A Pretty Couple.. Who Are They?

This is one of me after a good night out nursing a massive hangover.

... and of me having problems with my computer.

More seriously, can you tell me where these carvings come from?


On my travels through life I love to collect things along the way, things that remind me of my experiences and of the special qualities of the place.

This often means buying attractive artefacts and handicrafts, though it's increasingly dificult to find something that's old but not just made for tourists. Anything that's more than a few decades old usually comes with a high price because the locals know its worth.

Strangely some of the nicest ethnic antiques that I've found have surfaced not in their place of origin but in Europe. As a result they weren't so expensive as nobody knows what they are or where they come from.

In an antique shop in Topsham, Devon I bought a delightful pair of wooden carvings of a husband and wife in traditional dress, at a broccante in Auray in Brittany a baleful red mask and at a car boot sale in Taunton, Somerset a fine tribal mask.

All are old, all are of good quality and none of them is mass produced for tourists as far as I can tell. My problem is I don't know exactly what they are or where they came from.

Of course I do have some idea, but can you please add a Comment telling me their origins. Someone out there knows or can suggest where I could send the images to have them appraised.

They are all beautiful things but they would mean much more to me if I knew exactly what they are.

They might even be worth something!

Andrew Hicks The "Thai Girl" Blog July 2009

Squalor Out... Romance In!

The sign to our new room in Bangkok.

Our building stands tall in a sea of small businesses...

... its grandiose facade hardly seen, squeezed into the narrow soi...

...while directly opposite their neighbour hasn't prospered so well.

From our balcony we can see the lady burning the leaves.

Our local broom seller gives the thumbs up.

Our ice cream man makes a living if he sells out every day.

An old Chinese man gets on his bike nearby.

While some Chinese ladies smile for a passing farang.

A view down one of the many village sois.

One of the food stalls selling noodles...

... and another one selling fried bananas.

An old man takes his time buying garlic.


A Village in Bangkok

It’s hard not to have a love-hate relationship with Bangkok.

It’s so ugly and in your face but at the same time it’s so alive and vibrant. Despite the inhuman scale and harshness of so brutal a concrete jungle, the warmth of its people has to be its one redeeming feature.

Though most of Bangkok looks much the same, an endless sprawl of drab buildings and crowded roads, in fact it's made up of a series of urban villages each with its own charm and personality.

When I’m in our village in Surin I long for the buzz of Bangkok, though now in the chaos of the city I admit that I do miss the peace of the countryside

In my recent book, “My Thai Girl and I”, I wrote about the rented room we stayed in when I first was with Cat in Bangkok over six years ago. Just off Sukhumvit Soi 71, the room was in a block of about fifty bleak cell-like rooms though it served us well enough. What Cat liked about it was that this was Isaan in the city, a place where migrant workers always stay, eking a precarious living so they can send money home for the children and the old folk.

There were Isaan food stalls, busy evening markets that sprang up on vacant sites and friendly faces that always greeted us when we came back from the village. We enjoyed being there but our building was poorly managed and hasn’t seen a lick of paint for many years. We were on the top floor and during the day the lift was closed to save on electricity and this drove us mad. The sheer meanness of the owner was breathtaking so at last after six years we decided to move out.

Just after I broke my jaw and was in a bit of a mess, Cat went down to the end of the Skytrain at On Nut and walked the streets looking for looking for a new room for us. After six hours she found the nicely named "Romance Mansion" on Soi 97 and that’s where I’m writing this now. (Though its taken a few weeks to post this story on the blog.)

When the extended Skytrain is eventually opened we’ll be right by the new Bangjak station and it’ll be very convenient to get into the centre of town. In addition to this, the room is as clean and well kept as the old one was awful and all for 4,000 baht a month, only a little more than we were paying before.

Romance Mansion has two blocks, ours for long lets and the other a regular hotel and it tells a typical Bangkok tale of a Chinese family made good. Surrounded by small commercial businesses and with broken down houses just across the road, it’s typical of the jumble of land uses that you find in Thai towns and cities. Some families make good and others do not.

The pleasant thing about the place is that it’s a part of an identifiable village, this time not of Isaan migrants but of Chinese Thais. Look out the back of the building and you see grey asbestos roofs covering acres of low quality terraced buildings andeven a few leafy gardens. Each of the terraces is five storeys high and only a few metres wide. There are five or six sois of these houses and they all run dead straight for about a kilometer before reaching a Chinese temple and a stagnant canal at the end, so thousands of homes are packed into this cohesive Chinese immigrant community.

