Legless Blog - Ian Reed / John McMiken
Legless blog archive for November 2007
For my current Blog click here!
British expat amputee in Thailand
'Let it be'
Legless Blog -I first decided to create this blog page after seeing all of the bad publicity given to and constant hounding of my fellow legless celebrity, Heather Mills on many other websites and in the media in general. This page I have created as a place where I can state my personal opinions, thoughts and musings openly, and share my views and feelings with the Internet World.
This is my legless website, I pay for it and I am the manager, owner/boss/king of it, so 'legless or not', as 'freedom of speech' is still a basic human right in true democratic countries where you can view this blog, then I feel that this is somewhere that I can speak my mind without recourse. This is not a commercial page, it is just my own social media page. Nobody has forced any of you to come here and nobody is holding you here, so if you don't agree or like what you are reading here, then please feel free to leave at anytime!
As someone who has exactly the same physical injuries that I have, I find that the hounding of Heather Mills by the media is disgusting. I now see how celebrities, legless or not, can never have a normal life, because they never have time to themselves without someone from the media trying to drag up any kind of dirt from what would just be a normal everyday incident to anyone else, but in Heather's case any normal incident gets sensationalised by the media. Heather's physical disability seems to incite them more, and being honest, if I personally was hounded the way that Heather is, then some of these media personnel would consider being just 'legless' a bonus after the physical injuries that I would personally inflict upon them. I am thoroughly disgusted at the treatment of Heather, I suppose you could call it a feeling of 'Legless unity', so if any of the media responsible are reading this blog, then in Paul McCartney's own words "Let it be".
We are both legless!
****
You can email me anytime at: blog@leglessinthailand.com
'The Legless Blog' November 2007
So now I know that I was wrong in believing that the main purpose of a British Embassy was to help British Citizens abroad. I now see that helping British Citizens abroad is something that the Embassy staff may feel obliged to do occasionally for publicity purposes, but now I also see that their 'Primary Objective' is the generation of money and anything else that they may be asked to do is dismissed off-hand, especially if it delays or interferes with the 'Primary Objective'.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
This increase in price would not worry me too much if I were just a normal seasonal traveller and my ten year passport, actually lasted me for ten years. But, because of the local visa regulations where I am, I have to regularly travel and update the visa in my passport, so because each visa takes up a whole page of the passport and the regular physical stamping in and out of countries, my ten year passport, lasts me approximately 18 months now.
So I hope that the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and various immigration organisations concerned can come up with some new idea to cut down on the amount of passport pages used for visas and physical stamps. Why not just affix a digital chip to the passport that can be used to give you a visa and stamp you in and out of countries electronically? They probably wouldn't develop that though, because then they would lose a lot of income from the renewing of passports from people like me.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
I have been away for a few days with no access to the internet, so no input on here for a while, sorry!
A couple of days ago a Thai friend offered me a lift in his car because he was visiting his family in Supanburi and asked me if I wanted to go along for the ride. Because Supanburi is nearer to Bangkok than where I live now, I agreed to go along, as I have to arrange for a new passport with the British Embassy in Bangkok, because my last passport is now full and I have to go to Penang again in early December to get a new Thai visa, so I thought that this would help.
I stayed in Supanburi with my friend's family for a couple of days and then made the trip into Bangkok to arrange for my new passport. I know the opening times for the embassy, so when I arrived in Bangkok at about lunchtime, I decided to have a meal and then go to the embassy when they opened again after lunch. When I arrived at the embassy, I was a little surprised that there was no queue at the entrance, because every time that I have been there before there has always been a queue of people waiting to go in.
I spoke to a security guard at the entrance and asked to go in, he asked me what I required, so I told him that I needed to get a new passport issued because my old one is full now. He then told me that the embassy was closed for 'Staff Training' and that there was only a skeleton crew working that day to deal with 'emergencies only'. Being a Friday, the embassy doesn't open again until the following Monday and I had nowhere to stay in Bangkok, so I just had to make my own legless way, slowly back to my home in Nakhon Sawan.
So now I am back home and I have just two weeks before I have to leave for Penang again, I have to get a new passport before I go and I know that the passport takes five working days to prepare, so time is getting a little tight now. I don't have a choice with this, my visa expires on the 11th December and the Thai government have now introduced quite a hefty daily fine for any overstay on the visa.
It just seems to be the way my luck has been running for a long time now. Why did the British embassy staff have to have a training day on the one day that I could go there comfortably? Why don't they do their training at the weekends or in the evenings when it interferes with nobody else?
