Chapter 52

Plus ça change ..................


So here I am back in Bangtao again. It is rather like coming home.
The summer in England has been awful. With simply rotten weather more or less prevelant throughout the six months that I have been there.
This has resulted in me suffering one damned cold after another. It is good to be back where even though it rains it is warm.

I have been back for four days and yesterday my son Skyped me to enquire how I was.

I was able to tell him that I was fine, and that everything was just as it has always been here.
The people here who were happy when I left are still happy.
The people here who were fighting each other when I left are still fighting each other.
The same people get drunk and the same people don't.
In general it has been comforting that some things stay constant.

But, of course, some of the unchangeable factors make for a sadness which is deep.

A couple of nights ago a Thai lady unburdened herself to me with the story of her life.
To cut a long story short, by the age of about forty she has managed to be married to a Chinaman who took her child when they split up, to a German who was killed in a car crash, whose family have taken possession of her second child and is now still, to my knowledge, for the last three years, engaged in the process of violently and publicly disagreeing with her English husband on such topics as drinks, drugs, gambling, women and lack of money.
They have one child and I can only hazard a very gloomy guess as to the likely outcome of this present scenario.

Oh dear!

Then yesterday in khun Aor's bar a Swedish gentleman was drowning his sorrows at the prospect of leaving for Sweden later that afternoon.
He just did not want to go.
Apparently he adjourned to another bar, had a few more beers and set off, on his motorbike, to the airport.
His wishes were granted as he fell off his motorbike and fractured his collar-bone. He is lucky that it was not worse

He will be considerably poorer and will not see his native land for a week or so.

Like I was saying........

.........plus c'est la même chose.