Each house is both a home and a business and as you walk down any soi in the evening you can look into the open fronts and see the family in their own little worlds. Some are packed with plastic sofas, display cabinets and a blinking red Chinese shrine to the kitchen god. Others are cluttered with commercial goods and sundry junk, though almost all are full of humanity. Some families sit at a table to eat but most are spread round on the floor enjoying that most precious of social necessities, good and plentiful food, especially for the Chinese the very essence a successful life.

The people generally look Chinese and so this is a scene that can be seen everywhere in South East Asian cities, of hard working families making good in their adopted country, living behind steel shutters that concertina to keep out intruders. These are often closed at night but you can still look in as you go by and see into the intimate lives of hundreds of families.

On the long grey sois stand smart cars alongside the food stalls of the petty traders, generally Thais from outside Bangkok or from Isaan. There’s a full scale wet market and stalls selling grilled bananas, noodles and chillies and garlic.

Bangkok offers jobs for the poor in sweated factories but many scrape a living in the informal sector, selling cooked food, ice cream or brushes. For them it’s a hard life but it gives the streets of Bangkok a human scale and softens the hard edges of the city.

The centres of Western cities usually close down and die at night but Asian cities such as Bangkok stay full of life until late, their village atmosphere often intact. Physically they have little to recommend them but Bangkok is not soulless as its people make it so vibrant and warm a place.

Despite looking so modern, Bangkok is still exotic and I like it for that.

I can stll fall for what used to be called the romance of the East!

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog June 2009

The Death of Durian

Granny and Grandad sit in splendour at the door of our spirit house

Mama, Papa and Cat make offerings for Durian

What exactly are their prayers I always wonder.

Mama makes her offering.



If only Durian were still with us, enjoying the busy life of the family.


Mama has had a dream.

Durian, her eldest daughter who died a few years ago came to her a few days ago in a dream and said she was hungry. Something must be done about it.

In my recent book, "My Thai Girl and I", in a chapter called 'Living with the Spirits' I wrote about how the spirits are all around us in our lives here in our village in Isaan and how we therefore set up a spirit house for them at the front of the house.

I felt it was too intrusive though to write about the death of Durian as this was just too recent and raw to be a part of the book.

Durian was much older than my wife, Cat, and in a family of seven siblings brought up in a poor family in rural Thailand, she was almost like a mother to the younger ones. When she became sick with kidney disease a few years ago, it was a terrible time as the family faced the inevitable parting.

Once a year we remember her and go to the temple, but this recent occasion was something a bit special, a response to Mama's dream.

In the relative cool of the morning,offerings of food were prepared and we then all went out to the spirit house and performed a brief ceremony. As always it was low key and dignified, with emotions kept well in hand, even though the loss of a first born is one of the worst possible traumas. In fact it seemed comforting as they remembered Durian and prayed for her spirit.

How their belief in the spirits coexists with their belief in Buddhism I have no idea but coexist it certainly does. In Thailand the belief in animist gods remains strong and it would be fascinating to know precisely what these beliefs are. Does anyone really know?

The trees and the land have spirits and the spirits of the dead are everywhere. They are much to be feared and so must be humoured with offerings.

As Durian was such a good person, I cannot imagine her being anything but benign. At least Mama Papa now know she will not go hungry and will not again disturb their dreams.

Andrew Hicks


Written from Petersfield, Hampshire, UK. Cat and I have just come back from visiting Maria and Janna in Stockholm and on Saturday will be on the boat from Portsmouth to France. Normal blogging service will be resumed as soon as possible.

The "Thai Girl" blog. May 2009

Water and Weird Words!

Oh for a private joint on that long journey!

Clean environment. Clean Arse!

Koh Chang... the joy of Songkhran.

Big farang... pipsy bucket.

Motorcycles are fair game as targets...

... and only rarely get away unsoaked.


Since breaking my jaw, I’ve spent quite a lot of time recuperating on blue inter-city buses.

I couldn’t stray far from the hospital in Bangkok but we decided to go to the lovely island of Koh Chang to escape the water festival at Songkhran, the Thai new year. Being stuck in the city for five days constantly getting soaked wouldn’t be much fun and it made much more sense to get soaked at the beach.

