We've now been in Thailand a week. I have been mulling over the time since we got back from the Philippines, looking for some sort of connecting theme.

I can't find one... At the moment life is not so much a carpet as a series of small rugs, not so much a plate-glass window as a mullioned window.

But that's OK.

Here are some of the bright and beautiful shards of experience that have come our way in the last three weeks, in our old home and in our temporary new one:

-- Being part of the multiethnic congregation at KL's St Mary's Cathedral on Christmas Day
-- Listening to a completely captivating brass quintet at The Gardens mall, and remembering that carols can still sound wonderful
-- Plunging into the unfathomable world of story-telling in The Life of Pi
-- Being swept away by the big tunes from Les Miserables
-- Getting the big tunes from Les Miserables out of my head again
-- Eating with friends
-- Watching the full sweep of KL's New Year's Eve fireworks from our 10th-floor apartment
-- Being grateful for all the wonderful people who fed us, protected us, and were otherwise part of our lives while we were in Subang Jaya

-- Having the lower reaches of Songkhla Lake greet us every morning through our window
-- Reacquainting ourselves with all the old Thai favourite foods, and discovering new ones -- like boat noodles (rolled flat noodles used for guayjap, a soup featuring crispy pork and egg), or crispy fried egg salad (fantastically simple and so tasty -- but then, any of these "yam", or Thai salads, are good, because they're so fresh and sharp)
-- Getting to know beautiful Songkhla: its aquarium, its museum, its picturesque spit, and its always interesting streets
-- Finding two top-class coffee-and-cake shops, EP's and The Secret Garden (happy Prudence...)
-- Cracking everyday problems like locating a laundry and mobile internet (in Songkhla very little is written in English)
-- Finding an interesting new blog covering travel and languages, two of my favourite topics
-- Dividing my time, mentally, between three different worlds -- Southeast Asia, which is both my home and the focus of my day-to-day work; Victorian Britain, the setting for Trollope's The Way We Live Now, my current Really Good Read; and pre-coup Cote d'Ivoire, diary recollections of which I'm now engaged in digitizing

Sometimes, disconnected is OK. Sometimes, the spaces between the bits are what matters.