When September Ends

July 16, 2007 |

I will be living with a lovely wife in a cosy little village in the sticks in Thailand. If someone had told me 10 years ago, or even 18 months ago that this would happen, I would have gotten a big laugh out of it. Yeah Right, that will ever happen!

But it will, and I am still a bit surprised. I guess I will be more surprised when I wake up on the 14th of September and realise that I actually do live with a lovely wife in a cosy village in the sticks in Thailand. But I guess I will come to that realisation once that bloody rooster starts his morning concerto for 3 soi dogs and tractor at approximately 4.30 in the morning.

Later Nan will sneak out of bed to start breakfast, wake up the kids, throw them into the shower, make sure they eat and send them off to school. Then she starts working on getting me out of my semi-comatose state. Usually by pinching me and putting the music on really loud.

I’ll sit up in bed, yawn, and once I am conscious enough to dare venture out of my cocoon, I will stumble out into the hong nam to have my bucket shower, and probably try and get out of shaving that day. For this serious crime, Nan will pester me until I get that done too.

Then we have a quite breakfast consisting of rice and pork or fish, with some delicious soup I don’t now the name of. And then well, Nan will be full of energy, doing all sorts of stuff, while I grab my fishing rod and plonker on down to the river and see how many lures I can lose that day. I’ll end that session with a dive into the river, and head back to the house.

By now, Nan have figured out what we need to buy for lunch and dinner, so we head into town to shop for some fish and vegetables at the market, and Nan will exchange the latest gossip with her friend who sells fruit there. We’ll do a short stop at the supermarket for some farang necessities, and then its back home where Nan will start lunch.

After lunch it’s another shower, because Nan thinks “you hot to much”, that is Nan code for - You stink, go and clean yourself up!

The afternoon is to hot for doing much of anything, so it’s just relaxing in the hammock, reading a book, and perhaps surf the net and update this blog. Nan will be across the road visiting the neighbours wife to pass on the gossip she heard in town.

Then it’s time to start dinner. And this is where I plan to do something outrageous now and then. I will cook. Nan has heard me talking about cooking, and once I even explained to her how to make spaghetti over the phone, something that was a success with the boys who loved it. But she has never seen me in action in the kitchen.

After eating, it’s more goofing around, perhaps another fishing and swimming trip to the river with the boys. And then it’s dark and we retreat inside. Nan will be doing some ironing, while catching up on the Thai soaps on TV, and I’ll read some more and “play computer”. Nan’s final activity will be to hep the boys with their homework, and make sure that’s done, before it’s lights out, and into bed.

There we’ll talk about the days events, and what we want to do tomorrow, laugh a little bit about it all, and then slumber off in each others arms… until Luk Dik, the mongrel of a dog, starts barking his head off for no reason at all, whereupon Nan will poke me awake and have me check that everything that should be locked really is.

In between all these exhausting events during the days I will of course do my very best at something I really like. I love it actually. It’s fun, and the rewards are enormous. I will try my best to make Nan laugh. Not that it’s very difficult to make that happen