Apologies once again for the lengthy hiatus in posting. Actually, fuck that. Why do I need to apologise? Are there really people out there saying “You know, it’s been several weeks since Ho Chi Tim was last updated. I think that young man should say sorry”? I suspect not.

The reason for the delay is that I’ve been agonising over the nature of HCT, an agony provoked by my Tet holiday, eight very enjoyable days in Ben Tre. Every time I sat down to share with you my experiences in Ben Tre province, my travels, my meals, my attempts to find agreeable toilet facilities, it just winded up sounding like some smug, tedious, patronising travelogue. Something you’d find in one of those wanky “Lonely Planet” collections of travellers’ tales, or in a book I saw in the backpacker district recently called – I shit you not – “Chicken Soup for the Traveller’s Soul”. Surely there is no torture too unpleasant for the fuckers who published that one.

Other than a potentially embarrassing incident deep in the forest south of Ben Tre when I came across a small clearing containing a village and was invited into a house by a half-naked teenage boy, causing me to suspect either a Glitteresque entrapment or myself ending up in the starring role in some foul Vietnamese version of Deliverance, it was a fairly uneventful week, but the sort of thing that others might write about in terms of how wonderful the locals are, how they’re more in touch with the Earth, how they smile in the face of adversity & all that bollocks. But you’ve heard it all before, and it’s boring.

I’m sure you’d rather hear about what happened earlier this week, when I went to a local tailor shop to pick up the trousers I’d been measured for last week. In Vietnam, bespoke tailoring is often cheaper than going off-the-peg, which is just as well for those of us who are way taller than the average Vietnamese. And don’t get me started on finding shoes. I’m seriously thinking of getting shoes shipped over from Britain, such is the impossibility of finding a pair that both a) fit me, and b) wouldn’t make me a laughing stock in any country outside Vietnam. But back to the tailor. I’d ordered a pair of fairly boring dark grey trousers for work, and went to pick them up today, only to be handed a pair of brown trousers. I have nothing against brown trousers, but I already have a very nice pair and secondly I'd ordered dark grey. So I showed the tailor the cutting of the material I’d chosen, pressed it against the trousers, and showed him the marked difference in hue. “No, is same” he said. “No”, I replied, “is not same, is different.” (Funny how, despite my love of English grammar, things like pronouns and articles fly out of the window when talking to the locals).

After a couple of minutes of this banter, and despite my being backed up by a woman who was in there getting her son measured up for a suit and was clearly thinking twice about it after seeing my predicament, the tailor still wasn’t giving in, so after commenting on his incompetence with the aid of several classic Anglo-Saxon epithets I made my excuses and left, wondering whether he was trying to either rip me off, or was just colourblind. In which case, maybe tailoring isn’t the job for him.

I watched Liverpool v ManUre at the weekend, which, given the result, was highly enjoyable, apart from Alan Smith’s nasty leg injury. But I was surprised to read in the papers today the headline “SMITH OUT OF WORLD CUP”? I’m sorry? That’s rather like, on the day after my operation last December, the papers saying “TIM OUT OF WINTER OLYMPICS”.