We are supposed to be leaving for Spain in six days time, but my wife still hasn’t been granted a visa, despite everything being pre-booked as a prerequisite for that visa. She phoned up this morning at ten thirty and was told they were too busy to talk to anyone, she would have to email her query.
Meanwhile, I was checking our email and a message came in time-stamped ten oh-six that she could pick up her passport any time. However, it did not say that she has a visa. So, we won’t know until tomorrow because the embassy closes at one and it takes three hours to get there across Bangkok.
Why couldn’t they have said, “Oh, and by the way, congratulations!” just to put an end to her anxiety? It seems so petty and cruel.
If she has the visa, it’s the first bus or train back home (650km) for us, pack, say our Goodbyes, and then the return journey to Bangkok to stay with the sister-in-law a kilometre from the airport so we can be there easily on Monday morning.
If she has a visa, otherwise we will have to cancel our hotel and flights and reapply for a visa. The agony is not over yet, but we will know one way or the other in twenty hours.
Time for a few beers to help the hours pass, I think 🙂
It will be the first time that that I have chosen a location specifically to write a book in. We are heading for the area around Fuengirola in Andalucía, southern Spain. I think it is called the Costa del Sol, but I get all the Costas mixed up. I am hoping to find a place in or around Marbella or Los Boliches, so if you know of anything, please let me know.
Idealista.com is showing almost four hundred rooms etc to let in the general vicinity of Malaga, so I am not worried.
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Owen Jones, Amazon Best-Selling Author from Barry, Wales, has lived in several countries and travelled in many more. While studying Russian in the USSR in the '70's, he hobnobbed with spies on a regular basis; in Suriname, he got caught up in the 1982 coup; and while a company director, he joined the crew of four as the galley slave to sail from Barry to Gibraltar a home-made concrete yacht, which was almost rammed by a Russian oil tanker and an American aircraft carrier.
“I am a Celt, and we are romantic”, he said when asked about his writing style, “and I firmly believe in reincarnation, Karma and Fate, so, sayings like 'Do unto another...', and 'What goes round comes around' are central to my life and reflected in my work. I write about what I see, or think I see, or dream... and, in the end it is all the same really”. He speaks seven languages and is learning Thai, since he lives in Thailand with his Thai wife of fifteen years.
His first novel, Daddy's Hobby is from the seven-part series 'Behind The Smile: The Story of Lek, a Bar Girl in Pattaya', but his largest collection is 'The Megan Series', twenty-three novelettes on the psychic development of a teenage girl, the subtitle of which, 'A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!' sums them up nicely. He has written fifty novels and novelettes, including: Dead Centre; Andropov's Cuckoo; Fate Twister; The Disallowed (a philosophical comedy); Tiger Lily of Bangkok; and A Night in Annwn (Annwn being the ancient Welsh word for Heaven). Many have been translated into foreign languages and narrated into audio books.
Owen Jones writes stories set in Wales, Spain and Thailand, where he now lives. He is a life-long Spiritualist, and this belief is interwoven, in a very realistic way, into many of his books and storylines. If you like a touch of the 'supernatural', try his books
He sums his life up thus: “Born in the Land of Song, Living in the Land of Smiles”.
