Chiang Mai's magazine boom

By Seymour Cumming

I think I'll start a tourist magazine, what do you think? Heck there's only 12 already in circulation here in Chiang Mai, room for one more I reckon.

I've got it all figured out. I can get all the under-qualified English teachers to chip in with a few articles, my mate Tom the Cat can write a music review column on his dusty collection of obscure seventies glam-rock LPs, and we'll hire some retired fella who's been here donkey's years to write self-indulgent advertorial reviews about all our advertisers.

The sports page can waffle on about the weekly tiddlywinks league and we can even include celebrity pictures of ourselves getting freebies to all the gala functions in little old Chiang Mai.

Like everyone else in Thailand, we can just copy all the other magazines. To make the editorial authentic I'll hire a non native-speaking editor to ensure the grammar is reading like the menu of a Thai restaurant.

Proper and in the professional style. With dangling subordinate clauses and the scarce punctuation to a comfort read for you in relaxing. We will also written articles in a mixed of the tense and generally to confuse a reader with our delightfully quirky Chiang Mai Engrish. What a winner!

But this magazine will be hard-hitting Seymour stuff, getting under everyone's skin and rubbishing everything we can. Forget all the wonderful brochure-like stuff waxing lyrical about the Lanna Kingdom. We'll tell you where to get naughty massages and how much you should pay for a bar girl. Our magazine will warn the ladies about sweet talking tuk tuk drivers and tell which mobile phones look sexiest around your neck.

In our magazine you will be able to find out how to track down mail order brides and launder money. We'll rate the short-time hotels and advise you of where to buy fake gems and copied CDs. But we won't stop there.

With us, you'll get the inside story on exploiting illegal immigrants and how to set up a pirate DVD business, or where to score the best deals on stolen mobile SIM cards. We'll give you the low down on who to bribe when you need to subvert the building laws and which toes not... to... step... on.

People can write to us about how they got cleared out by their wife, or how they kicked their Thai boyfriend in the goolies for cheating on them. We can publish a blacklist of unethical lawyers in town and dodgy accountants, and I'll personally throw in my bit about incompetent computer technicians who wipe my hard drive clean more often than my girlfriend maxes my credit card.

Features could include: how to drive your motorbike recklessly, 10 effective ways to extort your deposit out of your ex-landlord and how to blow off a tuk tuk driver (there's always two sides to every story!). There could be surveys on how few people actually know what road signs mean, and how little we all know of places outside of Thailand.

And we can just recycle the same travel stories month after month, which won't matter because you'll need a bloody search function just to find the articles among the thousands of adverts. Someone even suggested we hire a dirty-mouthed sex-tourist with a reputation for slagging off everything. Make him a columnist. But we'll need to think about that one, after all every magazine has standards to maintain hey!

Investigative-journalist-at-large, Seymour Cumming has previously been a used car salesman, fruit picker, 'shock jock' and newsroom war correspondent. He has written for Farmer's Weekly, Nyet!, Chessworld and Cross-stitching Magazine.

He's been to more than 50 countries, some for less than a day, and is currently working on a travel novel, but he's written the author's biog, and not progressed much beyond that. His controversial commentary on ex-pat life in Thailand appears in Chiang Mai City Life Magazine.