I have too much sand in my car from the beach

Life is pretty damn good and often I don’t stop just to take stock. If you have followed my blogs for some time you will see how they flit between the good, the bad and the the just plain stupid of living in Thailand. They capture my feelings for that particular moment in time, so I am sorry when it is not all a bed of roses.

More recently I have been at that lower part of the roller coaster ride, sighting ridiculous schooling fees, poor Thai employee standards and a lack of quality working expats in the country as my bug bears. But, and this sums up my 12 or so years of living in Thailand, I am currently back on the peak of the roller coaster ride. However I am battle hardened enough from living here to realise this could change in a flash, and I am quite sure it will.

If you have been following your social media feeds – as you won’t see it on any mainstream UK news broadcast – you cannot have failed to notice the mess the UK is in. Political activist Tommy Robinson arrested and, due to already being on a warning, promptly jailed for 13 months. This event has mobilised certain groups of the British public into action with a feeling of injustice (rightly or wrongly). It was the straw that broke the camels back to a usually peaceful country.

I cannot help but feel desperately sad for the state of the UK at the moment. Sure media is always used world over by Governments to control its people, but this time the British Government have been found out for doing just that and that has rightly caused uproar. Media is the public’s last line of freedom, and if people believe that to have been compromised then you have a very real problem. I am not going to get involved in the political debate anymore than that, but the UK needs strong and brave leaders at this time and I wish the nation well.

This then brings me back to my life in Thailand. The other day the hot topic when my family and I were in my wife’s car was the amount of sand in the back seat. At least a few evenings a week we will all go to the local beach and the kids will play for an hour until the sunset. Of course, this makes a mess of the car as they bring sand from the beach into it. Those pesky kids!

The trivial pleasures of a sand in the car problem!

What a problem we have to deal with! On one hand you have our trivial issue of sand in my car – something most people would love, given how it got there – against the uproar happening in the UK at the moment.

I live in year round sunshine, I can swim in the pool everyday and besides trips back to the UK I cannot remember the last time I wore a coat. I have a progressive business and a generally solid team in place around me. Life is good, work is good – what more can a man want in life?

Of course, I always do want more – hands up, I am a victim of a capitalist system – I love working hard and achieving more. You know, the reason is two fold, it energises me as to see what is possible and it puts me in situations that without work I would never see. For example, invitations to the British Embassy for various events and even a fully expensed business trip to Macao for a travel forum. Just 5 or 6 years ago, these kind of invitations were out of my grasp, but through hard work they are not now – I turn down more invitations to events than the ones I actually go to.

Changing the subject just briefly, I have had a couple of comments from readers mentioning I often come up with a strong headline and then skirt around the subject without actually digging in to the real crux of the debate. Hands up, you are probably right, I often only get a small window of time to put a blog or vlog together and so no doubt rush a few of the articles. I would like to apologise for this and will try and set aside more time to each subject. My feeling has always been, better to publish something than nothing at all, maybe I just need to revise this approach.

What I do try and do is give you a snapshot of that moment of time from my life here in Thailand and I ll continue to work hard to try and bring you interesting content.

For now, I will leave you with my more recent problem of living here in Thailand, that of too much sand in the back of my wife’s car. Nothing a dustpan and brush won’t fix, which, unfortunately, will not be enough to resolve the issues we are seeing in the UK at the moment.