The Boy and The Coconut Tree

My friend Paula told me to write these down as I usually share them every morning as I stagger into the office with yet another tale of weirdness, rudeness, smelliness or some other 'ness on my journey to work. The journey only takes 10-15 minutes but it is almost always eventful and not all of these stories are from my commute between Lewisham and London Bridge, a few are from other commutes in or out of London that I remember. Titanic in Essex I was standing next to 2 office girls one morning at the time Titanic was in the cinema and very popular. The girls were asking each other about their weekends. Girl 1 "What did you do at the weekend?" Girl 2 "I went to see a movie" Girl 1 "What did you see?" Girl 2 "Titanic innit", Girl 1 "What’s it about" Girl 2 "It’s a love story set on some big boat"... I started to laugh at this, "some boat" only the most famous boat of all time. I love the simpli...

I visited Vietnam in February 2011 and took a train from Saigon (HCMC) to Hue. The journey was 20 hours and I shared a berth with 3 locals. One of them was Dang Ngoc Hieu a 24 year old shopkeeper from Tuyen Quang. Only one person in the berth could speak English so using my phrase book and drawings, we chatted. For 20 hours I was overwhelmed by a sense of being the centre of attention in the most innocent way. This boy from Tuyen Quang had never met a foreigner; he lives in a small village, an 8 hour drive north of Hanoi, closer to China than Hanoi.  He asked for my phone number and in rough English asked me to visit Tuyen Quang province if I ever returned to Hanoi.  A totally innocent experience that felt like my first ever crush and so hard to put into words.  Our lives are very different.  And the coconut tree? Hieu was delivering it to his village from relatives in Saigon. He carried it almost 2000km by the time he reached his home in Thuong Lam village....