How often have you heard that? My mother's favourite phrase, when something in her family background such as living with my great-uncle Stanley in the beautiful Cotswold village of Lower Slaughter, (just up the road from Bourton-on-the-Water), during the Second World War, came to mind was, "I could write a book about that". She never did of course.

However her sons, having heard this phrase throughout their lives, rather took it to heart. One of them dabbled in a bit of poetry and ended up as a music teacher and writer of music, and the other, older and a bit more disciplined, went into the law (lots and lots of writing, but writing books? not yet). The elder brother soon travelled all over the world in his jobs, and because he was so incredibly busy all the time eventually fell ill. His illness led him back to tropical climates as a cure for his ailments.

Having had some experience of writing numerous very pompous technical legal documents for Courts all over the world, as well as quite a lot of articles for newspapers, magazines and journals when his various bosses asked him to, ("you don't mind doing the article for the "Times" tomorrow do you old boy, I'm off for around of golf with Mr. Justice....."), or ("I'm supposed to do an article on Hungary for Lloyds List, would you mind? Oh it's due to be emailed by 6.00 latest"), the elder brother, having found his tropical place to live, thought to himself "I could write a book".

So he did a bit on his book, researched more and more interesting things and found that writing articles was much more fun and the book would have to go on 'Hold' for a bit. As it was pretty difficult to buy pens, ink, decent paper and things in the tropics, the elder brother found that using a computer seemed more sensible. It also corrected his spelling mistakes some of the time, and as he was a bit dyslexic anyway this solved a lot of problems (his secretaries always having problems with his handwriting when he was a lawyer).

So the elder son of a mother who always wanted to write a book ended up in Pattaya writing articles for all sorts of different people. Some of them wanted to know what it was like to live in the tropics, some of them wanted to discover at second hand the dangers of the Far East, some even wanted articles about legal and official subjects, however some people wanted to have interesting articles about all sorts of things for their websites.

He soon came across other like-minded people and they decided to group together to take advantage of each others' expertise in writing articles "on demand" and in a short space of time, and many people from around the world started seeking out the intellectuals who live in Thailand. This can now be easily done on the internet, and the eldest son of an English lady and his friends do just that. Write articles.