A quick visit to Lumpini Night Market. This is a quality night market, not your ma and pa holding a baby while cooking dead chook and a domestic pack of dogs looking on.
No, Lumpini is full of nice things and nice people. They sell quality, like the genuine Tag Heuer Cararra watch, I bought there tonight. Normally they sell at, maybe, $10,000, but I managed to bargain a seller down to $75. Janet swore I was being taken but men know these things and I was on to something hot.

However, after an incredible dinner for about $15, we kept shopping and the same watch appeared at other stalls. It was a period of great triumph for Janet as she discovered my watch could have been purchased for exactly half the price at most other places. She produced not so much a prolonged laugh but a victory bray and carried a smirk that suggested she had lost either her mind or her moral compass.

Her greatest moment of the day was when she waied (formal hands-together bow) to an 18-month old little Thai boy and he waied back to her, his fat little hands clasped together as he gave a solemn nod. After that, Janet was in heaven. The kids are so beautiful, so cute. Parents lit up when showing them to us and we smiled and talked happily with them, usually in exaggerated mime.

My saddest moment was watching from a taxi a beggar who had lost his arms. He held a plastic cup in his mouth, bobbing his head to passers-by to solicit coins. Nobody put any in, from where I could see over a line or two of traffic. Moments later, I saw a man lying on the edge of the footpath, one arm outstretched and also holding a cup for begging. Janet saw others at the markets on Sunday, one covered in scars from acid attacks, his face barely recognisable as a face and his body a mass of scar tissue, all pink and peeling as he sat haunched up in the full sun. I guess we had better get used to all this before we get to Cambodia and Vietnam, as it is full-on in those countries.

It's the birthday of the world's longest reigning monarch today in Bangkok. King Bhumibol was born in Massachusetts on this day in 1927, close to where his father was studying medicine at Harvard. He's the only monarch ever to be born in the USA. He is dearly beloved by the people and every day or so, when the King is mentioned, we are asked whether we love the King. There's no other answer, Yes, we say, we love the King. He is a very good man. The taxi driver or the shop assistant or the hotel clerk then settle back with a grin from ear to ear. "Yes, he lovely man."

There is genuine admiration for this wise old monarch. Without saying too much to those who upset him, he manages to settle grievances. Thakskin, for example, the Chinese-Thai political leader (now ex-) was said to have started each audience with the King kneeling on the floor with his forehead touching the carpet.

Whatever the King wears is watched slavishly by the Thais. For example, when he was discharged from hospital on 7 November after a minor stroke, he wore a pink collarless shirt with pink blazer. He revealed recently that despite being an old man, he likes to wear bright colours to remove the stuffiness of his position. On that day, he wore pink. Fully a quarter of the Thais now wear pink polo shirts, ranging from a very delicate hue, almost white, to sunburnt watermelon.

The poloneck shirt I'm wearing today has the royal crest surrounded by pink but the shirt itself is daffodil yellow, the colour for Monday, the day of the week when the King was born (you can wear purple on a Saturday to show affection for the royal dog, Tongdaeng, which was a stray, or red for the day many of the King's closest relatives were born). Yellow is the most popular colour and is especially to be worn on Mondays. The streets today are awash with yellow - it is a veritable sea of daffodils. Even Janet is wearing her yellow shirt, for to wear anything else is to suggest that you do not love the King. Nothing will be done about that, but I like to show respect to this man, as does Janet, although I heard her grumbling at breakfast under the trees this morning, something about "toadying".

Streets are blocked off and oceans of daffodils are there waving their Thai red, white and blue flags. The daily papers are collector's items and the long speech given in one of his palaces yesterday, when the King's unscripted and very detailed examination of Thailand and its position in the world was televised, was very impressive. At 80, he talked for over an hour about problems and strengths and how Thailand should approach various situations, all with a comforting sense of Buddhism by never losing perspective that we live in increasingly challenging times. He is concerned about climate change for many reasons, not the least being that Bangkok is only a metre or so above the high tide mark and has a very flat terrain.

So, what do we do today? The television is showing the routes the King will travel but the roads are blocked off. We don't want to get into the cycle of eating, sleeping and doing little else but today the public transport and streets are crowded. It's also a public holiday so much is closed.

Janet is ploughing through a book a day, the present one being written by an American woman who lived in Thailand and fell in love with the place and the people. Strangely, she writes with great humour and very palpable affection. Janet laughed aloud when she read about the pet monkey that periodically chewed through its leather strap and escaped, running around inside the house, once being found sitting on the toilet reading a comic book upside down.

Tomorrow, I pick up our visa for Vietnam and book the train journey for the last excursion we will have in Thailand in January, the colourful trip down to Hua Hin, the seaside town that was once very pretty and has the King's summer palace. It's a three-hour journey in an air-conditioned carriage. The price is about $14 return. After that, it's a day or so in Bangkok and then the flight home.

Geraldine is back in Phnom Penh and thinks we are seeing her on 15 December but we don't arrive until nightfall from Malaysia and I also don't like the idea of walking the streets to find transport or be brought home in the dark streets at night in that mysterious city. The tragedy of Pol Pot's murderous regime seems to hang over the country like a black cloud and the soldiers of Pol Pot are now middle-aged citizens, thousands with the blood of tortured countrymen still on their hands. But that's another story. Today, we are daffodils with a touch of pink.