When Craig woke up at seven thirty, he was alone, but there was a birthday card on Lek’s pillow. ‘Happy Birthday’, it read, ‘gone to help Mum in the shop’, so he got ready and ambled over there. Pang had laid on breakfast for all those who were going canoeing for between eight and eight thirty. It consisted of coffee, cakes and four gallons of rice soup, using the best, most aromatic Jasmine rice, which Craig could smell before he could even see the shop and at first mistook for bread baking in its final ten minutes. It got his hopes up until he remembered that he had the only oven in the village that he knew of.
He was the last of the about thirty people who were going from the village and as he approached, most of them greeted him with ‘Happy Birthday’. The soup was so good, that it was
