I was thinking about your comment yesterday. With a group of friends and family I went to pay my respects at the local wat. It's in a small farming village in the foothills of the mountains, and the abbot is a fairly old man with lots of tolerant compassion and a great sense of humour. His monastery and some of the surrounding forest has become a protected area for pangolins, the scaly anteaters that are prized by local people for food and by the vast Chinese market for "traditional medicine" - which in this case, and in many other endangered species, means aphrodisiacs. Anyway, I was sitting outside in the shade and the abbot came over and placed a bundle in my lap, which turned out to be a snoozing pangolin. As I stroked it, it stayed there quite happily for more than an hour, and really filled me with a lovely sense of well-being. Finally, when my leg had gone to sleep, I had to put it down and it loped off into the shrubbery to look for ants.

There's a lot of publicity in Thailand these days about the corruption of the monkshood - which is real indeed - but fortunately there are still rural monasteries like this one that serve as sanctuaries, both for pangolins and for wandering writers.

All the best,

Will