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In Thailand a few years back, a group of us managed to have a simple yet splendid time. The group consisted of me and my two travelling companions, a very funny Kiwi lad, a nice English girl, and whoever else was staying at the bungalows on the beach we called home.
The routine was simple. We’d gather each morning in the restaurant; well, we’d gather at the tables and chairs under a simple shelter where the Thai family brought us food and drinks. Breakfast was invariably a fruit salad covered with yoghurt accompanied by a banana milkshake. Afterwards we’d discuss what the rest of the day would entail; usually this took long enough to warrant another milkshake and perhaps a second fruit salad or a pancake.
What with the morning wearing along, a few joints were no doubt being passed around, and all ambition for the day would fade. Dry mouths were watered with coke from a glass bottle poured over ice, and the munchies usually forced us into ordering a curry or Pad Thai for lunch. Once another joint had gone around, some opted for a pancake or a fruit salad for dessert while the more adventurous of us simply ordered another lunch - and a beer with it, for the days were hot and sitting around like this was hard work. Such overeating was going some way to help us regain the weight we had lost in India.
All the while we chatted with whoever came and went; we discussed how wrecked we had got when we last went out of an evening; or perhaps we made bold claims about how wrecked we were going to get in the evenings ahead. There was plenty of laughter to be had, and in a simple way, after six months on the road, I enjoyed every day as much as the last; it seemed as though we had landed in paradise and we all knew it.
A very large girl arrived at the bungalows; she was large boned of that there was no doubt, but those large bones were quite seriously padded with a plentiful helping of flesh. She was pleasant enough and whenever she came down to the restaurant to graze a little she’d sit with us and join in.
On one of our idyllic days, the large girl joined us for lunch. I had been eating steadily all day and had just finished a pancake after having two servings of lunch back to back. I leaned back and patted my stomach, exclaiming how incredibly full I was and wondered aloud how I was going to find room for a fruit salad. I then reached for the weed tin and started to make a postprandial joint. It was at this point that the large girl piped up and said, without any hint of irony, “I find that if I am really full and can’t eat anymore, if I force down a slice of watermelon then I can eat usually quite a lot more.”
Nobody said anything; what is there to say to such a statement? Well, obviously one could have said that she seemed to be the living proof of her theory, but it wasn’t that kind of atmosphere. The large girl left a few days later, and although I’ve never tried a piece of watermelon with the intention of being able to eat a little more, I have never forgotten her strange advice.
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