Short Pig (photo by Dan Jurafsky)

Long Pig

“In a pig dilemma. On the one hand, intelligent, sentient creatures. On the other hand, they’re made of bacon.”—Twitter from @rionam.

Lera and Scott roasted a pig for New Year’s Eve. He joined us at the table with a piggy smirk, plump and burnished like a Marbella ex-pat. Roasted birds never look like living chickens or turkeys—they come out of the oven not just faceless and smooth but also upside down, so that those aren’t really legs we’re dislocating. But our guest of honor sat up stoic as a sphinx while Lera, in a spectacular yellow silk dress, carved away his backside. On our plates: pale-pink, juicy pork. On his bed of banana leaves: a young pig with bare hip bones and a chayote in his mouth.

Our piggy reminded me of the spit-roasted guinea pigs with which Ecuadoreans celebrate Easter. In the wealthy parts of Quito the supermarkets sell them wrapped in plastic on polystyrene trays. They crouch on tiny rodent feet, bald and buck-toothed and looking very cold. Cuy, they’re called, a horribly onomatopaeic name for a guinea pig. Kwee! Kwee! I ate one finicky bite at a market stall once, and it tasted like Kentucky Fried Rat.

There was champagne, berries and cherries, and a suckling pig: the right winter feast for our dying empire. (Even Whole Foods doesn’t stock lark’s tongues these days.) I was mournful as the corks popped and popped again. A few months ago I gave up drinking, and what I miss most is champagne. Clarity is a gift, but not at parties, where you want your mind to be as soft as candlelight instead of bitching at you about having to talk to strangers. At midnight I borrowed a few sips of champagne from a handsome artist, but it was warm and flat: a glass half empty, and not enough to get me to fake an interest in following him to see The Titz play at 2AM.

It’s weird to come home from a New Year’s Eve party so undrunk that you floss and meditate—consciousness altered in reverse. In San Francisco, unlike Ireland, no one seems thrown by mineral water in their presence, and my friends aren’t big drinkers anyhow. Nothing outward changes. Even still, learning how to get around without a wine glass makes for a social experience that’s sharper, foreign, and exposed. It takes me back to our school parties at 12 or 13, when we had to figure out how to make things happen before cans of Ritz pushed one moment into the next.

I like Lera’s parties because she collects autotelic people. Scientists, artists, filmmakers, activists, and the odd entrepreneur roam her kitchen. They steer their own lives and look inside to measure how they’re doing, tracking discoveries, not bonuses.  In their company I’m sheepish about my corporate job—about taking, rather than making, assignments, and about the dullness of business thinking and its stumpy language. Their glamour reminds me to be queasy about my part in trying keep this maimed and frightened beast of consumer culture limping along, when it should go to the glue factory like Boxer before it.

So this year I looked to the artists with more interest than usual, trying to figure out what they think about what’s going on in the world. Art is a luxury, so economically they’re even more screwed than the rest of us. But they’re used to living unpadded lives, and compared to us worker bees, the ones I know seem to be relaxed and inspired by the shifts.

Artists scare me, to tell the truth. I’ve worked with designers my whole career and I have a good and pragmatic eye for what they do. Not so with visual arts. Without words or faces, I’m lost, and it’s hard to find the entrances where the questions go in. I’m the one who’s googling the artist’s statement or squinting at the gallery captions. When I come up against an artwork that hasn’t been wrapped in a story, it’s like having to taste something new with my eyes closed. There’s a scramble to classify: What is it? What is it? And it’s mixed with a bit of panic that this thing could bite back.

Here in San Francisco, machine art is big. It’s the spawn of punk rock and the garage engineering of Silicon Valley—both of which have been around for a while, so that you find middle-aged men dismissing “wannabes,” “Boring Man,” and “straights” (the heirs of squares). With undisguised pity, they ask strangers why we have day jobs. It’s kind of funny.  (Not that they’re all above the baubles of our time: “I’m anti-materialism,” said the artist who sat pig-left of me at dinner, “but my phone broke, so I got an iPhone.” He waved it around, excited about the Ocarina program that turns it into an eerie but lovely instrument. It wouldn’t be a San Francisco party without the iPhone app moment.)

