Guderian

The big hardware/DIY stores should have them, I've bought them there before in places like Thai Watsadu or Home Pro. I've bought them in packs of five fuses, as you say, it never hurts to have a few spares around the place. Be careful what you buy, though, as they look pretty much the same but have different amp ratings.

That's where I usually buy it, I like their Aussie, US and NZ fillets. My favourite beef, though, is Argentinian, it has a unique flavour, but I've never found good Argentinian fillet steaks in the shops here, only in the restaurants. I had one in Patrick's in Soi Diana last Saturday and it was excellent, while a year or two back I bought one to cook at home from Foodmart and ended up giving it to the dogs. Villa also has decent steaks, though I prefer them from Big C Extra.

Has anyone seen photochromic sunglasses on sale in Pattaya? No need for prescription glasses, just ordinary 20/20 vision sunglasses but with the light-reactive colour. I bought some from Amazon when I was back in the UK but they're not very good, they don't go dark enough in very bright sunlight.

The picture's probably not much different in the UK. 50K Baht is about £1,200, and judging by all the stories of large numbers of Brits being just one pay cheque away from serious financial difficulties the situation sounds much the same, maybe 60% instead of 88%, but if you looked at the poorer parts of the UK you'd probably be right up there with the Thais. Also, 50K Baht will keep an ordinary Thai family going for at least 3 months, while £1,250 will hardly keep a British family going for even one month.

That applies across the whole city, but it's not quite so simple from what I've been told. To build something over 8 stories tall there are far more hurdles to jump than erecting a smaller structure, but it can be done as all the giant new buildings around the place attest. An EIA has to be carried out and approved, and I gather they're not cheap. Larger buildings will also probably be required to make a hefty contribution towards improving the local infrastructure, and maybe even having a green rooftop like VT7. For a company that can afford the megabucks needed to buy that piece of land, these are small beer, and no doubt they'd want to maximise their returns on the property by building big and tall. Think maybe the Hilton/Central Mall crossed with Copacabana, or a larger version of Terminal 21 with a casino attached.

I've seen some beautiful bargain houses for sale in the Ban Chang area, near St. Andrews School I think they were. What would worry me, though, is that with the plans for an enormous expansion of the nearby U-Tapao-Pattaya-Rayong airport in the coming years, the number of flights taking off and landing will also increase greatly as will the road traffic to Pattaya, presumably mostly along the new motorway. How is this likely to affect life in the town, will the noise from the aircraft become unbearable, and will the local roads be choked with Chinese and Russian buses and minivans?

I wanted to eat in Patrick's steakhouse in Soi Diana last night (Saturday, so very busy) so dialled up a Bolt taxi. They've fixed the map app now and it actually gives the correct route to my house, instead of sending the drivers off down a dead-end street the other side of the village boundary wall, so well done on that score. I went for the Comfort option at 108 Baht and, after a few minutes scanning around, the app came up with a driver on Soi Yume, a long way away but, knowing that things would be busy and slow, I'd started looking early. He took 25 minutes to arrive, but that wasn't a problem as we got to Patrick's just after 7:30 which was fine. Getting back home from Soi Buakhao was a similar story, though quicker as it was almost 10:00, so there were fewer people using the taxis at that time and we got a Ford Ranger in under 10 minutes. So the trick when it's very busy is to be flexible on the timing and start the booking early, allow maybe half an hour for a taxi to actually arrive at your gaff. If by chance one does come within a few minutes, then just be grateful and have an extra beer to kill the time when you arrive wherever you're going.

Last year they either sold or leased a tiny little piece of it to someone who opened a cafe/bar by Dongtan Beach, beside the last building before Pattaya Park, the oddly narrow, white house. I've lived here for 20 years and that was the first change I've seen to that piece of land in all that time.

...and the Bright Side is nothing but road works. Travel in darkness on one side, or sit in endless traffic jams on the other.

Yes, and for a mere 20,000 Baht or so you can get a police escort, too!

Oh dear. Meanwhile, in filthy, polluted Pattaya (well, filthy polluted Dongtan Beach, anyway), lol...

...and what we call Central Pattaya Road was apparently called North Pattaya Road back then.

It's been bad for the last week. When I checked a few hours ago, it was over 160, only a bit better than Chiang Mai which was at the time ranked third-worst in the world, behind only Lahore and Delhi.

This is where they discover that the system is already set-up to send the money collected into a bank account in the name of P. Chan-o-Cha, lol.

When will we get an Immigration chief who promises to make things smooth for all the tens of thousands of expats living here? Did they take him on a tour of the Soi 5 office so he could see the long queues of people waiting outside in the street? If he wants to help, he should be lobbying for funds to expand the office and its staff to deal with the ever-growing customer base. But you can bet the conversation went something along the lines of, "Now what's the best way of squeezing as much money as possible out of all these dirty farangs?"

Still nothing from DWP inviting me to apply for my state pension, but I recently received a Christmas card posted well before Christmas and that took over 7 weeks to get here so maybe it's not surprising. I had a look at the form to fill in and mail back and it's all a bit daunting, far more information asked for than I can remember, so I tried the phone call option to +44 191 218 7777 using Skype. Got through within a few minutes, a lady took my details, went through some security questions, then asked some others about my last employment history. If you don't know the exact date, you just make one up as close as you can to whatever you remember. She then took my UK bank account details and asked if I wanted payments every 4 or 13 weeks, I opted for 4 weeks. After agreeing to a declaration that was it, supposedly, all done and dusted. They'll send me a confirmation letter and also SMS messages to my Thai mobile if need be. Very simple and quick, definitely the way to go. Thanks for the information on making the claim by phone, it's a sanity-saver.

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.