The book has not quite sunk without trace. Amazon send me a few pence every month, resulting in the need to fill in a tax return this year, which was quite a trauma! I have to fill in a USA declaration that I don't need to pay US tax, but Amazon.com tax me anyway, so my few pence are taxed twice. If I want to reclaim the two dollars I paid our friends across the Atlantic, I must get a tax lawyer. Perhaps I can offset it against gift aid.
As our eyes have turned to other parts of the world, so I have felt far removed from India. Vietnam and Cambodia were great, even if James did get a nasty bug in Dubai, but as we clean out our collection of books in an attempt to get rid of a storage unit (only James could think it a good idea to keep books in a storage unit) I am still bugged by the fact that there is no readable history of South India.
So why not write one, as I have already done half of the work? Not only that, we have several thousand photographs sitting around, a few of which are good. This is what retirement is for, I suppose. There is an urgency in doing things, but not much at stake if it all goes pear-shaped.
I am once again surrounded by dodgy research and my head is exploding with unpronounceable names, none of which translate easily into a Western alphabet.
I have got as far as the outline of Chapter 4 and it still hasn't got very interesting and I have a suspicion that we might need to go on a research trip again.
Back to the Pandayas, Chola, Cheras, Vijayanagras, Ays, Pallavas, Ezhimalas and anyone else who had a fiefdom in South India BCE. There are quite a few!
As our eyes have turned to other parts of the world, so I have felt far removed from India. Vietnam and Cambodia were great, even if James did get a nasty bug in Dubai, but as we clean out our collection of books in an attempt to get rid of a storage unit (only James could think it a good idea to keep books in a storage unit) I am still bugged by the fact that there is no readable history of South India.
So why not write one, as I have already done half of the work? Not only that, we have several thousand photographs sitting around, a few of which are good. This is what retirement is for, I suppose. There is an urgency in doing things, but not much at stake if it all goes pear-shaped.
I am once again surrounded by dodgy research and my head is exploding with unpronounceable names, none of which translate easily into a Western alphabet.
I have got as far as the outline of Chapter 4 and it still hasn't got very interesting and I have a suspicion that we might need to go on a research trip again.
Back to the Pandayas, Chola, Cheras, Vijayanagras, Ays, Pallavas, Ezhimalas and anyone else who had a fiefdom in South India BCE. There are quite a few!
