'Cracking mountains' Not

Here I am in Khorat, where I came for the mountains … and it’s a plateau. Brilliant: not a bloomin’ mountain in sight. It’s so flat it would give Bangkok a run for its money in the flat stakes. Oh well, at least I won’t spend hours gazing out the window.

And, you’ll never guess: there’s a school residential in MY hotel. No, it’s not one of our school residentials – but a primary school. I’m going to have to get up earlier tomorrow to beat those little critters to the omelette chef.

I had a little bit of a panic yesterday. A combination of ‘I am here to write: I must write’ terror and not being able to get onto the internet, meant that I couldn’t write a damn thing. I convinced myself that I needed the internet first… before I wrote and I couldn’t sort that out. I was waiting for help from reception. I telephone Husband and he is the kind of man who asks ‘have you plugged it in?’ so I pre-empted him and said ‘I’ve plugged it into the right hole’ which in reality turned out to mean: ‘I’ve plugged it into a hole it fits into.’ It was the wrong plug, obviously. When I eventually got onto the internet I was in a proper panic. Everything is crap, it reads like I’m in primary school, I can’t handle the story, blah blah blah.

Today I’ve woken up feeling less panicky. I will free write until I work out what comes next…

I had a look at the news, and I found this. Nick Park is one of my heroes. In an interview with the BBC, he says of his current project, A Matter of Loaf and Death, "You should do it for the fun or it, and not have any other ambitions in mind."

That, it reminds me, is what writing should be about.

Go and have a look at the BBC article: the film, due to air at Christmas, looks ‘cracking.’

Preparation

Next week my children go away on their school residentials. All of the senior school – apart from years eleven and thirteen – go away for five days, leaving the school quiet for mock exams.

Last year I went to Andaman Discoveries which is community based tourism project set up in the wake of the tsunami. This year I’m off to write for five days in Khorat in the Nakhon Ratchasima province. Famous for its silk and stone industries, I might have to take a day trip out to Pak Thong Chai where the best silk cloth is rumoured to originate. The jungle at the nearby Khao Yai – Thailand’s oldest national park – was the backdrop for the film version of Alex Garland’s novel The Beach.

I was scrabbling away for somewhere to go last week, my priorities being:

Relatively cheap
Max half a day’s travel
Mountains in the distance
Internet

It isn’t a rural idyll as it's Thailand's third largest city but it’s a change of scenery and being away gets me out of my regular ‘stuff to do’ mode.

In the meantime, my ‘stuff to do’ list is gigantic as we have to purchase all sorts of things on the kids’ lists of essential items.

Sexy silk

I went off at the crack of dawn yesterday morning to the Dusit Thani Hotel in Silom to meet with a group of unknowns going to join the The Thai Textiles Society/National Museum of Volunteers joint excursion to Khorat which is a hub of silk production.

We went to a Royal Project for natural silk dyeing; a commercial silk yarn factory; a batik and tye-dye group and then shopping for silk at the Silk Culture Centre.

It took us into Central Thailand (drive 3-4 hours) and was wonderful apart from a crippling migraine on the way home. (Straight to bed: 12 hours sleep and I STILL woke with a headache.)
Here are some almost edible pictures of silk in various states of production: