HIRAETH.: the existential moron's lockdown novel

By Haydn Wilks

The Main Character (Welsh, Virgo, ENTP, emo, 32, M) abandons the decadent neo-colonialist lifestyle of an English-as-a-Foreign-Language Teacher to pursue the workshy millennial ideal of life as a digital nomad.

<

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dead Bird Press
• Release date: Jul 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781838083137

Haydn Wilks

The Welsh Irvine Welsh. The ginger Jack Kerouac.The broke Bret Easton Ellis.The Sartre of the South Wales Valleys.A cynical millennial author from Wales whose immense literary talent is only outsized by his overwhelming sense of entitlement.

Book preview

Contents

HIRAETH.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

in loving memory of bailey.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

01. THE BEFORE TIMES.

02. THE LAST BIG WEEKEND & THE END OF FREEDOM.

03. THE LOCKDOWN.

04. FEAR & LOATHING IN THE LIVING ROOM.

05. LOVE IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS (EAT OUT TO HELP OUT).

06. AUGUST BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND.

07. LOCKDOWN: CAERPHILLY.

08. LOCKDOWN: THE VALLEYS / THE SHAPE OF PUNK TO COME.

09. FIREBREAK LOCKDOWN.

10. ELECTION DAY.

11. THE NEW NORMAL.

12. JET BLACK NEW YEAR.

13. THE LOCKDOWN TO END ALL LOCKDOWNS – part one.

14. THE LOCKDOWN TO END ALL LOCKDOWNS, part two.

15. THE GRADUAL EASING OF RESTRICTIONS.

16. THEY THINK IT'S ALL OVER.

17. FREEDOM.

18. THE AFGHAN WITHDRAWAL.

HIRAETH.

HAYDN WILKS

Copyright © 2023 Haydn Wilks / Dead Bird Press.

deadbirdpress.com

All rights reserved.

ISBN (PB): 978-1-8380831-2-0

ISBN (E): 978-1-8380831-3-7

Cover art by Jack Skivens

jackskivensillustration.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Welsh Irvine Welsh. The ginger Jack Kerouac.

The broke Bret Easton Ellis.

The Sartre of the South Wales Valleys.

A cynical millennial author from Wales whose immense literary talent is only outsized by his overwhelming sense of entitlement.

HAYDN WILKS’ novels include the infanticidal indictment of low-wage late capitalist UK call centers COLD CALLING, the drug-guzzling cryptocurrency-fuelled global sex crime spree of $HITCOIN, and the self-aggrandizing / self-loathing gonzo autofictional lockdown novel HIRAETH.

$HITCOIN by Haydn Wilks.

Wolf of Wall Street for the Instagram generation.

Bears & Bulls make money. Pigs get slaughtered.

Three Dutch university students watch rap videos and dream of big yachts & banquets of sushi served on the naked bodies of supermodels. Could making millions of dollars be as easy as writing a few lines of computer code? How easily could they launch their own cryptocurrency?

Alicia came to China from Malaysia to make her fortune. Now she’s trapped between working at a clothes factory and a seedy karaoke bar. One of the bar’s clients got rich mining bitcoin. Can she escape after emptying his wallet?

The lives of these and many others across the world intersect as Future Synergy Coin becomes a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Yacht parties, trashed hotel suites, drug binges with celebrities, torture, sex, mutilation, & death.

London, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Dubai, Rwanda, Moscow, El Salvador, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Groningen, California. This is a modern tale without borders or morals. With billions of dollars to play for, who will survive the SHITCOIN’s rise?

READER REVIEWS

$hitcoin is the kind of book that feels like it was written just for me. Wilks writes with the frenetic drug-fuelled energy of an Irvine Welsh, the cool alienation of a Beat Generation writer, the wonderfully sleazy atmosphere and cynicism of Ryu Murakami and Chuck Palahniuk, but with a more contemporary Millennial, tongue-in-cheek detachment and a British sense of gallows humour. - Dennis, Goodreads.

Profane, hallucinatory, predatory, soaring and guttered, vengeful and criminal-about all you won't find is religion, except for a neat and eloquent speech in which the history of civilization, bitcoin, and Judeo-Christianity are entwined. And Wilks' style, part Beat and part Gonzo, reads perfectly. Read it; it's one hell of a book. - Jerry Pearce, Goodreads.

A well written parody thriller of students going from impoverished to international bitcoin billionaires. A bucolic story full of sex, drugs and rap. A well researched page-turner. - Philip Duss, Goodreads.

The story is over the top, the debauchery excessively extreme, characters change from nerdy students to monsters, hard bitten business types become gullible fools, few seem to notice the coin doesn't seem to do anything. Yet through all of this, the story is so believable. - David, Goodreads.

COLD CALLING by Haydn Wilks.

American Psycho meets Crime & Punishment on the Cardiff call centre circuit.

You spend your days staring into a computer screen, trying to sell life insurance to young couples with new babies. You spend your nights staring into a computer screen, extracting filth from and injecting bile into the internet. You still live with the same dickhead housemate you went to university with. Your only respite from computer screens are nights spent getting smashed with your dickhead housemate at student bars, watching him prance around, trying to pull much younger girls. Your life sucks and you suck at it. One drunken night, you try something new. Something terrible. But something that brings you new energy, new drive, new desires. You start eating the young.

READER REVIEWS

This is hands down, one of the best Horror/Psychological Thrillers I’ve read in quite some time. – William Bitner Jr., Goodreads.

Haydn’s writing is brilliant, he effectively expresses the mind-set of the depraved, the dialogue is realistic and raw, the pacing compelling and perfectly crafted, and whilst the story is pretty damn sick I had to continue reading. – Spencer, Goodreads.

The prose is tight, edgy and authentic. Prepare to be shocked. If you are tired of the very safe and predictable style of so much modern literature go on this journey to the margins of life in Cardiff. – Thomas Harte, Goodreads.

This is a beautifully crafted descent into darkness, a measured deterioration of all that is right. So much new literature is poorly written, but this uses language to draw you in and spit you back out again. Something it accomplishes in the blink of an eye, impossible to put down. – Tony, Goodreads.

