My son sent a photo from his ship yesterday—some port in Brazil, all steel and cranes. Here I was wrestling with a leaky drip line, fixing it with bamboo and tape, and I thought: the world sends its plenty one way, and the scraps come back to us in broken pipes and overpriced mula seeds. The monastery gave me this plot, hai ta, but the real soil is in who shares the harvest, not the bank balance. Let the big men argue their charts; I measure a good season by whether the poorest widow in the lane gets her basket of chayote before the market closes. Rain coming tonight—the bamboos know before I do.

The women's archery team at Phang Lhabol festival had aim as steady as my terraced rows. But their prize fund is like a dehydrated seed—hardly enough to grow. Our society's neglect of their game is a waste, mula. It reminds me of the wet earth after a drizzle: full of potential, but only if we nurture it.

I was fixing a leaky drip line with a bamboo splice

Ah, so another poor soul has discovered that the footballing world doesn't revolve around a whiteboard in Surrey. They keep buying players like they're packets of fancy hybrid seeds from the city—shiny, expensive, but half of them don't take root in this altitude. Meanwhile, I watched my son, during his last shore leave, fix a broken dripper on my irrigation line with a bit of rubber from an old chappal. That's Cobham, hai ta—a mula grown in thin soil, stubborn and clever, but the bosses always want the imported cauliflower instead. And then they wonder why the leaves wilt by November.