Rather than asking about their work, I come at it through the side-door of biography, quizzing them on how they live and what they care about. We don’t even have the dole here in the U.S., so people who survive as full-time artists need hustle and discipline as much or more than they need talent. In a paycheck world, they have to create their own structure.

If you have a pencil and a junk mail envelope, you can write a poem on a bus. All this applicationless engineering, however—street sculptures, big fire, flying machines and head-slapping robots—that takes space. And materials, tools, and fuel. And permit-wrangling. And many hands.

So the tribe of artists becomes the patron. They share couches, burritos, and beer in Vienna, the Mission, and Brooklyn. They trade studio space, scavenged materials, and crew labor. In place of the family that couldn’t figure you out, they offer warmth and love. They throw fund-raising parties to pay the medical bills when you blow your jaw off building a confetti cannon. They see you through addictions, weddings, and creative droughts. You turn to your tribe for inspiration, encouragement, collaboration, and brutal assessments of your work. You promote their shows, and they show up at yours.

The scarcity of money binds artists together like rice farmers. As one writes: “We teeter on a financial apocalypse, what do I care? I have always lived on that edge, I am fine with eating rice ‘n’ beans, and thrilled to eat a piece of salmon.”

I asked that guy whom he was trying to reach with his work. “Everyone,” he said. (Privately, I translated this as “Everyone who already has tattoos.”) “It’s about getting people to wake up, using fear and anxiety to push them to change their lives.” And he told the story of asking the composer John Cage how he knew that whatever he was doing was working. “If just one person thinks about it afterwards, I’ve succeeded,” Cage said.

Their safety and comfort comes from the tribe, and it gives them the freedom to provoke the rest of us to look at how much we give up for our security superstitions and physical comfort. I’ll go on the Coney Island Cyclone, in the belief that someone must have carried out a safety inspection, but I’m terrified at the idea of cuddling a fire-spewing robot that could go rogue. I suppose that’s the point—to make me see how much I want everything in my life to be “up to code.”

Not much has truly changed this year. So far, most of us still live in the same homes and work at the same jobs, surrounded by the same people. But the mental contraptions we’ve devised to pad ourselves from pain and deliver pleasure have broken down.

My pal Tucker Nichols once put on an art show called “Together We Can Prevent Earthquakes.” I never got to see it, but that sly title sums up our illusions. We haven’t let go of our babyhood fantasy that we are omnipotent and all our needs will be met. We’ve believed—lord help us—that we are in control, or at least that some three-letter force who cares about us is in control, whether it’s God, the law, the FDA, the SEC, or the DHS.

We’ve been following hollow safety rituals: shuffling barefoot at the airport, swallowing for years the anti-anxiety drugs that were tested for six weeks, driving SUVs because it feels safer to sit up high. We trusted the bond-rating agencies who were paid by the issuers. We turned our lives over to corporations, and in return we expected a comfortable ambient temperature wherever we go, and enough material comforts to keep death away.

And right now, that all seems to be working about as well as any other propitiation rites. We now know that “they” weren’t taking care of us, and that our sense of safety, comfort, and control was just a collective feeling with no basis in fact. That collective feeling has shifted to fear and anxiety—the way we live just isn’t working.

Like it or not, we’re getting a do-over. We have to figure out once again what we value, how we are going to survive, and how we want act as a community. And though I’m concerned for those who have already been badly affected, and anxious about my own future, I also feel a great sense of possibility. We’re going to come out better for this suffering, and may even look back at the last decade of numb materialism as our most miserable days. And even though I don’t like being mocked as “straight” and “corporate,” I think we straight, corporate types can learn plenty from the tribes our artists have made for themselves. They know a thing or two about living through fear and insecurity.

