Anagarika is one pissed off Buddhist monk. Having witnessed the treatment of his brothers and sisters in Rangoon and Lhasa, he is seething with impotent anger. He has only recently attained the status of a full Bhikku and he is still somewhat impetuous according to his dharma teacher.

Anagi, as he is affectionately known, understands only too well the need to live within the 227 rules. However, he is still an unenlightened bhodhisattva and, one day, as he eats a modest offering of binderbaht food - rice and dried fish – an audacious plan begins to hatch in his trained but dissatisfied mind.

Following in the footsteps of Thich Quang Duc, the self-immolater whose protest became one of the defining images of the 20th century, Anagi is going to make an equally powerful statement. He will become the first ever Buddhist suicide bomber.

Of course his beliefs mean that he should not countenance taking the life of another living thing, apart from himself, as suicide is not necessarily frowned upon in Buddhist teachings. Anagi has to wrestle with his conscience. How can he possibly justify such drastic action? Then he thinks of the 500 monks chased out of Lhabsang monastery and the executed monks dumped in the jungle by the Myanmaran junta and he is filled with fist-clenching fury. He comes to a momentous decision. He will plough a truck packed with explosives into to the Chinese Consulate building in Chiang Mai.

Fortunately a rickety old truck has recently been donated to his monastery by a devout local villager. Anagi packs it with green mangoes and recyclable fertilizer bombs. The detonator is a modified prayer wheel. Three turns and then it’s time to blow some practitioners of the THREE BURNING MISDEEDS all the way to patala. Admittedly, they could progress from there to eventual Nibbana - if they then followed the path of enlightenment and achieved paññā.

Still, with quiet determination our mild-mannered martyr sets out for his chosen destination. He leaves behind a video message posted on a ‘free Tibet’ site. In it he sits silently on a prayer rug for sixteen hours in the lotus position. The message is loud and clear.

On arriving at the Consulate building, he wastes no time. He ploughs straight in, smashing directly through the front of it. The initial impact doesn’t detonate the bombs, but - as masonry and glass fall around him - he turns the wheel three times and that does the trick...

There are no fatalities, but screaming Consulate staff, many of them local, pour out of the building, clothes torn and bloodied. Ambulances arrive on the scene late and take the only seriously injured victim out on a gurney, a 63 year old charlady who suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage. There is a general air of panic, smoke and police hitting bystanders with batons - many of them victims of the bomb.

Anagi has been protected from the blast by the mangoes. He is, however, on fire. He has already shut off the pain by modulating his rostral anterior cingulate cortex and controlling the release of endorphins. He has also reduced his body temperature to freezing via thermoregulation. Lastly, and most importantly, he has activated his sweat glands to such a degree that they are secreting enough liquid to stop the fire from burning his skin.

Still on fire, he calmly gets in to his truck and begins the long drive home. In the ensuing panic the Thai authorities have not even registered his existence. Ablaze for the whole journey, he stops only once to adjust the rusty mirror on the cracked windscreen. The truck, despite extensive damage, still drives. In fact, being a good deal lighter, it gets him back to the monastery in record time. Astonishingly the tyres have survived intact, as has Anagi.

On arriving home Anagi gets out of the truck and walks into his lodgings. There he meets his dharma teacher and begins a conversation about the day’s events. He is instructed to leave the communion for breaking the most serious of the Patimokkha . He promises to leave in the morning and, on being offered some lentils, he eats a light meal and retires to bed.

Anagi is still on fire to this day. His protest had little effect on Beijing officials or Burmese generals but it has turned him into a minor celebrity. Although he is no longer a monk, pilgrims come from all over the world to light joss sticks off his head and sit around him warming their hands as he tells them instructive tales about the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS. The Chinese Consulate building has been rebuilt and refurbished. The 63 year old charlady is back in her job and Buddhist terrorism is not exactly a problem...

It is not often that I drag my sorry carcass to the cinema. I prefer lost films myself. Celluloid masterpieces such as Edward D. Wood Jr.'s 1972 classic, The Undergraduate are my forte. Films that exist in rare prints, films that are only extant in a damaged or incomplete form and some that never existed in the first place are my usual fare. À tort et à travers, I lurched into the local picture house recently to satisfy a childhood craving.

