The wheel is spinning, slowly, slowly.

This afternoon, furled up in a threadbare hammock by the Mekong, I jolted awake to the mad clucking of a platoon of sickly looking roosters. Around and into one another in clashing circles they ran, as if missing their heads, through the dirt and under the table, a straggler into a tree bounding back to its feet to catch up with its own. The sun kept sinking and I kept thinking- What strange things animals are. And then a luminescent glimmer writhing amid the roosters, cornucopian legs like augmented eyelashes, a centipede. The roosters squabbled while I wondered, from my hammock- Will this silent dying centipede sting its cagey predators? Like a bee, is it about to hit the ever-clucking roosters with a final crescendoing sting, one grandiose throwback to life as it knows it? To life as it knew it: a single earthbound centipede, a hundred diminutive feet scurrying along the ground under the soles of larger creatures' feet.

Life is simple in Laos. It seeps into your thoughts and guides them groundwards. There is no nightlife. There is no quarrelling. There is nothing but hammocks here, and snaggletoothed smiles, and mosquitoes whose bites invoke mass itchiness, horrid welts, and as such are my greatest concern at the moment, as small a concern as it is, as small a creature as mosquitoes tend to be.