I’m making French bread to go with breakfast eggs from Cleo the chicken. I’ve never worked with yeast before. It breathes, it stretches, and it smells like a sleepy lover—how could you not say good morning to such a substance? Tim makes fun of me when I wake up my dough with flour and water, and chat to it about the night it’s had, and show it the moves I learned last night watching Saturday Night Fever. But I’m in the city today, where there are no chickens to shimmy with over tinned sweetcorn. And it’s less crazy to talk to spores and birds than to screens and cars, no?

Because the internet is all about telling the world what you had for breakfast…

“They’re so busy,” I say. It’s Friday night at the end of winter, and the action on Tim’s kitchen floor is better than the movies. We sit on the sofa, chins on knuckles, and we stare at the chicks. They patter around the bare floor, and from time to time they hoist themselves up on a log of firewood to peck for insects.
“Yeah, but it’s the busy of a badly-run restaurant kitchen,” he says. “Lot of activity, lot of bumping into each other, but not much is getting done.” He’s the naturalist, always more precise in his observations. Able to tell a hungry cheep from a happy cheep within a few hours of owning chicks. And they love him for it, in their way. When he teases them by lifting his feet so that he’s no longer in their plane of vision, their peeps get shrill until his boot returns. The Boot of Worms. The Boot of Warmth. The Boot of Life.

“Birds, birds, birds, birds, bi-irds,” he says when he enters the cabin, and from their bathtub home they twitter with excitement. The Boot! The Boot is back! To Tim they are animals first, but to me they are females. I call them “Girls.”

Tim started with three chicks, bought from the Rural Supply Store as concubines for the ranch rooster. They are a self-assured eight days old when I meet them, clattering up and down the cardboard that lines his bathtub, scrabbling at their feed. A wall heater keeps the room at blood heat. A steady drip tops up their water bowl, and an Ikea desk lamp warms the small cardboard hutch at one end of the bathtub, where they cuddle at night. When they hear Tim, they stop pecking and start peeping. He greets them, and they let themselves be picked up—two in one fist, one in another—and carried out to the garden.

This grass place, it’s a wonderland. There is dirt; there are stones; there are things that crawl and things that buzz and things that scurry. Everything has to be investigated immediately. They are immensely busy, heads down, but they come when Tim calls them by tapping a fingernail on the flagstones to draw attention to a slow-witted worm. That’s how their mother would teach them where to peck.

At first they stay close to the cabin, and even when they explore, they stick together, peeping a constant call and response. When one loses sight of the others, her trills get higher in pitch and volume. She doesn’t peck again until her calls have been answered and she is reunited. But when she finds something good—or something that might be good—she tries to get away from the others to investigate in peace. The others give chase, flailing after her, and she as she heads them off the worm, or twig, hangs from her beak. It looks like chick soccer.

It’s when they are sleepy that I love them best. They want, more than anything, to be taken under a wing, but there are no mother wings in their hatchery world. Tim’s shirt pockets are a warm and crowded substitute, and after some formal complaints they enjoy being stuffed in there to doze while he fixes motorcycles or visits Sal. I peer into the pocket and think of being under the duvet with my two small sisters, at an age when they were all bird bones and soft, sweaty hair. How annoying they were, and how comforting, with their doggy toddler smell. The chicks seem to have the same regard for one another.

When it’s too late at night for pockets, he sets them down on the kitchen floor to run around before bedtime. When they get tired they huddle in a fluffy scrum and try desperately to get under another chick. Is that so much to ask? They stagger, slit-eyed, up against another’s belly, and butt until they’re underneath. But the comfort never lasts. Their bodies are too light. The top chick topples off, and the bleary one is exposed again. These negotiations go on and on, a shifting dune of exhausted fluff.

The following day, Tim goes to town to buy three more chicks. He brings them home in a bucket with a window screen for a lid. Next to them, the older babies look like hulks, and I begin to feel sorry for all the toddlers who get stuck with younger siblings.

