I've actually been able to blog for almost five days now, but I've felt that to do so would make me feel like I was working on holiday. Yet here I am. I have yet to decide if I'm a geeky loser.

So I'm staying with my friend, Zach, at a resort on Ko Phangan, which is a small island in the Gulf of Thailand. The resort is called The Sanctuary and is seemingly populated entirely by 40-something British hippies. I can't help but feel supremely more culturally relevant when I see them attempting to dance (swaying is a better descriptor) to Slave to the rhythm on the beachfront veranda. However, I do feel slightly uneasy with the fact that I am reading The Insider by Piers Morgan while all around are reading The Road Less Traveled. I'm wondering if I would have been better off holidaying in Magaluf.

I am getting on very well with Zach, which is a relief. Not that I thought I wouldn't, but Zach is one of my best friends and two weeks in the company of a close friend can be testing at the best of times. We are actually having lots of interesting and sparky discussions about celebrity, the human soul, American politics and the fact that Dawn French is NOT a lesbian (like, DUH!?) Thankfully our (my?) more knowledgeable friends are not here to challenge some of our (my?) more outrageous statements.

There is one small problem and that is that the weather has been pretty mixed. While there have been pockets of sunshine and I have managed to begin to obtain the beginnings of a tan, most of the time the sky is completely overcast and I am often finding myself wearing a sweatshirt. When deciding upon Thailand as the destination of my winter vacation back in the summer I had been unaware that December can be severely unpredictable, weatherwise.

Because there is absolutely no-way, no-how that I am returning to the UK in just over a week and a half only slightly paler than I was before my departure, tomorrow Zach and I are going to scour the internet for a "Plan B". Fortunately flights to other Far Eastern destinations from close-by are incredibly cheap, so we have already discussed relocating to Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia or Vietnam. Or just simply returning to Bangkok and spending the days by a hotel pool and the nights in the gay bars in Pat Pong.

Oh yes. I chickened out on doing the fast (which, incidentally, involved the colonic irrigation). I hadn't realised that not all of the occupants of the resort would be fasting and that some would be being normal (i.e. drinking alcohol and eating). So while Zach sits with in a tent, drinking herbal broth with hard-core hippies with names like Moon, Sunbeam and Whale Breath, I can been found eating (organic) cheeseburgers and sipping Pina Colada's in the restaurant.

The other night, while we were both half-asleep, Zach knocked something into my hair which I then collected in my hand and threw across the room. It wasn't until the next morning that we established that the "something" had been a small gecko.

This would not have happened had I had hired a cottage in the Cotswolds.