Backpacker's Guide to the Universe

Coffee: sustainer of the day; black gold. Drink a cup, and get the jitters: your key to surviving a day.

Black gold in bubbling crystal hot water. The machine sputters, liquid gold dropping through the sieve into the cup like a pot of gold.

Sugar stirred in, viscous milk lumped in; mixed, then poured out into a cup of ice.

Ais Kofaye, the old man says.

The old spindly fingers grip the cup and bring it to the white man; the farang.

He returns to his perch of choice, atop a small table, littered with plates, cups, and teaspoons. He wears an aged T-shirt, emblazoned with 'MUSCAT', an alphabet so familiar with a meaning so foreign.

'Kofaye?', he says to the white men passing by.

No response, no acknowledgment, just a walk by. Upturned noses: uncivility running in the veins of the race of one time colonisers. What civilising mission? Your churches are empty and bare, your face etched with the crow's feet of ungraciousness and paucity of sincerity.

I guess one of the charms of Phuket must be the chance to ignore the calls of an old man, selling you black gold in a T-shirt so poorly cut for his small, compact size.

'Shi-ken noodel? Bak mee kio?', the old man says, showing off his offerings of roast pork and wantons behind a blurred and scratched glass. The traces of another oriental race, seamlessly integrated, mother dialects superseded by Thai.

More white men and women walk past: more people to greet, more chances to be ignored. Large men, huge women, no, not imposing. Well fed faces and rears, prominent bishop's noses, fattened up for the slaughter by the latest, newest epidemic.

So the coffee man sits, and the noddle man keeps the soup hot, smiling, waiting.

'Ko-faye'
'Shi-ken noodel'

In the old shop, peeling white metal-grilles, browned edges with the crayon drawings of age written over the wooden stools and cement floor.

Would you like to dine at Old Man Coffee. where the kofaye is fresh, the smiles are warm, and the pork is lean enough to avoid the rich man's glut?