It takes a few days for the chicks to learn to drink. At dawn, the small ones reach up to pluck at the tips of the blades of grass. I don’t understand why, until Tim points out that they’re sipping dew-drops. Most birds can’t swallow as we do; they don’t have a peristalsis mechanism. They rely on gravity to drink, tipping their heads back and glugging like a Spanish farmer with a wineskin. When they’re just a few days old, a dish of water is beyond them, and so they reach for dewdrops. Later, when they see their older sisters drink from a bowl, they understand, though they can’t yet work out the physics of reaching in. They step into the dish and together they arch their necks to glug, beaks open, like the four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

Now that they can drink, their digestive systems kick in. They leave little pesto droppings on the kitchen floor.

I don’t want them to grow another inch.

“Bonsai chicks?” I say to Tim, hopefully.

I have a narcissistic prejudice in favor of one of the small ones, a dappled brown Americauna. Because she has mouse-colored fluff, I believe that she is smarter, more resourceful, and finer of feeling, than, say, the butterball blonde Rhode Island Red who always has dried shit stuck to her behind, no matter how often Tim goes after her with the nail scissors. I name my favorite Helen, after Helen Mirren, another cool and brave brunette. None of the others has a name. Tim says that since he hasn’t felt inclined to name the rooster, he doesn’t see why the birds need names. Then again, he can keep the six different breeds straight, and I can’t.

They practice flying, vaulting over a few feet of grass or up the kitchen steps. When an airplane flies overhead, they freeze and fall silent. A born fear of aerial predators, maybe, but it’s also their response to any loud, new sound. When the rooster crows from his henhouse thirty yards away, they freeze again.

I sit on a tree stump and watch them for hours, chewing my bottom lip to hold in tender sadism. I want them to suffer, in tiny doses, just so that I can rescue them. After an hour or two in the weak March sunshine they start to shiver, and let themselves get caught. Their bodies are warm but their legs are chilled. Even the Leghorn, who wears ridiculous chaps of dirty white fluff, has cold feet. I feel Helen’s heart banging against matchstick ribs, and I want to squeeze her little body like an ortolan.

The rooster, for his part, is perturbed by their arrival. He was barely grown when Tim’s neighbor rescued him from the side of Highway 17, and he’s been alone for more than a year. These strange but familiar creatures have stirred something in his rooster heart. He seems to have a rusty memory that he is a patriarch by rights, born to lead and breed. But he doesn’t yet recognize the chicks for the sexy pullets they could turn into, and they are too small to be left alone with him. Since they were taken away, he has fallen into a rooster funk. He still crows, but then he puts his head down and stalks around his house, clucking in a low voice as if questioning himself.

Tim notes that when the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons first came out, in 1946, most of the audience would have known a rooster personally, and would recognize his pompous, ridiculous magnificence from life. These days, the references go the other way. Most chickens are industrial workers, as are we, and they’re usually in a KFC bucket by the time we meet. As I watch the chicks, I compare them to Furbies, or anime characters, or the clay birds of Chicken Run. All of them are objects designed with the cues that make us love infant creatures—big head, big eyes—but they will never grow. We call them animated, but they have no spark of life.

These chicks are beautiful because they are alive. They have their own drives, their own chicken hopes, and they are fully engaged in every moment. They’re learning, changing, moving, and even as they startle at every rustling leaf, they’re not afraid to depend on one another. I’m glad I met them.

