Grand Prix

Being a volunteer and earning not much more than £150 per month does occasionally carry the odd perk. For example, some people with money and advantage sometimes take pity on the likes of me and this is exactly what happened this month.

Pam and her husband Tim are both Volunteer Professionals and Tim is lucky enough to have been born into the same family as his incredibly generous big brother John. For some reason Corine and I found ourselves invited to join almost the whole family at John’s apartment in Kuala Lumpur and accompany them with complimentary tickets to watch the Malaysian Grand Prix! Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth (although sometimes poor Corine struggles!) and even though we could barely name more than one current Formula 1 driver, we leapt at the chance of this once in a lifetime trip.

Honestly, this is the most flattering photo I have of Uncle Pam and Auntie Tim...

I found myself dredging up all sorts of racing car information that I didn’t know I possessed (well, I impressed Corine once or twice anyway!) and wasn’t sure if my small but surprising amount of knowledge was due to watching Days of Thunder umpteen times, being taken to watch banger cars with Dad when I was younger (its practically a poor man’s F1 you know!) or from being forced to watch hours of Formula 1 on a Sunday afternoon with Daniel during his F1 obsession years in the early 90s, despite my pleads to turn over the channel to the Eastenders omnibus of even the Little House on the Prarie. I learnt more too and surprised myself at how interesting I found it all.

Kuala Lumpur is fantastic. It is a small but perfectly formed city, so very clean and smart compared to anywhere in Cambodia and with all the delights of any developed country’s capital city: air-conditioned shopping malls, restaurants, bars and Marks and Spencers. There were down pours of rain on Saturday during our well-planned ‘walking round the city’ day and glorious sunshine on Race day. It might sound a bit weird, but I really enjoyed having a break from the poverty of Cambodia. KL is a hugely multi-cultural city with renowned food choices which we sampled as much as we could although I ate a lot of Western food I’d been missing as well! Mmmmmm - a sausage sandwich...Swamping the occasional historical colonial house here are many tall buildings in the city (something I’m not so used to now) so I ooh-ed and aah-ed at the Petronas Towers, climbed the Menara Tower and took lots of photos!!

The Menara Tower...

And the view from the top...Nightview of the Petronas Towers from our comfortable seats at Sky Bar...

Karaoke is quite huge in South-East Asia. Cambodians will never miss the opportunity of singing tunelessly down a passing microphone and much crooning can be heard from Karaoke bars which pop up all over the place. Malaysia seems no different in its love of singing lyrics over slightly dodgy if not nausea inducing music videos. John took the lot of us to a Karaoke rabbit warren below a multi-storey car park on Saturday night. I think it was Corine’s vision of hell. I though it was a perfect idea and I’m thinking of bringing the idea back to London, if it’s not there already. We were shown into our own sound-proofed room with a computerised song selection screen, our own en-suite toilet and a waiter! We proceeded to thoroughly enjoy desecrating numerous all-time favourite tunes at extremely loud volumes although Tim’s high pitched Bee Gees style of singing Michael Jackson’s Beat It was the last straw!

Apart from thoroughly enjoying constantly ribbing Tim throughout the whole weekend (well, don’t dish up what you can’t take!) this was my favourite joke of the weekend... Ferrari took a decision for the British GP to hire a couple of Scousers as pit crew members when they found out they could remove all 4 wheels in under 0.8 seconds. But to Jean Todt’s dismay, after 1.5 seconds, the car was resprayed and sold to McLaren... I think part of the reason I liked this joke so much could’ve been because I understood it! I learnt all the gossip and back-stabbing of last season’s F1, got sunburnt, discovered the wonder of earplugs (the noise was terrific!), and even sneaked onto the track and made it to the pits to see all the F1 cars after the race – did you know there are 150 diagnostic checks carried out after each race?! After dodging the Malaysian guard and getting onto the track, no-one else seemed to mind (we were practically invited into the pits!) so we made the most of snapping photographs of the cars, teams and of course ourselves!!

Oh yeah, and I think the red car won!