Pickwick

I was in a similar position some years ago after breaking my neck in a car accident in Germany. Stay calm you have already started the process and soon you will be Tramadol free, it's not easy but will most likely not be as bad as you fear. You do need a bit of fortitude, so be happy with your decrease today, allow yourself some time to adjust to the decreased dosage, but also begin to focus on how happy you will feel when Tramadol free. There are two issues you are facing - the mental and the physical. It sounds like you have the motivation for the mental part - but please be aware that Tramadol does mimic some antidepressants, so as you taper down be aware of your mood and feelings. Your body is physically dependent on Tramadol, the main reason you need to taper down. Unfortunately, this is more difficult here than in Germany. In Germany you can get drops - liquid Tramadol - and you can literally decrease by a single mg. I do not believe liquid Tramadol is available here, though I am not 100% sure - perhaps @Sheryl can advise? That means you are stuck with the capsules (50mg each) or Ultracet (37.5mg). Superficial research suggests you should not split an Ultracet pill in half - again perhaps @Sheryl can advise, that's a pity as it is easier to taper into ever decreasing amounts. But if you have the will - and it sounds like you do - you've go this. You've already started, so well done. Take it slowly - that's the most important thing. Taper will most likely be a bit up and down during periods of decrease. You will have good days and bad. Make a plan - maybe 3 capsules for a week or more, then swap the middle capsule for a slightly weaker Ultracet pill; then go down to 2 Ultracet pills+one capsule etc etc). Stick to your plan, but do not be afraid to stay at 3 pills (or 2 or 1 etc) a bit longer if you need. But also keep focusing on your end goal to keep yourself motivated and determined. I found it a little difficult to adjust but it was not nearly as bad as I feared. Allow yourself to feel happy that you have got to 3 pills already, build your mental strength and then go down to 2. Slowly, steadily and you'll be fine. Best wishes.

Two conflicting answers! @DrJack54 I thought we always had to give the TM6 when exiting?

I last entered Thailand by land so have a TM6 stapled in my (now old) passport. Whilst in Thailand I applied and received a new passport as there were only six months remaining on the old one. I have the extension of stay stamps transferred to new passport etc., - I still have the old (now cut and invalid) passport with TM6 inside. I am off to the UK next month, do I need to show the TM6 when exiting, or just the new passport? I think the TM6 is linked to the old passport but TiT and assumptions are dangerous! Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

May I ask which brand of magnet curtains you have found to be effective?

Do you have a prescription from your home country? I'm asking with flying in mind. Tramadol really helps with my back pain here, I don't take it daily but it's effective when needed and fast acting. Next month I'll be travelling back to the UK via Qatar and would have liked to take some with me but that's not possible obviously. I am not sure I can get a prescription in English out here in the sticks (or if it's possible anyway). I'll be able to get co-codomol from UK GP but it's definitely less effective.

Could you expand on that please? What 'salary' did he want to see? I thought the only requirement was a statement showing 500,000 baht in the account at time of application?

I quoted his speech directly, thank you for sharing it.

Do you think your video is reflective of the House of Lords which you apparently admire so much? Or do you think your good Lord, former head of UKIP, might have a particular viewpoint given his political history (I don't just mean his UKIP history)? This is a man, who during the 2010 general election, as leader of UKIP, embarrassed himself on TV by not knowing what was actually in UKIP's manifesto. You seem to think people who disagree with you and do not want hotels set on fire are all Muslim apologists, when in fact we are simply saying the majority are not extremist terrorists, which your video supports - thank you. Here's a direct quote from your video of the good Lord, who is mates with Tommy Robinson: "Of course my Lords I pay vast tribute to the majority of Muslims in our country who eschew these tenets (radical Islam) and live decent and helpful lives in our democracy."

Er, no. Nowhere in my post did I mention myself or what I would or wouldn't do. When we are talking about a man who actually did something in the real world, I am happy to praise him, without needing to tell everyone that I would have simply done the same - from the safety of my keyboard. Yet when talking about the man who actually did something, you needed to tell us all that at the age of 57 you would have no problem tackling a man with a knife. Why did you need to tell us that? Was your point simply to belittle the bloke who did tackle a man with a knife? Why you need to do that is anybody's guess. Making stuff up again. I ended with 'good for you' - a compliment - because at 57 you are quite a bit older than me. Good that you still feel fit and able, though irrelevant to the thread.

I believe he is a security guard for a tea shop. I am not sure that patrolling the streets of London for any beverage related extremists and knife-wielding, coffee-drinking insurgents, is in his job description, though that's clearly speculation on my part. We are repeatedly told on this forum that the term racist is a meaningless insult thrown about by those on the left. I agree it is a term thrown about too easily, though I have no problem if you have left of centre politics. Good for you. I am aware that Thailand is full of tough farang, many with backgrounds in the special forces.

I'm not sure how saying we have a horrific problem with Islamic terrorism is burying my head in the sand? Did you overlook that part of my post, or did it not suit your hyperbolic reply? That many Muslims also have a problem with Islamic terrorism because it is extremist in nature really isn't a difficult, inaccurate or controversial thing to say. Unless you think all Muslims are extremist terrorists, of course - which clearly some on here do.

No, I am not saying that at all - you are making stuff up.

Why do you say Muslims are usually at the other end of the spectrum? They are victims too. Do you read your own links? Just a few paragraphs later it states: We also show that the majority of Islamist attacks were in Muslim countries and that the victims were mainly Muslims. It also states that 39% of worldwide terror deaths are due to Islamic fundamentalism. So no one is denying it's a horrific problem, but it's an extremist problem. I would suggest that the majority of terror deaths that are not due to Islam - the other 61% - are as equally horrific.

