Help!  I was chased by monkeys in the village last night!  No, not real monkeys, but former students wanting to resume English learning.  They blocked my bike and surrounded me, yelping and miming but certainly not speaking anything resembling recognizable English.

What a lousy recommendation, eh?  They can’t say a thing?  What’s the point, if that’s all we succeeded in getting them to do?  Good question. And yet here they are, happily dancing around like – well, like monkeys, actually.

Anyway, these are not the pre-teen large apes that occupied my veranda last year, and threatened they’d never leave.  That was novel.  I have yet to re-negotiate with their alpha, now without a gang, perhaps, but I’ll soon find out.

It’s the first week of the school year, here in Thailand.  If I do any after-school activities, first I have to find out what this year’s cliques are, and who is speaking to whom, and what’s cool and what’s not, this year.  Generally, studying anything other than motor mechanics or fashion magazines is massively uncool.  The other, bookier ones already shipped out to other schools on the mainland.  There are not many left around here who will speak to the likes of me.

Still, last night I was road-blocked by two particular monkeys (there have been many sets) who were the originals four years ago when they were kindergartners, aged six and four.  They’re still pals, now ten and eight. Over those years, they came and went, and I guess now they’re back.

“We cannot call them little monkeys,” said their mother, fooling me with mock seriousness. “They are big monkeys now!”

“Tomorrow! Six o’clock!” yells monkey number one, with monkey two clapping his hands just like  one of those toy wind-up monkeys.

“Are you joking? I ask.

“No!” they both chorus.  They nod wildly, while their mothers shrug and look mildly surprised.

OK, we’ll try it.  Crap, they must really be bored. That’s the only explanation.  Pure bloody small village desperation, that’s all there is to it.