Sak yant back piece with two tigers

You will not believe what Mr Tolliver told me over the porridge this morning. He had been up in the attic with the Coopers' boy, mending the skylight, and came down with a story about a monk in Chiang Mai who sat him on a low stool in 1962 and worked over him with a bamboo rod dipped in soot and holy water. Each word of the script, he says, is a prayer against drowning. He drew the tigers for courage, one crouched on either side, as if they meant to leap off the man and into the sea.

I told him we have no call for heathen nonsense in a respectable house on the front, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the stairs. Then he told me the rest. The little square at the bottom is called a yantra, and the monk drew it freehand with his eyes half shut, because a line that is measured is a line that is dead. Mr Tolliver says the sea took his two brothers off the Dogger Bank and left him, and he has never once been stopped by water since.

Mrs Penhallow at the desk says the guests have started calling him the Tiger of Room Four. I have decided to be fond of him. Yesterday he asked me to read out the script from an old photograph he keeps in his wallet, so he could hear what the prayers said in English. I stumbled over half of it, and he corrected my pronunciation with great patience, and I found I was not frightened of the ink at all, only of how little of it I could read.

Write back soon and tell me whether the Coopers have finished the new roof.

Yours, Elsie