From door to door it was about an eight hour trip, including taxi, bus, truck, ferry and finally a pickup to Jinda Resort on White Sands Beach. Twice we’ve had to go back home to our Surin village for a few days before returning to Bangkok to have the metalwork taken out of my mouth and for root canal treatment of my battered teeth. That’s a good nine hours door to door, all of which totals about fifty hours on blue and other buses.

Meanwhile with my jaw sewn closed I’ve been unable to eat anything other than liquids and it hasn’t been easy. If only the ‘Private Joint Buses’ of the BMTA, the Bangkok Mass Transit Association (??) really allowed you a little something to help you relax along the way

In out hut on the island we had a very entertaining shower room.

Bathrooms in England sometimes have carpets but Asian loos are always awash with water. This one had a large concrete water tank, empty except for some litter and frog. Next to the WC was a small ceramic sink for post-evacuation cleaning purposes and of course a shower. This was at the highest point of the room so that every time someone showers the whole place floods and your feet are always wet whenever you go inside. People call it ‘the wet room’ and for good reason.

The most entertaining bit though was the sign on the wall.

In most beach huts the latrine drains into a sump in the ground, so they ask you to put used tissue paper in a basket by the loo. Flushing it down the WC blocks the plumbing and fills up the sump which then has to be pumped out.

Westerners need to be told the rules and the sign on the wall had a picture of the special hose used for anal ablutions, together with the following words.

“This device is use for wash your behind when finish on toilet, and paper to dry for water. “Clean environment.”

So nicely put. Clean environment, clean posterior!

And talking of loo signs, our Bangkok bus pulled into the same new inter-city mega-loo this blog reported on some months ago… the one offering a choice of three different sit-down stalls with a huge sign saying, “Pregnancy. Deformed. Senility”.

Somebody must have seen this blog because it’s been changed and now it says “Pregnancy. Disability. Senior Citizen”. Shame really as I much prefer the original!

The best shower though was during the Songkhran festival. On Koh Chang as everywhere they were throwing water in the streets and no quarter was given for the grey haired, for cameras or for motorbikes. The roads become wet and greasy and when water is thrown full in the face of a passing motorcyclist, there are bound to be accidents.

It’s all good clean fun and there were plenty of farang holiday makers joining in. Frankly though I was relieved when it was all over and the horizontal rain came to an end for another year.

Blue buses too are a memory and instead it’s been twelve hours on an EVA Air flight to London. Now we’re in Petersfield, Hampshire, and Cat’s just emptying the dish washer so I’d better stop and go to help.

Yesterday I bought yet another liquidizer and I have to take paracetamol before eating so I’m not out of the woods quite yet.

Ever tried liquidized muesli? It’s not as bad as you’d think!

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog May 2009

My Jaw Meets Jesse Jackson

It says, "Peace. Jesse Jackson"

My mop handle and Nan's golliwog.

Stuff what's been in my mouth for the last nine weeks.


Some Jaw-Stopping Name-Dropping

“You must be tired tonight. It’s your third presentation today,” I hissed through gritted teeth last week to the Reverend Jesse Jackson in Bangkok. “And I’m so sorry I’m treating you like a pop star.”

“No I’m just fine,” he replied. “Not tired at all, really”.

Jesse Jackson was at the FCCT in Bangkok, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, giving us his third presentation of the day and he was about to start his talk.

So recognizable as he strode into the crowded room, pressing the flesh with all around him, he was tall, physically impressive and looking remarkably good for his years, though he must surely have been very tired indeed.

On a tour with the International Peace Foundation’s “Bridges” series and talking on the subject of “building a culture of peace and development in a globalised world”, this was a man who “over the last forty years has played a pivotal role in virtually every movement for empowerment, peace, civil rights, gender equality and economic and social justice’.

What a life! Long before this he should have been totally exhausted by it all.

I just happened to find myself at the table next to him and he was signing autographs on paper napkins. I’ve never demanded an autograph before but this time I did and the only scrap of paper I had on me was a card for my book, “My Thai Girl and I”.

It says, “Peace, Jesse Jackson”, though it’s almost illegible. I know it says that because it really was him and it really is his autograph.

He must have given this talk many times before and he ranged widely across his work with Martin Luther King and told us of the long road that’s been travelled in the United States from lynch mobs and segregation to universal franchise and equal rights, finally culminating in the election of Barack Obama as president.