The year was 1977 and my recently redundant father entered our sitting room with a brand new COLOUR TV. When I say redundant I mean relieved of his employment rather than his position as titular head of household. My dysfunctional siblings and I were already assembled around the space where the cathode shrine would take pride of place. Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis and all that. Up until then, and rather late in the day might I add, we had satisfied ourselves with monochrome domestic entertainment. We even listened to the radio in black and white, although this was only a problem when they broadcast snooker.

Anyway, the prospect of one show more than any other made our ocular facilities salivate or should I say lacrimate - Star Trek. We were a family of proto-Trekkies who weren’t sad enough to become actual Trekkies. We even had favourites. Mine was that irrepressible Russian Starfleet officer, Pavel Andreievich Chekov. I chose him because I was the youngest and all the others had been taken.

The television came replete with a sliding, wood effect door. This enabled you to hide the fact that you dared to watch the goggle box from your disapproving neighbours - if they ever popped around for tea. Middle-class families in our neck of the woods were obviously expected to have a good old sing song round the piano of an evening. Television was for common people and Roman Catholics. We were both. Property prices took a nose dive I can assure you.

Having switched it on, in eager anticipation, we were forced to wait while it ‘warmed up’. The picture seemed to wobble on to the screen like a sort of green tornado, something I’ve never witnessed on any other piece of televisual equipment. But, and this is the crux of my tale, the image that burned itself on to our retinas was the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Captain James T. Kirk sat in his throne, looking habitually pensive. Spock stood to his right, typically emotionless and calculating. Scotty stood to his left, a look of familiar defeat crowning his features. Only this time they were devoid of their dull, grey uniforms. Kirk was yellow, Spock blue, Scotty a shocking red. We had never witnessed anything like this. It was like walking in to a Jackson Pollock painting. That image lives with me to this day, in sparkling Technicolor.



So, having been blown away once by Gene Roddenberry’s baby I couldn’t help but notice that Star Trek was being reinvented for the big screen, again. I thought nothing of the original movies, still less of the cloying, saccharine, vomit fest that was The Next Generation. Those other abortionate incarnations will remain unnamed for aesthetic reasons. The difference here was the prospect of the original characters once again being introduced. I always loved Kirk’s logs which appeared to be full of faux ‘philosophispeak’ and Shakespearian buffoonery: “My soul searches for meaning on this deserted planet. Spock and the others seem distant. What is the lot of man, are we meant to suffer? The others may return to the ship but will they be the same men and women who left it”? In truth if an unknown character went on a mission they were invariably struck down by a child-like Apollo or laid low by a prosthetic disease. We called them ‘the expendable ones’. I do wonder how the Enterprise functioned with Kirk’s inane ramblings. Couldn’t he have inter-spliced them with some practical announcements like “The Holodeck needs a wipe” or “The canteen will be serving Vulcan selhat soup, followed by shepherd’s pie”?

I was not disappointed by the aural and visual delights that faced me as I drank in the latest incarnation. The story was a little far-fetched. A convenient meeting between the spanking new 'buff' Captain Kirk and a decrepit Leonard Nimoy stretched credulity, but with plenty of stunning, ear-splitting effects and a little humour, popcorn spilled on to my velveteen chair, the tangy taste of caffeinated coke fizzed around the roof of my mouth and I was entertained. Oh, and Simon Pegg really is a star, after all.

Thus far I have avoided infection from the beasts of the air and the beasts of the field and I feel a minor celebration is in order. I rest my worn quill (my prodigious digits) and crack open a bottle of Pinot Grigio, pouring it down my gullet like a starved cormorant - no Sideways reference intended.

Having no wish to carnify my apportionment of wit and wisdom, however slight that may be, I have begun to exercise not my sickly corpus but something all together more important - my judgement. It is my intention to regale the weary surfer with delectable titbits on myriad subjects, including politics, culture, sex, drugs and sofas. I hope no one gets injured in the process.

I shall do my best to be succinct for, as my granny was fond of saying, non multa, sed multum – not quantity but quality. She was a Latin scholar who occasionally lapsed into drunkenness. I am, on the other hand, a scholar of drink who occasionally lapses into Latin. Nota bene.