The last day of the shortest month of the year ends in rain. Showers have been sweeping through the Mountains and across the coast since last night and may well continue, or so we are told. I have picked up my son's sore throat, somewhat inevitably, and find myself restricted in what I can do. No swimming for the meantime. Nor kissing the bride.

I finished Basho's short travel diary, Narrow Road To The Interior, which was very pleasant to read. It would be a cliche to describe this five-month footslog as a spiritual journey, but not to presents us with a mere journey, albeit one with a lot of decent haiku thrown in. But unlike us, with our focus on objects and ephemera, the Japanese invest vast meaning in the natural world. The placement of a single stone can reverberate in ways that defy any Western aesthetic, though the good news is, we can learn.

Narrow Road is not a triumph of travel writing and there are much better travel writers than Basho. But there are few better observers and for Basho, it is full immersion, in every moment.

On Saturday Ann and I went to the Wat Buddharangsee in Annandale, something that we do from time to time. Thai's have many reasons for visiting a wat and Ann's reasons can be quite esoteric. But I am happy to go anyway, because the experience is interesting and challenging and somewhat exotic to boot.

Being a Saturday, there were more congregants than usual and even a few of us poor farang. A service at the wat involves quite a lot of to-ing and fro-ing before the actual beginning, as people prepare lunch (monks eat first) and get the other accoutrements of the ceremony organised. This includes gift sets for the monks (with basic toiletries), small silver holy-water ewers and the orders of service. People finally settle when a leader (not a monk) begins reciting the liturgy, which is in Pali. I get to have one in romanised script, so most times, I can chant along too.

What we chant is (not unlike the creeds said in an Anglican Church) a statement of the beliefs of the faith, centred upon the Buddha and his followers. The world we think we see is an illusion and until such time as we see clearly, that is, we come to apprehend the world as it really is, we are stuck in it. This is the cause of all suffering and the latter can only be overcome by Buddhist practice.

On the way. At the wat.

the storm

hailstones, big as...
I stop, lost in vented steam,
the sky, a grey glory

Valentines Day. A day, like pretty much every other Western Festival, that has lost its way in the commercial rush. It is a day for shopkeepers, florists, stationers, and restaurants to make money. But it is also a day for love. It depends on how you look at it. I can suspend my cynicism at the crass money-making side of it pretty easily if I know that my wife thinks it is important. And my wife does, for having been largely deprived of the benefits of romance in Thailand for such a long time, she craves it now.

So yesterday we joined the throng in the city looking for a place to eat. Ann had a shop selected, Mamak Malay Restaurant in Goulburn Street, but their policy was no reservations. First in best dressed meant that we needed to move swiftly from Ann's college to be there for the opening at 5.30pm. When we arrived the queue already stretched down past Meet Fresh at the end of Dixon Street, so we joined it.

A few minutes later we were seated in a romantic location as waiters and other staff roamed the floor, dispensing water bottles, menus and taking orders. It was a brilliantly well-organised operation, for about 70 people had all just walked in the door and were now being swiftly accommodated. The food was glorious - Malay salads, delicious lightly-puffed roti and skewers with spicy satay sauce. Aroy dee.

In the queue and in the shop.

It is another hot day in a season of record hot days. Tom and I are at home, the electric fans spin and turn and click, the curtains flap wildly, then listlessly, as the wind dies. We are baking, slowly. It is a time for reflection because busyness is out of the question.

But busyness has been a particular preoccupation for human beings since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. People seem a little lost in the chase for something to fill any time when there is not something to be done. The boredom I experienced as a child is disappearing, a shame really, because we can better appreciate activity when we measure it against an absence of it. Technology has only speeded this process, so that the mental clothes that were once hand-washed and dried are now spun at huge and variable speeds in a centrifuge. I suppose I am no better, finding a retreat in activities that I have chosen ( and thus conferred legitimacy upon), compared with the tabloid immersions of other people. It is an unfair comparison.