Born later or in different times might Jackson too, twice a presidential candidate, have reached the highest office? All I know is that it was fascinating to hear so major a figure speak on these issues, who has been at the center of things for so long.

He was of course a charismatic speaker though balanced and level with no histrionics, and nor did he wear his religion on his sleeve. He held my attention throughout a long speech, though he didn’t have the oratorical powers of an Obama. Indeed sometimes his diction was unclear and I couldn’t always catch what he was saying. Nonetheless it was a memorable evening, not least for my realization what a huge vindication the election of the new president is for ‘African Americans’ as he called them.

Obama’s election of course means so many things… that the under-privileged son of a single mother could make it so far, that his startling intelligence did not sink his chances in a society with anti-intellectual tendencies and that at last America has a leader with a broad world view are blessings enough. That he is also half black is just the icing on the cake.

While his predecessor, the grinning puppet of the neocons, represented the worst of America, Obama is his antithesis and represents the best, whether half black or not.

At the end of his talk, Jesse Jackson still had the stamina to answer questions and spoke volubly in the way politicians have that makes you forget the awkward question they’re supposed to be answering. One question seemed to stop him short though.

A young American stood up and asked whether, given the sensitivity with which the issue of racism treated in the US, it is a shock to him that in Asia and in particular Thailand there can sometimes be a total lack of awareness of such issues.

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I get your point,” Jackson replied.

The questioner tried restating his question but all he got was a politician’s answer. Perhaps Jackson had no experience of such a thing in Asia or perhaps he was just being polite, trying to build a culture of peace. In fact he hardly mentioned Thailand throughout and its internal conflicts not at all.

In the US ‘political correctness’ has become so very important. Was it a senator who had to resign because in a speech he used the word ‘niggardly’, no matter that the word bears no relation to the dreaded ‘n-word’?

On Koh Chang recently we had the rare luxury of a television in our wooden hut and I watched a BBC interview with Whoopie Goldberg and she and the black female interviewer came onto the subject of colour prejudice. Goldberg argued strongly for being open about such issues, confronting them head on and not relegating them to the realms of mere political correctness. In this context they discussed the sheer odium of the ‘n-word’ and agreed that it too should be confronted. Ironically neither of them could bring themselves to say the word itself but stuck with calling it ‘the n-word’. With wounds so deep, confrontation goes only so far, it seems.

However, “Black is beautiful!”, the very best of slogans confronts the issue of colour. And it’s the best because it’s proud, unashamed and true. After living for many years in Africa, I know that black skin truly is beautiful so why the euphemism of ‘African American’ which so awkwardly avoids the mention of colour?

Even so, like the questioner, I too am sometimes shocked in Asia by occasional insensitivity on racial issues. I remember once in Hong Kong I called DHL, the courier company, to tell them I thought their advertisement showing that even African natives with spears could receive a parcel was highly offensive. They didn’t begin to understand.

In Thailand I find the leading brand of mops, “Black Man” with its logo of a fuzzy black head and the slogan, “Think of Cleanliness, Think Blackman” highly inappropriate. (See www.mop-bm.com). At a houses and homes trade exhibition in Bangkok, I put this to a nice public relations lady on the “Black Man” stand. She knew exactly what I was talking about but said the brand was so well established with loads of goodwill that they couldn’t possibly change it even if it was offensive to a few non-Thais. When exporting mops, however, they used a different brand name, she said.

Do Thais think that different rules apply here, that they’re on a different planet, or do they not care about giving offence? You can buy Negro brand hair dye in the local shops and Darkie toothpaste with its get up of a black minstrel in a top hat only tweaked its name to Darlie a few years ago.

As a child I was reared on stories of the idiot black child Epaminados and collected golliwog stickers off pots of Robertsons’ marmalade, and yes, I think that these post colonial racist assumptions were contagious. Golliwogs in England are now consigned to the past, but not yet in Thailand. In out house, little Nan has a charming Golly attached to her mobile and while it’s pretty harmless and she has no idea what it represents, it does suggest that the point put to Mr Jackson at the FCCT may have some substance to it.

Black faces are great for marketing as they make teeth look so white, even while I was hissing through mine that night nine weeks after breaking my jaw, my mouth still wired tightly closed.