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
I first started writing what is now my book, when I was recuperating from my near fatal motoring accident, in a small town named Nangrong, in the North East of Thailand. The physical injuries from the accident were just really an inconvenience to me, "So now I only have one leg and my bones are gradually healing, so what! Things will improve with time". What was really tearing me apart at that time and what did not improve with time, was the discovery that the only girl that I have ever truly loved in my life and the person whom I had dedicated my whole life and future to for the last four years, did not have any real feelings for me and had been secretly and actively looking for a new partner for a long time. She needed someone who could more appropriately fulfill her secret desires for immense wealth and with my physical incapacity now, she had the perfect excuse she needed to leave me.
Knowing all of this now and being semi-confined to my living quarters for a long time, I only had my computer to talk to, so I started writing the whole story into my computer and I found a slight feeling of relief just writing all of my emotional pain down in words using my keyboard. I never deliberately set out to write a book, I was just writing my story on my computer to help to get the emotional pain out of my system. When I had written down the whole story up to that present date, I found that although it helped to write all of this down, I really needed to tell other people about my story and pain, but I was now alone and had no one to talk to, I had lost contact with all of my friends before, during my long confinement period in hospital in both Thailand and the UK.
So I now had my whole story in words, but I had nobody to tell it to, so it was at this point that I decided that I should try to get my story published and make it available to other people. That was when I decided to create my book and I gave it the title of 'Legless in Thailand'.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
I have received many emails before from people telling me that email lists are the way to do business on the internet and that I should build lists of my own. Well, having been the recipient of email from being on many lists, I would not want to spam anybody with my email, like the hundreds of rubbish emails that I receive everyday.
Even if I do consider that my new book is a good story and my short stories are interesting, I do not want to push them in everyone's face, I would much rather just link to them and keyword them properly on the internet or even write about them in a blog like this, then let people who are truly interested in a good story, find my books and short stories by themselves.
My books:
Legless in Thailand - http://www.reedinter.co.uk/Legless.html
Ex Post Facto - http://www.expostfacto.co.uk
My short stories:
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
Checking my blog on the search engines as usual today I got a very pleasant surprise, for the obvious keywords of 'Legless' and 'Blog' this blog has now re-appeared again on Google and Google fed search engines today and in the number one position in the search results for these keywords. I haven't tried other keywords yet, I am just pleased that after an absence of almost three weeks, Google has rectified whatever the problem was.
As hard as I try, I can never understand what happens with these search engines at times. One of my websites has now disappeared from MSN a few days ago, not just the main page but all sub pages and topics also, even though this website and pages appear on the first results page of all the other search engines. Search engines, who can ever completely understand them?
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
I have been a little quiet lately because I have been doing my usual routine of SEO for my websites and changing my websites a little to give them a Xmas look. I have also been changing some of the keywords on my sites to reflect the Xmas holidays. It is all just basic marketing work really, I am just trying to push the sales of my book for Xmas. If anyone reading this is interested, my book 'Legless in Thailand' is available at: http://www.redleadbooks.com/leinth.html and the first chapter can be wiewed HERE
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
So just after leaving Butterworth, I dug out my book from my bag and started the proof-reading again, I couldn't do it in Penang because 'Low Chi' the hotel owner, had borrowed it to read. I soon settled down to reading my book and being an autobiography, even though the whole story is in my memory, reading it in print, I soon found that I was criticising myself about things like: "Why didn't you expand more on that part?", "You missed an important occurrence here that would have explained it better", etc.
It was whilst I was occupied with my book, that a young girl with a small baby asked me if the seat opposite me was free, to which I replied that yes, it was free. So she sat down opposite me and started breast-feeding her child. I just continued reading through my book, until a little later she started talking to me and she apologised for any inconvenience that she had caused me, she then went on to explain that she had a seat of her own further down the carriage, but her husband was very tired and had fallen asleep across all the seats and she didn't have room to take care of her child properly. I told her that it was no inconvenience for me, smiled at her and then I just started reading my book again.
About one hour later, this girl started talking to me again and told me that she and her family were from Finland and that this was their second visit to Thailand and she asked me if I had ever been to Thailand before, so I replied to her and explained that I lived in Thailand and just had to come out to Malaysia occasionally for immigration regulations. She then asked me what book I was reading, so I just quickly explained that it was my own book that had just been published, my only copy, that it was an autobiography about the last eight years of my life in Thailand and that I was just checking it out. She then became very interested and asked me, if I didn't mind, could she read my book, so I smiled, nodded and handed the book to her.
