She who must be obeyed has a variable weekend, and this week it falls on a Tuesday and Wednesday. As is often the case on her days off, we find ourselves in Central. The official purpose is to seek out some seedless grapes which we have previously enjoyed thanks to the reduced levels of spitting required. No joy there, so I compensated by buying a couple of doughnuts. Then there was the inevitable trip to the B2S stationery area.

She who must be obeyed has a thing about stationery, particularly pens. We (she) can’t walk past a stationery store without her just popping in for at least an hour in order to stock up on writing equipment. Of course we rarely write anything other than with a keyboard so the pens just lie around until they get lost or dry out; but having them around the house gives her some sort of comfort and it is a petty vice compared to, say, pearls.

So off she trots into B2S and emerges an aeon with a bag of goodies. Heading back to the car park I discover a previously unvisited area of the Central Mall selling Muji; joy, stationery porn! I can remember my son taking me into Muji in London many years ago and being captivated by the minimalist, cute, very Japanese products. If I still used business cards, they would be in my brushed alloy Muji case; and I still have a working Muji pen somewhere. I explain to she who must be obeyed that, if stationery stores were food outlets, then B2S would be KFC and Muji would have at least one Michelin star, but without the price difference.

So for the second time in a day, a stationery outlet is raided, this time with my full involvement. I end up with a tiny calendar I have no use for, a red pen (ditto) and a little notepad on a ring on which I will never write notes with the red pen I don’t need. SWMBO decides on a nail clipper which is no use to me because I remove my nails with my teeth as evolution or god intended, depending on how much of a gullible fool you are your belief system. Oh, and of course she needs another pen.

Is the typical headline being splashed around newspapers and web pages in a pathetic attempt to attract more visitors; glad I don’t stoop so low.

As is typical in our celebrity obsessed society, the slightest hint of scandal and a horde of wannabe actresses, models, reality TV contestants and professional sluts come out of the woodwork claiming involvement. So when Mr. Tiger Woods innocently popped out for a late night drive and made the unforgivable mistake of driving without shoes (which is a capital offense in Florida) and then bumped into a fire hydrant (which carries the slightly lesser penalty of a fine); it was clear to the world that he was spreading his love around.

I have spent a fair proportion of my adult life fiddling with computers. Not just the “come on you bugger, work” while pounding on the keyboard type fiddling, but also the  “come on you bugger, work” while forcing components into incompatible slots and generating showers of sparks type fiddling. It’s the latter that consumes the most time and costs the most money (two motherboards destroyed in an afternoon was my best effort).

When the fiddling was successful, it was kind of fun. Upgrading your PC so you could play the latest games was satisfying, provided the bloody thing sprung to life after the upgrade. If it did, what a clever boy I was. If it didn’t, I had no idea how to fix it. There is this sick feeling in the stomach when you realise that your collection of wires and components has died, and you do not have the skills to resuscitate it; that you may have to take the mess down to Tuk Com and give it to a spotty teenager who will eventually get it working, but wipe your hard drive in the process, install assorted malware and steal half your memory cards.

Eventually, the pain and grief outweighed the pleasures and I move to a Mac. Nowadays, I don’t need to pound the keyboard because everything just works. I don’t need to rip out components because it won’t let me, and because the beast already does everything I ask it to do at indecent speed. Happy times. So why did my computer area look like this yesterday?"

As you may have gathered from previous posts, I have no love for the pissed-up idiots who rent jetskis and drive them erratically around the bay. But restrict jetskis to a confined space and let them race each other, well I have no objection to that; I might even be tempted to take some photographs.

It’s the annual King’s Cup competition on Jomtien beach and it is a bugger to photograph. Main problem is that you are shooting almost directly into the sun, second problem is that there is naturally a load of spray which can play havoc with focusing. But the camera did brilliantly, ignoring the spray and keeping focus on the jetski. Couldn’t do much about the sun though.

The officials were suitably attired:

Enjoying an MK dinner with she who must be obeyed and the phone rings. It is Nik from the condo.

A cement truck has just driven into the condo.

Well, I didn’t order any.

It is has actually driven into the condo, as in, hit it. Hard.

Oh, better come home then.

So we did, and this was the scene (rather crap phone shot):

Most of the powered craft on the waters around Pattaya are piloted by morons. The jetskis are piloted by drunken morons, and the boats which carry tourists are piloted by individuals who may or may not be under the influence of mind-altering substances, but they are certainly morons. So it is of little surprise that a boat full of tourists heading out from Pattaya to Koh Larn managed to drive head on into a boat heading back from Koh Larn. The tragic result was two people dead and fourteen injured.

I have previously confirmed my disdain for football. But I did not explain why.

When I was a little Spike, my grandfather was a director of Newcastle United Football Club. This meant that I had the privilege of sitting in the director’s box to watch home matches. To a football fan I suppose this would be paradise. To a four year-old boy, it was hell. It was usually cold, the seats were uncomfortable, I was not allowed to bring toys, go to the toilet or eat food. Instead I had to watch more men than I could count, run around a field chasing a ball for what seemed like an eternity; while crowds of people around me shouted words that I got me into fucking deep shit (examples) if I repeated them to my parents. By the age of six I had resolved that I would never watch another football match in my life, and I haven’t.

Naturally I wanted to ensure that my offspring were not subjected to the same misery and to that end, a Scalextric tracks was established in my home before my son was born; before he was conceived actually. Of course, by the time he was old enough to be deemed sufficiently mature to be trusted with a Scalextric controller (at least aged 12), the cars had long since expired and the whole contraption consigned to the rubbish. But the seed was planted, and was reinforced by making him accompany his wanna-be-race-driver father to competitions which involved him sitting around for hours while daddy alternated between visiting the toilet in fear or swearing at the inevitable technical problems. All solid grounding for a young chap.

……Someone asked the author Terry Pratchett. His reply: “Because I don’t have enough space for eight”.