Visit deadbirdpress.com for more info.

in loving memory of bailey.

a.k.a. Malibu

2009 - 2022

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to everyone who provided me with writing material.

01. THE BEFORE TIMES.

2020.

I have a weird thing about New Year’s, like I really feel there’s some natural reset occurring after the countdown. 31st December 2019 felt especially significant: the last day of the 21st Century’s second decade, and my personal circumstances really made NYE 2019/20 feel like some kind of hard reset.

I believe a lot of illogical stuff like this. Like I have some unshiftable lingering belief that there’s something to star signs, and being born in mid-September as a Virgo somehow endows me with an artistic personality type. Humans have been evolutionarily bred to identify patterns, which doesn’t always make sense in an existence truthfully characterised by innumerable chaotic elements colliding. Confirmation bias is a thing, and we look for patterns of evidence that support things we want to believe. My greatest delusion is that I can one day make a living, perhaps even a fortune, as a creative writer.

My life choices until 2020 have been informed mostly by illogical self-belief and a compulsive desire for novelty and newness. I grew up dreaming of living in New York City, which film and television taught me is the world’s one true metropolis. My horizons broadened to Los Angeles during my teenage years, where I thought I could become the Welsh Quentin Tarantino. I seriously thought of flying to L.A. when I turned 18, flush with cash from a massive insurance payment that had accumulated compound interest since I burned the flesh from my hands on an electric fire, aged 5, an idea I later realised, through listening to Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast stories of depraved Hollywood parties, would’ve led me to be abused by low-level entertainment industry figures until I got deported for overstaying my visa.

When the time came for university applications, I settled on the more realistic metropolis of London. I filled out my UCAS preferences with universities offering English with Film Studies in order of proximity to Central London. Three years later, I graduated from the Royal University of Central London with a 2:1 and realised I had no hope of making it in the London media without several years spent living on improbably summoned sums in London. So I moved back to Wales, and wrote some screenplays, and realised I had no hope of making it in the Cardiff media without an unlikely command of Welsh. So I bounced around call centres, and wrote two books about that, while applying with ever greater determination for English teaching jobs in the sprawling metropolises of the Far East.

I fell in love with Seoul and fell in love with a Korean girl and we were together seven years. I worked first teaching kids (aged 3 to 18) in the Seoul-adjacent city of Incheon, at a hagwon where the owner printed fake money with her face on it for the kids to spend on market day. I loved Korea, and the kids were cool, but there were frictions, e.g. the owner (who spoke no English, despite owning an English academy) asked the manager to tell me not to drink in my neighbourhood, after parents saw me and another Welsh dude supping soju at the end of an all-nighter at like 9am on a Saturday in the food court of the local Lotte Mart. I then spent two years doing a much more enjoyable job, teaching adults at a British-themed hagwon in the heart of Seoul's metropolis, Gangnam, several years before Psy taught everyone back home what Gangnam Style means. Most students during the day were applying for British universities; most students in the evening were office workers wanting to improve their career prospects. I would often go out drinking with both. For my birthday, some students got me a custom birthday cake featuring my Facebook profile picture (me holding an alligator by the tail in Thailand). The icing said To our British Idol. They bought me a Korea football shirt with the name of Cardiff City player Kim Bo Kyung on the back. I could’ve stayed there forever, but the holidays were shit: 10 days per year, plus national holidays. I’d learned by now of university teaching jobs, which offered as much as five months annual vacation.

I overplayed my hand pushing for an improbable pay rise while negotiating my third one-year contract at the British academy in Gangnam and consequently spent the next year at the worst of Seoul’s kindergarten-through-elementary-school hagwons, after a bad reference from the first job (where the owner’s face was on the fake money) tanked several chances at working better places. The worse hagwon’s owner (who also spoke no English) bought steeply discounted expired food to serve the children for lunch, even though their parents paid more than my month’s salary for each child to attend. The owner was an utter cunt in innumerable other ways, e.g. not letting my Korean co-workers leave until she left, despite them working from 8am and her arriving at like 4pm. I replaced the hagwon’s sole foreign teacher, an American guy who’d quit mid-contract, thus had leverage enough over the boss (as the hagwon's sole foreigner teacher) to not be exploited beyond the terms of my contract. Most of my Korean co-workers were replaced by new Korean co-workers when the new school year started in March.

As the year at the shit hagwon progressed, I researched online which Master’s degree would be most likely to land me a job at a Korean university. I applied for Master’s courses in Continental Europe, where (as an EU citizen) I’d pay a fraction of the cost of a course in the UK. The MA Applied Linguistics course in the Netherlands began a few days before the end date of my contract at the shit hagwon; the owner agreed to let me leave early, without financial penalty, if I participated in a sleepover for the kids at the hagwon, running until around 10pm on my final Friday. I left promptly at 10pm and took a taxi to meet Yuna and others in Hongdae, leaving my Korean co-workers to continue their unpaid late-night overtime, waiting for the last late parents to pick their kids up.

I graduated cum laude in the Netherlands, then taught for a year at two universities in Tokyo, then secured the dream job at a university in Korea. But not in Seoul; in the smaller southern city of Gwangju. I spent most weekends travelling to the far larger metropolis up north, staying at Airbnbs and motels with Yuna. I worked for two years in Gwangju, applying for every available Seoul uni job.

I didn’t get a job at a university in Seoul, but my desire for one was soon fading. I met a Mexican software developer in Hongdae who worked remotely, spending 90 days in Seoul each year on a tourist visa, with similar stints in Mexico and several other countries. I met a Dutch guy, also in Hongdae, who was on holiday in Korea, but spent most of his time in the Philippines, remotely running a server farm. On one of many holidays from university teaching, in Taiwan, I met a Scottish guy who lived nowhere in particular, doing freelance finance writing work. Holidays in Thailand and Vietnam surrounded me with people from Europe and the Americas and Australasia working poolside at their laptops. A new dream had revealed itself to me: I was going to become a digital nomad.

