Edward Allen

Dear All,

Happy New Year to you, it feels great to see the back of 2009… Last year so many different horrible things seemed to happen, but hopefully 2010 will be a fresh start.

It feels strange to be back in the UK, the reverse culture shock has been rather emphatic this time around. But it is so lovely being around my family, enjoying their considerable personalities, and experiencing again their sometimes astonishing quirks. My family is really very competitive, one lunchtime recently over our sausages and beans the discussion turned to which of us had the bigger vocabularly?, resulting in the dictionary being fetched and my dear father and brother competed to see who knew more words on random pages of it. My family is the only family I’ve ever come across which actually wears out of dictionaries. It seems my family is agreably eccentric, but very nice about it all.

We had snow again on New Year’s eve, ice and freezing fog have come along too, and cold is hard for me. The cold makes my joint pain very much worse and makes it hard for me to spend much time outside. But I am getting better.

It is good to relax in front of the TV with chocolate and watch endless repeats of the strangely addictive motoring show “Top Gear”. It is good medicine.

But I miss Laos, I miss feeling warm, and I miss chaos and insanity, I miss people who can’t drive straight. No matter how bad Laos has got, it has become home.

I walked into a cafe last week here in Suffolk and, feeling half asleep, I ordered a coffee and muffin and was asked if I wanted to eat in; I responded “Kin Yuu Nee”; and proved that speaking Lao to people in Ipswich doesn’t work. I corrected myself and grunted :”here” showing myself to be both insane and really rather desperate for coffee; and they all looked strangely relieved when I left.

My family have a quite splendid life, beautiful houses and great cars, and endless strangely fattening food. And no tapeworms. I do like it here very much. It is fun being able to drink the water from the taps and it is fun having hot water. It is soothing how people drive here, everyone obeys the road laws and actually leave you space, they drive with a serenity that is very almost mesmerising. This is a land where the supermarket chain Tescos advertises their tomatoes as being “Terribly good for you”. It is all so strange, so sureal, and so utterly unembarassing…

I’m between cultures, neither fully in either of the two cultures but neither fully out of them either. But both nations are kind places, the people have good hearts, and good natures. The British love to think everything is utterly miserable, the Laos don’t really think enough to know if it is or not, yet both ways work. And both nations work, work in their own strange way, and are sweet places to live.

In this coming week I’ll be meeting my boss, and having more medical tests in London too. I’ll also try and make it back down to my home church and see everyone down there again and touch base with the people I need to touch base with. I’ve kept my schedule deliberately empty to give myself a chance to heal up and it is working well.

Hoping this year will be a fresh start…

love Ned