Ruthrieston

This is bringing back so many memories for me. A few years after I started working at St Stephen's Hospital I was appointed as a Clinical Nurse Specialist in HIV/Aids and managed a team of Specialist nurses, social workers and counsellors. I then joined a campaigning/protest group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who dressed in traditional nuns habits, the rules were "no makeup and no underwear" and we often worked to organise protests with Outrage. The Sister who moved from Australia to London and started the group there was called Mother Ethel Dreads a Flashback, and my name was Sister Immaculata Worksurface. When the police tried to arrest the protestors they always went for Outrage first and just looked at us and we lined up in twos and walked away. Then I was funded to attend one of the first International AIDS Conferences taking place in Canada. The week before the Conference the Canadian Government cut the funding for AIDS work. The Sisters from Australia, France, America and Britain planned a protest. At the opening of the Conference the Health Minister was standing at the podium on the stage to make a speech and the Sisters were spread out across the building and as she started to speak we all stood up and turned out backs on her. No surprise that then the whole conference hall stood up and also turned their backs on her. Within a couple of weeks the funding was restored by the government.

I worked as a nurse on one of the biggest HIV/AIDS wards in St Stephen's Hospital in London in the 1980's. We had to recruit gay volunteers to help us transport patients as no porters or ambulance staff would touch our patients. The volunteers even had to take the bodies of the dead to the mortuary, and we had to pack and ligate the bodies and put them into big plastic bags. There was so much prejudice and fear. One day a fellow nurse who had only been working on the ward for two weeks was with me making up a bed for a patient waiting on a trolley in the corridor when I looked up and saw that his lips were turning blue, a sign of PCP, a common cause of death. I persuaded him to get into the bed. I went to call his parents who lived in Manchester and his father answered the phone and when I told him his son was dying he shouted "Let the faggot die!" and slammed the phone down. He had only been in London for two weeks so he had no friends, so when my shift ended at 3.30pm I went and sat with him, and he died at 7pm, he was 24 years old. We all lost too many friends. The person who helped most was Princess Diana who was often filmed and pictured visiting patients and holding their hands and hugging them, which proved that AIDS was not transmitted just by touch.

Well Londoner, the readers can blame you for prompting me to relate my boring story! Here goes... In 1998 I first travelled to Pattaya with a group of friends who had mostly been here before, nine people. My old flatmate, who worked with me on the Aids Ward in St Stephen's Hospital in London, insisted on laying for my flight, yeah right, it was a two for the price of one deal on Lufthansa! By the time of the trip my friend had Aids himself and he was so ill on the journey, I was worried about him. We stayed in a hotel near Beach Road at the start of Walking Street, and on the first evening my friend knocked on my door and insisted on taking me to a bar in what would become Sunnee Plaza, but it was a lot of dark streets, and the one bar was inside and had a few leather sofas and glass topped coffee tables and I was so concerned about him that I wasn't looking, until the young gentlemen were running past banging something hard on the glass topped tables and I turned to look and realised it was their hard-ons!! We flew back to London at the start of May and in July my friend died. His gift to me was the exciting world of Pattaya. After many years of travelling a couple of times a year I was kicked out of my job at the age of 53 and couldn't pay my mortgage and I decided to sell up and move to live in Pattaya. That was in 2011, and not for one day have I regretted that decision.

I really enjoyed the old Telephone Bar, those old fashioned telephones reminded me of my younger days. I never even had the courage to try phoning a cute young Thai gentleman seated at another table though, sadly.

There is a Tomboy nightclub on Third Road. You do realise that Tomboys are lesbians who cut their hair and dress to look masculine?

I hate Songkran in Pattaya, and it starts 11th to 12th and does not end until 19th!! I usually hide in my condo until 16th and then I flee to Bangkok, but this year I am going to my favourite place in Krabi, Railay Beach. The death rate over Songkran is appalling, as stupid drunk farang throw buckets of water onto people riding motorbikes and they fall under moving cars. When I made my first visit in 1998 I arrived for the last two nights of Songkran and it was more civilised, and all water throwing stopped when the sun went down and you could go out for dinner quite safe. I have lived in Pattaya now for over fourteen years and I absolutely hate Songkran here.

I am another person who has never taken part in the social media stuff and I wouldn't touch facebook. People's addiction to their telephones is becoming addictive and dangerous. So often I have seen young families sitting in a restaurant having dinner with a phone propped up in front of the baby, the four or five year old watching his phone and the parents also just watching their phones and not talking to each other or their children at all. That is all so unhealthy, and so sad to see.

My parents both smoked a lot and our house was a permanent nicotine yellow inside, I hated it and have never touched a cigarette. In my years in London I joined the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to protest for gay rights in the late 1980's and the Sister who came from Australia and founded the Sisters in London used to smoke cannabis and some made hashcakes but I never tried it. I was given the name Sister Immaculata Worksurface because my flat was always so clean. We used to stage protests alongside a group called Outrage and the police always went for them and arrested them but we looked like nuns and the police left us alone!

In Pattaya it all starts by 11th and goes on and on until 19th. It is all ridiculous and I hate it. I hide in my condo until 16th when I flee to a quiet and dry Bangkok until 20th.

Me too PeterRS, I avoid all the social media nonsense completely and if my phone battery goes down to 80% in one day that is a lot of use for me.

So true Vinapu. We hardly ever hear about the ongoing massacres of the people in Myanmar by the army anymore.

Nothing that comes out of Orange Face's mouth bares any relation to truth or reality. This sad escalation of violence on the Thai/Cambodian border is awful, and I hope they can calm things down soon, assistance from Malaysia would be more likely to help.

And the lovely sweet young Carlos Alcaraz deserves every penny he makes.

I think this is a reference to the absence of His Majesty Vinapu from his favourite five star eating place, the Took Lae Dee restaurant inside Foodland.

Bless Dame Maggie Smith!!