Our Family Gathering

Our family gathering is not in my mother-in-law’s this year, but in her sister-in-law’s next door but one. In Thai villagers, or at least in the ones around here, families tend to occupy an area or even a street sometimes, so all our lot live within a hundred yards of each other.

That would sound unusual to an average Brit, but when you understand that villages in Thailand were often caused by one or two men cutting down a patch of jungle and building a home, it becomes logical. As their children got married, they would cut a bit more of the adjoining forest down and so on. As in-laws joined the throng, the patch became a village and every family had its own locale.

I enjoyed myself too much to post yesterday, if you know what I mean. We, the whole extended family, went to a Muay Thai boxing tournament in the Watt in a neighbouring village. It’s not really my thing, but my wife likes it and so do most of the men in our family. Sitting at the back like I was, I didn’t see a single punch thrown, but I did enjoy the atmosphere.

I think we got back at about midnight, but I’m not sure, and went straight to bed.

The same is probably true for many people, as the village is unusually quiet.

July sales were the worst for thirteen months, and, even stranger than that, I didn’t sell a single copy of any of the five volumes of Behind The Smile in the USA in the whole month, and that has never happened since I wrote volume one in April 2012.

It is hard to believe that I couldn’t persuade even one person out of 300,000,000 to buy just one book out of that series over thirty-one days…

All the best,

Owen

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Podcast: Our Family Gathering