…Happy 1,293rd Birthday, George, the piano-player!…

…this ol’ Jurassic is an absolute adoree of human ingenuity… and the simpler it’s manifested, the better… about thirty-plus years ago, when I lived in Hong Kong in the Far East, I did what tons of yer fellow expatriates did around holiday break time… headed off for the (then) relatively unknown Thai beach resort of Pattaya… only to find that all the people yeez were trying to have a vacation away from were billeted in the same Hotel as yerself… the particular place chosen to cradle my head each evening was the Royal Cliff Hotel… much activity back then spun around the absorption of impossibly-named cocktails and gallons of Tom Yum soup… I’ve never figured out which is more deadly to yer intestinal nethers… I have no idea whether or not the Hotel still exists, but we holiday-seekers used to ponder if the location on the cliff, a hundred metres above the beach, was  there to allow the German tourists (those muscle-ripped beach Adones…plural of ’Adonis’, Mabel) to throw their towels from their bedroom windows onto the reservable deck chairs below before any of the rest of yeez could get down there each morning… but back to the human ingenuity… most evenings, the entertainment consisted of continued imbibement, and perhaps a snack of scampi, in the Hotel’s lounge and piano-bar area… one of the fixtures was a wonderfully gregarious supper-lounge piano player from the Philippines… George…

…an accomplished musician with funny lines of patter in between the tunes, some of which he played on request… these requests normally came with free drinks accompaniments from the Requestees… on the Wednesday evening, George told us he was gonna play ‘Happy Birthday’… for himself… today was his birthday!… of course much applause and raucous joining in was de rigueur… and needless to say, a plentiful further supply of free drinks for George… as it turned out, my stay stretched into a second week at the Royal Cliff… most other folks usually only stayed there for a week… and it also coincided with my presence at the lounge bar the next Wednesday evening…. behold and lo, about ten o’clock, George announced that he was going to play ‘Happy Birthday’ … for himself!… I nearly choked on my plate of scampi and fell off my seat laughing… George noticed me and realised that I knew, that he knew, that I knew… a conspiratorial wink and another room full of patrons lifting the roof to my rapidly-ageing, ivories-tinkling friend saw the predictable pipeline of drinks ferried toward the piano top… so this coming Wednesday, please join me in a raised glass and a toast… Happy 1,293rd Birthday, George, the piano-player!…

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