‘Make sure you write to us as soon as you get there,’ Nweh Nweh said as she handed me her address. She had written it in big round handwriting on a sheet of paper extracted from the middle part of her school notebook.

Thandar was not as prepared as Nweh Nweh. She took out her notebook and tore a sheet from the back and wrote her address balancing on her bicycle seat.

In the utter darkness of the night, we were driving on the highway from Mandalay to Yangon. There were my mum and dad, my uncle and his fiancée, and me. Because of the heat, my family decided to make the journey at night ...

Parkinson’s law, ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,’ is particularly working for me during these weeks of lockdown. Yesterday was a good example …

After the initial gloom and disorientation, I have started to adapt to the new strange world of staying home seven days a week. But things I have never envisaged before have come up.

One of my rituals is doing a 16- to 20-hour flight each way once a year. Every time, I have a firm list of what I would do to spend those hours productively …

Quite often, I have been misled by messages I see in public. Here are two examples.

The survival of gift shops depends on clever shrewd people who can read the mind of their friends and family. Judging by the prevalence of gift shops in the UK, it seems there are too many people like that.

Thanks to my Burmese family, I have been able to show some gushing sympathy to a blundering clueless girl who is finding it difficult to live a decent life.

The older I get, the more creative I become. This is especially true in one area that I have always been good at in the first place: procrastination.

I am especially creative whenever I need to come up with a write-up. Here are some examples.

It occurred to me today that there are plenty of people on earth who will help me spend my time. Just checking my email has revealed how these people can be found in every corner of the globe ...