Recently I bought a kindle e-book written by the haiku poet Matsuo Basho, this one tracing his final journey on Honshu (Narrow Road to the Interior). I have only just finished the excellent foreword and I can think of no better way of spending a sweaty day. Basho was heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism and so his life gradually became one with his beliefs, though he was never a monk. In the first paragraph of this travel diary we find the beautifully arresting, "Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." I hope to get my mind around this as I read further, though I suspect that there is less to do, and more to be.

heatwave

even the cicada
knows when to shut his wings,
heat glueing the air

Ann and I have been looking through travel books and guides to Thailand. She wants to pick out some good places for us to visit, an addition to the family commitments we will have whilst there. I was glancing at a map of Bangkok and environs when I noticed that the city of Nakhon Pathom was an easy day trip, so I suggested it to her.

"You have already been there David," she said.
"Really? I don't think so," I replied.

And truly, I had no recollection of having been there. I can tell you many towns I have travelled to or through in Thailand, but Nakhon Pathom isn't one of them. How could I have forgotten something so close to BKK?

"I'm pretty sure that I haven't been there honey," I mused, thinking that this was the end of the matter.

Ann got out of bed and retrieved a packet of photos from my 1997 trip to Thailand. Flicking through the prints, she pulled out one showing the unmistakeable chedi of Phra Pathom in, er, Nakhon Pathom. I don't know how it could have slipped my mind but I think that this was part of a one-day tour I took out west of the capital some 20 years ago now, which also included the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market.

Lesson learned. Never argue with a local.

And that photo.

Ever since l'enfant orange descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, the news-cycle has been full of his name, stories about him and responses to him on an almost daily basis. Now that he has conned his way into the Presidency of the United States, there is an even more intense barrage of Trump this and Trump that which I confess, I am thoroughly sick of.

I would like to start a Trump-free news site, in which his name, his deeds, his lies and his Twitter B.S will never be seen or heard and in which absolutely ordinary news abounds. There is altogether too much of this unworthy man to be had, the media being unable to leave alone that which sustains the beast. Aimee Mann, my favourite vocalist, penned the following song about the new President, before he won. Thanks Aimee.

"Can't You Tell?"

That bastard making fun of me in front of all my peers
Those people think I own this town, you're stripping all my gears
Well guess what Mr. President, I'll be seeing you
In four years

Though on the campaign trail the papers paint me like a clown
Still all I see are crowds who want to fit me for a crown
I point out all my enemies just so my fans
Bring them down

Isn't anybody going to stop me?
I don't want this job
I don't want this job, my god
Can't you tell
I'm unwell

You try to pin me down but you don't really try that hard
I throw out any shit I want and no one trumps that card
So dazzled and distracted by your fantasy
Of Hildegard

Isn't anybody going to stop me?
I don't want this job
I don't want this job, my god
Can't you tell
I'm unwell

You ask about my plan but baby my plan is to win
I wind up all the tops and watch the others keep the spin
You handing me grenades is just compelling me
To pull the pin

Isn't anybody going to stop me?
I don't want this job
I can't do this job, my god
Can't you tell
I'm unwell

And here's a live version

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI6AGfwdrGQ

My first real insertion into Asia happened in 1995. After 25 odd years of genuflecting to Western Europe as the van and repository of all culture, I booked tickets to go to Thailand. I went there again 2 years later and I thought at the time that I might be a frequent visitor. But Japan got in the way, happily as it turned out. The first decade of the new century was the Japanese decade for me and since that time, there has been a short Chinese interregnum.

But I have come back in a circuitous manner to Thailand, ostensibly through having married a Thai national, she being my darling wife Ann. Together we will go to Thailand in June and I hope I will get to see the places that are important to her and the people she loves. For me, now, culture in Asia holds far more allure than where my roots were had, no disrespect meant to either Europe or Britain. I haven't abandoned the latter, just embraced the former.

A couple of pics from earlier journeys to Thailand.