Thai Rack

This is a true story, unless I've gone crazy.

One and a half years ago my wife and I went on holiday to Thailand.  We were tricked by a travel agency in Bangkok.  My English sense of fair play was outraged, so I reported the incident both to the British Consulate and the Thai tourist police.

The next day, the manager of the travel agency threatened me.  To be exact, he told me that people have to get on well because they have daughters, and he accompanied this mafia-style pronouncement with the most sinister glare I had ever seen.   I decided to cancel the trip round Thailand which we had booked with his agency.  I wanted to have nothing more to do with him.

Unwisely, perhaps, I told the tourist police I had been threatened.

Two days later, as we were walking along a street, I heard a faint noise from somewhere behind us.  I turned my head and saw a man holding something vaguely like an umbrella.  He was pointing it towards us.  He had an extremely unpleasant smile on his face.  I noticed that the object in his hand had no cloth wrapped round it.  It was made entirely of metal.

When he realized I had seen him, the man swerved away and concealed his weird umbrella in a car which was parked conveniently nearby.  He watched me all the time.

By now I was scared.  The temperature was over 30 degrees centigrade and there were no clouds in the sky so no one needed to be carrying an umbrella, let alone point it at anyone else.  I told my wife what I had seen, saying that perhaps the umbrella was some kind of  weapon.  She thought I had gone crazy.

When I told the tourist police what I had seen they thought I was crazy too.

I persuaded my wife that we had to leave Thailand immediately because either I needed psychiatric treatment or our lives were in danger.  When we reached Spain I went to the emergency ward of our local hospital.  I was interviewed for ten minutes by two young psychiatrists who said I had paranoia.  They clearly didn't believe in umbrella guns.  I bowed to their superior knowledge and accepted that I might have imagined it all.

No one ever looked at my back or the back of my legs.

Over the last year and a half I have suffered from a number of serious physical problems - above all an extreme weakness and tiredness which have kept me in bed for months on end.   My digestive system was also gravely affected, my blood pressure was extremely low and I had frequent headaches, dizzy spells and pains in my back and neck.

The psychiatrists said this was all mental, or due to the pills I was taking, but at one point I felt so weak I thought I was going to die.  I even said what I thought was a last goodbye to my wife.  "It's been nice knowing you, but I don't think I'm going to get over this."

When I began to feel better, I found sufficient strength to to crawl to my computer and type in the words "umbrella guns" (between inverted commas) in Google and came up with some interesting information.

Hundreds of umbrella guns are confiscated every year by the police, so they are not as unusual as one might think.

They are not used exclusively by spies, but also by mafias and criminals in general.

They work with compressed air, so they don' make much noise when they are fired (but perhaps enough to have made me turn round).

The standard ammunition for this kind of weapon consists of tiny pellets coated with poison.

These pellets are so small that the victim doesn't even notice when they penetrate his skin.

Now I have fully recovered, I believe more firmly than ever that I was poisoned in a revenge attack by the crooked agency in Bangkok because I had dared to report them to the police.  That agency probably belonged to one of the mafias which operate in Bangkok, whose main victims are foreign tourists (see the Lonely Planet guidebook on Thailand to confirm the existence of such organized crime there).

My wife still doesn't believe me.

The psychiatrists don't believe me either (perhaps because they know that if they ever admitted I was right I could sue them).

What do you think?