02
Stop two
Wat Pho
Head Auxetic 2.0 Speed 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: Forty-six metres of reclining Buddha, gold leaf, and the feet – go and look at the feet – inlaid with mother-of-pearl across one hundred and eight panels. Beautiful. But that is not the story, and you know I never stop at the beautiful bit. The story is on the walls. In the reign of Rama the Third the accumulated knowledge of the kingdom was inscribed around this compound: medicine, massage, astrology, literature. Carved into stone. Where any ordinary person could come and read it for nothing. Do you understand what that actually is? That is somebody deciding the experts had been sitting on it quite long enough. They call it Thailand's first university. I call it the largest leak in the history of Siam, and I say it with total admiration.
03
Stop three
Jim Thompson House
Head Auxetic 2.0 Speed 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: Now sit down for this one. Jim Thompson, an American, came here after the war and never went home. He revived the hand-woven silk trade when it was all but finished, and got it onto a Broadway stage – an entire musical dressed in it. Then he bought six old teak houses, some of them floated down the canal from Ayutthaya, and put them back together on this spot, facing the water. And then, on Easter Sunday 1967, he walked into the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia and was never seen again. No trace. Ever. Now, I have heard every theory there is, and I am not going to repeat a single one of them in front of the man's own furniture. The house is as he left it. The silk still sells. That is where I leave it, and I never leave anything anywhere.
04
Stop four
The Giant Swing (Sao Ching Cha)
Head Auxetic 2.0 Speed 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: Two enormous red posts, nothing hanging between them, and a story nobody puts on the postcard. It went up in 1784, right at the founding of this city, for a Brahmin ceremony honouring Shiva. Young men were swung from a very great height on a seat, and the object was to snatch a bag of coins – with their teeth. Yes. Their teeth. Half of this square would have been out here watching. And it was ended in 1935 because too many of them died doing it, which is not gossip and not a joke; it is simply why the frame is empty. So there it stands in front of Wat Suthat, still red, still enormous, holding nothing whatsoever. The loudest silence in Bangkok. I shall say no more. I shall absolutely say more, but not until we are round the corner.
A young animal asked to carry too much never grows into a good one. The Head Auxetic 2.0 Speed 26 Junior gets the weight right: 26 inches long, a full 100 square inch head, 250 grams unstrung and 265 strung, a 16×19 string pattern, and Auxetic 2.0 construction, which gives feedback that changes with stroke speed and impact location.
It is the last junior step before a full-size frame, and it is light enough that a growing swing is never once asked to haul.
Bangkok grew into itself the same way. The city began in 1782 on the east bank of the Chao Phraya, and two red teak posts went up in the plaza in front of Wat Suthat in 1784, before very much else existed at all.
Everywhere from that empty red frame in Phra Nakhon to the porcelain spire of Wat Arun across the water in Thonburi, the place was assembled out of whatever arrived by boat. Those are not tiles on Wat Arun. They are broken plates — Chinese porcelain carried as ballast, shattered in transit, and pressed into the stucco by hand.
Take the racquet and go early, because the heat here is not a suggestion.
It is also perfect for a slow hour at Wat Pho behind the Grand Palace, where the reclining Buddha runs forty-six metres and his feet carry a hundred and eight panels of mother-of-pearl, and where Rama III had the accumulated knowledge of the kingdom — medicine, massage, astrology, literature — carved into the walls so that ordinary people could read it for nothing.
They call it the country's first university. Raise a young thing properly and hand it everything you know. That is the whole method, and Bangkok wrote it on a wall.
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