The harvest season in northern Ontario brings another crop of warm memories from my long-ago kindergarten teacher, Lydia Scott. Times have not always been kind since Lydia last updated her life story, but she and Jack have been able to persevere in the affection and kindness of family and friends.

This is Part 17. Click here to go to the beginning of the saga.

A few years have gone by since I last sat down to put my memories to the printed page, and it’s time to update my story.

This is October 2009, and I am 69 years old, so please forgive me if I don’t lay out things in the proper order or don’t quite have all details, but I do want to let you all know what has happened since I last wrote.

First of all, I want to give my most exciting news. On November 26, 2008, Jack and I became grandparents to a sweet baby girl, Shannon Rachel Scott!

More about this a bit later. Now back to the updates.

The first few years after my last entry here weren’t very eventful.

Jack and I have been doing fairly well health-wise, with occasional aches and pains associated with our age, but nothing very serious. I put up quite a bit of my garden produce, both preserving it or freezing it, but since we don’t eat as much as we used to (although you wouldn’t know that by the weight we both have put on), I give a lot of it away to friends and relatives.

Stephen, meanwhile, was let go from his job of many years when the company downsized during the recession, but has since found another, doing mechanical repairs on service vehicles. It isn’t what he wanted, but it’s work and he’s happy.

Amanda has been coming up for visits with her friend, when they can, but with working and university, there’s little time for Great-Aunt Lydia. We did go to see her at her university when I needed an angiogram, so we spent a bit of time with her.

Ashley and I had a falling-out for a few years after her last visit here, and I didn’t hear from her until last year, when we patched things up and became even closer. There’s more!

What a brutal month September was for funerals — I’ve only just finished weeping! All of my close personal friends are dying!

The scariest part is that all of my close personal friends who died in September happen to be in this one photograph that was taken at a party in Manhattan around about 1977. Is that spooky, or what? I’m going to have to start checking my other group photos to see who else is doomed!

We were at someone’s arty loft and Patrick Swayze was showing me how to “throw a pot” on the ceramics wheel. The word “pot” caught the attention of Niels Bohr, who’d shown up for the party in sepia tone, of all things.

He was in town from Copenhagen, where everybody smokes pot. He determined that we had the wrong kind of pot, but sat down anyway and started nattering on about quantum spinning wheels or something, and a crowd gathered round.

Mary Travers from Peter, Paul and Mary was there. She provided the music. And so was Keith Floyd, the celebrity chef, who cooked us some very boozy venison.

Keith Waterhouse, the guy who wrote “Billy Liar”, offered to buy the house a round of drinks if we could help him come up with an idea for another play, but most people were more interested in helping Larry Gelbart write the next episode of “M*A*S*H”.

Jim Carroll was staring at the potting wheel going round and round and suggested having Hawkeye and Trapper John accidentally discover that Colonel Potter is a secret drug addict.

Henry Gibson, who was still very much in “Laugh-In” mode at the time, said that was way too dark, even for “M*A*S*H”, and wanted to do something with a flower theme instead. So he and Jim Carroll got into a poetry pissing contest. I forget who won, but I went home with a nice vase I’d made and put flowers in it.

And then afterward, every time I looked at it on the mantel I kept thinking of the song “If I Had a Hammer”. Spooky, or what?

Farang: The Sequel
By Dr Iain Corness
Published by Maverick House, 2009

Mystified? Morose? Misfitting? Let Pattaya’s best-known alien physician give you another dose of his cure for the farang flu, My review for The Nation, published on September 12.

Suspicion does arise when Iain Corness virtually admits to augmenting his visits to public squat toilets with his own handkerchief (which is cheating), but the Scottish medical doctor who transplanted himself to Thailand from Australia does maintain his esteem, if not his dignity, in this second collection of light-hearted musings on strangers’ strange experiences in a strange land.

The first topped the English-language best-seller list in Thailand (he tells me anything over 5,000 copies sold represents a best-seller), so the symptoms indicated another trip to the doctor’s office and an extra dose of experience, observation and philosophy. These are the components of his patented remedy for any farang afflicted with a misunderstanding of Thai ways, which is potentially fatal.

As with the original book, this one deals mostly in familiar topics, but the amusement is in the fresh telling, and the healthfulness of the dose is in the author’s acceptance — and, usually, admiration — for the way things work here.

Actual physician’s advice is dispensed about Alzheimer’s disease and the need for the terminally ill to prepare Living Wills, and in the form of his own “75 Per Cent Diet”.

Ranging more widely, Corness extracts the following from his medicine cabinet of curiosities: boob and penis enlargers, karaoke and gik bars, gasohol, motorcycles as sports machines and modes of transport for entire households, Chang and Eng, school and security-guard uniforms, the disproportionate ramifications of fender benders (recounted with humour amid the horror), Buddhist and animist rituals, and the ability that God gave Thais but not foreigners to seal and unseal plastic bags with a rubber band.

There is also the fundamental reality that many Thais celebrate their birthdays on a date plucked out of the air, months or years after the actual date of birth, by a relative who has more important things to do than remember long-ago events for the purpose of government paperwork.

Are Thai ways always better than those of the West? The doctor is only human, so he deigns to complain about the state of the toilet paper here, the road conditions and car salesmanship, and allows that farang countries are better at noise abatement, albeit only by suckling at the nanny state’s teat.

Education he finds to be on a par, at least for those who can afford a halfway decent school.