   “Yah, so I busted dese people in the campground yesterday,” said Jacques as I was stirring my Red River Cereal. Jacques is an enforcement ranger, of the variety to whom a badge and a truck represent intoxicating power. A mwa-ha-ha ranger. He dreams of reading Bermuda-shorted matrons the Miranda Rights when they fail to extinguish campfires by 10pm. Every morning he tries to impress the chicks with stories of busting tourists over Regulation 748b. Every morning we turn the heat up under our oatmeal and stir faster to get out of there.
   “Yah, dey had a big basket of mushrooms. Dey were laying ‘em out on the picnic table in the campground.”
   “What kind of mushrooms?” Surely he meant the magically delicious brand.
   “I don’t know the exact type, but you know, cooking mushrooms. Dey had the butter in the pan all ready to go when I confiscated ‘em.”
   “You confiscated their mushrooms?”
He puffed up. “It’s illegal to remove natural objects from the rightful place in the park. Dat includes mushrooms. And techically blueberries and raspberries too. I woulda gone easy on ‘em if dey had five or six, but dey had a whole big basket.”
   “ Those people are on holiday! They’re probably immigrants camping with their kids. They don’t even know why you took their mushrooms. That’s so mean!” we cry.
He looks hurt. “Rules is rules.”

I was still in mourning for the berries I’d left to rot on the Coastal Trail. The whole park is carpeted with fungus. Even the bears are hardly denting this year’s fine natural crop. To protest Jacques’s lumpish enforcement policy, I dragged Ranger Tim ‘shrooming Sunday morning.

We walked the private trail from Beaver Rock to Laughing Brook with the big dented stockpot that’s been sitting outside the staff kitchen all summer. He showed me the basic identification rules: the fleshy, porous boletes, the gilled agarics, the snowy purity of the Destroying Angel. We picked bone-white coral mushrooms, strewn on the forest floor exactly like dead coral. There were brown-black pigs’ ears, turmeric-stained Slippery Jacks, speckled boletus, chanterelles. We found supermarket mushrooms and a few pearl-grey oysters. Tim told stories of tripping casualties of Amanita muscaria in early mushrooming days.

At the Pilot Cabin he spread newspapers on the porch and arranged our many finds into little groups. I opened a bottle of wine and sat in a deckchair while he frowned over borrowed field guides. We would do a tasting menu, we decided, sampling each set. More than half our haul was unidentifiable or else too close to scary species to risk, but that still left a fine spread. He got butter, olive oil, salt and pepper and good bread from the kitchen and we fired up the camping stove. First, pigs’ ears steamed on a cocktail strainer (inevitably, they fell into the water). Gelatinous and good, like the wood-ear mushrooms the Thais serve. Next, Steinpilz, sautéed in butter, served on toast. Yum. Oyster mushrooms in olive oil. Mmm-mmm.

I’d drunk enough wine to feel like inviting Jacques to the fungus party, but Tim had to go to work. We promised ourselves a good mushroom omelette for brunch next day instead. Tim was in charge, slicing sulphur-yellow Slippery Jacks. “Edible and choice”, according to The Mushroom Hunter’s Field Guide “Wipe the slime from the cap and remove the tubes before cooking”. They stained his fingers and blended pleasingly with the eggs.

Forty-five minutes later I was staring into an enamel bowl and letting loose enormous rumbling belches. Tim paced the porch looking up fungus poisoning treatment in the field guides. I retched and belched again, louder than ever.
   “Can you say your whole name in those belches?” he asked. Not funny. I wanted more than anything to get the Slippery Jacks out of my stomach.
Eventually he headed to the kitchen and rushed back holding out a tall glass that looked exactly like a pisco sour. I groaned.
   “Emetic,” he said briskly, “Salt and mustard powder in warm water. Hold your nose and chug it.” I got half of it down. It immediately shot back up my nose: hot mustard solution, like the worst icecream headache imaginable. “I’m going to make more.”
   “No! No! I can’t take it.”

But I did. Two minutes after I finished the second glass, the Slippery Jacks were returned to their rightful place in the woods and I felt suitably punished for my wanton transgression. Naturally, Tim felt no ill-effects. I’ve never had a food allergy in my life, but it turns out I react badly to slimy yellow fungus in the north woods. Could be worse.

This was my seduction dinner back in my student days. The theory, I recall, was that I would charm them with cocktail wit while conjuring earth mother images by stirring this dish for forty-five minutes. Mixed marketing message. Sadly, none of the subjects fell for it, but at least they liked the rice.

