Sometimes, just sometimes, I get it right. Actually, to be fair this wasn't one of those times but hey, it looks good!

Lo and behold my tagliatelle, courgettes, asparagus and ham "thing".

Just as we arrived in Thailand last month, I found that this website was being flooded with blog spam. As you can see below, I have no CAPTCHAs or anything else to stop naughtiness so it was bound to happen sooner or later. Thanks for the timing though, guys.

Despite not wanting to work whilst on holiday, I did grab a few minutes while Daeng was getting her hair done (first priority!) to write a few lines that searched for the presence of certain phrases (e.g. viagra, cialis, etc.) and prevent the comment being saved if any were found. An obvious downside to this approach is that one has to add new words (and delete a whole raft of comments) every so often to the list of 'banned phrases', but I was pleasantly surprised to find that my effective list of these phrases and URLs remains remarkably short.

Upon returning to England, I spent some more time trying to think of a better way to resolve this issue. I still don't really want a CAPTCHA on my site (I don't really like them outside of serious web-apps to be honest, plus there are better ways), wanting it to remain as simple as possible for a friendly passer-by to say hello.

I tidied the hastily added code written in Bangkok and started logging the spammer IP addresses in MySQL in the vain hope I'd see a pattern or two. Not a sausage: it only took a few minutes to amass a few hundred addresses and sadly, against my wishful thinking, they were all unique. It's not the end of the world of course, after all, the problem was "solved" whilst on holiday in so much that I haven't had a spam message left since, but it doesn't stop that grating feeling that I'm still getting thousands of attempts per day that I'd rather prevent.

"Back to the drawing board", thought I, "but not this morning, things to do". In a final act of churlish spite against my attackers, I added a quick line to return a 403 "forbidden" error to spam comment submission requests instead of returning back the usual page (that's my 2000 bytes of bandwidth, godammit), logged off and went about my offline day. That was last Saturday.

I was stunned to come back and see that this simple move stopped the requests instantly. Had I beaten them so easily? No, sure enough they started up again but this week has seen less requests overall, their number slowing yesterday and so far today, many less spam requests than genuine hits.

I'm pretty sure that if they're giving up it's because their requests are failing to register a fruitful spam comment rather than worrying about the returned error code, but the nice upshot of this is that my JAWStats installation no longer treats these hits as genuine (the 403s are logged as errors under the 'status' tab) meaning my website visitor statistics have become meaningful again.

Have I invited a whole world of pain writing this post?

I've told myself off for not updating my blog, consider this my penance. Actually, I've got a few things lined up to write about but I wanted to round off the holiday first.

Thailand has become a lot more expensive than I remember. Local prices seem to have risen by a not insignificant percentage while the exchange rate has pushed everything way up for the visitor. It was gloomy reading to be in a bank and see the sign on the wall showing their interest rates akin to our own here in in England - current account: 0.5%, 30-day account: 0.65%, long term savings: a whopping 1% - it wasn't that way when we left. I didn't understand why the Bangkok Post and The Nation newspapers seemed much thinner until I worked out it was because their usual job vacancy supplements were, pardon the expression, paper thin. The entire globe has taken a cruel left to the chin.

That didn't stop the Mrs make a innocent mistake when she bought a bottle of wine for 34 quid, accidentally miscalculating it as £3.40. Want insult with that injury? It was plonk. Want salt in that wound? Try chrimble's twitter feed the next morning exclaiming that "Tesco has 3 bottles of wine for a tenner!". Great, thanks mate.

It was wonderful to see family again. My sisters-in-law were all resplendent as usual and my two young nephews were predictably loud and boisterous. We waved sister Lek goodbye for two years, she's gone to the University of Washington to continue her climb up the medical ladder though first she is trying to understand why Seattleites wear t-shirts when the sun comes out while she shuffles around in a thick jacket and ear muffs. It hit 44°C during our stay in Bangkok, she won't experience much of that in the Great Northwest.

It was fantastic to return to Saxophone, the jazz and blues bar just off Victory Monument that Daeng and I previously frequented. Hoochie Coochie managed to be even better than I remember them and it was a pleasant surprise to hear Pure Band play too; the last time I saw them they were playing Bohemian Rhapsody at our wedding. Seeing Nacho and Joy in the Bull's Head was brilliant too, I miss those guys.

The real highlight of the trip though - even better than feeding the hippos at Samut Prakarn Crocodile Farm and Zoo - was our trip with perfect friends, Suki and Nooh, to Koh Samet. I've been to a few of the islands before but this was my first trip there and it was well worth the wait. Sitting on a paradise beach for a few days - doing nothing - while others bring you ice cold beer and fantastic food (the laab moo was exceptional) really does something fantastic for the soul.

It was a struggle to leave, it really, really was.

For my first two years in Thailand I refused to go near it.

Why spray water on one's self when us Westerners have tissue paper for such things? Such an ugly practice. Not cricket at all.

But, – it has happened to us all – there was a time I found myself suddenly faced with the ugly dilemma of realising there was no tissue paper in the bathroom post waste disposal. There I was, completely solo in the smallest room in the house, no choice but to pull the trigger and finally "go native".

Oh, how I have missed you, my friend.

Unlike the French bidet, where one feels like a nervous helicopter pilot delicately touching down on a tiny offshore oil rig landing platform, the bum gun allows full control without leaving the comfort of your warm seat. I would love one installed in our place in England but, to put it bluntly, the water would be far too fucking cold. The warm water, jet spray, total-cleansing-experience may not export very well, but it is treat I forgot that would be waiting for us here on holiday.

God, I love Thailand.

It will be very strange to be back in Thailand next week.

I tried resolutely to us prevent leaving there in first place but the politically dire situation back then simply didn't bode well for small businesses like my own: military coups, protests and bombs do not inspire decisions makers to invest in that new website they budgeted for in happier times.

Almost two years on I am elated I failed. It was shocking TV viewing to see soliders fire live rounds into crowds of it's own people, worse still on a street I must have walked down several hundred times.

I'm so far resisting the urge to rant at that stupidity of it all, but fact remains I know close friend Thais who have been offered 800 baht a day to riot, regardless of their allegiance. If you earned 5,000 baht a month doing a dead-end job, for a business which is too scared to open at this time anyway, what would you do? This is not a protest that has grown organically, make no mistake whatsoever who is behind it all.