When she started reading my book, I dug another book out of my bag that I had brought for the journey, a Tom Clancy novel and started reading again myself. The girl very often stopped reading, looked across at me, smiled knowingly and then started reading again. About one hour later this girl started talking to me again, but this time she was asking me questions about my life from the book, she said to me "Do you still live with this girl 'Noi' now?", I looked at my book that she was reading and I could see that she was only about one fifth of the way through it, so I answered her and said that "No, I do not live with Noi now, she is now living in Scotland with her new husband and I pity him". She then started asking me many more questions about my life from my book and I found the whole situation very embarrassing, explaining about the stupid mistakes that you have made in your life to a complete stranger sitting opposite you on a train.
I eventually said to her, that all of the questions that she was asking me would be explained later and better in the book, so could she please stop asking me questions, just read the book and eventually she would find the answers to all of her questions in there. She did as I asked, which I was very grateful for, then after a little while she said that she was returning to her husband, because they were making the sleeping bunks now and asked me if she could take my book with her and that she would return the book to me before we reached Bangkok the next day. This I agreed to quickly, I was just glad that she would not be reading my book opposite me again. The girl did return the book to me the next morning when we reached Bangkok, she said that she really enjoyed my book and hoped that my life would be fine from now on, then she left the train and I never saw her again.
I must admit, that this incident was one of the most embarrassing times that I have been through in recent years and I would definitely not repeat it by choice again, I much prefer that the readers of my 'Legless in Thailand' book are thousands of miles away and contact me by email if they want to.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
As I mentioned in a post before, every two months I have to travel to Penang for Thai visa regulations and I have been doing this for a while now. When I first went to Penang, I found a good, reasonably priced place to stay, the Blue Diamond Hotel in Georgetown. This hotel also has a good food and drink area at the front and features live music in the evenings, which I enjoy, so this soon became my regular haunt when visiting Penang. The staff in the hotel are very friendly and me being a regular visitor, fairly soon they all recognised me on sight each time I went there. But probably because they have hundreds of different guests each week, the one thing that they had problems remembering about me, was my name.
Just after I received my first copy of my published book earlier this year, I had to go again to Penang for visa regulations. Whilst I was sitting in the cafe area at the hotel, just proof-reading my book, the owner of the hotel there spotted me, recognised me and came over to greet me. He was very interested in my book, because we had spoken about it before on one of my previous visits and he asked me if he could borrow it to read, so I agreed and gave it to him. He then started to thank me and I could see that he was struggling to remember my name, but he glanced at the book and then said "Thank you John, I shall make sure that you have it back before you leave". I started smiling and explained to him that John McMiken is only my writing name and that my real name is Ian, he had my book 'Legless in Thailand' in his hand, so I just pointed to it and said "Maybe it is easier if you just call me 'Legless'" and I also pointed to my false leg and said "You know that I am legless anyway, so it will be much easier for you to remember".
So that was how my name 'Legless' started and now everyone who knows me in Penang greets me by shouting "Hi Legless, how's it going?" and nobody forgets my name anymore.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
Well the unusual cold spell seems to have passed now, today is more like the normal temperature for this time of year. I know that it will get cooler around the Xmas and New Year period, I just hope not too cool again.
I really must get this house finished over the next year, well at least get some more walls built, I do like being in the open air in the evenings, but living completely in the open air all the time has got way beyond a joke now, I am just thankful that the rainy season has finished for this year.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
The continuing saga of my disappearing blog. This blog has still not re-appeared on the search engines were it was removed before and now it is also disappearing from some of the other search engines that up to now I have been ranking quite highly on. Obviously someone with influence has a problem with this blog and wants it removed, for what reason? I still don't know.
Try it yourself on different search engines, just type in the keywords 'Legless' and 'Blog' and see if you can find this blog, I am not just being paranoid here, this is really happening.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
Today is the anniversary of Armistice Day and it is a day that has always been special for me. I have always spent this day in thought of all the people that died to give us the freedoms that we just accept as normal today, even this Blog.
I have never looked it up, but I hate to think how many amputees just like me, survived the war and what were their lives like in the following years?
Lest we forget!
