We are J (Dad), R (Mum), E (the eldest) and e (yes, two e's — and he's the boss). A well-travelled family from the UK who recognised the limits that mainstream education has for our two neurodiverse boys, sold most of what we owned, strapped on four backpacks and booked one-way tickets from Heathrow to Bangkok.
We have backpacked around India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. The West's bargain — work until you retire, then live the life you wanted — assumes a perfect health and a surviving pension we are not prepared to bet our family on. So we are showing the boys, rather than telling them, that there is more than one way to live.
A deep breath before plunging into a new year — kumquats, red envelopes and bunting between the flag and the hammer-and-sickle.
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"Yeah… I mean, they don't bother me…" — the eldest, on fireworks and a city he is beginning to call his.
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Water buffalo in shallow paddy water, dousing themselves with their tails. Content and untroubled.
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Tourism, Western influx, and what happens when the things that make a place itself are diluted by their own success.
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Hội An local life, seen through the steady rhythms of a man who knows every street by its produce.
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Google Translate as accidental poet — and the strange beauty of weddings, mistranslations and good fortune.
read on →A few of the threads that keep coming up in the writing.
There is more than one way to live, and more than one way to thrive.— from the about page
A short letter every other Saturday — one dispatch, one photograph, and one daft thing the boys said this week.