Met up with Welshman S and his dog near City Beach this morning. He asked me had I been playing last week when poor old Banteung had fatally collapsed on court at the Sheraton. I said I had not, but felt I ought to add something to express my surprise, and so added that the victim had neither smoked nor drank. S, ever the witty Taff, replied – “Then that was the reason for it then!”.

Apologies for my absence, but the past couple of weeks have turned out to be busy ones.

Daughter Niney and friend Rachel changed their holiday plans to spend ten days here having. fled from the constant rain of Koh Samui down south. At the same time grandson TenTen and Rung were here from Bangkok during the extended school break for the king’s birthday. On their heels and ‘out of the blue’ as it were, came Miko’s son, Ek, fresh back from his travels to join the scrimmage. It was lovely to see them all, and to have the house come alive, but hectic, and I must admit I appreciate the stillness now.

Politically Thailand remains on the edge, but with demonstrations and street protest put on hold at the king’s behest.

I managed one afternoon of tennis, that was marred by tragedy, as one of our number collapsed at the side of the court and was later certified dead. Once again – ‘In the midst of life there is death’. Banteung was a highly competitive sixty-four year old lifelong sportsman, who neither smoked nor drank; the shock left me looking over my own shoulder.

Last Sunday morning’s church service turned out to be surprisingly jolly as a vacationing young Swiss priest shared his genuine enthusiasm for the coming Christmas. He spoke from the heart of his pure joy, and I have never seen a preacher use his whole body to convey his mood as this man did.

Saraburi students terrified as training tank fires at their school

Saraburi – Over 30 students ran for cover when a training tank accidentally fired into their school compound Friday.

The students were having lunch at the canteen of Wat Thung Salika School at 11:30 am when they heard an explosion so they ran for cover.
It was late found that the explosion caused by a shell fired from a tank for training from the training ground of a cavalry unit from the other side of the mountain.
Captain Prakorb Imjai, who is in charge of the training, said the shell was not dangerous because it had no shrapnel and made only explosion sound.

– The Nation 2009/12/4

My youngest daughter turned up much earlier than expected from Koh Samui, where the beach was idyllic, but the unrelenting drizzle was not, and thus it turned out we were able to celebrate her thirtieth birthday in nice style on a dry. cool moonlit evening, al fresco in a favourite restaurant.

She was travelling with the old school friend she meets up with once every year, and it was evident that they must know each other really well as they related the horror story of their four hour high-speed ferry trip from the rain-sodden island back to pick up a bus on the mainland. Apparently it was a rough sea crossing and most of the passengers suffered from pernicious mal de mer, including these two, who were so ill that they found themselves sharing the same vomit-bag, and not minding much at all. It must have been bad, because at one point, despair led to the thought that it might be preferable to jump overboard. Despite this harrying adventure they tucked into their dinner creditably enough, such is the resilience of youth.

I’ve has a few days away from this journal due to the arrival of visitors, and then the continuing fight to master the arcane art of internet freelance writing absorbed me (my first piece was submitted last night to a well-established outfit named Associated Content whose web site I stumbled across and who seem to offer a fair system of ‘payment by results’). I wrote about a thousand words more quickly than I did the actual online submission of this opus, finding the learning curve to be steep as I battled away until midnight to get the job done. But a start has been made.

Time out from social whirl and the grindstone seems worth celebrating by the inclusion of a photo taken on ‘Home Beach’ , where I still make time for peace and quiet at the welcome beginning of this year’s cool and dry season on the Gulf of Thailand

Looking at this photo of Leo had me thinking about the close shave we had with his health last April. In abbreviated form this is what happened.

He was breathing heavily although the sun was only just up as we did the early morning walk in the country park last Spring, and when we got home I noticed he wasn’t chewing his food properly. The vet took his temperature and thought he probably had a cold, giving him an anti-biotic injection, and when I mentioned he wasn’t eating normally, she tried to look in his mouth, but Leo, usually the most helpful and compliant of animals, seemed unwilling to open up. In fact, it turned out a a few days later when we went back to the vet again, that he wasn’t being obstinate, but was completely unable to open his mouth more than about an inch. He was suffering a life threatening disease called Masticatory Muscle Myositis (MMM).

It took a lot of time, intensive nursing, and cost a bomb too, before he pulled through, but ti was all worth it and this is how he looked this afternoon as we took a breather in the sunset on Home Beach.

I’ve decided I must do something to increase income since my pension is fixed and frozen, and has been cut into deeply by the fall in the pound against the local currency this past year. There seems little hope of its recovery.

Immigration rules don’t allow me to work (and I’m getting a bit long in the tooth to go back to sea) so I’ve been surfing the internet in search of ways to make extra cash, hacking through a veritable jungle populated by hucksters of all persuasions along the way to what seemed the most promising source – freelance writing, and for the web itself.

I’ve been self-educating myself by means of the (free) tips and strategies offered on the web to those in search of guidance in what I soon discovered was quite a unique market-place, and one that required a unique writing style. For the home truth is that people don’t read articles on the internet as they might a magazine or a newsletter (and perhaps as they do this blog) but they skip great chunks as they seek the particular morsel of information that they need.

Secondly they come to those articles mainly by courtesy of the Google and Yahoo search engines. Thus the writer has to learn the art of enticing readers by the astute use of keywords; keywords that figure most often in the search engine’s vocabulary. It makes one feel a bit of a charlatan to employ such tactics, but I shall endeavour to learn them. And then try them out here!

Last week Archbishop Rowan Williams met with Pope Benedict in Rome to talk over the relationship of the Anglican Communion with the Roman Catholic Church in the light of the Roman initiative to invite those Anglicans most disaffected by the impending election of female bishops, to transfer en masse. The invitation itself had come abruptly and apparently without consultation and there was speculation that the Anglican leader had been offended.

The media had stoked the whole thing up, but Archbishop Rowan handled the whole affair splendidly in my view, exhibiting the very the best Christian virtues of patience, humility and generosity of heart when he gave an account of his meeting with the Pope to a BBC reporter from Radio 4’s Sunday programme. He emphasised instead the steady and continuing progress of the existing joint council on ecumenism, which he saw as a work in progress. During such troubled times as these for the Church of England, and for Anglicans all over the world, I feel thankful this saintly, scholarly man is there to lead.

UPDATE : 25 November 2009

The red-shirt group has decided to postpone this weekend’s gathering indefinitely following widespread opposition against the rally due to the fact that it is being held close to HM the King’s birthday on December 5.

Red-shirt leader Weera Musikapong said the leaders will meet again in mid-December to decide their next move.
Earlier this morning, fugitive former PM Thaksin Shinawatra also called on the red-shirt group to reconsider its gathering.

I’ve been too busy today to do more than account for myself here. The day began with a dawn patrol of home beach (loads of unseasonable jellyfish) and then a full bath for Leo, then the mandatory 90-day report at Thai Immigration, which was crowded, and to market with M. All that necessitated a siesta after lunch and in order to enable recovery for tennis in the late afternoon.

Waiting for me then was the job of corresponding with an old friend in the HK pilots’ service rather urgently (the deadline is near) regarding the drafting of a character reference to the judge on behalf of a colleague of his who’d been in a serious marine accident in the harbour. All done now and so to bed.