My smashed teeth were turning yellow with plaque so I went to see a dentist in soi 71. As I gazed into her eyes above the white mask as she bent over, examining my mouth, she said to me quietly, “I see you’ve got a fixation.”

“How ever do you know that?” I nearly blurted out, before realizing she was talking about the intramedullary arch bar fixation in my mouth that’s made my life a misery for so many weeks.

“You’ll have to get it taken out before I can do anything useful for you,” she concluded.

So that Sunday I had the metal work taken out of my mouth and it was one of the more horrible experiences of my life, proving perhaps that I’ve had an easy ride so far. It took a three hour operation under anesthetic to put the fixation in and an hour or more without any pain killer to take it out again.

Imagine your worst of all nightmares where your teeth are smashed and falling out, when your mouth’s full of barbed wire and blood and you’re chewing broken glass. It was just like that but worse.

The arch bar across the upper and lower teeth for tying my jaw closed were secured with a tightly twisted wire around almost every tooth and each of these had to be cut with wire cutters. There was a sickening crunch like a tooth being smashed every time a wire was severed and then the broken wire had to be pulled out through the gap between the teeth. It felt as if it was taking pieces of gum and broken tooth with it.

My mouth was full of cut wire and of broken arch bar and spitting out a mouthful of blood and mucus, I realised there were still some bits of wire inside. Yes, it wasn’t much fun.

That was my small torment, but imagine how it must be to have a lynch mob hunting you down. They deliberately smash your face, baying for your blood and then they string you up.

I’ve been lucky in my life and fortunate too to have heard Jesse Jackson speak, a man of stature who has travelled so far in the fight against racism. And all I did at the FCCT was to treat him as just another celebrity and ask for his autograph.


Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog May 2009

Thai Girl. Treasured or Trashed?

I’m pleased to report that my recent book, “MY THAI GIRL AND I” has sold out and been reprinted already and my novel, “THAI GIRL” has just been reprinted for the seventh time.

I also note in the press that Dan Brown’s plodding novel, “The Da Vinci Code” has sold 51 million copies which is more than the total sales of both my two books together.

It’s taken him six years to crank out a new novel whose name I forget and the first print run is said to be five million copies. Unfortunately, because of storage problems in Bangkok my print runs have to be smaller than that.

On 1st April 2009 I posted on my blog at www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com a glowing review of my own new novel, “The Kandinsky Lode”, a work in the same god plod genre as all of Brown’s.

The review describes the story of how Desmond Jones, a suburban accountant in southern England is chosen as God’s intermediary on earth to reveal to mankind that Christ’s second coming has already happened. Desmond learns that God has sent his only son to confer upon us the advanced data processing capacity He uses for judgments at the Pearly Gates.

God’s son on earth at last is revealed as none other than Bill Gates, now in philanthropic mode, and the review of course is an April Fool.

On 17 October 2008 in a blog called, ‘Dear John, I’m Confused’ about how often reviews of commercial fiction are utterly ridiculous, I gave some examples from the ‘pseud’s corner’ of quotes on the inside covers of a couple of novels by John Irving and John Grisham.

Like most things where there’s big money sloshing around, the power relationships in publishing are fundamentally corrupt. Reviewers seek to flatter a major author or want to get themselves or their journal quoted and it’s their grovellings that I parody in my spoof review of “The Kandinsky Lode”.

Writing can be a solitary calling and all authors crave feedback. Before the internet it must have been lonely indeed and I’m lucky to have had loads of feedback on both my novel, “Thai Girl” and my new book, “My Thai Girl and I”. They had many reviews in the Bangkok press, mostly positive, but there was sometimes a sub-text I did not always understand.

One reviewer of “Thai Girl” met me for dinner with his photographer, praised the book to the skies and then wrote a review that rubbished it. Happily the magazine’s publisher distanced himself from the review in the next issue and the reviewer no longer had a job, but it alerted me to the strange world of book reviews.

I therefore value more highly the many personal messages I receive, which I always post on the Readers Forum on www.thaigirl2004.com, as these come without any such baggage. Sometimes there are some critical comments but I need these too and they’re all there on the Forum, as well as some positive quotes from the media in the website’s Introduction.

