Guderian

Looking out at the vast, arid Pattaya desert, we could use anything wet that the weather wants to throw at us.

OK, here's some positive news from the IPC. I sent an e-mail to my helpful contact there and she passed it on to her manager to ask what to do about it, and this is the reply she just sent me: "After talking with my manager he did advise me that we have a contract with a postal company which may send post through other countries to minimize cost and to protect tax payers funds. I understand that 18 weeks is not satisfactory at all and the mail should arrive within 8 weeks, this is going to be looked into. If your pension does stop you can telephone our department on +1912187777 and confirm your identity over the telephone and payments will be restarted immediately. Please feel free to pass this information on, also if you need any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact me and I will do my upmost to help."

Yes, or else they will fine you 200 Baht for late payment.

I was just doing some shopping in Mega Home in Pattaya and they have these travellators to get up and down to the first floor where most of the interesting stuff is. I noticed a couple of employees pushing a trolley loaded with heavy tiles, even with wheels they were having difficulty pushing it onto the escalator. I wonder if these machines are specifically designed for such heavy loads, which are far more than the average person with a bag of shopping or a suitcase? If not, then they're just an accident waiting to happen, I think I'll take the lift in future, lol.

You could try Bank Gold in Soi Rungland, by the Magna Carta law office in South Pattaya, but don't expect a great exchange rate.

Meanwhile, the reality of the "ongoing thunderstorms and heavy rain" as shown by the TMD weather radar at 15:00 this afternoon... <whistling>

That's her, though I'm not sure about her having been bought off. It would be interesting to hear her views on the APPG report on Frozen British Pensions.

Don't tell Pattaya City council or they'll send someone up there to chop it down pronto, lol.

Don't be too hard on the Thais, the climate here is much more prone to extremes than, say, the UK, yet the English water companies seem incapable of storing enough rain, or processing effluent adequately to prevent raw sewage from entering the rivers and ending upon the beaches. Plus they allow, even encourage, building new homes on flood plains with the predictable results. I'd say that for a relatively poor country which, every rainy season, has to manage the delicate balance between storing too much water and causing floods, or not storing enough to avoid flooding but then causing a drought if the rains aren't heavy enough, Thailand actually does a reasonably good job. One thing I don't understand is that so many of their reservoirs are simply natural depressions or hollows that they block off with a small dam, yet because of their limited depth they hold relatively small volumes of water. Lake Mabprachan in Pattaya is a good example, why didn't they originally excavate it, say, another 50 ft or more in depth and thereby double or triple its storage capacity? And it's the same thing in many areas, just flood a minor hollow in the ground, never bother deepening it first.

Another possibility if you don't get any satisfaction is to try contacting Baroness Altmann. You may remember her as an effective pensions campaigner who was Pensions Minister under Cameron. She's been elevated to the Lords but is still very active on the pensions front. Contact details are here, be sure to use the correct form of address for a peer: https://members.parliament.uk/member/4533/contact

First I heard of this from SCB was over the weekend when I opened the SCB app on my phone and was taken straight to a screen saying that if I wanted to transfer more than 50K Baht or raise my withdrawal limit then I'd have to use the facial recognition feature. I'm not sure it's worth bothering with, as I've never transferred that much online in any case. For buying expensive electrical goods like a TV, or a bike or a car, I've always used cash, and for the house it was a banker's draft. Is it really worth it?

I've just sent an e-mail off to the helpful lady at the IPC who dealt with my query about the missing pension confirmation letter. If I get anything useful in the reply I'll post it here.

I'm pretty sure it's not the Royal Mail that's to blame as the letters are sent via what looks like the Dutch postal service, postnl, see the envelope below. As always with business mail, there's no postmark so I can only date it by what DWP told me, that it had been sent on March 3rd, and that it arrived at my house here on July 7th. I had some birthday cards from the UK back in May (not sent via EMS) which used the Royal Mail and Thai Post, and they arrived within 3 weeks, not great but both of those services seem to be working reasonably well. So although I can't prove it, the problem appears to be with the postnl service. It's also possible, of course, that the March 3rd date was an internal DWP note, and it could have sat in a physical Outbox in their offices for weeks. It's also possible that however the mail gets from DWP to postnl is a poorly run service and what's causing the delays, we have no way of knowing. What we do know, however, is that the service is not currently fit-for-purpose and one way or another we need to let the DWP know. Maybe some people can e-mail the International Pensions Center via https://secure.dwp.gov.uk/ipc/personal-details while others can try contacting the Embassy or Consulate as suggested by @kinyara, or even do both if it suits you.

