2026 and still in Bangkok. Rarely ride my bicycle along Khlong Pravet Burirom now.

Five years on from the last post and I'm still here in Bangkok. I am no longer walking the klongs regularly. My football team Charlton AFC are doing well in League 1 this year even though they have the most incompetent owner in the whole English Football League.

Still Here

I hope to bring to this blog some of the articles I write for the monthly Pattaya Trader magazine. I still visit the canals, but not as often as I used to. I'm more often than not going back to places I visited before.

As for my football team Charlton Athletic, they had a good season in the Championship, (the old Second Division where they spent most of my childhood), after their record breaking winning of League One, (the old Third Division), the previous season. In Chris Powell they have not only a young ambitious manager and one of the few black football managers in the English game, they also have an ex-player who was deservedly a crowd favourite and still does have a fantastic relationship with the crowd.

The one problem Charlton have is with their rather secret and hidden ownership and that so many of the old guard in the club's administration have left. Forgetting this, we can still dream of promotion to the Premiership. My local satellite TV provider has lost Premiership football broadcasting this coming season, maybe they will get the Championship. We can live in hope.

An Important Win

Sheffield Wednesday 0-1 Charlton Athletic.

So we get the points in the first of two six-pointer games. Next week Wednesday's neighbours, Sheffield United, visit Charlton.

Of course they are not really six point games. A win still only gives you three points, but the advantage gained by beating teams also vying for promotion can seem like double the points are on offer. The visit to Sheffield Wednesday may well have been the more difficult of these two games as they were unbeaten at home this season until our visit. On the other hand United are the in-form team. If we do get the three points in that game, champions of the third division starts to look like ours to lose rather than for anyone else to win.

Year ends badly for Charlton

So the last game of the year ended up with 1-0 loss to the Orient. The Charlton keeper was sent off very early in the game so there's an excuse. The shame is both Sheffield teams got three points. A win at home to Brentford is very much needed tomorrow.

I have to add I have a soft spot for Orient. Many years ago I had an invite to their directors box for a pre-season friendly against I think Grimsby. It was during the very early eighties and at the time there were quite a few more mature players finishing their careers for the O's. The ones I can remember are Stan Bowles, who had sent an apprentice down the road to put a bet on, Ralph Coates and Mervyn Day. Also a young winger called John Chiedozie was playing who promised so much for the future.

What made my day was the minicab driver taking me over to the game. I would have been in my late twenties or early thirties. I dressed up for the occasion with a blue velvet jacket and a nice pair of strides. I looked the part, and even though I was smoking with the window open, the driver was convinced I was a player. This was helped by the fact that the entrance to the directors box was via the ground's players entrance. That was the one only time I ever been mistaken for an athlete unfortunately.

Still unbeaten but not top

It had to be. We didn't get the three points, just the one. Sort of knew that was coming. Charlton 1-1 Sheffield Wednesday.

Good point was that there was still a +14,000 crowd for a Monday night division 3 game.

Still up there

A good away win at Bury and a win over Reading in the League Cup on the Tuesday of the week before were very good. This week we have to wait for a Monday night game to see if we can keep up with the other two early leaders, Sheffield United and MK Dons (*boo). Our game is at home against the Sheffield team, Sheffield Wednesday, who are not known as pushovers but 3 points will put us as joint division points leaders.

The Independent carried a nice interview with Chris Powell about his team building policy. Nice does seem the right word for Chris. He comes over as a genuinely nice fellow and I do wish him well for more than just selfish reasons.

A good start

I knew yesterday's game was going to be problem when earlier in the day my brother said that it was an almost guaranteed three points. I can't blame him saying that. Following a good home win against Bournemouth with two wins on the road, 2-1 over Notts County and 2-0 over Colchester, made a home game with lowly* Scunthorpe seem easy. It wasn't to be of course. A 2-2 draw still leaves Charlton tied on points at the top of the third division with the MK Dons (boo**) and Sheffield United so we mustn't complain, but it will be interesting to see how good this side that Chris Powell has put together is.

*lowly - not really fair as Scunthorpe has only just joined the third division after relegation last season.