Yuna broke up with me in March. It sucked. I drank a bottle of wine on Friday and went into Downtown Gwangju. The night sucked and the bouncers at the downtown area’s only decent club wouldn’t let me in (all foreigners were often banned for the actions of one, and that one was usually a German teacher from the university called Luther that I would often play FIFA and eat BBQ and drink beer & soju with) and it was depressing as fuck. There was a long weekend for a national holiday soon after. I went out in Gwangju on the Friday and met some Indian guy I was vaguely familiar with and got drunk and burned some guy’s shirt in a club with a cigarette. The Indian guy tried to smooth over the situation and suggested I pay for the guy’s shirt (he only wanted ₩10,000) and the three of us then drank soju together in some hunting bar. I got wildly drunk on soju and failed at hunting. Some of my students were there and probably saw this messy scene. The night ended with me face-planting the floor and the Indian guy getting the attention of someone (maybe a paramedic?) who did something to my nose, which was broken and required some kind of covering. I went to Busan the next day with a stupid bandage over my broken nose and spent the rest of the long weekend staying at an Airbnb. I met some Korean-American guy drinking cans outside a convenience store near the beach. I explained the bandage and he told me he genuinely believes God is some kind of human-like figure, but was otherwise cool, and we went to some bars together. I spent most subsequent weekends of the summer in Busan, staying in hotels and Airbnbs, sometimes with Luther, sometimes alone. Busan, like Seoul, is a place where you’ll easily meet people if you go out alone.

I got a six-month looking for work visa extension when my second one-year contract ended in Gwangju on August 31st and moved to an apartment outside Exit 1 of Gangnam Station in Seoul. I’d built up freelance writing work over the previous few years, mostly with an American real estate company and a cryptocurrency news website run by a guy from London. The London guy sold the website when the crypto boom went bust (I rode the bust to the bottom, turning $3,000 into $27,000 into $8,000), but the real estate writing work kept coming in. I spent three hours each morning taking Korean lessons and a few hours each afternoon doing real estate writing work and writing a novel about cryptocurrency. I spent my evenings and nights and early mornings meeting people in Gangnam and Hongdae and Itaewon, at language exchanges and clubs and through Tinder.

I planned to stay in Seoul doing this until my visa expired in March. Afterwards, I would pop back to Wales for a month, then spend my last year of full freedom of European movement under the protracted-but-nearing-its-end Brexit process bouncing about the European Union. Until then, I would live mostly in Seoul, except for a week in Tokyo for the 2019 Rugby World Cup in October, and the month of January 2020, which I would spend travelling in South East Asia.

Ho Chi Minh.

I fly from Incheon to Ho Chi Minh on the 2nd of January, 2020. I spend days visiting war museums and nights on Bui Vien Walking Street, drinking Tiger beer and huffing giant balloons of laughing gas.

How the fuck’s it take you so long to finish a balloon? asks some fucked Chelsea fan in a club on the Walking Street. I realise several days later (and fifteen years since first doing laughing gas) that you’re not supposed to exhale back into the balloon at the end of each session, as this keeps the balloon pointlessly inflated with exhaled air.

The first war museum has a huge section displaying weapons used against the French colonial forces, which surprises me, because I thought it’d mostly be focused on the war vs America. Then I reach the American section and it’s 10x the size of the French bit. Outside the war museum are American fighter jets and B52 bombers downed by the Viet Cong.

I talk to an Indian girl at the same club on a different night about India, and how my German friend spent a year teaching German in Bangalore, and India looks really cool, and it’s cool how they don’t mind the British despite all the colonisation.

Of course! she says. We wouldn’t be able to win the Cricket World Cup if you didn’t colonise us.

I visit another museum with photo galleries displaying the horrors of the American war: hundreds of Vietnamese civilians murdered by Americans in the Mỹ Lai massacre; generations of horrific birth defects caused by the USA carpeting the country with chemical weapons, e.g. Agent Orange.

A Korean girl approaches me while I’m huffing laughing gas outside another club on the Walking Street on another night and asks me What’s with the balloons?.

I attempt to explain, then offer her my balloon; she declines.

She says she lives in Daegu.

I tell her I've been to Daegu.

Why?

She walks off and I wonder what chance I have of bumping into her again. Then some Vietnamese mother points at me, laughing hysterically, talking about the funny foreigner with his stupid balloon to her kids. Her kids stand near my table and pose for a photo. I hold the balloon out of shot under the table until they piss off.

One afternoon I walk around an old zoo where half the displays are empty and everything is blanketed in surreal dystopian smog.

One night I walk through back alleys flanked by building sites until I’m far from the Walking Street. There’s some classy rooftop cocktail lounge that’s supposed to be good. I’m surprised that everyone there also huffs laughing gas.

I huff so much from a giant balloon in another club on the Walking Street that I trip out entirely, and am transported to some surreal doctor’s clinic, and return to reality having fallen from my stool. The bar staff help me up and hold a wet rag against the cut on the back of my head. They ask if I want to keep the rest of the balloon, which I somehow managed to keep fastened while falling. I say yes, but inhale what remains in it more slowly.

Dead Kennedys - Holiday in Cambodia.

A minibus takes me and some others from the travel agency near the Walking Street to some tiny bus depot on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh. I talk to some German teenager who’s spent the past five months travelling through South-East Asia. His favourite place was Indonesia. We spend an hour at the bus depot, mostly looking at our phones and not talking to each other, until our next bus arrives. He gets dropped off at some ferry terminal to go to some Vietnamese island and the bus driver thinks I should be getting off with him.

I say Cambodia.

He nods, drives more, & drops me outside a closed travel agency: Open six.

A minibus pulls up around 6.30am. The other passengers are two Israeli girls and a Colombian girl and her Korean boyfriend. At the Cambodian border, they argue with the border staff about the $1 processing fee on top of the expected $30 visa fee. The Korean guy pays for his girlfriend and the two Israeli girls with a $10 bill, then complains about getting the change back in Vietnamese currency. The Cambodian border guard eventually gives the Korean guy change in American dollars.

We wait in some building in the hinterland between Vietnam and Cambodia while our visas are processed. I talk to the Korean guy about Korea. He tells me he met his Colombian girlfriend in Busan, where she was working in a youth hostel. They decided to travel the world together and make a YouTube channel. He interviews me in Korean for YouTube.

