The other week, when Mr and Mrs Landlord were harvesting long green things, and I asked what they were called, I’d no idea it would take hours to work out the latest Thai vegetable mystery. (Photo by Hariadhi) “What’s it called?” This question sounds simple and I wish it were. They were at a distance, […]
— Hello friends and valued supporters. I just learned a few things. 1) New books are excluded from all kinds of search engine stuff on amazon, until they get 30 reviews. 2) Even a one-word review counts. Even bad reviews count. Therefore: 3) Please help me gather this first 30? (Ok it’s 30 in the […]
Mr Landlord squinted and scrutinised the tree, doing his recce. It’s a whopper, a beaut, a grand old, gorgeous old tree, at least ten metres tall, fertile and famous in these parts. “We come, tomorrow, take, OK?” He speaks more English than I speak Thai, thank goodness. What he means is they’re harvesting Sato, the […]
The basic choice in our jungle village is this: do you want to live with live rats or bloody bits of dead rats? It’s not every day, let’s be clear. This is not a horror movie. It’s just a shabby jungle hut, and choices are choices, however limited. Here, it appears, there are no ratless […]
“I killed a dragon!” Joe’s smile was brimming over. No, it’s not a fantasy computer game character, or a symbolic inner demon of fear. It was a very real, very big lizard that Joe killed. It was one of the “takuat” river lizards that live in southern Thailand and nearby. There are a lot of […]
Mr and Mrs Landlord were lotussed on the ground with their traditional extra wide flat baskets, full of roasted cashews. It’s that season. It looks like bloody tedious work too. You roast them, peel off the outer skin, and repeat a few thousand times. It’s going on all over town. At the bookshop, at the […]
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, […]
There’s often that one old picture, that you forgot, from before, that suddenly pops up when you photograph some new stuff. I just found my last image of Scotland, before I came back to Thailand. I miss my pals Up North.
Things came in threes today – magic? or just icky? 1) A centipede in other parts of the world is no cause for alarm, but here they exert an almighty screaming bite, so I was alarmed to shake one out of my shoe. I’m out of practice checking shoes. First rule of hot places: check […]
There are shortages every year, and it drives me crazy that the usual guttering seen elsewhere, up and down the land, isn’t on many buildings at all, here on this eccentric little rocky island, hours by boat from the Thai mainland. I was away from my hut here, for a few weeks, and coming back […]