Should grandad marry a Th*i woman?

(I’ve often been negative about the Land of Smells, so here’s something more positive, I hope)

In the UK – There are about 11 million people over 65 in Britain, including 5 million over 75 including 3 million over 80. Around half of the over 75s live alone – 1,800,000 women and 700,000 men.

Let’s just look at the 700,000 men over 75 who live alone. What do they have to look forward to? Increasingly frailty, probable dementia and even greater loneliness as their friends become immobile or die. And at the end of it, a couple of years playing dominoes in a care home with a once-weekly musical ‘entertainment’ where they can clap along if they manage to stay awake after their institutional lunch. Whooooppppeee! Sounds like fun.

In the Land of Smells – Now let’s move to the Land of Smells. A typical worker in the ‘adult entertainment’ industry will be a girl who probably got pregnant from some local layabout in her village when she was sixteen or seventeen. Then, not learning very fast, she probably got pregnant again with another Th*i-whiskey-drinking layabout a couple of years later. So, there she is, with one or two kids and no means to support them in the crappy little rice-growing village.

The only solution is to travel to one of the major cities, leaving her children to be brought up by her parents, in order to find a job. If she’s lucky she might get something in a factory or on a building site earning say 4,000 or so baht (£80) a month. That’s just about enough to live off, but hardly enough to have much left over to send her parents for bringing up her kid(s). Then, talking to the other girls, she’ll hear that if she worked in ‘adult entertainment’ she could be earning 40,000 to 50,000 baht (£800 to £1,000) a month taxfree  – a fortune in a country where a doctor or lawyer is probably only on 25,000 baht (£500) a month and where a decent house will only cost about £20,000.

Hopefully during her years in a gogo bar the girl will then save some of her earnings. But many just fritter the money away on clothes, jewelry and their Th*i boyfriends. Sex workers are much prized by young Th*i men as they earn a lot of money allowing the man to spend his life sleeping or drinking Th*i whiskey, taking drugs and gambling. But when the girl is in her thirties, she has a big problem. Her time in ‘adult entertainment’ is coming to an end, she can’t get any other job, no Th*i man will go near her and she has one or two kids to put through high school and university so they have a better life than she did.

There’s only one solution – get a farang (Western) husband. Ideally, the woman would want a farang in his forties or early fifties. But most of them will be married and not many of the unmarried ones will be overly keen to get together with someone who already has a couple of teenage children. The second best solution is to find a farang in his sixties or early seventies and enter an arrangement whereby he supports her, pays for her children’s education and ensures she has a pension after he dies, while she looks after him, considerably brightening up his final years on this planet.

Given a choice between 10 to 15 years living alone then a couple more years in a care home or staying in their own home with the company of a very caring Th*i woman, I know which one I’d choose for my grandad if I had one.

But, if grandad decides to go down this route, he must ‘choose wisely’. If he chooses wisely, he will have some very happy final decades. If he chooses poorly, he may find himself joining the Th*i Flying Club – being thrown off the balcony of a high building so his new wife’s family can get his money. Such deaths are always classed as ‘suicide’ by the local police after the woman has made a suitable contribution into the police pension fund.

So, grandad, choose wisely. Great joy awaits he who chooses wisely,  great sorrow he who chooses poorly: