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this annoying hamlet is the 7-Eleven. It’s a bustling hub of Slurpee buying, exotic magazine browsing and self-watching in the CCTV screen above the counter. Local teenagers hang out in front on their motorcycles until seven p.m., sometimes eight p.m., largely because it’s one of the few places still lit after dark. If the 7-Eleven is too exciting for you, there’s always the post office. The concept of queuing, introduced to the rest of Thailand in the mid-1980 s , has yet to make it to the Pak Nam P.O. Elderly ladies in floppy sun hats assume you’re standing behind another customer because you’re fascinated by the curvature of their shoulder blades. They smile at you, these old biddies, and step up to the counter in front of you. And they get served. But even at its busiest you will see no more than six customers jockeying for position. Our P.O. box is number two, which shows you how much correspondence passes in and out of Pak Nam. I imagine they merely lost the key to number one.
    Along the street there is a small photocopy shop which specializes in gray, fluffy versions of your original. The manager puts on her shoes whenever a customer enters the shop. Next to that is a Chinese pharmacy which allows you to sample medications right there in the shop. They’ll give you a cup of iced tea if a pill needs to be washed down, and privacy if you need to apply cream to a delicate spot. There’s a hairdresser’s with a photograph in the window that gives the false impression that Julia Roberts is a patron, and no fewer than four traditional barbershops. As this is Thailand, there are numerous food stalls and seven restaurants which all have the belief that unpainted gray wood, Happy New Year banners and glamor calendars are an acceptable style of decoration in the food and beverage industry. Despite two small establishments masquerading as coffee shops, you can’t get a decent cup of coffee or an edible cake in Pak Nam. Not that you could park anywhere long enough to eat one. The spaces not taken by motorcycles and bicycles and handcarts are occupied by trucks delivering exciting goods you never actually see on sale in the shops. On very special days in Pak Nam, the intriguing odor from the fish factories squats on the town like an unwashed swabbing mop. This, is our nearest town. Have I made my point yet?
    I often complained that I had the raw end of the sausage at our place as, apart from regular shopping trips into this metropolis, I was obviously the only one doing any work. Mair was in charge of the shop, which largely entailed standing at the cash drawer gazing out at the quiet road and chatting with the two or three customers who came in to buy something they probably didn’t need. I suspect they felt sorry for Mair. Everything in stock was in cans, packets, boxes or bottles and some of the labels were written in languages they hadn’t used since King Taksin ruled the country two-hundred-odd years ago. We had nothing fresh, exotic or home-made and, more importantly, nothing you couldn’t buy from Yai Yem’s much bigger shop half a kilometer along the road.
    As the resort manager, Arny was in charge of the five budget bungalows that faced a largely uneventful body of water and the five thatch-roofed tables we playfully called a restaurant. Including the hectic Songkran holiday rush in April, that year we’d averaged two overnight guests and eight diners a week. Currently, our cash cow – no offense to her – was an ornithologist from Khon Kaen University who’d booked our end room for the week. She was studying the migration of hawks on a grant and was attracted to us, not for our five-star service or our luxurious rooms, but because we were so close to a bog which, evidently, the hawks were particularly fond of. I suppose I should be berated for having a fixed image of an ornithologist in my mind. There was nothing pasty, shortsighted, spidery or matronly about our own bird fancier. She was a Thai