Serves 2 greedy people

1 medium red onion
2 cloves garlic
8 cups good chicken stock (I make mine with roast chicken carcass, or giblety-things, simmered with sliced celery, carrot, onion, a handful of whole peppercorns, salt, and a bay leaf).
1 cup dry white wine (maybe you could use wine vinegar)
1 ½ to 2 cups Arborio rice
1 cup dried porcini, morels, shitake etc., and/or as many fresh forest mushrooms as you care for. Strain and keep the soaking liquid from dried mushrooms.
1 cup Parmesan cheese, coarsely grated
Butter
Salt and pepper
Light-bodied Italian red wine for the cook

In a wide, heavy-bottomed pan, sautée the onions and garlic in butter over medium heat until slightly softened (2-5 minutes). Add the rice and stir until grains are lightly coated and shiny. Turn the heat up and add the wine: let it sizzle until the alcohol burns off. The rice will start to absorb the liquid.

Back on a low to medium heat, add the chicken stock one ladle at a time. Stir constantly as the rice absorbs the stock (though you will probably find the time to make a green salad and dressing if you like). Add the mushrooms about halfway through cooking. When you run out of stock, use the liquid from the dried mushrooms. Continue cooking until the rice releases its starch and becomes gloopy, but the grains are still al dente. Turn off the heat, stir in the Parmesan cheese, add salt if you like and plenty of fresh pepper. Stir in extra butter if you’re as gluttonous as I am.

Serve immediately: unlike seduction techniques, risotto does not improve with age.

The office I worked at in Manhattan was in a gastronomic wasteland near Penn Station. The lunch choices on our block didn’t go much beyond Subway, Fresco Tortilla, and the place we called Dirty Deli. Ram&oacuten, then, was a great addition to the staff: our Chief Scientist cared about food. We waited for his emails proposing an expedition to some little Peruvian place that sold good ceviche, to the roti shop, or to a soul food restaurant ten blocks away. If we were meeting Ram&oacuten at the elevator at 12.30, chances were we’d eat well that day. I was happy to hear from him when he stumbled across this site last week:

Your mention of banana pancakes made me smile. How did they become the official comfort food of the budget traveler? You can always tell a backpacker mecca by the concentration of places that serve those things. Yangshuo is a good example, a small Chinese town with at least five cafes prominently featuring banana pancakes (with chocolate sauce!). But try ordering some otherwise common steamed buns at one of those places and you’re out of luck. I blame it on Lonely Planet, indispensable for logistics but awful for food recommendations.

Noting my frequent posts about food, he added a favorite quote:

“People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking?
Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about
love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow
gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But
there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for
food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we
cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that
when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger
for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it.”

M. F. K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me (1943)

Thailand is obsessed with food, and nowhere more so than Bangkok. Days after I should have processed my visa for Laos and moved on, I linger here waddling from one food stand to the next. I’ve got good at casing plates of food as I sidle by, and pointing at anything that looks promising: ‘Same-same. One.’

Even in Bangkok where tourists scurry like cockroaches, street vendors still seem tickled when foreigners sit down with them rather than enduring another banana pancake at the guesthouse. Last night, I spotted a family dipping goodies into a hotpot on a tabletop charcoal brazier.
   ‘Sukiyaki. Beef.’ said the stallholder.
Sukiyaki. Just like the Korean barbeque places on 32nd St.
   ‘Same-same. One. And one Tiger beer.’

First they brought a brazier, then an earthenware pot of broth. A plate of vermicelli, cabbage leaves, holy basil and chilis followed. Then—oh sweet Jesus—a plate of raw tripe, cartilage, and tendon. The tripe was yellow like old net curtains, and the cartilage had the look of long slices of quince jelly. But I knew it wasn’t.

