Every single morning since he married Sinjai 24 years ago, he’s made her a black coffee with honey.
“I place it on her bedside table,” he tells Praew magazine, which has the couple on the cover of its 34th-birthday edition. “I’ve never missed a day, except when I travel. She loves it! She says I make a better coffee than she does.”
More than just a wake-up treat, the coffee also a handy way to reconcile (government take note). When Sinjai gets angry, says Nok, it can be a scary experience. “It’s not that she does anything – it’s that she doesn’t do anything!” he says, quivering at the recollection.
If she appears to be boiling under the skin, he brings her a second cup of coffee. “If she picks it up and starts to talk, then it’s worked.”
Sinjai says he’s recently come with another way to soothe her when she’s mad at him. “He sends a cartoon character on the Line application to make up with me, or else he’ll just send me a message, like ‘Are you tired?’”
Yes, that’ll work too.
He seems sure
Thai politicians often talk football to win over voters. Former Bhum Jai Thai Party leader Newin Chidchob, on the other hand, abandoned politics altogether and switched to football. Now a successful club owner, he vowed yet again on his birthday on Thursday that he’ll never return to politics.
“Why should I accept any post when I’m so happy with football?” He’s said it before, but this is the first time he’s said it since his five-year ban from politics lapsed.
“I can hug my wife before the eyes of thousands of people in the middle of the field! Football makes me content – politics can’t give me that feeling.”
His penultimate dream is to see Buriram United in the Asian top five. The main goal: “To see Thai footballers playing in the world’s leading leagues.”