Burma

This pestle and mortar have sat somewhere around our dining room fireplace for a quarter of a century. It's probably our most distinctive souvenir from our late-'70's hippy year, the result of an exchange in Burma. It still brings back memories of our first exposure to south-east Asia, a reclusive country with (then) so few tourists and a recursive way of life.

We obtained the pestle and mortar in Rangoon, in a back-street deal from a street trader who was very keen to take our single bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label whisky brought in duty-free. And we loved the country. It was too difficult to visit Mandalay and Pagan in the north, but we took a bus to Pegu outside the city, to the giant reclining Buddha of which my father had such memories.

And now, the nightly news is reviving my memories. The TV shows the street leading to the Schwe Dagon pagoda, the street I remember walking along, between the verandah'd colonial shops and houses all painted white and green. The heady scents and heat sway back in my mind. I can visualise the brightly coloured cars and crimson monks' robes, the gold of the pagodas and statues. It's the one country to which I now want to return, if the politics and purse permit.

Thinking along the timelines, there is now almost the same interval between my father's sojourn out there during and just after the war and our short tour, as between our tour and the present. Thirty years, near as dammit. We should send an offspring out there.


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