”

“Where you from?”

“Norway.”

“Oslo?”

These skills are arguably transferable, but I’d still feel happier if they were learned in school.

So I don’t give money to kids who are touting on the beach on a school day.

But what about the landmine victim? The dude shuffling down the beach on his arse because both his legs have been blown off below the knee?

He might have an okay time in Europe or the US, where prosthetics would be available, there are access laws, there’s education, and opportunities for a potentially lucrative desk-based career.

But he’s kinda fucked here in Cambodia.

Admittedly, education to 16 is free here now, if you can afford the uniform and your parents let you attend, but a forty-year-old Khmer guy certainly wasn’t lucky enough to benefit from it, and employment options outside service industries seem limited, at least here in Snooky.

And what about this little old lady I’ve seen stumbling down Serendipity beach every day, carrying her diminutive husband around on her back – carrying her husband on her back, for fuck’s sake – begging for change?

She’s 60 if she’s a day. A warped and wrinkled Mother Theresa clone. Her husband, who looks like he’s about two or three hours away from death, weighs about 70 pounds soaking wet and is wracked by either extreme old age, some kind of degenerative nerve disease or cancer.

What are her options?

School’s out.

What are her options in a tourist town like Sihanoukville?

She’s lived through war and genocide. She’s well past retirement age and, as far as I know, there’s no significant social safety net to speak of in Cambodia.

If I give her a dollar, she’s not going to go spend it on alcohol or drugs. She’s going to use it to feed herself and her dying husband.

There’s always the Big Picture argument, I suppose.

Guidebooks like the Lonely Planet are sometimes quite fond of that.

Beggars almost certainly bring down the tone of a place, perhaps discouraging the lifeblood of tourism that a community relies upon.

(I doubt that applies here. The persistent rumour here is that the Russian Mafia is about five minutes away from requisitioning this entire beach for the development of mid-range resorts and casinos. They’re apparently already doing it up at the nearest Snooky beach, to the northwest of here)

Plus, giving to beggars might encourage people who perhaps could work to instead beg.

Maybe the money would be better given to a charity, which can benefit an entire community and buy vital supplies with economies of scale not available to individuals, they suggest.

Could be true.

But I’m always a little bit sceptical about charities.

The overheads for some charities can be quite astounding. You could wind up paying fifty cents on the dollar (or something similarly ludicrous) to the charity’s staff and expenses.

And you don’t know what other agendas they have.

The only charity I regularly donate to, Children International, at children.org, has a fairly reasonably low overhead. I checked out their accounts before I started my own direct debit a few years back.

But they also seem to have some kind of surreptitious milky-milky Christian agenda that I find disturbing.

(Why do they keep asking me to send my Calcuttan sponsor child, Raunak, an Easter gift? The only reasons I can think of is that either they assume I’m an American Christian, or that the charity is quietly indoctrinating her and her peers with absurd belief systems.)

Suggesting somebody seek out and donate to a local charity is also pretty lousy advice to give to the average tourist.

How many westerners are going to go to the beach, be accosted by a bunch of people as desperate as those described above, and then go make the effort to locate and visit a local charity to make a donation?

Not many, is my guess.

I didn’t.

But if a dollar keeps an amputee fed for a day, why the hell not give it to him? It’s a rounding error where I come from, but rather a lot of Cambodians earn that amount or less per day.

(Khmer bartenders serving rich tourists on the beach in Sihanoukville can earn as little as $4 for an eight to 12 hour shift)

I’m quite happy to give the little old lady that dollar.

And if that means the next tourist to arrive is going to be bugged for change while he’s working on his tan, then so be it.