Quite an optimistic post, honest.

And today my equilibrium has returned. I feel serene about what will be…

Yesterday Husband and I went to school to see Daughter in Macbeth. Son, who is full of cold didn’t come. (I always feel a cold, in such hideously hot weather, is so wrong.) His not coming meant that Husband and I could talk and it was the Beattie-style Worst Case Scenario planning that has brought me some peace.

The ideal situation is that we stay in Bangkok. I want to stay here but more than my selfishness, Son should finish school here because that would suit him and his personality best. I’ve been online to look at schools in the UK and funnily – or probably not – the school we chose with him at 11 is still the school that looks the best fit now. But we talked about what we could do if that school doesn’t have places. We have a plan… should we need it.

Bangkok is my home. It’s not where I’m from but it is where we’ve made our home for the last five years. Whatever people think about our lives here – that it’s a cushy number or that we’re spoiled – there are tough things about this life; we make sacrifices and face different problems (as well as some of the same) that you do in your home countries. I suspect that you have noticed some of our stresses in recent weeks! My immediate family are here and my books are here; it’s home.

But I am lucky because I have friends in both places; indeed, I have friends all over the world.

If I am made to come home (for that is the lack of control for us) then I will be closer to my elderly parents, I will be able to join friends at book launches, for weekends of laughing and eating. I won’t always have to miss the important occasions in the lives of my friends, my chosen family and both our extended families. I can think about what work I want to do and I can consider doing an MA. (Then I will have the three degrees I’ve longed for and will, forever more, be able to wear glitzy dresses and burst into song: ‘When Will I See You Again?’)

So (some of) the plan is that I shall be home to the UK, as planned, in July. I may be looking for schools; I may not. Then I may come back to Bangkok or I may not but I feel happier about all of this.

Gratuitous picture of beautiful, visual production of Macbeth.

Explanation

Thanks to everyone who sent positive wishes after my odd (and cryptic) post on Monday. The medical procedure wasn’t mine to blog about but I’m glad to say that nothing nasty was found. There is one more test to exclude all other issues.

Being a doctor’s daughter (also a doctor’s sister and doctor’s cousin) I’ve spent my youth surrounded by medical matters. Dinner time conversations were colourful and graphic enough to make many a guest wilt at our table. I’ve always loved medical dramas, and get terribly over-excited when I diagnose before the doctors do. (I specialise in identifying Weil’s Disease, Munchausen’s by proxy and Leukaemia which appear to be favourites in medical soaps.)

My Dad’s speciality was endoscopy. You can, if you are strong of stomach, look here but it might be enough to know that it is looking into the body, in my Dad’s case, through a natural opening, *coughs* using an endoscope, a thin bendy tube with a light source that projects what it sees onto a screen for the doc to diagnose.

But, and maybe no-one’s very good at this, we’re not terribly cool or calm when it comes to our own health. Maybe we know too much.

Anyway, thank you for your thoughts; they really helped.

Thoughts

If you can spare them, please send your positive and healing thoughts this way today.

Thank you.