God's Punishment and the Mossie Men

The Buddhists believe in Karma – that your actions will bring about inevitable results, good or bad - and the Greek Gods punished manifestation of hubris - overweening pride - so really it was only a matter of time before my smug holiday blogging caused me to be castigated: bitten on the backside by some higher power.

In my case, retribution wasn’t a single mandible to the rear end by any higher power, but about fifty thousand mosquitoes feasting on just about every part of my sweet flesh.

I am alive with tingling, prickling and plain old hurting skin. I have so many bites that I can no longer be serene about it. As I type my lower legs are humming; radiating energy of their own existence. The bites, though certainly deployed by a number of individual mossies, are somehow linked to each other. When one on my leg itches, and I scratch, it alerts the forty eight on my left arm to the existence of my nails, and they in turn begin to hum, tingle and sing for attention of my fingernails – which, since I am on holiday, are rather nice and long. They are doing significant damage to my skin.

I think they bit me in the first resort – our room was zinging with the little buggers, no matter what extermination programme we undertook.

At this second resort, at about 6pm on the first day we received a telephone call in our room saying ‘We spray Mosquito. Don’t leave your room.’ I didn’t like to ask if there was only one mosquito was it really necessary to spray the whole resort? Instead I asked ‘how long do we stay inside?’ ‘15 minutes’ is the answer, but we really had a ringside seat.

Hubris and bla bla bla

I came out of Dreamweaver Brain Drain class today, having had a stonking lesson: very enjoyable, felt like I begun to understand a bit. Oooh, and bought two domain names while I was there: first choice and second choice. I texted husband to say ‘Great Dreamweaver lesson, feeling great, hope you’re having a good day’ and then I wrote another note over food to say: ‘And eating Dim Sum; can life get any better?’

I was definitely guilty of overweening pride, but the gods were sure gonna push me in a filthy puddle for it, and maybe twist my ankle as I went down. In my inbox when I got home was an email from children’s school, titled: Son’s bus behaviour. Mmmm, it’s a fair bet here that they weren’t writing to let me know what a joy he’s been on the bus lately!

We’ve been having diminutive teenage issues at home too (he’s 12). There is only so much nagging and telling off a Mum can do, and there’s unquestionably a limit to how effective this is. For me, it’s only effective for the length of the lecture and then I go all the way to Guilt City: for him, all he appears to hear is ‘bla bla bla’. It makes no impact on future behaviour at all. Whatever the problem, I am sure that I need to give him lots of positive attention... but boy, give me back those toddlers.

Writing? Well, this morning I had a deadline I’d been putting off. I was supposed to send a review of January’s Book Club meeting to the magazine I write for. We’d been reading Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. I struggled to get it read (because our best friends were here for the whole of Christmas and New Year) but loved it. Only two other people in Book Club had attempted to read it and neither had finished it. January’s meeting was a bit of a disaster on the book front, but interesting because some of the women present talked about their experiences of political unrest and having to flee the country during their expat lives. Maybe you know something about the unrest here in Thailand at the moment? So it felt a very relevant book. Thankfully, the story surrounding Nemirovsky’s life, the book, and its discovery was so incredible, that I told that in my review instead.

So no, as yet I haven’t started writing. I’ve got brain drain homework to do before all the knowledge leaks out of my head: I really should do it tonight.

Tomorrow is February's Book Club day (Alias Grace) … oh dear, more excuses.