Looks like I'm staying in Phuket another week. Gawain's here, so I'm going to move in with him, play some golf, do a bit more reading. I've got a small pang, a 'you should be doing the difficult thing not the easy thing' which is encouraging me to go to Bangkok or Phnom Penh, but right now I'm pretty certain I'd only be doing it to satisfy a sense of guilt, rather than feeling particularly keen about seeing either place. The same feeling took over in Japan, and I didn't spend any time in Tokyo, but I've got one eye on next month, when I'll be doing a lot of intensive travelling, spending no more than four days in any one place, and usually just one night. The one thing that really has struck me about moving about is the feeling of being absolutely lost when you first get to a new place, a sense of being 'lost in the world' as opposed to lost in a place, and it takes a moment to catch up.

The advantage of my plan at the moment is Gawain's place has no internet, which means I can't distract myself with ringing people from home, email, facebook, blogs, newspapers and the like. It always amazes me how powerful the urge is to keep staring at a screen, no matter what's going on around you, and it's good to spend a bit of time incommunicado.

Max has started a blog! For those of you who don't know, he's my brother Wills' best friend, and a genuinely funny bloke. To find out about meeting Chelsea Davy, his man-love for my brother (flitting between Scrubs and Brokeback) and truly great puns check out max-sittingontheblog.blogspot.com