From the rough: Recovering from Thailand

Mention to your mates that you?re going to Thailand and its all nudges and winks. Women, on the other hand, react rather differently and simply ask if you?re taking your wife. Well, a friend of mine went with his better half to Bangkok and ended up having to pay corkage! Before I receive a barrage of email asking how much and whether or not it?s tax deductible, I should perhaps explain that that was a joke, albeit an appallingly sexist one.

Anyway, I returned last night from ten days in Thailand and am still recovering? from the flight, that is, not from anything else. I was principally there to investigate the golf courses, you understand but, having flown so far and sensing that you might be interested in that sort of thing, I dutifully checked out what else was on offer. And it?ll come as no surprise to you to learn that, yes, the beaches are excellent.

Since I know for certain that Mrs Agran never reads this blog, I am furthermore willing to reveal that, in the interests of research, I did pay a visit to the fleshpots of Pattaya to see for myself if they were quite as outrageous as I had been warned they might be. ?Shocked? isn?t the word so let?s go for ?enthralled? instead. How I had previously managed to make it all the way into my late 50s without witnessing pole-dancing in the flesh, so to speak, is a matter of both record and regret.

My principal problem was managing to maintain an intelligent conversation, never easy at the best of times, while half-a-dozen nubile nymphs were strutting their stuff just over the left shoulder of the bloke I was chatting to. Why, you might wonder, was I talking to someone of the same gender when there so many lovely ladies about?

I?ll be straight, if that?s the word, with you. This was no ordinary bloke. The nightspots of Pattaya attract a rich variety of people with an exotic range of personal preferences and unconventional lifestyles. And the bloke I was talking to was no ordinary chap. No, he was in fact a fairly rare example of a type you don?t often come across in the UK. He was a self-confessed, 32-handicap golfer.

In my next blog, I promise to expose even more shocking details and reveal the unalloyed truth about golf in Thailand with particular reference to female caddies. Stay tuned.