Football from here.

Food (mulligatawny soup and meat and potato pie) from The Cart (obviously).

Right, we’re out of here. Later tonight we’ll be catching a flight back to the North East of England to spend Christmas with my family so there won’t be much activity on the blog for the next couple of weeks.

I just wanted to say Happy Christmas to friends, family, people who take time to read this blog etc etc. It’s been a wonderful year all in all.

I can’t wait to get back to see everyone in the UK and yet Hanoi is currently stunning. We’ll back back for the cold of January.

Take care.

As usual the fan was whirring.  Well, there was the whir, the additional clinking of the chain that hangs from it and a slight clacking noise that I assume must be internal ball bearings.

On top of that there was the dehumidifier buzzing. On other occasions, at warmer times of the year, there is also the noise of the air conditioner.

And then the dehumidifier stopped dead and the fan slowed.  My phone charging by the bed lit up. It dawned on us the power had stopped.

In the summer, when this happens it is hell.  The heat means you lie there sweating with the choice of losing the net and opening windows to catch the minutest breeze while getting eaten alive, or you continue to dehydrate on damp sheets.

But this time my only discomfort was the silence. Silence is spooky in noisy Hanoi.

My wife, as ever, fell asleep straight away but suddenly I was aware of everything.  My breathing. The compressing of the bed springs as I rolled over.

Our house is down an alley too narrow for cars and while there are houses on all sides, Hanoi sleeps early. If I strained my ears I could just about hear a distant peep every 20 seconds or so from the dike road a few hundred yards away. I could just make out the generators from our neighbours at the Sheraton.

But for the most part the silence was overwhelming.

I’ve heard of Vietnamese simply not being able to stand the silence on trips overseas.  A friend who went to study in my home city of Newcastle called it incredibly quiet. I’ve heard Newcastle called a lot of things but never quiet.

There was a time in my life, not such a happy time, when I realised I had developed the habit of turning on the TV or radio on entering every room.  I came to the conclusion that it was a way of jamming my brain to stop myself mulling over problems. About the same time I realised that walking home from work gave me unwanted thinking time.

Here it’s hard to miss the Vietnamese compulsion to create noise.  The peeping on the roads is obvious, less so is the constant clicking of safety belt catches on planes or a TV blaring in the background of a shop. The tinny speaker of a mobile phone between a group of teenagers by the lake.

So much of modern noise is now created by the constant building and development but is this largely tolerated as part of a acceptance, culture and even welcoming of noise?

If noise has become a habit what started this?

For a few weeks a year Hanoi becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, the weather is gorgeous but how beautiful can weather be? Perhaps it is the light too. Maybe it’s the air.

It’s hard to know if this atmosphere of romance comes from the all the young couples that appear this time of year or from Hanoi itself. But it’s more than youthful lust and love. It’s optimism too. And excitement and energy.

Does it feel so perfect because the rest of the year is so difficult? If you arrived in Hanoi for the first time today would you still feel it?

These days will be forgotten between the sweats and the shivers of summer and winter and yet, today, it seems like enough to keep me here forever.

It seems like a more than reasonable trade off.

GQ: I’ve always been interested in what it was about London in the ’70s that produced so much great music. What was going on there? 

Nick Lowe: London was a real dump in the 70s, when it belonged to me and my friends, because, like most cities, you kind of hand them off. You’re in charge for a bit and then you don’t go out anymore. You say, “Oh god, it’s going to be too crowded,” or “Blimey, not that place again.” So you hand it off to the next blokes, but when it was ours, it was a real dump. In the main, a real dump. Nothing like it is now, with its cafes and its sort of wannabe New York stuff. We had to make our own fun, you know. It was very hard to come by.

I always took the word “developing” from an NGO point of view to be something of a polite euphemism.

After all, “developing countries”, was a phrase that was coined to replace “third world” which had little suggestion at all of any positivity. As a kid watching Bob Geldof plug Live Aid the Third World to me was starvation and flies.

So “developing” for the most part seemed like doublespeak. Surely the whole point was that the third world wasn’t developing – that was the problem.

The year I spent in Cameroon saw a country not so much developing and unravelling.

But Vietnam, as ever is different. Even the people who introduced the use of “developing”
couldn’t have imagined anything like this.

My wife’s family home is in a small suburb on the outskirts of town. It used to be in the countryside but urban sprawl caught up with it. The footprint of the house is about the size of a badminton court and there are four floors which housed, at one time, seven of them.

As people do in Vietnam they built their own home – or rather saved for, oversaw and organised its construction. Until recently I had always assumed that the fairly grand house I saw was how it had always been.

Later I learned that, little more than a decade ago, they all lived on the ground floor. So did all their neighbours. There wasn’t one two-storey house in the neighbourhood. Beyond that toilets and washing facilities were external and often shared.

What’s amazing is not how their family has prospered but how all the families have prospered. All houses are now several stories high. Beyond that houses are now being extended further.

The location out beyond Big C is a huge growth area so the neighbourhood is ringed with high rise tower blocks.

Multiply this on a grand scale and this is what is happening in Hanoi. Relentlessly upward and outward. Coping with migration to the cities coupled with a population explosion.

