We Live in Interesting Times

May you live in interesting times is an expression often used by us Brits in an ironic context.

Apparently it’s also known as the Chinese curse. Of course we all prefer to live in uninteresting times, not in times of trouble and strife, peace and tranquility are much more preferable.

I haven’t blogged on Thinglish Lifestyle since life on planet earth took a sudden turn to interesting and has been accelerating into madness ever since. You can still catch us on Youtube though!

Not that I have had the luxury to Netflix and chill, far from it, (I haven’t watched any TV programming for over a decade), but these last two months have been incredibly busy for many reasons.

Because of the lifestyle we live, many people wrongly assume we are rabid environmentalist, we’re not. Here’s why…

When Life Gives You Lemons…

I have anticipated an economic collapse akin, if not worse than the great depression since 2008 when I got interested in economics. All the problems from over a decade ago, never got resolved and were only papered over and have been building into maga-bubbles.

It was a no brainer to understand that you can’t buy yourself out of debt with more debt but that is what the central banks, governments and individuals have been doing. Stealing from the future to live in the now.

So with that acquired knowledge, I pivoted the production company I had at the time to an online marketing agency and bootstrapped it out of that recession.

Soon after, I got out of debt, started investing in precious metals, cryptocurrencies, profitable companies and more recently fertile land and a farm.

I still run my company today with a team and clients on three continents. If you need any help with your website, SEO or digital marketing, get in touch. We don’t work with everyone, but if we are a good fit, we can do some good work together.

Although we anticipated a market meltdown (I’m sorry but the worst is yet to come) we never saw a pandemic slapped on top of it. Maybe this was a great distraction and something to blame the failing economy on. Who knows, but one thing is for sure, the economy is in the toilet. What goes up, must come down, and it’s now spinning round and round and who knows when the music will stop. I can’t hear a fat lady singing!

So, because of all the recent hullabaloo we have not only been pivoting our business but actually been busier helping our existing clients through it all and position them stronger on the other side of shelter-in-place to get more market share from a reduced market.

These processes have been extremely interesting to work through but also exhausting.

Talking daily with clients across the globe with great businesses who have been forced to shelter-in-place or lockdown by their governments response to this virus has been heartbreaking and maddening.

All those businesses not only supported the business owner and their families, but those of all their employees and their families, other businesses and local communities.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to sit at home while your business is being systematically destroyed by clueless politicians who never ran a business in their lives.

So we have come through this particular chapter and are currently preparing for the next instalment, in whatever form that may take.

Anarchy Farm

Back on the farm, my weekend job and great antidote, de-digitising myself for a couple of days a week, we have been in harvest time.

The durian was a poor harvest this year compare to last year but the mangosteen, longan and rambutan were very good. The only problem was actually the market price, which compared to last year sucked.

Supply lines for sales to China were greatly reduced and many provinces had lockdowns, so the usual buyers from the South never showed up.

Fortunately we sold a lot this year direct to contacts in Bangkok, skipping out the middlemen which secured us both a better price. We also sold by mail-order, gave a lot of fruit baskets to friends and repositioned the fruit into other products.

Katae made some delicious ice-creams, cakes, jams and lots of dried fruit, now safely stored away for another day (or on my waistline).

We also started brewing our own kombucha and use different fruits from the farm and our permaculture food forest in the second fermentation. We’ve brewed up, lemons & ginger, snakefruit (pictured below), rambutan, mangosteen, starfruit, Barbados cherry, banana, plum mango and longan to date.

Also during this time we built a chicken coop on the farm for our retired old hens to coverless and more recently started to build a small nursery where we will be growing edible plants and flowers to sell locally.

Anarchy Chocolate

Anarchy Chocolate took another step or two nearer to reality when we finally got our malanger and Champion juicer out of Import/Export after jumping through endless hoops and paying the extortion fees for their release.

We now have a supplier for cocoa bean in Chanthaburi and will soon start experiementing with recipes to create our first bean to bar chocolate.

We now have a couple of cocoa trees starting to fruit but in the next 12 to 24 months anticipate we will be able to harvest sufficient volume to create the first tree to bar chocolate here in Trat.

K.I.S.S.

So with each passing day, we get a little more self-sufficient, build up our food security and live a simple yet fulfilling life.

While I sit in my office and write this post, I look up and over our lush gardens and marvel at what we have achieved in three short years. It’s been an incredible journey and we’re so happy and grateful we don’t live in a city, now more than ever. We saw this kind of chaos coming, it’s all part of the demolition of the economy and we are doing our best to insulate ourselves from the worst of it.

When I’m online, it’s hard not to see a world of madness fanned by the flames of the media (mainstream and social) and advanced by paid provocateurs.

When the people realise that black v white or blue v red is all just a distraction to divert attention away from the  real criminals and thieves; the career politicians and the central banksters. When the penny drops and they see the curtain pulled back on the system and how it is set up to distract and divide us, they may start to vent their anger in the appropriate direction.

We will then live in interesting times without the irony, that may result in a new paradigm of peace and prosperity.

Keep it simple, live in peace.

We Live in Interesting Times