The Adventures of Penny & Sir Geoffrey
Steve Rhodes wrote this book describing the encounter between his daughter Penny and Sir Geoffrey many years ago. It was then translated into Thai but was put on the back burner for eighteen years when Steve’s literary career stalled due to a rush of other commitments.
It languished in limbo until 2008 when Steve met a small group of art students in Bangkok led by Tewakorn Ketnuam and Chanaporn Chairsumrej. They worked together to create the art work to illustrate the story.
The Sad and Sorry Saga of Sir Geoffrey Hill-Pig Smythe was finally printed in Bangkok in November 2024, and Steve donated 1,000 copies to Wat Tam Doi Toan – a meditation temple in the Chiangmai province of North Thailand that is deeply involved in community activities.
The abbot of the temple Phra Ajarn Nawee Piyadhassi and a group of volunteers, distributed it to schools and libraries in remote villages as part of their campaign to encourage Thai children to read more, receive a better education, and become absorbed and integrated into today’s modern society, while still remembering the old adage: “Past ignored, Future ignoble”.
The Sad and Sorry Saga of Sir Geoffrey Hill-Pig Smythe is ideal reading material for students who want to become fluent in both English and Thai.
Late Starter
My life is full of mixed blessings. One that stands out is the birth of Penny, the heroine of our book, which happened when I reached the ripe old age of 63.
This is a time when many men take to the golf course or spend their days trying to catch fish, but in my case, I had the awesome task of becoming a parent.
I read somewhere that children have very little recollection of their lives until they reach the age of roughly five, so I decided to chronicle her adventures on video tape and store the end result in a time capsule so that she could look back on it in her adult years.
The result was The Renata Files, a sprawling saga that blew out to SIX EPISODES!! It was bigger than Days of our Lives and kept me occupied (off and on), for quite a few years.
Movie making is a time consuming business. At first Penny and her mother were really keen to see the finished movies when they rolled off the computer’s assembly line but over time enthusiasm waned, and production of them ceased upon the conclusion of Episode number 6.
Hopefully she’ll enjoy them when she unlocks the time capsule, by which time I may well have taken up residence in The Next World.
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