A colleague tells me that, as a kid, Westlake was like the sea. They couldn’t see the other side simply because there was nothing to see. They couldn’t view it from any height because there were no tall buildings.

Development in Vietnam really means development.

There’s no polite way of putting this – I’m an utter arsehole in Vietnamese supermarkets and the like.

Its just the layer upon layer of irritation. The too-loud music on a loop is bad but go to an electrical shop and they’re liable to have four sound systems playing four separate tracks competing with each. All that with the in-store muzak on top.

Then there is the paying. You’re taken to a distant counter which needs to process an incredible amount of paperwork. You then have to take that paperwork to another counter on another floor to get your goods. If you want the guarantee then that’s yet another counter and more in-triplicate paperwork.

Normally they also insist on checking each item before you leave so it has to be unpacked and plugged in and you have to nod your head in agreement that, yes, it does work.

Bizarrely it was corruption that rescued us from the sheer irritation of Nguyen Kim electrical store and had us smiling as we left the store today. Having bought a Philips juicer and blender for the new Cart we were allowed a go for each item on the lucky spinning wheel.

I took the first spin, spinning it anti-clockwise until it all but stopped on a prize, before lurching a full half turn back clockwise and settling on the free glass option. Curious.

The next time it slowed a full half turn away from the glass before again spinning backwards to the glass. We scoffed.

We already had an audience of numerous shop assistants who were slowly realising that the in-store Philips promotion was a bit of a scam. Just to test it we had a third, fourth and fifth go and every time it swung back to the glass. Laughing shop assistants queued up to have a go as the Philips promotions girls became more and more sheepish.

Considering that the best prize we could have won was a thermos mug it was hardly worth complaining about. In fact we left the place giggling and, as we travelled down the escalator, we could clearly see the back of the spinning wheel. There, obviously where the glass was located, was the large outline of a weight.

…and so we find ourselves in this awful predicament. Our darling son is hurt in a road accident, we have no knowledge of how it happened, just that he has serious brain injury, we have to get him home, but the cost is immense. How on earth we find the money, God only knows. There is no help from the Government, not even in the short term, and the state hospitals don’t have the facilities for his condition, so every day he stays in the private hospital costs £1,200. He won’t be well enough to leave for some time, and then there’s the air ambulance home. If he is well enough to come by stretcher on a scheduled flight we are looking at £35,000 to £45,000, so with the hospital fees of at least £30,000, that’s a lot of money to find. If he isn’t well enough for a stretcher flight and we end up arranging an air ambulance that will be £100,000.

We have managed to raise £60,000 by re-mortgaging our house, but we will be unlikely to ever pay that off, being now 59 and 60 years old, so we will have to sell at some point. We have pooled all our credit cards to raise another £25,000, so if all stays as planned we sort of have enough. The problems start though when we have to start repaying, so absolutely anything that can be done to raise funds to help will be great and truly appreciated.

Hanoi Rock City, Saturday 24 September.

The fact that it was just the once makes it stand out. I was in a bar chatting to a backpacker and they asked if I lived here. I said I did and they were astounded.

“How could anyone live here,” they said. “It’s horrible”.

I won’t tell you the miserable hellhole they came from. Each to their own.

But lately it seems no one admits to liking Hanoi.

There’s no doubting Hanoi has changed. Nothing stays the same in Vietnam but did it really change that much?

I came here first as a wide-eyed backpacker and was overwhelmed by many of the things that people still seem to be complaining about today. I was scared to cross the street. I was ripped off repeatedly. I got sick from the food. I had cockroaches in my room.

And yet people still seemed to like Hanoi – we liked it in spite of these things.

We loved it because it wasn’t like Singapore – now people seem to wish it was.

There’s no doubting that my circle of friends has changed and shrunk. Back in my volunteer days I’d be a regular around Hanoi’s bars and now I’m more likely to go out for a quiet meal with the missus. Are those pubbing and clubbing still loving it? Is it just the olds who are less positive?

Perhaps young and old expats want almost the opposite of each other. Cheap beer, illegal drinking dens, motorbike madness and the complete absence of a nanny state – all good for young volunteers and backpackers. Meanwhile the marrieds worry about healthcare and education, air quality and having somewhere for the kids to run around.

But I’m tired of meeting people who talk only of escaping.

I wonder how much social media plays its part. In giving us platforms to criticise we forget the positives. Didn’t we we used to love Vietnam’s once-charming crapness? We’d giggle and order another beer and our Vietnamese hosts would giggle with us.

Do we expect more from the country now? Should Vietnam have grown up?

Did it change or did we change? Did it change too much or not enough?

For the record, I still love it. That’s not to say I wouldn’t one day welcome the chance to work somewhere else. I guess Hanoi now fits the role that Newcastle used to for me. It’s the place I’ll always come back to. And I know however much Hanoi grinds me down – I’d miss it if I left. Frankly I miss Hanoi during a weekend in Hoi An.

I sometimes think that expats are scared to love Hanoi. Loving Hanoi is for tourists. Being positive is seen as naive. You need to be brave to be positive.

I hear negativity from Vietnamese colleagues too. I hate that most. Is this something the more international, English speaking crowd have picked up from hanging out with tays? Did we do this to them?

So what did Hanoi lose?  What stopped it being lovable?  Is it just us?  Do we ask too much?