Guderian

The road is two-way, and plenty wide enough except at weekends and holidays when selfish people park so as to reduce the width to just one vehicle. Maybe they should make it one-way on weekends and holidays, the rest of the time there's no problem?

Thanks. If I understand you correctly, then I might qualify for an uplift of 1% per 9 weeks of deferral, like everyone else, but if CPI next September is still running at, say 5%, I wouldn't qualify for that even if I hadn't started taking my pension yet? As my pension will be £8,400/year, that would mean if I deferred taking it by 27 weeks I'd get an extra 3% uplift, or £252, for the rest of my life (but not indexed, of course). On the downside, deferring by 27 weeks would cost me £4,361 in pension income, and I'd have to live until I was at least 83 years old just to break even. Hmm, if that's right then I think this is a clear case of better having the jam today than deferring the pleasure, lol.

I sorted out all the extra payments many years ago and am due to start getting my pension at the end of May this year. The current forecast is for just over £700/month. Not surprisingly, although it's now less than 4 months until my 66th birthday, I've heard nothing from DWP about making a claim. My address with both the DWP and HMRC is in Thailand, so the pension when I get it won't be indexed. Reading some of the posts above, I was wondering if it might be worth delaying taking it in order to benefit from the next indexation based on the CPI in September 2023. To qualify for this, could I start taking my pension in October this year, or would I have to wait until the indexation is applied in April 2024?

The stupid council paid for that vast expanse of empty sand to be dredged from the seabed, it's far larger than beachgoers down there need so I really don't see the problem. Just charge them a fee and give them a licence. There are two options: allow local businesses to make limited use of certain parts of the new beach in a regulated manner, or buy a dozen camels and start 'Crossing the Sahara Desert' tours for the Chinese tourists when they return, lol.

Not really surprising, the RTP has been past its best-before date for longer than I can remember. But when the politicians calling the shots are even more corrupt than the cops, how do you fix things?

That's Pattaya in the background? Where exactly?

Hire a wheelchair for the day and have someone push you there, you'll be let in very quickly.

As my mother used to say when she was treating herself to something expensive, "Why have cotton when you can have (Thai) silk?"

I don't know about the rest of Thailand, but Pattaya is full of tourists. Makes a tear come to my eye when I think back to the quiet, halcyon days of 2021, lol.

Prayut has to be able to keep an eye on that pesky Thaksin and his whereabouts somehow, lol!

Prayut will have his lads polishing their tanks in preparation for the next coup, lol!

Just flash your nazar amulet at them, also called the evil eye, that'll scare them off for sure!

That's one of the businesses in Pattaya that actually had a good pandemic. Remodelled it and the amount of custom seems to have increased quite a bit.

Offer the Mayor a suitably padded brown envelope and the work will be finished in no time, lol.

I've been on to the GF for months to get the bitches spayed, not just to prevent pregnancy but also to avoid the chance of pyometra in the future. I offered to pay for it, but she hasn't bothered and this is the result. Maybe Buddha forbids spaying dogs, I have no idea.

Does anyone know of a vet doing this, or selling the medicine? The dim-witted GF already has 8 dogs that she struggles to feed, and now my favourite bitch is bloating up like a balloon, obviously pregnant. I took her to two vets this morning, the Na Jomtien Pet Hospital and Muang Ake but they're doing the Buddhist mumbo jumbo and refusing to help. Jeez, as if Thailand doesn't already have far too many dogs.

Beautiful dog, good luck finding the owner, I'm sure he or she will be desperate to get the dog back.

I got fed up with the excess of tourists in Jomtien many years ago, not so much the families and sensible ones, but all the people tattooed from head to toe, drunk or out of their heads on narcotics from the time they woke up, aggressive and with no manners whatsoever. I moved around 1½ km inland and bought a house there, it's not a tourist-free area, but there are far fewer of them out here. When I drive to Jomtien now and see the crazy traffic and crowds of people, with more than a few head-bangers among them, I'm very glad I took the plunge and left the main tourist/entertainment/beach area. If it gets much worse in the city, I might look at moving out to the lake, or maybe even down to Ban Chang.

