Most days, Miz Nazeat is a humble fisherman, plying his trade on the Tonle Sap and Tonle Bassac rivers of Phnom Penh. But when the police call, he takes up a second job. Nazeat is the man who finds bodies and hauls them out of the river.
The Japanese Bridge has become the capital's Lover's Leap. Every month, at least on star-crossed lover manages to evade police placed along its span and throw themselves into the fast-flowing currents of the Tonle Sap.
Frustrated Cambodian police turned hairdressers this week in an effort to teach the fashion-conscious youth of today the dangers of drugs in a way they might understand - by ruining their expensive hairdos.
Deputy Military Police Chief of Banteay Meanchey province on the Thai border, Ou Borin, said his men had put down their guns and taken up hair clippers, shaving unsightly shapes into repeat offenders' quiffs to show them life isn't all about party drugs.
Madame Hieng at Shop 9 Central Market is a convincing seller. She has to be. Selling ice to Eskimos has to be easier than selling Christmas trees in predominantly Buddhist Cambodia.
"These trees come from Vietnam," she says. "After Christmas, you can put them in the garden. No need to buy one next year. I guarantee."
Many expatriates find the tacky plastic Christmas trees not only less than authentic or aesthetic but less than environmentally friendly. Now there is a living alternative.
Sandwiched between the smiling faces of Cambodian music icons Sin Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea, the lithe body of US evergreen Madonna and reams of K-pop from South Korea, a darker music has returned to the shelves of many of the capital's prolific bootleg CD shops.
Khmer Rouge propaganda anthems are back in vogue, and according to vendors they are selling well as the 56-million dollar joint UN-Cambodian trial of former leaders of the Khmer Rouge's Democratic Kampuchea regime prepares to get underway.
We were both under the weather. We had packed the kids off to stay with friends and my Cambodian partner had decided to celebrate moving house by spending the night trawling bars, thoughtfully taking my keys with him and leaving me outside with the guard until the small hours of the morning. A whole dead chicken complete with head and legs on the doorstep was the last thing I needed, but there it was. Roasted, Chinese style, its eyes staring and looking a little rancid already in the morning heat and no more attractive for the fact it was reclining on a bed of fruit.
As a young(ish) man about town I somehow seem to have found myself on Phnom Penh's invitation A-list. Back home, I struggled to get invited to a funeral. All my friends were forever in the Sunday social pages whilst I was the very definition of a pariah.
What woke me up I don't know. I just remember realizing there was someone in my house who shouldn't be there, and glancing over to see a robber almost within touching distance going through an antique wardrobe a friend had just left when she went back to Australia.
She saw me the same time as I saw her. I froze and waited for a knife or a gun, but thankfully she just ran into the night.