A place I’ve been less well treated has been the members’ forum on www.thaivisa.com. What happens is that somebody asks on the forum what books to read about Thailand, “Thai Girl” gets a mention and then someone else piles in, not with informed criticism but with simple abuse. Things like, “Thai Girl” is the worst novel I’ve ever read,” and “I bet Mr. Hicks has never even been to Koh Pha Ngan”. (Actually the book is set on Koh Samet.)

As their user names are anonymous, they can be as outrageous as they like, but I do wonder why they bother, especially as it’s often clear that they haven’t even read the book. Towards the end of “Thai Girl” there’s a passage where Ben’s backpacker friends slag off Anglo/American foreign policy in Iraq and ridicule the ‘War on Terror” and I wonder if this could have given offence, though even that seems unlikely.

Usually somebody on the forum comes to my rescue and one member, himself an editor and writer, said some very nice things indeed in his post which reassured me on one point.

When I was writing “Thai Girl” I was worried that the plot might be a bit thin. In the story young Englishman, Ben, comes to Thailand and falls for beach masseuse, Fon, has a frustrating time and then flies home again. Nobody gets eaten by sharks or is killed by snakes in a locked Mercedes and there’s not even a tuk tuk chase.

I was thus relieved when my saviour on the forum (after some negative comments about the dialogue) had this to say.

“I read THAI GIRL off the back of a Haruki Murakami book... However, I was quickly drawn into the story and this is where the author's talent really lies: he has a natural gift for narrative. No matter that there's no strong plot… Hicks' raw talent for storytelling keeps the reader turning the pages and this is the prime directive in any kind of writing.

The real heart and soul of this book lies in the character of Fon (the 'Thai girl'). Beautifully observed and drawn, a striking metaphor for Thai culture itself, it is through her that Hicks adeptly explores the central theme of most books of this genre: the difficulty, frustration, pain and, perhaps ultimately, the futility of the foreigner trying to come to terms with the mercurial nature of Thailand. It is to his credit - and I believe displays and reflects the respect he has for this country - that he chose not to use the hackneyed milieu of the Bangkok bar scene as a vehicle to achieve this.”

I was truly grateful to him for so strongly refuting the psychos.

My problem on a public forum like Thaivisa is that I cannot act as my own advocate. If I could, I’d have quoted a brief review posted on www.khaosanroad.com by someone called Anne Merrit. I do not know her from Eve but she’s done what no author can ever do for their own book and that is to sum it up in a few words.

This is what she said about “Thai Girl”, the story of Ben and Fon.

“What comes across as a couple wrapped up in mind games will get you thinking about power games in general, and how gender, age, ethnic and economic differences all factor together. The endlessly complex characters will leave you guessing until the very end. Feminists may find this relationship hard to handle, men who date Thai women may find it instantly relatable. Regardless of your opinions on the falang/Thai romance phenomenon, Hicks’ honest dialogues and relatable themes make this an absorbing read.”

I particularly value criticism of this sort as it’s specific and has no agenda, unlike a few media reviewers and forum critics of the abusive kind. She puts it so well and I couldn’t ask for anything nicer that this, so I’d love to know who she is.


“Thai Girl” was described in a glossy magazine as, “one of the top selling English language novels ever published in Thailand”. I can thus dismiss the psycho critics and my fear that the plot might be a bit thin has long disappeared.

I know he got there first, but it’s reassuring too that William Shakespeare got good reviews for his earlier version of the story.

For that’s pretty much what “Thai Girl” is… a tropical “Romeo and Juliet” without the coffins.


Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog April 2009

My Google Gurgled... Why??

Every blogger wants their stuff to be read and that means maximising visits to the site.

My blog has more than 200 articles posted on it and you folks out there do seem to enjoy it. But suddenly the river of hits referred by Google searches has dropped to a gurgle. Why could this be?

I used to get lots of hits from Yahoo too but these suddenly fell away to a trickle and then last week my Google hits as good as stopped. Previously I was getting a total of 200 hits a day but that has now halved.

Previously if I did an appropriate Google search, my Blogspot would appear very high up but now it only does if the search is vey specific.

Can anyone tell my why this might be and if there's anything I can do about it?

Other bloggers have lots of little icons all over their blogs, I guess to maximise traffic but I have no idea what I should do to this end. Again I need help!

I track the referrals on my magic 'sitemeter' and it could be that it is simply failing to record referrals that are actually being received... though I think that's unlikely.

To me it's a mysterious world so can anyone enlighten me, please?

Thanks,

Andrew.