As I mentioned in my previous post, I was going out to the village to attend a celebration that is specific to the region of Thailand in which I live. The entire village spent all day cooking food, to be left for the ghosts of dead family members to eat, complete with beer, whiskey and bottles of coke. Of course, as expected the ghosts didn’t actually eat much of it, so around midnight we had the chance to eat all the left overs!

This is the spread that Nuth’s family prepared in their house (every house in the village did the same), when you consider that this represents the kind of food they can seldom afford to cook for themselves, then it becomes apparent just how seriously they take their dead relatives. My particular favourite was the bowl of tiny fried fish, very tasty!

It’s Nuth’s birthday in a few days, so last week I asked her what she wanted as a birthday present. She said she didn’t know and would think about it. I thought she would come back to me and say a bracelet or something; she had also been making exciting noises about these little electric scooter things they are selling in the local supermarket, so I figured jewellery or one of these.

Eventually she calls me up and says hey I know what I want for my birthday, so I ask her what, and she says… two cows…

I really was not expecting this answer! So, anyway today we went and bought the two cows and they are now happily in her father’s old cow shed. I think this is possibly the strangest birthday present I have ever given somebody.

I’m looking at plane tickets today, and am seriously thinking about jumping on a plane three months early. My mother has been ill for many years, but she seems to be getting worse a lot quicker now. Only a couple of weeks ago she had an accident, fell out of bed and broke her hip, she was rushed to hospital for an emergency hip replacement.

Yesterday my step sister let me know that she is back in hospital with an infection in her gallbladder and they are going to remove it, so she will have had surgery twice this month for two separate things. I haven’t been back to the UK for a couple of years, I think I should go and visit her.

There is a children’s playground right next to my apartment block, it also has a running track, and most morning there are a few people jogging around it, trying to keep fit. At one end of the park is an open storm drain, not very big, not very deep, take a look at this picture below.

You see that white concrete bridge? Well that’s the storm drain underneath it. This is about 100 metres from my house, I took this picture from my balcony. This morning at 6am, a jogger discovered three dead children in the storm drain, supposedly drowned. They were a pair of brothers and a friend, quite young about four or five years old.

Now what the hell are three kids of this age doing out on their own at 6am in the morning? Why didn’t anyone see them? How did all three manage to die? Surely if one fell in the others would shout or go for help? There are shops just across the street, and this is a fairly busy road, the chances of nobody seeing three boys get into this kind of trouble is extremely slim even at 6am.

I think there is something suspicious about all this, it just does not add up to me, I don’t believe it is possible that this could have been an accident.