The Cambodian border guard at the exit checks our passports.

One of the Israeli girls is really annoyed about this. She almost refuses, but finally shows him her picture: Beautiful, no? She then complains loudly about what assholes all the authorities in South East Asia are.

Another minibus waits for us on the other side of the border. It passes fields being ploughed by strange beasts.

Are those cows? the Korean guy asks his Colombian girlfriend. They don’t look like Korean cows.

The minibus stops in a small town at a bus depot across the street from a Mexican restaurant. Why everywhere has Mexican food but not Colombian? asks the Colombian girl.

We get into a new minibus and I get an aisle seat with no back rest. The nice Israeli girl talks with the Korean guy about each of their experiences with mandatory military service.

The Korean guy says It’s crazy women do military service in Israel.

The Israeli girl says most Israelis travel the world after their service is finished. She says There are so many countries I cannot visit with my passport, most of them neighbouring Israel. She says you can tell Israeli tourists by the kind of sandals they wear.

We stop at a service station and stand around smoking cigarettes.

The nice Israeli girl says Look at their feet.

The couple she’s pointed at overhear her and start talking with us and, as indicated by their sandals, are also Israeli.

Sihanoukville.

Traffic gets heavy with heavy trucks laden with construction gear as we near Sihanoukville. Our minibus rides over the crest of a mountain to reveal a metropolis of construction sites, unpaved dirt highways and high-rise half-built casinos with Chinese characters affixed to their exteriors. The minibus stops at some tiny overcrowded bus depot swamped with tourists travelling to different places. The Israelis and the Korean guy and Colombian girl disappear with the majority, on a bus bound for a ferry terminal, then off to the islands. I wonder if I might see the nice Israeli girl again on the islands.

I take a taxi with one of the few who aren’t taking this bus, a Swedish guy with dreadlocks who is going to a different ferry terminal to camp on an island that he tells me is uninhabited.

Look at that, the Swedish guy says, pointing out the window. In front of one of the half-built casinos is a Rolls-Royce, covered in dirt.

I tell the Swedish guy that I booked a three-night stay in Sihanoukville before reading recent reviews, which say Sihanoukville used to be a paradise, but is now a construction site, the city being transformed from a backpacker’s haven to a shiny seaside getaway for wealthier Chinese tourists.

The Swedish guy says he doesn’t bother reading online reviews: Think of how much of a loser you must be to write a bad online review about something.

I stay in a hostel (avg reviews = 4 star) run by an elderly Italian man and what I assume is his Cambodian wife and their daughter. The place does amazing pizza. It’s a ten minute walk from the beach, through the madness of a main street at the blunt edge of brutal development, consisting of puddled mounds of dirt four-lanes wide.

I connect to wifi at a bar just beyond the open beachfront sewer pipes and read about Sihanoukville on my phone: the Cambodian government declared ownership over all the nation’s coastal land, and is in the process of selling off islands & coastal cities for international development, evicting the existing residents and bulldozing their homes. My cocktail arrives and I read The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. I overhear a British guy talk to his British wife about a massive mansion his British brother’s built on a Cambodian mountain. They’re going there with their sunburnt British kids after Sihanoukville.

I win a wild battle with a large flying cockroach in my room, killing it with my shoe.

I block the toilet by flushing toilet paper, only realising after that you’re supposed to hose your shit off with the toilet-side hosing device.

I try and fail to unblock the toilet by pouring boiling water down it, and using a sawn-off water bottle as a makeshift plunger.

I tell the Italian guy on reception about the blocked toilet as I wait for my tuk-tuk to the ferry terminal.

I see an elderly Cambodian woman enter my room to clean it, then rapidly exit, cursing the retarded toilet-blocking foreigner in Khmer.

The Islands.

There’s confusion over when ferries are arriving and which ferry goes where. I talk to some Turkish guy about this. We continue our conversation and drink beer together on the ferry. He tells me his friend is throwing a party tomorrow night at the place he’s staying: Police Beach.

My hostel is in the jungle but just a few minutes’ walk from the beach and all the beachfront bars and restaurants. Some older Danish couple are smoking weed with the Cambodian guy who runs the hostel and a Ukrainian guy who works there on a porch in front of the reception hut, surrounded by dense jungle foliage. They offer me a joint while I wait for my room to be ready. Weed is very illegal in Korea, and consequently difficult to get hold of, and prohibitively expensive, so I haven’t smoked weed since last summer, when I went to a Full Moon Party in Thailand, and have no built-up tolerance. I’m also dehydrated from the heat and beer. My vision goes and everyone can see how fucked I am. The Cambodian guy gives me a can of Coke. I recover.

The Cambodian guy tells us that the bird we can hear only lives on this island. Listen, he says, he’s telling them all it’s time to go to work. He laughs hysterically and me and the Ukrainian guy laugh too.

I think about what I read online about an airport maybe being built on the island and feel sad about the future survival chances of the bird which only exists here.

I go to my room: it’s a jungle hut just across from the reception hut, featuring a large veranda with a table and chairs. Inside, there are two large beds covered with mosquito nets.

I buy weed from the hostel guy and smoke it while doing real estate writing work on the veranda.

I walk down to the beach and swim and see the Turkish guy from the ferry. He invites me to meet some friends he’s meeting. His friends are all Turkish and they all speak Turkish together, inducing some weird paranoia as we smoke weed together that they are Chechen rebels and this is a dangerous situation, remembering the phrase Cambodia is the Wild West of South-East Asia from blogs read before coming here, this paranoia multiplied by imagined implications of the Turkish/Chechen guy staying at a place called Police Beach. This paranoia dissipates as more beer is drunk.

I bring a Turkish kebab back and eat it on the veranda. The hostel owner’s cat approaches and I give him some of the kebab meat. Maybe because of the sauce, the cat vomits the meat up. I worry I’ve seriously harmed the cat but the next day he seems okay. I leave the kebab wrapper on the table. The next morning, a huge line of ants is transporting what remains in it to their nest.