**Anyone who is against the Americanization of British sport should boo here as MK Dons were the first English football club to be franchised and made to move towns. Something very un-British.

Time to start blogging again. A new football season kicked off yesterday, at least in the third division, aka League One. It's so early now, just the first Saturday in August. I have to admit other things have taken my concentration over the last two seasons, but during this one I hope to follow the games more closely.

So Charlton beat Bournemouth 3-0. Couldn't ask for much better than that. I didn't recognize many of the players names, but seeing that Chris Powell, manager and Charlton legend, says he has brought in 14 new players during the summer it may take a while to learn them.

Only Post of 2010

Sad to say this is the only post I'm making for 2010. Not as many walks as last year. A merry Christmas to any readers who stumble upon this page and best wishes for the new year.

That's enough of the resting boys

Well Norwich managed an injury time equalizer to share the points with Charlton at Carrow Road. The 2-2 score line knocks us off the top of the third division table as Leeds well beat Gillingham. I managed to get the live coverage of the game on Radio London. I wonder if this was a jinx. Next week I won't listen, promise.

And on the seventh day they had a rest.

Well the run ended yesterday. It would have been the seventh win on the trot if they had managed to beat Southampton but instead it was a 1-1 draw. From the sounds of it Charlton didn't play well in the first half and went a goal down. In the second half they were unlucky not to win after equalizing. Oh well, it had to end sometime and we are still top of the third division.

Run continues!

Charlton's fantastic start to the season carried on when Brentford visited the Valley. 2-0 was the score. Next week we have Southampton at home which is very winnable. Leeds are also still on maximum points. Not going to say too much in case it puts a curse on.

As good as it gets?

Well I hope not. Maximum 15 points from 5 games with a 4-0 win at Tranmere, but with two home games coming up even more wins are a strong possibility.

The only downside is Leeds United are matching Charlton's pace. Now Leeds, with apologies to the good citizens of Leeds, are not Britain's best loved team. In fact they are way up there with ManU, Chelsea and Arsenal. This maybe truer for those of a certain age who remember the Don Revie years, which admittedly were a long time ago. So we need Leeds to drop points before we do if we want to keep this heady feeling at the top of the division.

4 games 12 points

The perfect start to the new football season. Charlton, not at their best, beat Walsall 2-0. They still managed most of the possession and were ahead in all the stats except for fouls which Walsall won by a long way. The only other team with a perfect record in Division Three is Leeds. As they say in boxing, one of them has to lose the O. Let's hope it's Leeds, who still in my mind carry all the darkness of the Revie years. OK, I watched "The Damned United" last week.

Three games - nine points

Last season was one to forget, ending in demotion to the old Division 3 for the first time since I was a boy, which was a long time ago. Well at least we get to play with neighbours Millwall again.

This season has started with a bang. Three wins with two of those on the road. There was our usual loss and early exit from the league cup, but it was a ManU style second team playing. The first game was a 3-2 win at home against Wycombe Wanderers with an encouraging sixteen and half thousand crowd. Next came a 2-0 win in Hartlepool and round off our first three wins (four if the last match of last season is included) three thousand supporters took the short trip over the river to see Charlton beat Leighton Orient 2-1.

Can this keep up. After the last few years it makes a pleasant change.

Two Sundays east of the airport

If you follow the small road, Lat Krabang Soi 54, from Onnut Road it becomes a much larger new dual carriageway and you will find Wat Hua Khoo on the right side at a junction of two canals. Outside the temple is a good place to park and skirting the temple walls to the south will allow you to access a walkway along one of the canals. Along this canal, and sorry as I have no names for the klongs in this area, you will find a number of other paths on side canals.

Although very close to the new Bangkok airport, because we were walking parallel with the runways there was hardly any aircraft noise. This are is still very rural with ponds for raising fish and a vegetable grown in water that usually ends up in soups. The klongs are used for transport but it is fairly thinly populated out here. The walks shown on the Google Earth graphic below add up to about 16 kilometres.

