Foresight - or how not to paint yourself into a corner

I asked the guy who comes once a week to look after the garden to help me finish treating the wooden floor in one room of the house with linseed oil. He seemed a little nervous at this onerous task but, after showing him how to do it, I left him to his own devices. Half an hour later I came to see how he was getting on. Watching him work was a lesson in what seems to be a very Khmer way of thinking: he was painting himself into the proverbial corner, having started in the middle of the room working away from the door.

Now certainly it is not that Cambodians are stupid: my helper is actually a very smart young man who is studying extremely hard towards his ambition of being a teacher. But he and many of his compatriots seem to share a common attribute: no sense of foresight or forward planning.

Driving around Phnom Penh, it is astonishing - and terrifying - the extent to which people just do not look around them before making a manoeuvre. A moto-dup, fully laden with passengers, will shoot out of a side street into the main fast-flowing stream of traffic without so much as a glance to see whether it is diving into the path of a truck - or worse still a suped-up SUV driven by the drunken son of one of PP's jetset.

I used to wonder whether the French were to blame for this particular suicidal tendency, with their quixotic rule about vehicles entering from the right taking priority over those in the main road. The mother country abandoned this rule some time ago so as to give roundabouts a chance of working properly, but perhaps it had survived in the former colonies. But certainly most Cambodians do not seem to have a very developed instinct to look before they leap.

It may have something to do with Buddhist ideas about reincarnation and the very fatalistic attitude towards death that most Cambodians seem to have adopted. Perhaps being run over by an overloaded Chinese lorry is just a fast track to another, more prosperous life. The majority of Cambodians do not seem to have even a minimal sense of self-preservation.

But then again, given the history of the country, where most people were forced to live one day at a time in a desperate attempt to survive and had little control of their own destiny or chance to plan for the future, the instinct has been lost.

This week the Phnom Penh Municipality announced that henceforth it will be obligatory for all motos to have a rear-view mirror fitted and has imposed fines on anyone without one. It will provide one more opportunity for the traffic police to fleece the motorists of Phnom Penh to supplement their own meagre salaries through arbitrary fines. No one says anything about having to make use of the mirrors and one suspects that it would not occur to most drivers here to do so. One of the guards at the house seem perplexed when I came home with new two rear-view mirrors on my moto. His attitude seemed to be that they would be fine for combing his hair in the morning (Khmer men are terribly vain it seems), but they were far too uncool for him to consider installing them on his moto - not good for his street cred. Presumably being flattened by a Chinese truck would be cool...