Mr Kosol Tananitporn has an ingenious way of building his wardrobe. He offers you a carrier bag of goodies and all he asks in return is to take a photo of the two of you together and send him a copy, along with a sweatshirt (large size) of wherever it is you come from. He’s so organized that he even has a plastic laminated panel prepared with his name and address on for you to photograph.

Mr. Kosol accosts you in the politest way as you walk into Bankok’s Tha Tien market along the alley that leads directly to his stall from the pier.

‘Good Morning,’ he says, stepping from behind the counter of his cluttered shop and proffering you his hand. ‘Where are you from?’

England, I tell him. I used to say that I’m English but lived in Spain for fifteen years before coming to live in Chiang Mai (as if it made the slightest difference) but it only served to confuse, so I eventually abandoned the pocket history for brevity’s sake.

I don’t know if his patter would be different whatever his visitor’s nationality, but I’m told that his son studied in Scotland, the University of Strathclyde to be precise, as I later find out when he shows me a business card with the hand-written date of 2005 on it. His son has obviously done well, because I’m shown a more recent card that shows him to have risen to the dizzy heights of Vice-president in charge of something or other for a major Thai bank.

Mr. K’s life is portrayed in his business cards. He pulls out the most destroyed wallet I’ve ever seen, with four bundles of cards, receipts etc. all pertaining to a different element of his life. ‘I’m a senior,’ i.e. a pensioner, and to prove it he shows me his pensioner’s discount cards. It slightly shocks me to be told that he’s a year younger than me.

He is enormously well travelled particularly in Europe where he has visited ten times, regaling me with a list of all the countries he visited in each of his trips, and five times to the US, with an equally detailed list of his destinations and stops along the way. I’m proudly shown a photograph of President Obama, Hilary Clinton and friend of Mr. K’s, a monk, posing together when they visited Wat Pho. Mr K tells me he shook President Obama’s hand, and who am I to say otherwise?

Sixty years ago the family business was furniture, forty years ago it was clothing and now, as he stands alone behind the counter of his dried-food stall in ramshackle Tha Tien market, I’m not sure whether he thinks he’s come down in the world. He points to the concrete floor of his workplace and proudly tells me that it is one hundred years old. The age of the dilapidated stall and display space is difficult to tell, although they can’t be much the floor’s junior.

Mr. Tananitporn hands me my plastic bag and says his goodbyes, although not quite as rapidly as I make it sound; there always seems to be something to add. I wander off and in the spirit of making merit I try to find someone even lower on the food chain than myself to pass it on to. Its new poverty-stricken owner might appreciate the two hard-boiled eggs and one-cup packets of coffee, (Mr. Tananitporn’s monk friend’s regular breakfast apparently) but I’m not sure what they would make of a rolled-up calendar and two tiny clay amulets. Perhaps I was throwing away my luck by passing them on, but I prefer to think it would be to the betterment of the recipient.