MASSAGE THERAPY I first met Ricky sitting at bar on Walking Street in Pattaya. He was tall and thin and pretty much bald, hunched over a glass of iced water. He seemed a bit miserable and I’m a cheerful enough chap so I asked him what was wrong. He had one hell of a story – most people move to Thailand because they want to start living but it seems that Ricky had come to die. He’d been a butcher in the north of England. He’d owned his own shop and made a decent enough living despite competition from the supermarkets. He was a widower – his wife had died of cancer in her fifties – and had two grown-up sons. When he’d reached sixty Ricky had started having problems with his waterworks and had to get up several times a night to pee. It got so bad that he went to see his GP and the doctor referred him to a specialist and the specialist told Ricky that he had prostate cancer. According to Ricky’s specialist there are two sorts of prostate cancer. There’s a slow-growing one that can be treated and managed, and there’s a fast-growing aggressive one that is invariably fatal. Ricky had the second type.