Back to football and walking

Over the last year I haven't posted either about my football team or walking along the Bangkok klongs. The football was because it was such a horrible season from the beginning and the walking because I did fewer and spent too much time on UK politics.

Well I have still kept up walking new klongs although far from regularly but the next post will cover the last two Sundays east of the new Bangkok airport. With football Charlton are having a great start to the season so I will start posting results again.

Whatever happened to...?

There was a time not that long ago when you knew it was a Labour MP speaking on TV because he wore a red tie. Tories sometimes wore a blue one and Liberals any colour they liked, but for Labour a red tie was mandatory.

This changed with New Labour. They no longer wanted to be reminded of the past, the history of the party. Red stood something. It was the colour of the worker's flag. It was the colour of the blood shed by generations of activists going back to the Chartist and before.

As the various Blairites and Brownites start to creep away from their previous positions I wonder if the red tie will make a comeback. We are now seeing them dump the 'New' and just calling themselves Labour and even the banned word socialism cropped up today, so maybe we will. (And yes Ken Livingstone, I noticed the yellow tie you have been wearing. A little bit of tradition please!)

It’s going to get worse! The Americanisation of British politics.

I’m not sure when it really started. Was it Maggie bringing in Saatchi & Saatchi for the 1979 election? Certainly by the time Blair was aping Clinton with sound bites, spin doctors and the 24 hour grin we were well on our way. Even Blair’s career path of university to law to politics was the standard American one. Now I have nothing against America, I worked for US marine companies for most of my working life. I am even a republican in the sense that I would rather not have a monarchy. But I do not envy the US political system. Now, like them, the difference between our two major parties can be hard to define.

Recently I have begun to feel we were out doing the Americans at their own game. It’s the increase of twenty-something potential and actual election candidates who have moved directly from university to a political career. This isn’t only happening with our own party, but also with the Tories and Liberals. Although I don’t always agree with him the Ken Livingstone interview on the Labourlist blog does highlight what’s going on. See two of his answers below.

Q. “Do you mean Old Labour with a capital O and a capital L or…”

KL. “Both! The main weakness of the so-called New Labour project was that it was too young and too graduate middle class. I was surprised how many old right-wingers who had spent their lives trying to stop me ended up supporting me because of how bad things had got.”

Q. “You know you can be young and graduate and working class and on the left of the party…”

KL. “I’m sure there is one somewhere. But in the run up to the 1998 Borough council elections in London, they introduced al these tests. Instead of being selected, you had to write statements of your values and management experience. But it wasn’t just the left wing that was stripped down by that; it was the working class people, black and white. I thought that was absolutely disgraceful. Blair and Brown between them took a functioning, broadly working class party, but one that was also strongly middle class, and reduced it to a shell. They closed down all the channels by which working class people could express themselves, through their unions and their local parties. If they hadn’t closed down the Labour party in that way, they might not have made the catastrophic mistake in carrying on Thatcher’s ban on council house building, And they’re now surprised that working class people are angry? What fuels the anger of those working class voters is that their kids have got nowhere to live.”

We haven’t really seen this since WW2. Before that there were rural seats that were passed down through aristocratic families, but by the 1945 election many of the new MPs had been in the forces before. Even those who wanted a political career like Churchill 40 years before that started with another job.

These new members of the political class are the evil spawn of Blair, Cameron and Clegg. Blair had a pretend job in law while attempting to get into parliament. Cameron didn’t even do this, going straight into the Conservative Research Department. Clegg looks like he saw the opportunity to enter UK politics via Europe.

But what do these and the new crop bring to the table; what experiences have they had which will help the country move forward? I try to see something positive in the youth of these people and New Labour’s parachuting in the likes of Georgia Gould, but it’s not working for me. Just look at the photos of the posters in the left column of Labourlist’s home page. It scares me that these are our next Labour Party representatives. (Apologies to those who don’t feel they fit my description.)

What the expense scandal should tell us is that we can’t afford to have this type of candidate. The political class must know that eventually the public will revolt and not just by not voting, or by voting BNP. Maybe a study of the French revolution will give them some warning. The people are very angry.