If it’s good enough for The Pattaya Ghost, it’s good enough for me. No, not half the female population of Pattaya, but an Apple Magic Mouse. Having previously poured scorn on the idea of ever owning another crappy Apple mouse, I played with the new offering in a shop and rather liked it. The Ghost then confirmed it was good, so I added one onto the end of my order for my LCD monitor.

And I do like it. I glides nicely over any surface I choose (especially cats) and has a pleasant heft to it thanks to the metal body. The buttons have a solid click to them and the “scroll anywhere” feature is brilliant. Like The Ghost, I wish there was more I could do with my fingers (stay on topic folks), but expect there will be updates to facilitate that. Nice one Apple, the Logitech is in the drawer.

Of course, I had to photograph it. These are my initial efforts:

Finished processing the shots from last weekend’s Kuppa Trophy polo tournament. Here are some that I like, maybe you will like them too.

Called to Bira today to take some photos of a professional racing biker. Regret to say I can’t recall his name, mainly because nobody told me what it was, but there was much fawning and doe-eyed admiration going on; so I assume he is quite good. The plan was for him to take Graham’s bike, and he ended up borrowing Graham’s race suit too, because he did not bring his own. Suddenly the reason for wanting the photos became obvious. Once the guy was suited up, he was, to the casual observer, Graham. So now Graham has a collection of photos of what appears to be him riding his bike in a perfect racing position.

Like this one:

Much celebration over on Billy’s blog where, after a lifetime of trying, he has finally persuaded our previously mutual employer that he should be released into the welcoming arms of early retirement. Well done that man, but let me assure him that retirement is not just the carpet slippers and the hours spent staring blankly into space that you might be looking forward to. It’s much harder work than that.

It’s been the usual week of mayhem and pillage in fun city. A man shot dead while fishing at a lake. A bomb at a construction site which critically injured a worker. Suicides, drug busts, a body washed ashore, and a law office attacked by gunfire (I can sort of understand that).

So, plenty to keep the local cops busy, as well as the usual activities of extorting cash from motorists and sleeping next to their bikes. Luckily they had the help from Police Colonel Gitipong, who holds the title of “deputy chief of special investigations for police region 2”. He mounted a massive operation yesterday and raided a snooker hall. Was his elite team of storm troopers there to arrest one or more of the many murderers, thieves, rapists, lawyers or drug runners at large in this town? Nope, they swooped upon a slot machine which, horrors of horrors, was rigged to pay out real money. This is illegal and is a crime that should be punishable by death.

Five months since I last reported on this magnificent development, so thought it was time for an update.

This was the scene this morning:

The last couple of days have been windy. Really windy. Like smallest sail you can find windy. And it has rapidly dawned on me that I am not as fit as I used to be. Truth is that I have done very little windsurfing since my accident a year ago, and what I have done has been in reasonably benign conditions.

All this is an excuse for the panting, wrecked individual that crawled out of the sea yesterday. She who must be obeyed was there to video me collapsing onto the beach, a piece of footage which will never be published to a wider audience if she knows what is good for her.

And of course high winds, choppy seas and an unfit sailor can only result in one outcome; an accident. My lovely new board was propelling me at a healthy pace across the water, until one particular wave launched the front of the board into the air, the wind inserted itself below the board, and the entire contraption, including me, was airborne.

The normal reaction to this event is to bend the legs, sheet in the sail and perform a neat jumping action before landing safely. But my reaction was to think “I don’t know where, and I don’t know how much, but this is going to hurt”. And it did. My head hit the mast, my legs hit the boom and my arm hit the board. The first two resulted in an ache for a while, but the latter was more messy.

New windsurfing boards have their decks treated with what is known as “non-slip”, which means sprayed-on, industrial strength sandpaper, extra coarse grade. This is great for giving grip to your feet, but it is also very effective at removing all the skin from other body parts should you be foolish enough to drag them across the board. And I was, and if you bother to look at a recent tweet you can see the result, a bit of a bloody mess which is refusing to stop being bloody; yuk

Never mind, the sun was spectacularly elegant on the way down to the horizon this evening.

I’m a Northern boy. Never lived south of Teesside in the north east of England, and spent my last eight years in the UK in the chilling wastes of Aberdeen, where shirt sleeves in the depths of winter were de rigueur, and hypothermia was something invented by people south of the border.

But living in Asia for more than twenty years seems to have changed me. On our recent visit to Tak it felt decidedly chilly in the mornings, such that I was forced to wear a warm jacket that I had brought along for emergencies. And this was an emergency, it was bloody freezing.

So I was somewhat surprised to check the thermometer and find that the temperature was 19 degrees Celcius, slightly warmer than the hottest day ever recorded during an Aberdeen summer (a season which lasts no more than a week), and a temperature which would have had us stripped to bare essentials and consuming gallons of cooling ice cream, rather than seeking refuge in a warm jacket, whimpering like a puppy and sipping hot soup for warmth.

That’s how many photographs I have taken over the last ten days. Still have about 1,500 left to process which will take the next couple of days. But she who must obeyed has suggested that what I need to do right now is go out for a draft beer; she is so wise sometimes.

Buffalo racing is a very Thai sport and I was hoping that my photographs would be able to capture the very Thai-ness of the activity. But some of the shots were ruined by product placement, in this instance by “Manchester United” which I understand is some sort of club whose purpose is to play an obscure game called “football”.