Jetlag

I hadn't slept enough, nowhere near enough. And those three glasses of red wine had caused headaches well out of proportion with the amount of alcohol they contained, but that was probably because the tiny portion of roast pork in my dinner wouldn't have satisfied a sparrow. And once I had woken up I had to sit for hours on a bus as it stop-started through smoggy crowded streets, then trudge through hundreds or thousands of people shuffling slowly in front of me.

I eventually found my room, and after a few hours of sleep my foul mood lifted long enough for me to realise... hold on a minute... that I wasn't hungover, I was jetlagged! And this wasn't London, it was Bangkok. That was the 414, it was the airport shuttle!!

It all suddenly made sense.

And so here I am no, trying to face breakfast when all my body wants to be doing is what all sane Londoners are doing at the moment - making the always-unwise decision to have a third martini!

Of course, there are thousands of differences between Bangkok and London. You can get good coffee here, for a start. The service in cafes is pretty bad in both places sure, but when you pester waiters in London you just get attitude, but here them seem a little panic-stricken that the foreigner has come up with yet another request! What, a spoon now? their expression seems to say. Hold on, I'll see what I can do. Also, when you're buying illegal copies of DVDs at street markets over here, they're willing to take orders of movies from you, then deliver them to you piping hot from the DVD burner in a couple of hours.

And in London to brown your undergarments as a twenty-tonne bus heads straight towards you, you have to get on your bike. Here, the experience is available on a tuk-tuk, allowing you to mentally draft your will as exhaust fumes blow gently through your hair.

Another thing - they have a huge "Democracy Monument" here. It commemorates the move to a consituitional monarchy in the 30s, and was the scene of massive riots and the deadly put-down by the army in the 70s. It's quite a sight, two massive pillars arcing towards the sky in the middle of a massive roundabout. The effect is qutie beautiful and poignant. One thing. There's a McDonald's overlooking it. Who said global corporations don't have a sense of humour?