Murder in Saigon.

A few people have asked me why I ended Over the Hill and Far Away where I did. Without giving the game away, I can see that there might be some curiosity about what happened next.

Well, I wandered on around Cambodia and Vietnam - and here is a street scene from Vietnam to tempt you:

Saigon, of course, was much busier than this.

Here is a little tale about Saigon that I wrote when I came back, and was published last year in Domestic Cherry.

MURDER IN SAIGON.

I stayed with friends in Saigon, and, on my last night, asked if I could treat them to dinner. We’ll show you how things are done here, Lydie agreed. And so they took me to a rooftop restaurant in the middle of the city.

We climbed the red-carpeted stairs, passed an elegant restaurant on the first floor, and emerged onto a flat roof with steam and rich smells from the kitchen to our right, and a space to our left that was packed with tables and people and food. Chatter, echoing from a corrugated iron roof, was deafening. Waiters in red jackets somehow managed to weave between the tables, yell instructions at each other, move chairs and people to fit in yet more diners, produce sparklers for a birthday party and stop to join in the singing of 'Happy Birthday to you.' We squeezed ourselves by the wall next to the doorway, and eventually attracted attention.

We were finally given a corner table, where it was almost quiet enough to hear each other above the general cacophony. It was a round table, with a calor gas bottle below and jets with a metal plate above: we were, we realised, going to cook our own food. No problem. The prawns are good, Lydie suggested.

Prawns, grey and unremarkable, still smelling of the sea, duly arrived. Onto the hotplate they went. And then came the 'oh sh*t' moment: their little antennae waved at us; their little legs scrambled as if trying to find a footing. They were still alive.

Now I don’t eat meat; and I pride myself on general kindness to living things.  But, given that these sizzling prawns already had a thin wooden skewer up their bums their life expectancy was obviously limited, and so grabbing them from the heat and racing through the chaotic streets of the city to throw them back in the river seemed a little futile. All we could do was push them to the centre of the hotplate and watch as they were cremated. Painfully.

And yes - they tasted wonderful: the flesh pink and sweet, with a brisk hint of chili from the oil.

Words v pictures.

Last week I posted a blog entitled 'Do blogs need pictures?' (You can read it here, if you weren't around last week.)

And it caused a little stir. (Only a little one, nothing to frighten the horses.) Comments - on the blog and on facebook - ranged from 'Pictures are wonderful, and essential to break up pages of text' to 'Words are the point of blogs; too many pictures can get in the way.'

So - what is the blogger to do, if she wishes to keep her readers happy and enjoy the whole blogging thing? Alternate? Jump down on one side or the other and hope enough followers will hang in there?

Surely it's about the nature of each post, what you are hoping to achieve, and how you want to communicate. I wonder how many of you found this post on Trish Nicholson's blog. Here are photographs with no words - and I didn't miss them. The images are simply beautiful, all on their own.

Then there are the posts (like most of mine) with no pictures at all. I take the point made in one comment, that pictures can break up very long blogposts. Speaking personally, I am put off by blogposts that take half an hour to read - they have to grab me in the first paragraph to make that time investment. I prefer posts that are short and to the point. In contrast, someone suggested that too many pictures get in the way, meaning you have to scroll on down to find the point the writer is actually trying to make.

So - given that I can't please all the people all of the time, I shall take each post as it comes, and if it needs an illustration I shall try to find one (bearing in mind I'm no photographer). And the rest of the time I'll chunter along, playing with words in my usual haphazard fashion. (Because if I'm not enjoying myself the whole thing is pointless anyway!)

Interestingly (and this is an aside) there are no pictures in Over the Hill and Far Away, even though it is a travel book. And not one critic has suggested that illustrations would have improved it, which hopefully means that the words were enough on their own.

There are brownie points for anyone who can think of a suitable image to illustrate this post!!