Holidays – Khao Pansa

Today is the eve of one of Thailand’s biggest annual holidays in the original sense of the word as a holy day. Khao Pansa is the start of Thai Buddhism’s Lent. It is one of the four holidays that I can remember when people living away make a serious effort to go home to be with their immediate family. The others are the first of January; Songkhran from the 13th to the 15th of April (the old Thai New Year), and Mother’s Day (August 12th).

Our village is starting to fill up now, and a party has begun down the road. I can hear the music from the shop I’m sitting in.

I probably won’t get involved tonight, because I want to finish my site maintenance before the start of August, which gives me twenty-nine hours, then I’ll join in as well.

I love these holidays, because, although they don’t mean that much to me, I love to see people enjoying themselves. Perhaps I’ve become a jaded, grumpy old man. I hope not, but it is a distinct possibility.

I will probably use a large part of these holidays promoting my books and websites. July has been a very odd month for sales indeed, although I think each of the last three months has been unusual for one reason or another. July’s unique claim is that it is the only month since I started writing, that no-one, not one single person, in the whole of the United States, with its 250,000,000 inhabitants, has bought a book from my ‘Behind The Smile’ series, and that has not happened since I wrote the first one three and a half years ago.

Odd, eh? They have bough other books of mine, and Britain and the rest of the world s keeping its end up, but not the USA. It is unfathomable to me.

Some good news though, I have finished replacing all my old duff Amazon links a day early, and, left to my own devices tonight, I will finish moving the last of my PLR links to this website. That means that I will have completed all my site maintenance a day early, and I could begin to think of starting to write a new book.

Perhaps the sixth ‘Behind The Smile’, I get asked for a new one every week, although not from America.

All the best,

Owen

My Books

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Podcast: Holidays – Khao Pansa