I would never say I hated my country—that's for arseholes—but I had fallen out of love with it for sure. Britain has always been a place that loves to complain but never does anything about what it’s complaining about. Some things aren’t deep enough to try and fix, like the price of Fredo’s, and some things can’t be fixed, like the rainy summer days. But some things can and should be fixed, but we seem to not want to make change because we enjoy complaining so much. The Chinese don’t complain, though they bloody should, and find our need to say negative things all the time perplexing. And they’re right for once.

But when you see a whole country swirling down the toilet without even waving their hand in the air for a saviour to spot, you have limited choices: sink or swim. I swam. Many have swam and will continue to swim.

One big problem I would hear from older expats in Thailand was immigration. At first, this sounds bizarre, as an expat is an immigrant, but the fact is that Thailand isn’t a place that welcomes the sky-high numbers of immigrants that European nations do. Thailand isn’t exactly the most welcoming nation on earth, despite being called the land of smiles. Foreigners know their place, and that place is second to Thai people; this is a country that has foreigner prices. How do I know this? Because I’ve seen places that have a price list with foreigner price written next to the regular price. Thailand, except for the rammed tourist destinations, isn’t a diverse Benneton advert nation; it’s very Thai. Britain isn’t very British, not because we’re flooded with foreigners but because we lost our balls, our big British balls, and we also want to be China. Who the fuck wants to be China?

When you take the time to sit back and observe Britain like an outsider, you can notice how weird and sometimes backward it is. Britain has so many silly laws, thanks to the reign of Tony Blair, that it actually becomes quite difficult to not accidentally break one of them. Britain is a nation where we may have had Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, but we don’t really have freedom of speech. In America, you can actually be a Nazi and have your rights protected, whereas proclaiming you’re a Nazi in England will get you banged up faster than a nervous twitcher’s wink. I’m not saying it’s great to legally be a Nazi, but it’s nice to have options. The Falun Gong are considered to be a cult in China and therefore outlawed, so they’ve fled across the world, including America, where it’s perfectly fine to be a member of the Falun Gong, and this, to my mind, makes my country more like China than America. That’s sad.

My country would often have reports on countries like Thailand that would point out human rights abuses and the restrictive nature of speech. This amused me. There’s so many things you can’t say in the UK in public, like biological facts about ladies. Britain isn’t a free country; Thailand is a free country.

In Britain, you have safety nets, and these nets are what chain us. They called it the nanny state, and it’s a fitting moniker. No matter what happens, we will always be taken care of, and we’ve taken more than a mile from that system, and it’s made us lazy and enslaved. Practically everyone I grew up with was abusing the system one way or another. I had friends who had never worked a day in their lives and were perfectly happy to be taken care of by the state. It was easy—so easy that it was easier than trying to make money for yourself.

In Thailand, if you don’t have work, you don’t get paid. Simple. There is no safety net. There are mothers with babies on the streets of Bangkok in the pissing heat night after night. But in Thailand and other similar places, you can wake up one day broke and just go out and do something. You can set up a business in the morning and have your first customer by noon. Carts and vendors are everywhere; people are out selling anything and everything, and they’re allowed to do so. You could rock up to the side of a busy road with just a small ice box full of booze and some tiny nursery school stools, and now you have a bar. Is it legal? I don’t know, but the police don’t give a shit; they know people are out there making money without robbing or defrauding, and that’s ok. Thailand will let you earn money. Even just thinking about setting up a food cart in the UK requires fifteen forms to be filled out, and you won’t even get the all clear on your thoughts for at least seven months.

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Thailand is free—more free than my country. You can drive around with a hot furnace attached to your motorbike with three babies in the front basket and no helmets, and no one's going to bother you. People wake up in the morning and go to a local shop, buy some hand wipes, and go sell them for double on the beach to tourists, and no one cares. Let people live.

Freedom comes at a price, and that’s safety, and I chose to be unsafe. The UK was becoming so sanitised and spoiled. Everyone demanding more and more and more. I didn’t want to live in a place that had everything and was ungrateful. I too want to ride around on a motorbike with a vat of 1000-degree cooking oil hanging off the side, because fuck it.

I spent too long as a slave to the benefit system; I was addicted to that free money, and I was almost proud to be on the dole. Giro Day was the highlight of the fortnight. A man was paid and could go out and buy a box of cigarettes and have a pint like a king. Then everything increased in price, and the giro didn’t follow, and then it became clearer and clearer that I wasn’t the king I thought I was. There were TV shows like Benefit Street, all designed to make the viewer feel better about their lives because they weren’t some scrounging scumbag with fucked-up teeth. One day I watched Benefit Street and realised I could apply to the next big star, and that was cold.

I made a decision to do something about my rut and set up a market stall. I was going to sell some local produce, pimp it up a bit to look fancier than it was, and extract cash from people who didn’t know better. It was a great plan. I did all the facts and figures, secured a way to get some start-up capital, and sourced everything I needed. When it came to contacting a local market to get a pitch, that’s when reality kicked me in the dick.

First, they said I needed to get in touch with the local council to get a license. I called the local council and was told I would need to wait for some man to get in touch with me about having an initial discussion about what I planned to do. Following that, I would have to get in touch with the Food Standards Agency and go through the process of getting vetted, then go through the process of getting the right licencing, and then I could have my market pitch.

Well, I waited for the council to get back to me and kept waiting until I realised that maybe they’d forgotten. So I called them. No answer. I tried calling again and again until, by the end of that week, I got through to someone. They told me that everything was fine and someone was going to get back to me as soon as they could. I waited again, and still no one called. A month went by where I was still trying to get hold of someone and was still being told someone would call me, and then it became two months, three months, and four months, and eventually it was six months and I’d given up. If I were Thai and in Thailand, I would’ve just rocked up to the market, seen the man in charge, and been in business by the next morning because no one gave a fuck—just go out and get money.

Maybe I over-simplify how it is in Thailand, but I certainly don’t over-complicate how it is in the UK. Thailand does love its bureaucracy, but the UK has so much red tape that I don’t understand how any business gets going legitimately. The UK seems to hate business and any kind of entrepreneurship. Before I set sail, it had become a nation that just wanted people to work in the public sector, doing roles that provided barely any value for humanity. People can say what they like about hookers, but at least they provide a service that stops people from killing themselves—something I could never say about the civil service. Local councils in the UK would rather spend money on putting up some dystopian Chinese facial recognition CCTV outside your bedroom window than fill in any pothole in the road. The UK was fucked, and I fucked off.