I go to the party at Police Beach and see the Turkish guy again. I meet other people. I drink until a few hours after sunrise, get my stuff from the hut, then take a ferry to another island, where the sand stretches far into azure water, rolling out for hundreds of metres before even reaching waist height. I eat fresh barbecued red snapper served beachside. I finish my real estate writing work sipping Mai Tais beside the beach the following morning.

I go by boat to the Party Monkey Hostel Island. Luther told me the Party Monkey Hostel he stayed at in Malaysia was completely crazy. I talk with a Chinese guy who went to high school in America on the boat. He chain-smokes and throws his cigarette butts into the crystal clear ocean. When we get to the new island, the Chinese guy talks loudly with lots of people listening about how many American girls he fucked in America, and how he doesn’t fuck Chinese girls because he prefers white ones.

Nobody asked! a girl from Manchester says when we discuss the Chinese guys’ antics in a mixed group of British, American, and Irish tourists the next afternoon. Then she and another girl from Manchester tell us about a different Asian-American guy who fucked someone in their twelve-person dorm the previous night.

He was hot though, says the other Manchester girl.

Phnom Penh.

I stay at another Party Monkey Hostel in Phnom Penh. I travel by tuk-tuk to the Killing Fields then to a school which was used by the Khmer Rouge as a prison camp. Both are fucked on some deep visceral level. Pol Pot and the rest of the Khmer Rouge were educated in France, where they learned about Communism. They then viciously persecuted anyone even remotely well educated. They moved the population of all Cambodia’s cities to the countryside to farm rice. They killed two million people. They only ran Cambodia for four years, and didn’t even reign long enough to publicly display any of the Pol Pot statues they commissioned for their prospective personality cult, but the Khmer Rouge completely destroyed the country and killed more than a quarter of its people. Pol Pot was put on trial in the 1990s but died peacefully (aged 72) under house arrest. Cambodia is now ostensibly a democracy but it’s been ruled by the same Prime Minister since 1985 (two years before I was born). Prime Minister Hun Sen was a member of the Khmer Rouge during their 1970s reign of terror. Most serious opponents to Hun Sen’s rule are serving lengthy prison sentences.

The Killing Fields are horrific, with skulls and bones and clothing fragments from the many who died there on display. The prison school is even more disturbing, as the audio guide tells the stories of some of the many who were tortured and killed there. Between the Killing Fields and the prison school, my tuk-tuk driver asks if I want to go to a shooting range to fire an AK47. I really don’t feel like shooting anything.

I meet an Irish guy in the hostel’s bar. He isn’t staying at the hostel; he lives in Phnom Penh. He tells me he just paid $180 for a gram of coke. But I’m buying it off a foreigner, he says of his expensive purchase. You have to be careful here. Someone he knew died from ingesting some powder which wasn’t what it was sold as.

The Irish guy takes me to a club on the back of his moped. I hold his waist tight and tell him to drive slowly. A guy I knew in primary school fell off a moped in Thailand and spent some time in a coma. His mother created a GoFundMe page to pay his medical bills and bring him home. I am also travelling without travel insurance.

I talk to a girl at the club who quickly stops talking to me when I mention I’m staying at the Party Monkey Hostel. The Irish guy tells me to take off my branded digital room key bracelet.

We drink and talk about British politics and Brexit and the Good Friday Agreement and Tony Blair until the club closes, long after sunrise. Then the Irish guy drives me back to the hostel to watch the Conor McGregor fight.

A big crowd has gathered in the hostel bar for the fight. There’s another Irish guy amongst the crowd who I know from the islands. We watch the prelims and talk and drink beer. The more serious UFC fans tell everyone that Cowboy is a decent fighter who might give McGregor an upset. The fight finally begins then it’s over in thirty seconds: McGregor smashes Cowboy’s face open with his shoulder and pummels Cowboy with punches as Cowboy collapses to the ground. The Phnom Penh Irish guy goes home on his moped and all the hostel guests go outside or to bed.

Siem Reap.

A six-hour bus ride takes me from the capital to Siem Reap, then a tuk-tuk takes me to my hostel. The tuk-tuk driver offers his services for a sunrise tour of the Angkor Wat temples. I add the tuk-tuk driver on WhatsApp.

I meet other foreigners during the Siem Reap Party Monkey Hostel’s free beer hour, then go with some of these foreigners to various bars and clubs on Pub Street. I meet a Cambodian girl in a club and try to bring her back to the hostel, but the Cambodian security guy says No guest allowed. I tell him I’ve got a double room, not a dorm bed, but he stands firm as I drunkenly rant.

I wake up late the next day and take a tuk-tuk to a North Korean restaurant staffed by real North Koreans who online reviews say do a traditional North Korean song & dance routine before serving dinner. I tell Alice and Yuna and Hoon about this place on KakaoTalk: Alice and Yuna tell me to send them pictures/videos; Hoon (a Korean guy who works for a German bank that I met at a Gangnam language exchange) says I shouldn’t go to the restaurant because my money will fund North Korean nuclear missiles.

While I sit outside the North Korean restaurant, waiting for it to open,  I fantasise about charming a North Korean waitress with my intermediate Korean skills and getting her KakaoTalk ID. Then I realise North Koreans don’t have KakaoTalk, and the North Korean waitresses will be closely observed by North Korean minders.

I wait until 30 minutes after the North Korean restaurant was supposed to open, then eat at a Cambodian restaurant instead. I drink several $1 beers, then leave soon after some middle-aged British guests ask the staff to play Ed Sheeran songs.

I join the hostel’s free beer hour then go with a mixed international group to the Pub Street. Our tuk-tuk driver back offers us weed. I verbally express paranoia he might drive us straight to a police station, but a French guy I’m sharing the tuk-tuk with buys weed, so I buy weed too. A Mexican guy in a Mexico football shirt comes to my room to smoke weed with me; we smoke and talk about our ex-girlfriends, prompting him to come onto me. I give the Mexican guy’s offer serious and confused stoned consideration, before rejecting his advances with mild stoned paranoid homophobia.

I do the sunrise tuk-tuk tour of the Angkor Wat temple complex and it’s all mind-blowing and incredible and other superlatives.

