Sixty-one people died at Sanitka on New Year’s Eve. I’ve been to Sanitika many times and I spent one New Year there three or four years ago. I have no idea whether friends or friends of friends were then on New Year. People, get in touch.

From what I can tell, crisp sandwiches are a British invention. They don’t seem to have caught on with the rest of the world, but I’d like to take a minute to sing their praises. In case you’re wondering what crisps are, the Americans call them chips. In my mind, nothing completes a sandwich better than crisps.

There have been a number of occasions when I’ve been eating a sandwich and someone has seen me put crisps in it. That person will usually act if I’ve done something sacrilegious, but then when I let them taste my sandwich, they become converts.

I admit that there have been time when I’ve eaten a sandwich made up of nothing more than two slices of bread and some crisps. These times mostly occurred when I was a student, although when there’s nothing else to hand, a crisp sandwich isn’t a bad snack. However, the best type of sandwich to add crisps to is a sandwich that would stand up on its own, even without the addition. When I go to Subway, I get the meal so I can have crisps to add to my sub.

It’s the combination of the crunch and the extra flavour that makes eating a crisp sandwich so pleasurable.

I wanted to wire some money from my Bangkok Bank account to one of my accounts in the UK. I’d been meaning to do this for a while, so I finally got round to looking into it during my last trip to Bangkok. The MBK branch where I opened my account told me to go to the Siam branch, who then told me to go to the Silom Branch, which is where the head office is. First lesson: go to your bank’s biggest branch.

The Bangkok Bank head office is a huge, confusing place. I eventually found where I needed to be (on the second floor) and the whole process took a little less than an hour. Bear in mind that to wire money from one country to another, you the SWIFT code of the bank you are sending money to. The only problem I came across was that because I no longer work in Thailand, I was only able to wire 350,000 baht between accounts.

Had I been in possession of a work permit then I would have been able to wire the lot. Likewise, a letter from my previous place of work would have done the trick. Though it was a slight inconvenience, I opted to withdraw the rest in cash and change it to pound sterling there and then. I guarded that money all the way back to London, where I quickly found a bank to deposit it.

There was no charge on my UK bank’s side and the charge from Bangkok Bank was only 400 baht (Western Union would have charged something like 12,000 baht). The exchange rate I got was about 52 baht to the pound. I am no great economist, but the value of the pound compared with the baht has decreased by about one third in the last four years. I don’t know if it is going to sink much lower, but I have been reading that the pound is likely to recover. Call it blind faith, but I would rather entrust my money with the UK than Thailand.

Any other experiences then please share them here.

Today is Christmas day and I find myself in the middle of nowhere in the French countryside. It’s freezing cold and about 9 am as I write this. This year, I’ve been in Phuket, Bangkok, Bali, East Timor, England, Singapore and France. It has been a good year in many ways, but it’s had its ups and downs. I hope to build on this year’s achievements in 2009 and take over the world by 2010.

Like the last three years, I didn’t write a single Christmas card for this holiday season. I also didn’t buy any presents, which would perhaps explain why I didn’t receive any.

Last night we watched my brother’s Roseanne boxset. I’m not kidding. He has boxsets of the television show Roseanne. Like you, I struggled to fathom the idea of anyone even thinking of buying such a collection of DVDs, but low and behold, my brother did it. The show is actually a lot funnier than I remembered.

I’d like to wish everyone a happy Christmas, regardless of whether you know me.

I had no idea how I was going to feel setting foot on land in my home country. It was the first time I’d been in England for about four years. I touched down in London at about 7 am last Tuesday. The first thing I noticed was the cold. I’d bought myself a coat from Castro in Bangkok the day before, but I was still shivering and couldn’t feel my hands.

The next thing I noticed was how bloody expensive everything is. It cost me almost 20 quid to travel from Gatwick to Heathrow – an hour’s journey between London’s two major airports. You can’t even eat a sandwich for less than three pounds or use a payphone for less than 40 pence. Trains, buses, coaches, taxis: the cost of travel in the UK is ridiculous. Or perhaps it’s just that I’ve been spoilt in Asia. It’s hard to say.

My six days in England went like this: Gatwick, Heathrow, around London, Sheffield, London, Sheffield, Bath, Heathrow. I was on a mission to catch up with as many friends as possible. I didn’t get to see everyone I was hoping to, but I met up with most of the people I’d been thinking of, wondering what they had been doing.

There was no awkwardness. With each group of friends, we slipped into familiar routines, patterns, habits. It was almost as if I hadn’t been away. People haven’t changed much. They’ve moved on and up, found new jobs, rented new places to live, but for the most part it’s same old, same old.

It was depressing to hear how bad a lot of people are doing financially. Many of my friends are working decent jobs, but they’re still struggling to make ends meet. England is very expensive. The flailing global economy certainly isn’t helping people. Everybody seems to be waiting to leave the country, be it for a short holiday or an extended period of traveling.

I was elated to see old friends, but I couldn’t help feeling that England is a depressing place. It was getting dark at about 3 pm. There was no sunlight. It was freezing cold to the point that I was sleeping in my coat most nights.

A little while ago, I wrote that I had made up my mind never to return to live in the UK. After spending a week back there, I’ve never been more certain of my conviction. Perhaps I’ll be lambasted for saying this, but part of the appeal of living abroad is how comparatively cheap everything is. Saying this, if I go through with a move to Dubai, Hong Kong or Japan, I’ll have to go back to a near-Western existence, but still, I’ll be in Asia (or the Middle East).

Europe has lost its shine for me. I love Asia: the people, the food, the climate, the way of living. I’m digressing, anyway. I was really expecting some kind of reverse culture shock when I was in the UK. It didn’t happen.

I couldn’t get used the food, temperature, prices and all, but being back home was like watching an old movie you love that you haven’t seen for years. On the plane over from Bangkok I watched Home Alone and almost cried. It was a similar emotion.

I soon realized that when I’m in Asia, what I miss most is that special kind of conversation that you can only have with people you’ve known for years. No matter how close I become to people in Thailand, Timor or wherever, the feeling is never the same as with people back home.

It was also refreshing to be surrounded by people who had more to talk about than Thailand and Timor. I don’t know why I don’t find much about Western people in Asia to interest me. It might just be that I’m a cynical git.

Although my nostalgia trip has cost me an awful lot, it has been worth every penny, if only to remind myself about the things I’ve left behind. I’m now in the French countryside visiting my mother, her boyfriend and my brother.