Well this is the fifth volume of short stories, and some may ask why he doesnt just pull his finger out and write a proper novel. But he figures he is being novel, doesnt have the brain to concentrate enough to achieve a novel, and realises possibly just where his strengths and weaknesses lie. So go and sit on the toilet if you need to hang shit on him. Besides, he is a lazy prick.

Phuong can wake up in the morning, declare herself hungry, and walk one hundred meters to a freshly cooked bowl of soup or a mini-baguette filled with meat pate and vegetables. Pho and banh miwe have a choice at least between those two in the space of a two-minute stroll on the street. Phuong will then come home and devour half a kilo of lychees while I eat the leftovers from the night before because she will not touch them. Its funny that she eats my cooking, because maybe she has toshe is the only Vietnamese woman I ever met who could not and did not want to cook. Then its off to town for a com tom for her and a pork baguette roll for me. Then we hit the market. Tonight it will be pork stir-fry with rice, of course. We stock up on fruit as well, and today she insists on buying one of those deadly, spiky, stinky-shoe-shock smelly fruit: a jackfruit or durian. I am not sure which. This is the less smelly one, and I actually enjoy eating it with her. Its a lesson to Western women to watch these women eat so much food and still remain slim. Then she gathers the seed pods, boils them up, and peels them for me, and I am surprised at how much they taste like chestnuts.

A not so extraordinary life to all but himself; yet he found the need to put it down on paper just so that he could recall it all when he added dementia to his list of mental illnesses. And also so that his son could know what sort of man he was in case he died before the boy could find out for himself. He wants to be strung up in a tree somewhere north of Maree when he dies so that the birds can pick his bones dry. It would be such a waste of good food to put him in the ground or to burn him.

Well they tried to drug him to keep him quiet for a while and then they had the bright idea of giving him testosterone injections under the guise that they were using him as a guinnea pig in some sort of research trial. Well you stupid friggin doctors you are somewhat responsible for this particular pile of words splattered onto a page of a pretend book. Didnt you specialists know that you could have done the same thing to a monkey given them a laptop and got nearly the same result.

Well, some may call it satire, but like with most things in life, poor Mr. Scarlett seems to make it almost a poisonous and bitter observation of the human condition. Sick people may think that he is funny, but unfortunately, there are many out there who, if were given a single brain cell, would be terribly lonely and will not be laughing at all. Most people do not take enough care and attention to the things that happen around themthe wool that gets pulled over their lives with the propaganda and brain washing machine that they live inso they get tumbled around in the machine of life's events and are too lazy to look for the end-of-cycle button. So please forgive this poor prick, but he feels the people of the world need a kick up the arse and he mistakenly thought that with his disgusting words he may achieve this.

The stories of this book are my experiences during World War 2, also events which took place previous to, but are nonetheless relevant to them. Taken from a day-to-day diary kept by me, hidden from my captors in my AP (water bottle). I was taken prisoner at Singapore by the Japanese and incarcerated for three and a half years. This account has been enhanced and enlarged by extra memories triggered by reading my original diaries, which were sometimes written in a hurry due to illness or cut to a minimum at the time in case they were discovered by the Japanese. All sketches and poems are my own work unless otherwise stated most prisoners, others from memory since.