Thai Diary Two

Vero Nihil Verius

Lucy Weir, PhD

Dec 21, 2025

This isn’t at all chronological and not even accurate geographically since I now find myself in Lanzarote. I know.

Lucky me.

My mother just died and I wasn’t able to get back to say goodbye.

Unlucky me.

Seriously.

What is going on?

I’m drinking too much. I’ve drunk too much all my adult life, but I’m much more aware of it now. I suppose that’s a good thing, though facing up to one’s addicted brain is rather a long drawn out process, in my experience.

My mother died on the 12th of November. I didn’t expect to be writing about it on Substack, but I have, and I am. I’ll go back and finish off the piece on Face Yoga and one on The Cats of Lanzarote, and one on what it’s meant to be me, sometime, in the near or middle distant future, I hope, but for now writing on Substack will, I resolve (getting in my resolutions early) become a more regular event. It might even help me with the determination not to drink during the week that we have recently made. More on drinking another time… It’s a taboo subject, and that’s why we need to talk about it.

Our second week in Thailand was the week we found out (or confirmed?) we wouldn’t be selling the condo and that Mum died. It was about as gentle a lead up as possible and I’ll write up what I can of what happened although already the atmosphere has changed dramatically, here in Lanzarote, in a flat Mum shared with us on three occasions. The first year must have been her 84th birthday. 2022. We went out on the catamaran and she slid down the slide into the deep sea with me and we went and had fish of the day in the farthest Playa Honda beach restaurant to celebrate. It was very good. When she got off the catamaran, she cut her leg and the owner of the company came out of her office and insisted on driving us home (it was one of those expeditions where you get picked up at the hotel, only we had been picked up at the bus stop in Playa Honda). One of many wounds that took a long time to heal and was a further harbinger of things to come.

The next year we went on a ferry to Puerto Calero and Mum was extremely slow and having difficulty getting on and off, and up the stairs. I ran while Noel took the ferry back with Mum. There was a really kind woman from Senegal who was collecting the boat fare, and she helped Mum, and was very patient, and didn’t hurry her. She was called Mercy, which is also the name of Mum’s half aunt, who was kind to us, but apparently, I heard at the funeral, very cruel to my cousin.

The third year we didn’t manage to do much in the way of expeditions. I think the farthest we went was into Arrecife in a taxi, to sit at the restaurants by the laguna and watch the world go by over a glass or two of wine. Walking down to the sea here in Playa Honda was an ordeal. We had to stop two or three times on the way down, me desperately looking for something other than the ground for her to sit on. We made it. Just. Each time more slowly.

The thing that really put us off inviting her last winter were the steps to the apartment which she became very nervous about, and would have been impossible last spring, given she had to use a walking frame (which she hated with a vengeance, flinging it down the corridor ‘like an Olympian’ as one carer put it). I can feel her with me now, though, going down to the sea and sitting on a bench to look out at the wading birds, the plovers and sandpipers and whimbrels and turnstones, the egrets and gulls and sanderlings. Getting into the sea with walking poles, and getting into trouble and not being able to get her out, and someone running down, a young, stout, probably local man, and helping me to get her upright. Much laughter. Much fear.

Going home on her own was the final straw. She arrived absolutely exhausted, having really struggled to understand what was going on, even with special assistance. This after me coming to get her and us staying in a hotel in the airport. She insisted on getting up in the middle of the night and wandering around and in the end, I told her I was going to help her have a shower and get into bed, and I was very firm with her, and she was furious with me and said that she wanted to go home. In a taxi. Nevertheless, we calmed down, and we made it. It was worth it to get her into the sun.

Why do I think this matters to anyone else? Because it’s the story of life itself, told through the prism of an addicted brain, looking to dig down far enough to be able to uproot the causes. Perhaps it’s a craving for attention. I don’t think so. I stayed in the Heinrich Boll cottage once and when the curator, John McHugh (if you’re Irish you’ll have heard of his daughter, Saoirse, of political fame) asked why I wanted the residency, I said, not because I want my work to be published, but because I want to write for its own sake. I think the act of writing, or producing art, is relevant for its own sake, not because it has to meet anyone else’s approval. That got me in…

I’ve been unimaginably lucky in my life. Of course I’ve had times of desperation. But I’ve just come back from Phuket to land in Lanzarote for five months. I have an amazing life, walking, swimming, practising yoga and meditation, and writing. Oh, and drinking, dancing and singing… and living with someone I adore.

To live like this is an unbelievable privilege.

Alive, alive oh, and so aware of dying.

When I collapsed, as I wrote in the last Thai entry, N woke at four and kept watch over me for the rest of the night. When I woke in the morning with an unusually clear memory of what had transpired the night before, I apologised profusely, and kept trying to reassure him, but I’d seen real fear on his face. He told me I had nothing to apologise for. I was ashamed, though, for a while. It’s hard not to feel shame around over-indulgence. But to drink oneself into oblivion, regularly, speaks of something that requires attention.

Thailand was utterly beautiful, where the ravages of overtourism hadn’t burned and buried that beauty. Flowers everywhere with large, waxy petals, seductively coloured in bright reds and pinks or more subtly hued in creams and lilacs. Beautiful white sandy beaches with obligatory palm trees, green coconuts piled up in carts sold for their juice, the top lopped off with a machete for you, a straw inserted, 60 baht, or 20 if you went outside the tourist parts, up a lane and puffing up the side of a mountain along a tarmac track one could only imagine the perilousness of in the pouring rain (of which there was much while we were there).

The Thai people are fantastically friendly (tinged, perhaps, with an air of bitterness, and desperation?) The land of smiles. Bright, too, of necessity, no doubt. Certainly the cleaner outdid me on the Google Translate stakes! We don’t need a change of sheets and towels every day. We don’t need the room to be swept, the floors washed, more than twice a week. We went through ways to signal what and how much to …

We had heavy showers. The seasons are no doubt changing and although we missed the worst of the storms, the tragic effects of which were felt further south and east in Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as in other areas of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, it was bad enough to warrant warnings of landslides. I’d imagine all the excavations and logging of rainforest won’t have helped, and we saw a house teetering on the edge of a ravine, and threatening to collapse onto the road below, where we were walking.

I managed to find a good website describing which birds to look out for, and kept a bird list (if anyone’s interested, I can post it at some point. Mynah birds and Brahminy hawks were commonest over the condo but I listened out for the croaking boom of a Hornbill and almost convinced myself on a couple of occasions that I’d heard one.

Thailand feels far less safe than Lanzarote. The climate as we experienced it was more severe, with more storms, tsunami warning signs, earthquake zones than I felt comfortable with.The air hot and heavy against my thighs. Music and children laughing - the children went into the pool while it was raining. I ought to have another swim. I will make up my bruised and battered face. And we will venture out, my man and I, into the day …

In The Marriott I listened as a drunken Australian couple got into a verbal fight, insults ringing out, until finally he got up, leaving a full bottle of Chardonnay in an ice bucket in front of his chair (she was drinking cocktails). “What are you going to do with that?” she demanded as he turned to walk away. He turned back and announced, “YOU can take it upstairs or you can shove it up your arse”.

Ah, to be young, and rich, and able to get drunk and angry in Phuket. Happy holidays.