I applied for my state pension by phone back in February. No problem, everything went fine and the helpful lady said they'd send me conformation my post. After my 66th birthday I still hadn't received any confirmation so I e-mailed the IPC and around 5 days later got a reply saying that everything was fine and they'd sent the confirmation to me on March 3rd. At the end of June my first full four-week pension payment was made and it seemed about right, a bit more than I'd expected if anything, but I won't query that. Yesterday, July 7th, the confirmation letter from DWP, supposedly sent on March 3rd, finally arrived, it took a bit over 4 full months to get here. This agrees with other recent experiences mentioned here of post from DWP taking four months to arrive in Thailand, and it makes the Proof of Life system both ludicrous and impossible to comply with if they cut off your pension 16 weeks after sending the certificate. I'm going to send them a polite e-mail pointing this out, and I'd suggest that anyone else who's had this experience should do the same. They won't pay much attention to just one complaint, but a dozen or more saying the same thing might get them to take a bit of notice and move from the very slow Low Countries postal service they're using now.

The British system seems more effective, nobody answers the telephone or replies to e-mails, so it's impossible to get an appointment.

They needed to get there ASAP so as to check if he had a wallet full of cash on him, or any other valuables that criminal elements might easily slip away with. Now, what did the report say they found on him? lol

A misleading headline, it makes it sound like the warning is for the whole country, while it only covers 40% of 8 provinces, encompassing roughly 15% to 20% of Thailand's area. A more realistic headline would be: "Thai Meteorological Department issues flash floods and heavy rain warning for less than 10% of the country."

Only foreign criminals? Oh, that's a shame, so they won't be raiding Pattaya City Hall then... lol

Actually, I'd say that it's all the more reason for as many foreigners as possible to leave negative reviews where justified. What are these idiots going to do, fine or lock up tens or even hundreds of thousands of paying visitors who've simply written about a poor experience in the Land of Stupidity? Great, that would be the end of Thailand as a serious quality or family tourist destination. Please do force the issue and let's see what the political ninnies in Bangkok do about it.

Great idea, in no time at all we'll be back to sane exchange rates like 40 THB/USD and 55 THB/GBP.

TAT evidently hasn't noticed that Thailand might be in the early stages of the worst drought in a very long time, with what looks like a very strong El Nino event ramping up. Maybe they should ask the tourists to bring their own water with them, lol. Or more likely they'll implement a 500 Baht 'shower tax' on arrival, the proceeds of which will be used to cushion the retirement funds of senior politicians against the effects of a bad drought. Whatever, if you don't even have enough water to grow rice or sugar cane then the wisdom of begging 30 or 40 million foreigners to come and use what little is left is doubtful.

Here we go again, back to pre-Covid normality, with yet another daily TAT forecast of fantastical impending tourist numbers. <rolleyes>

I swim every day and, unless I'm careful cleaning out my ears afterwards, I sometimes get swimmer's ear, which is just a minor infection in the outer ear canal, but which can be quite painful all the same. I've been using Opsardex for years, it's readily available, cheap and effective. I've never tried using it in my eyes, but it says that they're ear and eye drops. They're not excessively strong so safe to use, if Opsardex doesn't get rid of the problem then best to go and see a doctor and get them to give you something appropriate that's more powerful.

Yes, and the cost of getting a taxi to and from U-Tapao isn't much less than the cost of getting one to and from Swampy. Plus Swampy has regular, cheap bus services from Pattaya (like the airport bus in Jomtien), while I'm not aware of any regular, cheap tourist buses going to U-Tapao (of course, that may be a chicken and egg situation, lol). Then for those of us who like to treat ourselves and fly in business, Swampy has some wonderful airline lounges which we're unlikely to see duplicated at U-Tapao as it will never have the volume of business traffic that Bangkok has, Eastern Economic Corridor or not.

Proof that dinosaurs still roam the planet...