The majority of legal migrants are a net economic benefit to the UK. I'm not sure why you continue to conflate legal migration with illegal.

Let's remember we are talking about legal migration here. The majority of legal migrants work in the NHS and care sector - we have an acute staffing crisis, one of the actual reasons for longer waiting lists etc; or they pay a premium to study at a UK university. The workers have paid the NHS surcharge as part of the visa process and then subsequently help fund the NHS via continued taxation. The students also pay to use the NHS should they need it. Given that the UK has an increasingly ageing population, legal and positive net migration is a necessity to help fund the NHS and the state pension etc. We desperately need working age tax payers, and we desperately need more doctors and nurses. What do you think would have happened to the NHS if we had subtracted 10 million people from the population - people who have paid the NHS surcharge and are continually paying taxes to help fund the NHS? People actually working for the NHS? I appreciate the word 'immigration' is now loaded with emotion. But we need to be able to discern between positive and negative migration, unless you want to scrap the state pension to fund the NHS etc.

I doubt anyone's happy with that. Thugs reacted to misinformation online - there's a common thread there. I note the white manager of that pub said that vast majority of Muslims tried to protect the pub, condemned the thugs and cleared the damage, offering to pay costs. Not dissimilar to the majority of white people, after thugs attacked and damaged a mosque in Southport. There are non-white and Muslim people currently in custody after the riots. Here are just some of their names to start you off with (their non-white mugshots have been widely circulated on various media sites). Adnan Ghafoor Anis Ashfaq Nazam Hussain Hasan Yousif Zain Akbar Faheem Ahktar Sameer Ali Hamza Mohammed Akheel Khan Saleem Khan

Thank you for telling me Nick.

True, which might beg other questions like where's the other £ 1197 billion pounds going, or why do politicians award themselves such generous pay increases consistently that they don't need to worry about electric bills etc.

True, which might beg other questions like where's the other 99.75% of the money going, or why do politicians award themselves such generous pay increases consistently that they don't need to worry about electric bills etc.

No, as I wrote above the figure of £36,000,000,000 is the total of unpaid tax not received by HMRC (in 2022) - through evasion, errors and other criminal attacks (I don't know what 'criminal attacks' means here, this is HMRC's wording). The largest percentage of this unpaid tax (by far) is from small businesses, which is where my confusion came from. I apologise for the confusion and I'm glad you have pointed it out. Nevertheless, that the amount of £36,000,000,000 is 'lost' to HMRC is true and correct. And the point of that big number was to use it as context to other big numbers being talked about. It is true that the UK spends £8 million a day housing asylum seekers. It is also true that this is 0.25% of the UK's daily spend (link below). I appreciate some people may feel that spending 0.25% of our daily budget is too much, but it is clearly not the main reason for the UK's financial problems. (Calculated as a daily percentage of the government's yearly spend of £1200 billion see here: https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/what-does-government-spend-money#:~:text=The government spends huge amounts,to around 45% of GDP)

Would you be kind enough to confirm the statement was just to show balance of 500,000 at time of application (not six months worth of statements as has been reported elsewhere)? Also, I assume when you said you used 'the e-visa system in the UK' - did you mean the general Thai immigration website or via the UK embassy in London (I can't connect to their site to view, perhaps as I'm currently not in the UK). (Sorry if the questions have been asked before - I gave up on the other DTV thread as it had descended into petty bickering about tax, the LTR visa and visa exempt entries.)

Fair enough, I should have worded it more carefully. I should have written 'Unpaid Tax, as reported directly from HMRC, amounted to £36,000,000,000 (in 2022, the last full year of data). https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/hm-revenue-customs

I told you the information was freely available and I have quoted the source - HMRC. Feel free to post conflicting sources by all means. I did add a little bit of simple arithmetic to get the daily number. If you really need to see my workings I did it this way: total annual cost divided by 365 (days in the year).

That's an excellent question. It is very difficult to find solid information on this, partly because the government (or the state, we are not really talking about political parties here) does not want to advertise its methods, which I can understand to a point but it is frustrating. I see the oft repeated phrase warning migrants that if their identity cannot be proven by the usual means then 'less reliable forms of identification will be used'. I have no idea what this constitutes. I know that the UK has readmission agreements with individual countries - such as Pakistan, Iran etc. These agreements are put in place to help establish the identity of an individual without paperwork. Currently, there are just over 5000 'stateless persons' in the UK. That's a total figure, not an annual one, so it relates to a very small percentage of immigrants. I would expect facing indefinite detention for the rest of your life is not a primary goal for many.

I don't agree with the first part of your sentence, though the second part is valid. We are not talking about protesters, we are talking about violent thugs, setting fire to hotels with people inside them and looting the businesses of hard-working British citizens. The second part is a fair concern. Brexit has made this immeasurably more difficult, considering the UK no longer has access to Eurodac. There are laws in place - from both previous Labour and Conservative governments - that allow for prosecution of immigrants who travel to the UK without valid paperwork. If identity cannot be proven at a later date, then the asylum application is failed. However, there have been relatively few prosecutions under the 2004 and 2022 laws, I don't know why. Perhaps the politicians are happy to have a group to take the blame for all their failings, and to deflect from things like the generous pay increases they consistently give themselves, the vasts amount of money given to the businesses of their friends etc., whilst everyone else appears to suffer from low wage growth etc.