Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) Tourist Guide


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JULIE CHRISTIE CAME TO BREAKFAST

by J.M. Cadet

Bonnie and I had been up in the forest for a week or so: rough going, sleeping out, getting bitten by this and that. I'd picked up one of those four-day fevers. You know the sort of thing: bells in the ears, a thumping head, everything wrapped in cotton wool, and you seem to be floating. So when I saw the note on the door, I had trouble taking it in. I asked Bonnie what she made of it.

Sensible girl, Bonnie. East Coast, Ivy League. Making a Christmas stopover in Thailand on her way to China, where she was going to rescue someone…

What the note said was:

Hallo. We are English friends of Jean's. Both she and Nina suggested we should call on you. We are planning to go into the hills and they thought you may have some advice. We're staying at the Chiang Mai Guest House and would love to meet you if you were free tonight or tomorrow.

It was signed - and this was the problem, given the state I was in - Julie Christie and Duncan Campbell.

Duncan Campbell? OK, I could cope with that. There were two UK journos of that name I knew of, one writing for the New Statesman, the other for Time Out. And I could just about believe that if one of them was around and wanted to get into the boonies, he might look me up. But Julie Christie? The Julie Christie? "Striking British leading actress," as Halliwell describes her, "whose choice of roles has not always been fortunate." Well, never mind the roles, Halliwell. What about the face and form that has launched a thousand fantasies - in Darling, Billy Liar, Don't Look Now and what was that super-biggie? Dr. Zhivago, fer chrissake, where she plays Pasternak/Zhivago's muse and mistress, Nadzhenka or whatever…?

Bonnie was down-to-earth. Why didn't I phone the guest house?

Well, I got on the phone, spoke to someone at the other end, inviting them over for breakfast the next morning. Explained too how we'd just come back from the hills, I wasn't in a state to get around much, so if they wouldn't mind…

And if the voice at the other end wasn't exactly enthusiastic, who could blame the speaker?

This is some years back. I was living off the Huay Gaeow Road, the other side of the irrigation canal, in a sort of rural shoe-box. Outside the walled city, more or less in the shadow of Doi Suthep and its reliquary. One room upstairs with a big solid bed that pushed the work-table into a corner; a hong nam at the top of the stairs with a generous supply of rusty water; and the luxury of mosquito screening on the windows. Downstairs, under the house, was the open-sided dtai tun ban where you did your cooking and socialising. It wasn't the Ritz but the compound had lots of the blue-flowering garlic plant in it and some interesting residents. Yeah, and it was cheap.

In all, our visitors must have been with us about an hour. Difficult to say, as I still had the weird, detached feeling, the floating insubstantiality, along with the thumping head, that comes with the country.

“I think your friends are here," I heard Bonnie say guardedly from below. As I was struggling down the stairs with the extra chair, I heard a distempered, a rather shrill, female voice saying, "Well, what are we going to sit on, then?" And as I was introducing myself and Bonnie to what were either a couple of bedraggled hippies or a film star-journalist duo travelling incognito, the same voice, now emanating from the person in front of me - who, behind the dark glasses, might well have been an off-form Julie Christie - was saying, no less shrilly, "And how much longer do you intend to live here, if I may ask!" - Campbell in the meantime making soothing, conciliatory noises as if he'd been having a lot of practice.

Well, we sat ourselves at the table, had coffee and biscuits, and Campbell - the Time Out Campbell, and a genuine nice guy, it turned out - told me they'd been to Aranyaprathet with some other film folk, drawing the world's attention to the plight of Cambodia. Now they were taking time off, wondered if I could offer advice about the forest up by the Burmese border. And the Thai political situation, now - was there another coup in the offing?

I told him what I could. But all the time I was having this fever-reality problem, this curious detachment from the world around and the ringing in the ears that went with it. I should explain we'd more or less paired off, Campbell and I at one corner of the table, Bonnie and the star at another. But every so often, from out of my patch of fevered fog, I couldn't resist glancing to where Bonnie and Julie were exchanging friendly woman-chat. And although we'd been tremendously civilised about it, pretending this was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, super-stars dropping by on a regular basis… dammit, as if Jean sent them through most days of the week - Arnie Schwarzenegger and his missis having only just left - (and, come to think of it, who was this Jean person anyway?) …As I say, civilised as we'd been, sneaking a glance across the table or not, every so often I'd get the thought, "That's Julie Christie over there, talking to Bonnie!" And another bolt would flash through me, the cotton woolliness of the world intensifying.

That's about it. Yes. That's it. No requests for signed beer mats or anything like that: just ordinary folks getting together to chat, etc…

Except that some time afterwards, back in England, I mentioned the meeting to a friend of mine, hoping to impress, and he said, " Yeah, I knew her at RADA. Sounds like she hasn't changed a lot." And when later I told my teenage nephew and niece how Julie Christie, you know, had come to breakfast with me in Chiang Mai (the intended message being, of course, what a travelled fellow their uncle was), there was this moment of silence, a sort of baffled pause as they took it in.

Then my niece - the blue-eyed little bumpkin! - put things into perspective."Oo's Judy Christie?" she said suspiciously.