I am getting so hot, I wanna take my clothes off (but doing so has undesirable connotations in a school)

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Wiz won at scrabble again. This is ridiculous. Losing at scrabble to a dyslexic is like losing to a legless man in a ‘best legs’ competition; it just shouldn’t happen - and certainly not three times in a row.

Thus this entry will be short, bitter and resentful.

On Friday night we went to the Sakaeo fair for the sixth time in a row. Now don’t get me wrong, we like the fair. But six times? Surely excessive. Actually, despite these preliminary doubts, we had a bit of a blast, although some of the male teachers in attendance seemed to be playing ‘get the farang hammered’; the second we had taken to tiniest sip of our beers they would be refilled to the brim. We watched a concert featuring a singer billed as the ‘Thai Michael Jackson’ (perhaps a tactless moniker given Thailand’s problems with child abuse as a feature of the sex tourism industry). Anyhoo, our memories of the evening are patchy; Wiz spent the evening hand-in-hand with Mr Na Long Chai’s wife, whom I also gave a deeply inappropriate hug to at the end of the night. In the car on the way home we desperately fought to regain sobriety until the car pulled up unannounced outside a karaoke club with an incredibly slender lady-boy as its compere. I think it’s best for everybody that we were denied entry.

Compared to Friday’s shenanigans, Saturday and Sunday were spent in sedentary fashion. Indeed, compared to sitting on a chair for a long period of time, Saturday and Sunday were spent in sedentary fashion. That is to say, we spent most of it lying down with both fan and air-conditioning on full blast trying to conserve some semblance of coolness. The temperature has soared over the last few days and in true falang fashion our activity has reduced to a level roughly equivalent to a dead squirrel’s. We were left to our own devices for most of the weekend, and left the room only to eat and (mercifully) swim in a surprisingly luxurious pool a few minutes from our bedsit. I managed to successfully order a meal and ask how much it cost in Thai and received the glorious comment ‘poot Thai geng’ (‘speak Thai well’), a compliment that lost some of its lustre from the fact that I had to consult a Thai-English dictionary before I could appreciate it.

Today we are teaching the present continuous tense through the medium of charades. At the moment we are thinking of a new game to play with each class but I think after today, we will literally have covered every wholesome English language-themed game known to man, and will have to move on to more immoral ones like English roulette (like Russian roulette but the ‘gun’ fires questions about your hobbies instead of bullets), and drinking games where incorrect formation of a past participle incurs a one shot penalty. We’ll let you know how that one goes.

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