Spike Tennyson

A long time ago (1998) in a land far away (Thailand), I was assigned to work in Bangkok.  A challenging job in an exciting destination where I spent an unhealthy part of each workday in traffic jams and an unhealthy part of each weekend pursuing local ladies online.

The latter resulted in a meeting with a lady in Starbucks. The glamorous location obviously impressed her because she eventually agreed to marry me.

As I now longer needed to spend my weekends being pathetic on a keyboard, I bought a condominium near my windsurfing club in Jomtien; and when my assignment ended in 2004 and I was given early retirement, we moved to the condo and I spent my days windsurfing and crashing model aircraft while my wife managed a branch of Black Canyon,  a local competitor to Starbucks which differentiates itself by selling drinkable coffee rather than brown sludge.

After crashing too many model planes, I decided to change hobbies and bought a camera. Then I bought more cameras, And lenses.

Soon I was carting 15kg of camera gear around on my back, had paid jobs photographing polo horses and racing bikes, and even ended up in Bangalore shooting a motor rally.
Partly as a medium to  share my photos and partly as an encouragement to write, I started what used to be called a blog (maybe still is). 

Jomtien is close to Pattaya, a city with a notorious reputation for seedy nightlife, and thus an ideal candidate for both photos and words. So the site was called Pattaya Days.

Launched on the 24th March 2008 with a hard hitting piece about my coffee machine, Pattaya Days became surprising popular (from my perspective), with more than 5000 daily views and many regular commentators on the posts,

I updated it for more than eleven years, with a final post in December 2019, just before we moved to the UK.

It was a valuable snapshot of my life, writings and photographs from my time in Thailand; something to treasure and look back on. So naturally I fucked things up and let the site expire and I lost everything. What an utter dick.

Fortunately, I am blessed with a highly talented son who almost forgave my stupidity and set about re-creating the site. He found the posts in archives of the web. The associated photos were sitting in Flickr. but they were about to be deleted because I refused to pay for them to host them; so he extracted the relevant photos and inserted them  into the articles.

The result is HERE.

(Click on the post headings to read the full post)

The last four years are currently missing; but there is sufficient bollocks recovered to keep you amused and appalled for hours,

Massive thanks to The Son (as he is known in the blog), you are amazing and I love you.

---