Legless in Thailand
Well this year that has changed a lot, it is now just early November and starting just three days ago, in the evenings I have to wear a jumper now and the main reason that I am writing about this today, is because yesterday evening at approx 19:00 it started to get so cold, that my joints in my hands and fingers were locking up just typing at my computer keyboard, I really must get some walls built around here. I also had to wear two jumpers, one on top of the other and I was still shivering all night. I don't have a thermometer available, so I cannot tell you the exact temperature, but from my experience, it feels like the temperature is just inside double figures Centigrade in the evenings at the moment.
I live in Northern Central Thailand, so if the weather is cold like this here this year, what must it be like for the poor village people that live in the hills in the North of Thailand? I hate to think how cold it is going to be in the evenings here by Xmas this year, I shall definitely have to get some whisky in soon.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
This was fine for a couple of days and then today, I found that 'Digg / Legless Blog' has now been removed from Google results. So just what problem Google has with my blog I really don't know, but I do know now that Google is deliberately removing any direct link to it.
If anybody has any ideas about this, then I would really like to hear from you because I am totally confused with this now.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
Heather has been making herself heard again through selective outlets and complaining again about the media harrassment, but all of the comments that I can find on the internet, still show that the media have successfully brainwashed the majority of the public against her. As part of that public, but now looking from the outside, I still find it hard to believe that the UK public can be this gullible, what has happened to the famous old British virtue of fair play, that I personally still abide by? It has obviously now disappeared along with many other good old British traits, probably due to the influence of foreign cultures(USA) through the film industry these days.
I used to miss the UK and it's easy-going, dependable and helpful way of life living abroad now, but what it seems to be changing into these days, is the last country on earth that I would ever want to live in again, and following what is happening to Heather, I am sure that she feels exactly the same way too.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
I have only ever had contact with two people that have read my book and the comments and reactions from one of them is below:
The first reader of my book that contacted me, contacted me by email and said that he really enjoyed my book even though it was a very sad story. He knew that it was an autobiography and he went on to say "How can you write about yourself like that and let everyone see what a fool you have been?" So I replied quickly to him and said "With hindsight I can now see what an absolute fool I have been, but at the time with the emotions involved, I was blind to what was really happening around me. That is one of the reasons why I wrote the book, so hopefully people who read it can learn from the many mistakes that I have made."
He replied again quite quickly to me saying "I know that you must understand exactly what you are doing, but personally I could never do that, I could never openly admit to anyone about major mistakes that I have made in my life" and he ended the message by wishing me good luck for my book.
That was the first comment on my book and the reader was thousands of miles away and contacting me by email only and I found it quite easy to reply to him and explain my motives for writing my book. The second reader was not so far away and I found it very embarrassing and fairly difficult to deal with and it is a much longer story, but that is for another blog input, not today.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
I find this hotel a very convenient place to stay in Penang, they don't have any frills and the rooms are just basic, but that is all I need when I am there and it is very inexpensive to stay there. I like to sit outside in the evenings wherever I am and the Blue Diamond has a very good open-air eating and drinking area at the front and every evening they have live musicians playing and singing there, they also ask some of the guests to join in if they want to, which gives it a very good party style atmosphere.
As a friendly gesture, I have given them a page or two on my website now and if you would like to take a quick look at them, they are available here: 'Blue Diamond'
The one thing that I have never done in Penang yet, is to spend time there over the Xmas period and knowing the people there now, I am sure that it would be a very fun place to spend a legless Xmas :-)) This is something that I plan to do in the future when I can afford it, because although it is a relatively inexpensive place to stay, the small medical pension that I just survive on now does not give me sufficient funds to travel very often, only when I have to for visa purposes.
Just in case somebody is reading this and thinks that this is just an advertisement, well it isn't, I am just recommending a place in Penang that I personally enjoy, so maybe one of my future books will have the title 'Legless in Penang' :-))
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
As usual today I went through the daily routine of checking my blog on the search engines and I got a pleasant surprise, MSN is listing me again and at the top of their first results page, yet on Google and Google fed search engines, this blog is still conspicuous by it's absence, so this has now really got me confused. Just what was the cause of all this and why has it been rectified now on one search engine but not on the others?
I would like to say 'thank you' to MSN here, because they have now given me confidence in their search engine operations again.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
So let's look at the angles that they had before they started their onslaught:
(1) Sir Paul McCartney - Paul is very well known and generally liked by the public and if they concentrated on him in this divorce, then although the public would be interested, if they found that he was partially to blame for this break up, then the public would have a hard time believing it and would maybe start disbelieving that the reporting was true and impartial. - NO, even though Paul may be the guilty party or partially to blame in this, it would be very difficult trying to convince the public of that, because of the image that they already have of him as a 'nice guy'. Also, with his personal security personnel, it would be very difficult getting near him and dangerous to try and hound him. THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT THE WAY TO GO WITH THIS!