Sometimes Corness gets carried away praising his adopted country. A gushing essay about the Tiffany’s shows claims that kathoey are “totally accepted in Thai society”, when in fact they remain legally oppressed. He showers fawning praise on the performers (and elsewhere in book does a drag turn himself), but is surprised that there are no catfights backstage.

A chapter on the cash crunch ends up imploring readers to invite overseas friends and relatives to Thailand. Tourism will again soon flourish, he claims, thanks to “Thai friendliness”. Optimism prevails on that score, despite the political mayhem, which also gets some passing scrutiny.

Being based in Pattaya, the doctor wades into the scrum of red and yellow knights seeking the grail of democracy, but the episode turns out to be just a news recap, really, and hardly worth the bravery medal he jokes that he deserves.

There is a near-complete disdain of hyphens (an affliction so easily treated) and the choice of words tends to be rushed, weakening the heart of clarity, but these are piddling worries in a book that’s plenty of fun and, once again, a sure and dependable guide for newcomers.

One particularly humorous episode finds Dr Iain setting a Brisbane neighbourhood ablaze while trying to lure people into his Thai-food restaurant (there’s a couple of good Thai recipes at the back of the book), but he’s completely at home on Siamese soil, and makes no such blunders in judgement.

Read my review of the first “Farang” here.

Many readers have asked me to tell more stories about my years in the Soviet music industry. It was a long time ago, but I’ve managed to come up with a few old photos to spur the memories. Unfortunately, the memories aren’t all pleasant, but then, neither is the music industry.

As I’ve said before, my first band, pictured above, was the Grostinkas, and we played Moscow cabarets and less fancy dives during the late 1960s. We quarreled often, mostly over creative direction.

I was unable to hide my disdain for the lyre players, but the band’s founder, former cosomonaut and national hero Yuri Gagarin, squatting opposite me on the left of the photo, was insistent, and he claimed to have the support of the Politburo. “Besides, those aren’t lyres,” Yuri insisted, “they’re chairs.”

As soon as the drugs wore off, of course, I could see his point, but by then I’d realised that my bandmates were way too serious anyway, and quit the group. I’d been invited to join Igor Granov’s Synthy Troupe, which was making good money at the time in Balkan nightclubs.

Igor had a five-man synthesiser outfit that specialised in very zippy renditions of Tchaikovsky, but he needed something to fill out the sound, quite apart from the constant barking of his father’s Great Dane. I suggested a bicycle bell, it added just the right touch, and a whole new career opened up to me.

We put out two albums and played something like 5,000 wedding receptions in the year and a half I was with the troupe, but in the end my bell-ringing thumb simply gave way, and a state doctor advised me to try a different instrument or risk permanent damage. I struggled on for a few more months, using my toes, but it was hopeless, and I gave up performing altogether for a full decade.

I turned my throbbing hand instead to designing album covers for other artists. Below are a couple of the ones of which I’m most proud.

Debytuka C Odrodseku was Georgian chanteuse of Hungarian descent who sang a wicked version of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” that was a huge hit in the midst of the sex scandal involving Brezhnev’s gay son.

I think the fact that I depicted Deby holding her own photo makes for a clever trompe l’oeil. There’s more!

Continued from Part 1.

Strangers in a strange land, the Brits. No business being there, but these are the blokes they thought needed some help.

After one of those bitter winters, it would have been a nice warm day on May 12, 1937, when the XXth of Foot Lancashire Fusiliers in Tientsin trooped the colour and beat retreat to celebrate the coronation of King George VI. Lt Col RFH Massy-Westropp’s 1st Battalion was among the units engaged in the five days’ commemoration, which even included a “Ye olde English faire” set up at the Race Club Gardens.

On hand for the occasion with an extra hyphen if needed was Britain’s ambassador to China, Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen. It must have been just after the coronation festivities that the envoy was wounded when his car was machine-gunned by a Japanese fighter aircraft. He narrowly escaped being paralysed, but went on to other postings.

Sir Hughe’s misfortune might have been part of the Japanese bombing of Nankai University on July 29 to shut up the rabble-rousing students. The Japanese followed that up by occupying Tientsin the next day. They still couldn’t evict the Westerners.

On June 14, 1939, the Japanese blockaded the foreign concessions in what history has noted (in passing) as the Tientsin Incident, the latter word a euphemism for Britain’s most ignoble non-military defeat between the world wars.

The British authorities refused to hand over four Chinese, hiding within the British concession, who had assassinated a customs official accused of collaborating with the Japanese.

The British Concession bordered the French to the north, with the Japanese settlement on the far side of that, and to the south the area occupied by the Germans until World War I. The Russians were across the river. All the arriving troops passed through East Station, which neighboured small concessions for the Italians and, previously, the Austro-Hungarians.

While everyone leaving or entering the concession, including women, was publicly strip-searched by Japanese soldiers and food and fuel was blocked, the embarrassed Brits — unable to bring naval thunder in from Europe — bluffed and lied their way to a negotiated resolution. Then, on August 20, they handed over the four Chinese, whose heads were swiftly lopped off.

Just over a week later, Hitler’s tanks rolled into Poland.

It seems to me that, even if Dad had been stationed in Tientsin in August 1937, he must have in some form witnessed the Battle of Shanghai, as it came to be known. I always interpreted Dad’s description of his stay in China as being part of a “police action”, keeping the Chinese and Japanese troops away from one another, not that there was much hope of that. There’s more!