Gail and me at the Corner Shop. Away with the Fairies?
Fairies? Who Believes in Fairies?
Yesterday, my wife had to take our granddaughter, Gail, for a vaccination. When she came back she was on the verge of tears. Gail’s pure gold bracelet had come off her wrist and there was a red mark, which suggested that it had been wrenched off.
Neem hunted everywhere and even went back to the surgery to ask the nurse. All this took hours, but we couldn’t find it. She had a small band of people helping her look.
In desperation, she went to the village Buddhist Temple and prayed, offering to supply two pigs’ heads, if she found it. She returned to her mother’s who was looking after Gail during this crisis, and her mother spotted the gold chain hanging in the lace on the front of my wife’s blouse.
Make of that what you will, but Neem spoke to dozens or people, including her mother, me and the nurse, had several people helping her look, and everyone knows what Gail’s gold bracelet looks like, but no-one noticed it hanging from her shoulder like a bit of gold braid fallen from an admiral’s epaulette until she came back from the Temple.
The thing is bright yellow, six inches long and weighs seven grammes and Neem’s blouse is white and brown. There was no coat, jacket or shawl to conceal it – this is Thailand’s summer and it’s forty degrees centigrade.
Needless to say, she is over the moon that it wasn’t lost permanently and Buddha, not the fairies, is receiving a lot of praise from our household at the moment.
What do you think it was? Collective blindness, mass hysteria, the power of prayer, Buddha, serendipity, good luck, karma, fate…?
…
It reminds me of a story Davy told me a while back.
He got home in the dark one evening last year, parked the car up and went inside.
The following morning, his wife called him outside, rather upset. Dave had parked the car on their sleeping cat – one of the rear wheels was across its chest. Dave moved the car right away, of course, but there was not much life left in their cat. His mother-in-law was called from next door. She bathed the unfortunate moggy and rubbed some oil in it, then it stood up and walked away.
He was so amazed that he couldn’t keep the tale to himself and came straight round to tell me. Healing hands, the power of prayer, fairies, the nine lives of a cat?
They call this Amazing Thailand.
Not for nothing sometimes.
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I started to put my books onto Kobo, in my own account, today. They are already on it via aggregators, but I want my own listing now. I also want to do it with Nook and Ingram’s. It is easy to do, but it will take a while to put thirty-seven books on three new platforms.
Once they’re there though, it’s for life.
It could be the most profitable thing I do this year with repercussions for decades to come.
Yesterday, I also checked all the books I have on XinXii. There were a few errors, not of my making, where no epub had been created, and other things, but they are now in hand, ready for the sharing of their catalogue with Google Play and Scribd later this month.
I like to do this sort of maintenance, Spring Cleaning, early in the year, every year.
Bye for now,
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