There’s a lot I want to say about the last 36 hours in Madurai. I thoroughly recommend it as a place you could easily spend a week, mostly just getting your head around the Meenaksi temple.

However, I’ve just been highly amused by something and wanted to share it with you.

I phoned home from an open international call box just outside the temple. The owner’s son and his mates were there. We got talking and one of them offered me a palm reading. (The palmist spoke no english but his mate, Ramesh, spoke very good english.) Most of the predictions were ‘your life will/can be nice, especially if you do (various sensible things)’ and ‘something very nice will happen in November/December’ but the thing that caught me was the prediction of me fathering 2 or 3 children; i.e definitely not by adoption but ‘by your own sperm‘. (This is a verbatim quote.)

I have the interlocutor’s email address so I will be very pleased to keep in contact about the number of children I sire, even if I end up less than pleased about what that number turns out to be.

Grinning like a loon, as ever!