The current dry, sunny and not too hot weather, is a good time to get some outdoor essential repairs done. I’m not sure how ‘Health and Safety’ would view the way this is normally achieved
but needs must when your roof has developed a small leak after the heavens opened earlier in the year!
We had planned to celebrate Christmas Day in an idyllic setting overlooking the sea in a beachfront restaurant. On Christmas morning, however, the proprietor of said restaurant awoke to a howling gale with the accompanying waves which were flooding his beach side terrace! Panic measures ensued, so our table was quickly moved to a safer, totally non idyllic environment with views that were more like a car park than the ocean!
Undeterred, we still managed to have a great time full of good food, good chat and copious amounts of liquid! Good sense should have dictated that we stopped our celebrations there but, hey, it was Christmas Day so ‘one for the road’ was called for on the way home which, perhaps inevitably, turned out to be quite a few more…..
evidenced by the headaches the following day. The only sensible thing we did that day was to use taxis!
As soon as we had recovered from the Yuletide excesses, it was party time again on New Year’s Eve where, at midnight, the bars emptied when everyone moved into the street to watch the various firework displays lighting up the skies
together with a fair amount of inebriated waving!
And it was then back into the bars to continue the night’s excesses. One of our customers got so carried away she insisted in buying ‘shots’ for all customers and staff.
A very generous gesture indeed and one that I managed to escape as I was hiding in the loo!
Meanwhile, in the west of Bangkok a more sedate -and, frankly, bizarre event was taking place. A number of people choose to climb into coffins,
lie down in them , get covered by a few monks who then offer up some prayers after which the ‘corpses’ arise and walk off to start the new year totally cleansed of their past year’s sins and mistakes.
It sure beats the confessional!
It’s been a hectic 2+ months in our bar/restaurant, what with Halloween, Nokky’s birthday, the footy World Cup,Christmas and New Year’s Eve so it was good to finally find some time to do a bit of home entertaining with guests from the UK
whose children -as most children of that age like to do – spent most of the afternoon in the pool
a lot of the time trying to annoy Mummy and Daddy!
And we even managed a country ramble on New Year’s Day which, inevitably led to some edible foraging by Nokky. Whilst she was picking tamarinds, I spotted this amazing ‘thing’ dangling from one of the tree branches.
which I was confidently was a bird’s nest. Exactly which avian creature is able to make such an extraordinary piece of engineering, I do not know.
A very Happy New Year to one and all and here’s hoping that 2023 is better than 2022 but not quite as good as 2024!
R.
thelasthurrahsite 