congenial lot

it's a kind of reading matter that befuddles my consciousness. so this is how a posh, educated englishman view a pinoy countryside? published in 1987, Playing with Water by james hamilton-paterson offers a glimpse of the dreariness of the philippine bucolic life. i'm not even halfway through the book, but i could absorb the gist and the theme of the travelogue. i know the philippines is fifty years behind in some aspects but it's not as depressing as it is pictured by some foreign writers. ok, the lack of health and home insurance, the prevalence of feudalism, the dearth of clean water are some dodgy aspects of our heartbreaking poverty driven lives. but i don't sense depression amongst our people. i, for instance is irked with the gossip habit of our neighborhood in our subdivision. but that is what keeps the community going so the majority need not focus on the lowly-paid manual labor that they have to plough through in order to eat the next meal. in the uk, there's a generous welfare state but i could still sense a melancholic ambience amongst the denizens. whereas a communal pinoy noontime habit of eat bulaga or listening to the rhapsodic opinions of the radio announcers on bombohanay bigtime already puts a smile on people's faces. we may be poor but unlike the well-indulged west, our gemutlich society is something to behold.