So says retired university professor Doctor Patrick Campbell who is one of Phuket’s best known and loved personalities and who this very weekend celebrates his 90th birthday at his lovely home in Nai Harn.
He is a highly accomplished author and writer who, before retiring to Phuket, enjoyed a stellar international career in university teaching, research and academia and who, I’m privileged to say, is one of my best friends in Phuket.
Patrick has contributed hundreds of entertaining and informative articles over many years both to this newspaper and many other local and regional publications. He is the author of eleven books, including Plums to Persia an autobiographical account of his early days and upbringing in the charming rural countryside of Worcestershire in England’s West Midlands. Patrick was born into the foreboding era of pre-second world war Britain in 1935, yet his upbringing was a charmed rural idyll, which imbued in him an enduring passion and love for the natural world.
Patrick is well known for his passionate environmentalism ardently expressed in many pieces of his writing and in his definitive book The Tropic Gardener about the cultivation of the gloriously diverse floral wonders of tropical southern Asia. Patrick’s own garden at his charming villa in Phuket’s south is a beautiful and diverse testament to the skill, knowledge and energy that he brings to the nurture and cultivation of living flora.
After studying at the famous King’s School in Worcester, Patrick graduated from Keele University and subsequently taught English at the University of British Columbia and Middlesex University.
He has a deep interest in theatre and was the founder of the first Master’s Degree course in performance arts in the UK.
Patrick is a man of many talents, particularly in the arts and has written analyses of several books about poetry, psychoanalysis and performance, plus several critical studies of poets, most notably the great Victorian Alfred Lord Tennyson, about whom Patrick conducted ground-breaking research for his Doctorate at the University of London in 1970.
Roller-coaster
Why would a man of Patrick’s erudition and experience move to such a hedonistic pleasure ground as Phuket, which, let’s be candid here, is not exactly globally celebrated for its intellectual rigour and cultural offerings? The answer is probably enshrined in Patrick’s recent, partly autobiographical book Phuket Days - Life in the Island Fast Lane which he published in 2017.
On one hand, the book is a roiling roller-coaster adventure ride telling scurrilous tales of ne’er -do-wells, misfits, liars, losers, Lotharios, babes and bimbos getting into all sorts of scrapes and mis-adventures. But also, his book is clearly a love-song, a paean, to Phuket and the Andaman region starting just after the tragic 2004 tsunami, when Patrick first made the island his home.
Patrick’s abundant love of this fabulous region and its living bounty and diversity, human, natural, organic and floral, clearly shines through his entertaining and comical prose. Clearly, like many ex-pats who have chosen to make Phuket their home, it’s obvious that Patrick is fascinated by the kaleidoscope of human excess and folly for which Phuket is justly famous, but also by the natural beauty and abundance with which the Andaman region is gloriously blessed.
Patrick’s lovely quote with which I started this article, “Phuket is like a stage where everyone is an actor in an absurdist comedy of errors. It’s insane, but it’s never boring,” is a clear summation of his enduring love of Phuket. And so many of us who are privileged to know Patrick reciprocate with a love of having such a wonderfully colourful character living here within our island community! Happy 90th birthday Doctor Patrick!