At the next table, the family whose dinner I ordered became enthusiastic. They crowded around to show me how to pick up the tripe and cartilage on a slotted spoon and cook it in the bubbling soup, adding the garnishes at the end. They smiled and nodded as they waited for me to pronounce on my first delicious bite. As I choked down the gluey mouthful, I caught sight of a handsome Swedish couple pointing at my dish from a few tables over.
   ‘What’s that?’
   ‘Sukiyaki. Beef.’
   ‘Ah. We try. Same-same. Two.’
I smiled at my new Thai friends and said nothing to the Swedes. Hell, I can’t afford real dinner theater.

— Shirley MacLaine

I always thought Shirley MacLaine spoke for all of us on this one, but that was before I discovered my new mantra.
Rambutan. Durian. Mangosteen. Papaya. Lychee. Mango. Coconut. ’10-baht-one-kilo-you-come-back-tomorrow-thank you.’

I mean, the fruit here even looks cool. The rambutan, for one, ought to win a few design awards for innovative packaging. Bright red skin covered in rubbery lime green spikes, opening cleanly to reveal a glistening white egg of sweet, gelatinous fruit. And a nice little seed in the middle to suck.

I just ate a kilo of them. Life is sweet.

On my last visit to Central Park, there was a small patch of mud just inside the entrance gate to the Sheep Meadow. People hopped over it or walked around the edge. As I was leaving, a pair of toddlers approached. She was about three and a half, he was two. Their matching navy-blue outfits were immaculate. At the patch of mud, they stopped dead. Alien substance. Bad?

Mom followed, pushing a huge sports-utility stroller. She was as blondely, blandly perfect as they were.
    ‘Ewwwwwww!’ she said, as though they were forced to ford a twenty-foot latrine. ‘Get in the stroller! Now!’

I felt sorry for these kids who didn’t know what mud was for. I remember making mud pies with my friend Danielle, stirring them with sticks and fingers and singing ‘Shit-ty, shit-ty, shit-ty’ until our mothers came out to explain that that wasn’t a nice word for little girls to say.

Thai kids have a very different life. Ton picked me up in a jeep yesterday as I walked back to my bungalow. There was a borrowed three-year-old in his lap (no seatbelt, of course). He belonged to one of the kitchen staff.
    ‘He like to drive. When I go in jeep, he come.’
Ton’s hands were by his side. The little boy flicked the turn signal at the bottom of the road, and Ton helped him haul the steering wheel around to the left. The kid steered us home single-handed while Ton worked the pedals and the gears. They chattered the whole way. Bear in mind that Koh Samui has the highest rate of traffic accidents in all of Thailand, which chills my heart as I walk to the fruit market every morning, flinching at the onslaught of 18-wheelers driven by toddlers.

Thai kids run naked on the beach. They clamber over guests at beach huts and shout ‘Hallo! Spiderman!’ They sing and chase skinny chickens. They are tickled half to death and folded into deckchairs at Bangkok market stalls. On the buses, adults stand up to give them seats. They are so free that’s it’s never quite clear who their parents are. I would like to be reborn as a Thai child. And I swear I’ll never raise a Manhattan veal calf of a kid.

I’m still here at the Starvation Spa, determined to make up in the second week for the privations of the first. Cruelly, the Spa has one of the 50 best restaurants in the world according to some magazine or other, and the aromas had tormented me throughout the fast. But an odd thing has happened: I now want to eat fruit, salads, steamed vegetables, goat yoghurt, occasional fish. I bounce out of bed at 6.30 a.m., though I haven’t had a cup of coffee in two weeks. I’m all shiny. You’d find me obnoxious.

Aside from food, the other great delight here is the company I keep. On a one-week vacation, I’d never give up a precious day to spend with, say, a psychologist who’d lived in India for thirty years, or a professor of Criminology, or a landmine control activist, or a San Francisco software engineer (okay, maybe the latter). But with an open-ended year ahead, I can putter about from one to another, listening to their stories like a little girl at bedtime. I feel rich in people. And I’m starting to believe my life’s work lies in persuading others not to miss out on their own lives.