I meet some British lads during the next evening’s free beer hour. A lad from Newcastle asks the bar guy if he knows any pharmacies which sell liquid ketamine. I go with the Newcastle lad and a lad from Kent to the recommended pharmacy. We buy silver baking trays and multiple cigarette lighters from a convenience store, then return to my room to cook the ketamine. We each burn through several lighters before realising we’ve double trayed the ketamine, and it’s consequently taken twice as long to cook as it should have. We finally form and snort the ketamine. I think I’m in a club for a bit but we don’t actually leave my room.

The next afternoon, I play drinking games beside the hostel pool with some guy from New York who looks like A$AP Rocky and a big girl from Manchester and some others. The A$AP Rocky guy and the big Manchester girl both teach English in China. They’re in Cambodia for the Chinese New Year holiday.

Have you seen this?! the big Manchester girl says.

Everyone looks at their phones and reads that the Chinese government has blocked all transport into and out of the Chinese city of Wuhan because of some new virus that’s spreading there.

That’s crazy, says the A$AP Rocky guy.

Bangkok.

I fly from Siem Reap to Bangkok after reading online that the Cambodia-Thailand land border takes many hours to cross, then stay four nights at a hotel on the famous backpacker’s strip of Khao San Road. My phone tells me about five cases of the new coronavirus being identified in Bangkok; most of the staff at Khao San Road's bars and restaurants wear face masks, but the many foreign backpackers in shorts and vest tops seem unbothered.

I drink big bottles of Tiger Beer and huff laughing gas balloons on Khao San Road. The balloons are much smaller than those in Ho Chi Minh, but they arrive in an endless stream of five balloons for ฿150. I talk and drink beer and ingest laughing gas with a Romanian guy and his Thai girlfriend and her friend Bibi. The couple leave for a club and Bibi stays with me for the rest of my time on Khao San Road.

Bibi tells me she likes Westerners but doesn’t like Koreans because Korean tourists pass through Khao San Road quickly and take a few photos while displaying a superior attitude to the locals, instead of getting drunk and huffing laughing gas with them like Europeans. She tells me she’s breaking up with her Turkish boyfriend, having recently visited him in Turkey, where his family looked down on her for being Thai. I find these new insights into inter-Asian racism super interesting, and think about writing a novella where Bibi is the main character.

My phone tells me the new coronavirus came from a wet market in Wuhan, where exotic animals are kept in cages in close quarters. This puts me off eating crocodile, which is sold spit-roasted at several places along Khao San Road. But Bibi wants to eat crocodile, so I eat crocodile with her. It tastes like gamey fishy chicken.

Korea.

I fly back to Incheon Airport and join a huge line of passengers awaiting quarantine screening. All the airport staff wear face masks. After a few minutes, the airport staff tell everyone arriving from Bangkok that the quarantine queue is only for those arriving from Beijing, and we’re ushered through security quickly.

I stay at an Airbnb near Hongdae for my final month in Korea. My room is one of many on three floors of short-term accommodation being used by a mix of older Koreans and younger foreigners. The virus dominates headlines and conversations; I think that where I’m staying would be the perfect place for it to spread. I get text messages from the Korean government whenever someone living near my Airbnb tests positive for the virus. These text messages include the person's age and recent movements; news articles tell of these texts leading to many discoveries of adultery and consequent divorces. The text messages increase in frequency as the month progresses.

I go out often, sometimes with Yuna and Alice and/or Hoon, sometimes alone. Restaurant staff regularly scrub and disinfect surfaces and everyone wears face masks on the subway but things are otherwise normal.

I go to an Indie Rock Club in Hongdae every Friday. Bands play there until midnight, then the DJ plays mostly British indie rock until 6am. A South African guy also goes to the Indie Rock Club every Friday. He tells me It’s crazy how paranoid everyone is about this virus. He says the death rate isn’t much worse than the flu. Lots of parents have stopped sending their kids to the English academy he works at. One week later, he tells me his school’s been shut due to a lack of students. The week after that, he doesn’t go to the Indie Rock Club. The staff at the Indie Rock Club start wearing face masks; they start taking temperature checks on the door.

I meet Yuna and Alice and Hoon at an event with lots of Americans in a bar in Itaewon for a friend of Alice’s who's launching a podcast. Alice’s friend gives an intensely earnest speech about overcoming the identity crisis he's struggled with as a Korean-American gyopo and launching a podcast about it, speaking about himself and his feelings in a very American way. Yuna says I think you must hate that, and I think she knows me so well, and I would definitely not be leaving Korea if we were still together.

I get drunk on soju with Yuna at an izakaya in Hongdae, then we go to the Indie Rock Club and share a bucket of Jack Coke that I ask the barmaid to make 세게, prompting her to half-fill the bucket with JD. I drunkenly tell Yuna that I’ll always be in love with her, etc.

Incheon Airport.

I have a flight to Amsterdam with a transfer in Istanbul on Turkish Airlines departing at 10pm. I get to the airport just after 7pm. The airport is much less crowded than usual, with no line at the Turkish Airlines check-in counter. A Korean woman stops me as I approach the counter and says Turkey is only allowing Turkish citizens to enter from Korea. She says I need to call the online travel agency I booked through to find out what happens now. I cancelled my Korean phone contract already so I pay ₩10,000 for an international calling card to use on the airport’s payphones. I spend an hour on hold before the travel agency tells me the flight will be refunded. I connect to wifi and book a direct flight to Amsterdam through KLM for the following evening. I luckily have one night’s stay remaining at the Airbnb.

I leave the Airbnb before the next day’s 11am checkout feeling deeply fucked, which I think is probably because of my final weekend of heavy drinking in Hongdae. I drag my suitcase to a samgyetang restaurant, thinking samgyetang (chicken soup with lots of health-promoting herbs) will be a soothing thing to eat. I then drag my suitcase to the Airport Line and Incheon Airport and spend hours semi-sleeping on a bench, wondering if I’m just tired & hungover, or if I’ve been infected with the virus. I drink an immune-boosting ginger tea from the airport’s Caffe Bene, just in case.