(2) Heather Mills - Heather was relatively unknown until she got involved with Paul and also being an amputee, it would be very easy to convince the public that Paul married her because he was just feeling sorry for her being an invalid, and that she was to blame in all of this and that she only really married Paul to get access to his millions. - YES, the gullible UK public would believe this easily, because they do not really relate to her and they could very easily be turned against her and would be interested in every sordid detail that we can publish about her, whether true or not and this would definitely sell papers! Heather also has no security personnel and we can monitor her every move very easily. THIS IS DEFINITELY THE WAY TO GO!
Having said all of the above, I am not trying to convince anyone here that either Heather or Paul was to blame for their break up, that is something that only they know themselves and nobody else does. All that I am trying to say here, is that from my point of view, the above are the reasons that the media have concentrated on Heather and I think that they would be much more usefully employed by reporting on important world and local events and leave the settlement of what should just be a routine divorce case to the two parties involved and not get involved themselves, celebrity or not and then everyone concerned would be happy.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
I actually quite enjoy playing these scammers around now, probably because after all the years that I have been playing with them, I can recognise and preempt just about any situation that they are going to throw at me now. So when the weekend arrives I get a little bored, because I know that none of the scammers will be coming out to play today.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
Advance fee fraud or Nigerian scam 419 has been around for a very long time now and it has developed into a multi-billion dollar industry for the scammers. There are many variations on the initial approach to a potential victim, but in general, it is usually in the form of an email from someone asking for a foreigner to help to move millions of dollars into their bank account, to assist someone who says, that otherwise they cannot get access to these funds without overseas help and they promise you a substantial percentage of these funds for your help.
When you answer them and agree to help, somewhere along the line you are called upon to assist financially to cover some kind of initial expences required and usually this is in the region of one or two thousand dollars, which they expect you to pay thinking that after this initial expence, then millions of dollars will soon be in your bank account. The whole story is false and usually they have a few hundred or a thousand people on the same scam at the same time and even if they only get a 10% success rate, then you can imagine the amount of funds that they are scamming from people on this.
There are many different variations on these scams now including false lottery wins and I have covered many of these on my website about these advance fee fraud scams at:
http://expostfacto.co.uk/Advancefeefraud.html
I may seem a little strange to other people, but I enjoy playing these scammers along and letting them think that I am one of their easy victims that they are going to get thousands of dollars from and usually, at any one time, I have about five or six of these scams on the go that I am playing with. I just hope that whilst they are wasting their time with me, then someone else who doesn't know about these scams is left alone.
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
Just because I personally support Heather Mills and her fight against the media, does not mean that I have any problems with Paul McCartney, in fact I have great respect for his music and musical talent. But for some reason, people just automatically jump to the mistaken conclusion that if you support one person for any particular reason, then you are also against the person that they have a disagreement with and this is just not true, I have no problems with Paul at all. My support for Heather is purely in relation to the media harassment and their all-out attack on her. The differences between Heather and Paul are their own personal concern, not mine, I am not trying to judge here and neither should the media, they should just let people try to sort out their own disagreements privately and stop trying to interfere and cause more problems in a matter that, just like you and me, they really know nothing about.
Only Heather and Paul themselves know what their disagreements are and they should be left alone to work this out in private, without the media trying to cash in on it, which is basically what this is all about, the media trying to make money out of other peoples misery. Whilst I am writing this blog, I am listening to music in the background and as usual the music is a mixed collection of Phil Collins, Ronan Keating, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton songs, because these are my favourite artists and still are.Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
Yesterday I was registered on Heather Mills' amputee forum, so I have many other legless people to talk to now and many of them seem interesting and from many different countries. If anyone is interested, the forum is on http://www.heathermillsmccartney.com
Cheers for now
Legless in Thailand
To my blog Archive for October 2007
To my Legless Headquarters site
P.S. "I don't remember reading the small print when I signed on for this life, in fact, I don't remember signing on at all, I was probably legless then too! So seeing as you wont let me resign, can we renegotiate the contract please?"
My first published book - Legless in Thailand
My other blog at the St Helens Star newpaper, UK
My home town St Helens, UK and their famous rugby team
Some of my short stories HERE
Biography of author John McMiken
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