I already wrote all this. Forgive me if I get a little pissed off for a second.

1500 or so words that were, I thought, really quite readable and in any case were unscripted and irreplaceable, the spontaneous result of a whole week of not writing anything.
Saved on a computer because the internet failed mid-flow, saved in two seperate places to secure their survival against accidental deletion and deleted purposefully the next morning - from both places - by some unthinking person who used that machine before I got back to use it.
They cleared the recycling bin too; I just can't imagine quite why? How exceedingly stupid and pointless.

Hey ho - here we go again!!
>

I was ill last week for 3 or 4 days, and when you get ill here it's something quite spectacular, I've lost weight to the probable tune of around 10 pounds and most of it was briefly decorative, I'll say no more. It also happened to stop me drinking for 3 days though which was a pretty sweet bonus, and I even held off the alcoholic urges for 3 days afterwards because it felt so good to wake up sober!
Not bad going in a place like this, where the pasttime is to basically get leathered every day and every night (much like back home in fact but in a sort of licensed way: "it's my holiday and I'll poison myself if I want to" sort of thing).

As a result, I have learned some great things about the good Doctor Death in the village: he is not only accessible, friendly, properly qualified and happy to dispense affordable narcotics but is in fact helpful, knowledgable, speaks better English than almost everyone else and is two people.
The good doctor(s) also know an impressive amount about modern brand names for various medications and he (they) has (have) the exact same malaria tablets, for example, needed by yours truly. So I wont be dying like a quinine-deprived Victorian gentleman explorer after all, you'll be pleased to know

So I have been passing my time* playing beach football (once), eating at the best restaurant in town (twice), not playing volleyball as everyone seems rather good at it (bugger) and climbing hills and the odd cliff face (rewarding and very painful). Also lots of time, far too much time, has been spent at another restaurant, The One That Shows The Movies.
Many new and old films have I seen this week, and as well as working my way through their tragically bad menu (a Hamburger is, in fact, a square of Spam DEEP FRIED and served within a bun between two undisclosed and vaguely congealed sauces, the origins of which I would rather not enquire too deeply.
They more than make up for it with their sand-coated pool tale though, which increases the skill of all who play on it by dint of it being impossible to sink a single fucking ball without laser-guided precision in making it reach the very centre of any pocket.
Also excellent is any time spent talking to AJ, the Del Boy of the East and general manager of the whole place.

He looks like Del Boy, he has the same haircut and portly silhouette, he bahaves like Del Boy treating favoured (i.e. regular) customers with charismatically warm welcomes and insincere gestures of friendliness, and he has a curious talent for making the same kinds of mistakes.
Despite knowing people quite well, he is always ready to ascribe to them a different country of origin than the right one, a Dutch bloke from the parasailing place on the beach is, apparently, Australian, an Austrian guy who's staying near me has switched allegiances overnight and become a Spaniard without knowing it, and, in the eyes of AJ, a fella called Jason who couldn't be more Irish if you painted him green, stuffed a potato in his mouth and pints of Guinness in each hand and shoved a bunch of shamrocks in his ears has magically become Italian without anyone (bar AJ) knowing about it. Jason is in this bar each and every night and has dropped the name of his country into the conversation many times, to no effect whatsoever.

Even celebrities are not exempt from this xenomania: among others, Mel Gibson is English, and Jodie Foster is Russian. I do hope no-one has told their legal people.
I'm quite sure that I'm French or Mongolian or Japanese or something - it doesn't matter much, it's just amazing how well he has the character down pat

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I've also been reading a fair bit and, apart from the book in the footnote below, I've worked through The God Of Small Things which won the Booker prize a year or three ago. It's set in Kerala in Southern India which is where I plan to spend a good deal of time myself. As long as I don't encouter any of the characters from this work I'll be set: it is a most depressing book in places, and confirms some of my most cynical suspicions about human nature. Extremely well written and well paced however, it invents it's own language and style of language along the way and is an impressive piece of work, worth reading if you can withstand the gloomy overtones and supress the desire to throttle one of the characters in particular!

I've done one or two other things that are more interesting (for those of you whose brains have turned to cottage cheese reading this, I apologise. The last version was snappy, concise and far more interesting but some total son-of-a-bitch deleted it, so now we all have to suffer) but that's gonna get written up in a little while.
I shall leave you with a passage from the God of Small Things, because it's so bloody well written, that describes one aspect of India and of human nature, in how easy it is to forgive small hardships when you have better things to think of. I my case at the moment it's coconut palms, beaches and the English Stiff Upper Lip (SUL) that I'm leaning on, but the things I am forgiving are (perhaps not surprisingly) exactly the same

"The view from the hotel was beautiful, but here too the water was thick and toxic. No Swimming signs had been put up in stylish calligraphy. They had built a tall wall to screen off the slum and prevent it from encroaching on Kari Saipu's estate. There wasn't much they could do about the smell.

The trees were still green, the sky still blue, which counted for something. So they went ahead and plugged their smelly paradise - `God's Own Country` they called it in their brochures - because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other people's poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to.
A question of discipline. Of Rigour and Air-Conditioning. Nothing more."

*Reading stephen Hawking's `A brief history of time` has made this phrase tickle me slightly. Read this book, all ye who migh'st question this world, it's fascinating, and more in-depth and interestingly explained than all other rough guides to science that I've read. It explains the `twins paradox` properly for one thing, so now I understand the real thinking behind how one of a pair of twins can be 20 when the other is 60. Gravity affects time, time isn't at all fixed for us, space isn't fixed either and black holes are truly the most fascinating things in this universe.
Read. This. Book.