Amsterdam.

Everyone wears masks on the flight but nobody is wearing masks at Schiphol Airport. I still have my face mask on as I wait for my luggage. Dutch people look at me wearing the face mask. Some seem smug, others quizzical; most appear to think I’m being weirdly paranoid about the coronavirus. I take my mask off after I collect my suitcase.

Luther stays with me for a few days in Amsterdam.

We go to a pub which sells 200 kinds of beer with a Greek guy Luther knows from university.

We buy MDMA in the Red Light District.

I tell Luther I think I'm starting to feel that MDMA.

A police officer overhears me and says You boys be careful now! with a friendly Dutch grin.

When we smoke weed, Luther smokes half the spliff first, in case I picked up the virus in Korea.

Luther tells me his Korean girlfriend’s aunty got the virus: She said it is not really like a cold, but it is like you cannot really breathe.

The staff at all the Albert Heijn supermarkets are wearing gloves but there are no other obvious signs of an escalating pandemic. I think I may be having some trouble breathing properly, but reason this is probably just because we’re smoking so many spliffs.

The television in the room has ten channels, all 24-hour news networks. I realise you can rename channels using the television remote. I rename France 24 ‘Hardcore Gay News Network’, Russia Today becomes ‘Rimming Today’, CCTV becomes ‘Communist Cocksuckers TV’, BBC becomes etc., which Luther finds funny. We settle on Bloomberg News, which I’ve renamed Bumbugger News. Analysts talk with deep panic of falling markets and catastrophic potential economic fallout from the escalating pandemic.

It is like watching the apocalypse, Luther says.

I smoke a spliff on the balcony of our hotel room. Some Welsh lads walk out onto the adjacent balcony. I tell them I’m from Wales too.

They say You don’t sound Welsh.

I say My accent is all messed up from living abroad.

I answer a few questions from them about Korea (e.g. North or South?) while consciously trying to make my accent sound more Welsh again.

Home.

I booked a month at an Airbnb in Cardiff before leaving Korea. I haven’t been home in 18 months, so a month's stay seemed appropriate. The plan was to spend this time reconnecting with everyone, then fuck off to spend my last year of pre-Brexit freedom of European Union movement countryhopping the continent. Probably mostly Eastern Europe: Romania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, etc.; places where the cost of living is lower than the UK.

Mum suggested I should ask Dad if I could stay at a house he owns in Ystrad during my month in Wales. (Dad lives in his wife's council house in Cwmbran, with his wife and step-daughter and step-granddaughter, being one of very few council house tenants with a fully-owned second home.) I stayed at this house in Ystrad when I came back in 2018, while my sister was living there, between breaking up with her ex and moving in with her fiancée. Before that, I always used to stay with Mum and Toby. (I can no longer stay with Mum and Toby, for reasons I'll probably later explain in gratuitous detail.)

I didn’t even consider Mum's idea of staying in Ystrad: I want to be in Cardiff for this month in Wales, going out every night, meeting the boys, (ideally) bringing girls back, and generally doing Millennial city things without worrying about catching the last train home to the Valleys.

I get back to Cardiff on Friday. I have a suitcase and a large sports holdall holding all my worldly possessions (except some junk stored in the garage at Mum's), and the wheels on the suitcase are fucked, so I get a taxi from Central Station to the Airbnb, which is a large terraced house in Splott. I have the upstairs double bedroom at the front of the house. The owner says the room is an upgrade.

There are other long-term guests at the Airbnb. I meet one, a guy aged somewhere between 30 and 50, on the upstairs landing. I instinctively offer him a handshake as I introduce myself; he accepts my handshake but looks at me weirdly for doing it. I register the handshake was unwise in these unprecedented times and immediately enter the bathroom to wash my hands.

I meet a second Airbnb guest in the communal kitchen, a podgy bloke in his 30s with glasses who reminds me of co-workers I used to have in various Cardiff call centres. He tells me about the Airbnb’s other guests: the other guy I shook hands with upstairs (He’s alright, him.); and another guy, staying in the downstairs front bedroom (He’s hardly ever here.). There also used to be a Dutch girl staying here but she disappeared at some point before my arrival.

I go out with the boys almost every night during my first week back in Wales. The coronavirus is a background thing, something people bring up as intriguing newsworthy trivia, like President Trump or Prime Minister Boris Johnson being a knobhead again.

Tabloid newspapers name and shame several coronavirus super spreaders: global gallivanters who sojourned in virus-riddled places like Italy, then infected multiple people while carelessly cavorting back in Britain. I become paranoid that I may have brought the virus from Korea to Europe, and could consequently face brutal public shaming from the bloodthirsty British media.

As the week progresses, the coronavirus starts to feel (to us cossetted Millennials) like a thing of unprecedented life-altering seriousness. Lockdowns descend across Western Europe; Champions League games start being played to empty stadiums.

The front page of the Metro free newspaper at Cardiff Queen Street station leads with a coronavirus outbreak at a call centre in Cardiff Bay. I read the article as I ride the train to Caerphilly to meet Mark & Fatty & Yannis.

Leipzig hammer Spurs in an empty stadium in the background as we hammer pints at The Old Arms, talking about the spectre of pubs closing and growing rumours of a total lockdown to stop the coronavirus’ spread.

Luther messages me on Facebook the day after to complain Football is completely boring without fans. Every team is playing like shit.

02. THE LAST BIG WEEKEND & THE END OF FREEDOM.

On my second Friday back in Wales, Mark* sends a Facebook message saying Twin Atlantic are playing in Cardiff. I don’t know who Twin Atlantic are, but a gig’s a gig, so I buy a ticket. Mark has to pop home after work before joining us, so I head into town to meet Yannis** and some others first.