When I was a kid in school in the UK, we were often slapped about the head and other parts of the anatomy. I won't say it built character, but it did teach you to show the teachers some respect and I don't recall it ever causing any long-term damage. I realise this has very much gone out of fashion now, and probably a good thing too, but it must make life much more difficult when dealing with a certain type of pupil.

@newnative since I've got that old photo folder open, here's a few more from the same date, October 2005. This was the view towards Cosy Beach at the time: while this one looks towards the north end of Dongtan Beach, you can see Soi 5 snaking down towards Sugar Beach, plus the Adriatic Palace hotel and Baan Had U-Thong, as well as VT3 under construction which should interest you. while this was the view from the door of my condo. I don't suppose that's changed very much, lol.

I lived in Pratumnak for a year way back in 2005/2006. It was a nice, quiet area with lots of trees and greenery, but even in the year I lived there I could see how quickly nature was shrinking. Back then there was very little up there in the way of entertainment, Cabbages & Condoms and a few bars. The first 7-eleven in the area opened while I was living there. There was no Baht Bus route around Soi Pratumnak so you were dependent on motorbike taxis for getting into town, which was fine until it rained and they all headed home early. There's a lot more up there now, of course, I sometimes take the GF to go for a meal in Dom's, even though I live way off in South Pattaya nowadays. Just for fun, here's a photo of the view from my balcony in Star Beach taken in late 2005. If you know Pratumnak, that's Soi 4 on the right leading down to Hotel Asia. Look at all that greenery, I'll bet it doesn't look like that any more.

I think they've just gone completely overboard on it. The beach south of Wat Bun is now more like a stretch of the Sahara desert, a vast expanse of empty sand. You have to walk quite a long way on very hot sand under a burning sun to get from the deck chair vendors to the actual sea. Compare it with the old beach north of Wat bun, where you can just slip out of your deck chair and a few yards away is the sea, and I know which one I prefer. I guess there was more money to me made my the authorities this way, maybe their kick-backs were measured in Baht per ton of sand dredged up, lol?

You can get a tablet for half that price. But a small screen dumb TV with an Android box would work, I'll have a look.

I went back to the UK in September for the first time in three years. No restrictions at all on the flights or in the airports, and certainly none in the UK. I don't know what it is about the country, but everything seems much more crowded than it does in Thailand. Anyway, in spite of having had four jabs in total (2 AZ and 2 Pfizer boosters, the last one in August just a month before flying back), within a week I went down with a dose of Covid. It was like a bad cold but with no coughing or sneezing, just a fever for a week, and then it disappeared, but it left me with long Covid symptoms for 3 more weeks (brain fog, extreme tiredness and loss of appetite and sense of taste). Unfortunately, my brother is almost 7 years older than me and I gave it to him, and he's had the long Covid stuff for more than 3 months and is still trying to get over it. Due to a pre-existing medical condition, I was on the NHS's list of critically at risk people, so in some ways I'm glad I got it as I know now that it won't kill me, thanks to the jabs I'm sure. Dr. Yong, of all people, should know better than to give this blinkered advice. The vaccines will usually stop you from falling seriously ill or dying, but they do not stop you from contracting the virus. This is not controversial and it's widely published. As I found with my brother, you need to consider others, not just yourself (unless you're a selfish, ignorant gobs hite, of course), and wearing a face mask in the presence of vulnerable people should still be recommended based on my own recent experience. I certainly still wear them, because it's a sign of respect for the Thai people working in shops and offices who wear them. Of course, if you have no respect for Thai people and their ways then don't bother, but then why not go and holiday in Ibiza or Aiya Napa instead, lol.

I used Mot a few years ago, she's friendly and knows what she's doing, but I thought the bill was a bit steep given how little she actually does herself. This year I was going to do it myself, but with the queues at Immigration I think it's at least worth paying an agent to get the residence certificate, and then you may as well let them do the medical certificate, fill in the paperwork, make the appointment and taxi you there and back too for what extra it costs. So I'll be using her again in a few months.