* Mark (like all the boys, except Smithy & Thomas) was in my year at school, and we've (mostly) been friends ever since, with a few interludes, which I mostly blame on Mark's tendency to be an obnoxious prick, especially when drunk (which we usually are when together.) Mark and Jake formed a band with me named Infix (picked at random from a dictionary) aged 14, which fell apart when Jake fell out with Mark for continually being an obnoxious prick to me & someone else Jake was friends with. Jake's band (Shalako & the Russia House) and Mark's band (Reset the System) then engaged in a heated rivalry through the remainder of our teenage years, me attending the gigs of both, standing stagefront, filming on a shitty digital camcorder, having been removed from Jake's restructured band for lacking the ability to play an instrument, sing in tune, do a convincing emo scream, or exhibit any onstage charisma. (I'd also occasionally contribute lyrics to both bands, then be mildly annoyed when they were changed to something less meaningful that better fit the song structure.) Reset the System eventually recorded a banging E.P. produced by a creative genius local scene icon, but disbanded before releasing it. Mark became a father with Reset’s singer Cari at 18, worked back-to-back day and night shifts at two call centres, got a mortgage, transitioned into financial services, and is now definitely on more money than the rest of us. Mark was consequently the only one of the boys with the funds and wherewithal to visit me in both Seoul & Tokyo.

** Yannis was Mark's co-guitarist in Reset the System (though Mark insists he was Reset's main songwriter and creative architect, e.g. being the visionary behind them having duelling screamo girl singers, which became just one screamo girl singer when Cari fell out with the other one.) Me and Yannis were the only ones in our year who knew basic HTML coding, and at one point worked out each other's web hosting passwords (my website was wwfattitudexplosion.com, password: ilovestephaniemcmahon; Yannis' website was dj-yannis.co.uk, and I don't remember the password.) Yannis was Jehovah's Witness, meaning he didn't have to do R.E. (which was actually a fun doss class with a teacher who spent more time teaching us about Thatcher's pathological hatred of the working class than the intricacies of world religions); consequently, I would often (inspired by South Park) call him a Jew as a slur (which I obviously wouldn't do now, aged 32, unless very drunk, when I'll still sometimes say the most offensive shit I can think of, drunkenly confident that whoever hears it will know I'm only pretending to be a cunt ironically for the purpose of childish edgelord humour, like e.g. Ricky Gervais); so when I hacked dj-yannis.co.uk, I covered in it in Christmas tree gifs and scrolling images of Santa's reindeer-led sleigh. Our Mums had a screaming match on the phone after, and I attempted to have a widely mocked fight with Yannis, which consisted of Yannis grasping both my wrists, controlling me, moving us round and round, dancing, encircled by laughing schoolmates, until I gave up. I've been friends with Yannis without interruption ever since.

I get to the Wetherspoons by Central Station and it’s rammed as fuck inside. It seems pointless to navigate the mass of people to find Yannis and the others, then immediately manoeuvre myself back through the crowd to the bar, so I go to the bar first. I connect my phone to wifi to tell Yannis I’m inside. My Punk IPA arrives and wifi connects and I see a message from Yannis saying they’ve moved to another Wetherspoons. I quickly drink my Punk, then walk down Saint Mary Street to the other Wetherspoons, where the bouncer IDs me.

I produce a Korean Alien Registration Card and European Health Insurance Card from my wallet. Both display my name and date of birth, but the Korean ARC is written in Korean, and the EHIC doesn’t have a picture. I think these non-British ID cards will need some explanation, but the bouncer glances at the date on the EHIC (I was born in 1987) and says Go on, mate.

Inside, I find Yannis sitting with Steph* and Lee** and Lee’s wife*** and some others.

* Steph worked at The Old Arms in Caerphilly with Yannis, and Yannis had a major crush on her when I visited home with Yuna in like 2014. They started dating soon after, and now live together above a pub Steph manages in the Cardiff-adjacent seaside town of Penarth. Last time I was home, for Christmas 2018, they were living above a Cardiff City Centre Pub that Steph was managing and Yannis still works at (owned by the same nationwide chain as the Penarth Pub, BrewMasters, which owns even more pubs than Wetherspoons, though BrewMasters’ branding is less obvious). Me and Jake had a drunken wrestling match in the living room, accidentally smashing several statuettes Steph bought in Disneyland Paris. I obnoxiously offered to pay for the broken Disney statuettes, being flush with crypto cash at the time, which only pissed Steph off more. I worry that she’ll still be annoyed about this, but she seems friendly & welcoming now, 18 months later.

** Lee was in my sister's year at school (two below me & the boys), alongside Steph, and Lee & Steph have been best friends ever since. Lee now manages The Old Arms in Caerphilly (which is also a BrewMasters-owned premises.) Lee often gives the impression that he thinks I'm a fucking idiot, probably because I usually get stoned as fuck with Yannis just before going to his pub.

*** I don't really know anything about Lee's wife. I think her name is Lauren? Or Lisa? They got married while I was away (in Jamaica, attended by Steph & Yannis.)

Yannis introduces me to a bald guy in a dai cap called Kevin*, and I agree with Kevin when he says I think we met each other before.

* Maybe Kevin works (or worked) at one of the pubs with them?

Steph offers me antibacterial hand gel, then holds up her phone to show me an email announcing the Twin Atlantic gig's been cancelled. And the singer liked the thing I put on Instagram about it earlier, Steph says, he could’ve said something then.

I talk with Lee and Lee’s wife about Korea and how Korea's been dealing with the virus, then with Yannis and Kevin and Chef Ramsey from the Penarth Pub and whoever the other two at that end of the table are about how mental it is that they let Atletico Madrid fans travel to the UK for Liverpool’s Champions League match when all the football matches in Spain are being played to empty stadiums.

Lee’s wife says When did you get back from Korea? in a way suggesting she suspects I’m infected.

Talks turns to the many Scots in the Wetherspoons, identifiable by their kilts and rugby tops.

It’s pointless cancelling it now, Steph says of Wales & Scotland's 6 Nations clash, cancelled earlier this afternoon. They’ve already all flown down for it, and they’ll all be out in bars down here getting pissed up all weekend. They might as well play the bloody match for what good it’s gonna do.

Mark meets us on Saint Mary Street, Cardiff’s main drinking street, which is rammed with Scots in kilts and scores of other pissheads from Wales and beyond. We walk from the Wetherspoons to Coyote Ugly, a weird themed bar based on the movie where the all-female bar staff get on the bar and dance at regular intervals.