Oh dear. The problem with living a life of unaccustomed and unbridled luxury is the coming back to earth with a bump at the end of it.

We waved a rather sad yet royal farewell to our rockstar pad on Coconut Island and set off for Koh Yao Yai, which is just south of Koh Yao Noi (yai means little, noi means big in thai) where we spent a few days last month (keeping up? There may be a quiz later…). How can anywhere compare to the opulence we so quickly grew accustomed to?

We are staying in a resort on a beach that nestles into the dense vegetation, providing a leafy canopy of welcome shade and a cosy home to about 2 million crickets, who will suddenly start chirruping en masse, reaching a deafening crickety crescendo for about 5 minutes before dying back down to nothing, presumably having been told to shut up by their cricket mums. After our palace-cation we were steeling ourselves to living like the common people in a humble little one bedroom hut, and on paper our place here looks lovely - the bedroom may be quite small but we have a huge veranda with a day bed, wooden armchair and a couple of sunbeds, but these appear to be purely for show as they have no mattress and you would only want to lie on one of them if you happened to like lying on a plank of wood and getting up to find your back had developed striped indentations. Not a particularly attractive nor comfortable look.

However, unfortunately for us (as if we weren't suffering enough) we were placed in the least attractive room. We should have been alerted to this fact when, on checking in, the first thing the receptionist told us was that if we did not like our room we could move the next day, but it slowly dawned on us why she had been so quick to offer that option.It took us a while before we realised it, but there was a strong smell of damp in the room. It took us slightly longer to work out that the so-called air conditioning unit was only masquerading as such. All it actually achieved, for all its huffing and blowing, was to move a few warm air particles from one side of the room to the other. Hardly worth the bother.

So after a sweaty and smelly night we moved accommodation the next day, but of course nothing really compares to the rockstar mansion. Sigh. I cannot wander disconsolately from room to room or gaze out at our infinity pool to relieve my depression. I can merely take two steps, put the kettle on and flounce back onto the (only) chair. Yeah, I know, at least we've got a kettle eh?

The beach here is a bit disappointing too; the tide goes so far out it could more accurately be described as mud-flats for a few hours every day. Although it's long and sweeping we can't walk or run along it for more than a few hundred metres as it's bisected by a river that runs straight down into the sea. So our daily exercise regime is reduced to walking to breakfast, or flouncing on the veranda.

Luckily though the pool is magnificent; huge and curvy with spectacular views, it's the best pool of the holiday so far. I've booked us in here for 12 days and of course we don't really appreciate it after the last place. Bri has come over all Fletcher Christian by the second day, harking back to the golden days of backpacking, turning up on spec and haggling for a good rate in some beach shack.Which is all well and good when you're 18 and have a tiny backpack containing only a spare pair of shorts and a battered copy of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, but it's not so practical when you're wheeling around a small trunk containing 15 electrical appliances, their attendant chargers and half of Boots. For some reason I have brought with us 3 sets of tweezers. I shall be well plucked by the time we return.

Bri continues with his daily grind of editing, he is the only person I know who comes on holiday and actually wants to work. I am not totally immune however to a spot of labour (although I do have a motive); there is a Library at this resort - well, OK, a few shelves of books - and I couldn't resist the urge to tidy up the books into categories, i.e. put all the 'foreign' books onto a couple of shelves together and put all the children's books in neat piles on the bottom shelf (yeah, out of my way uninteresting reading matter). As I'm always on the lookout for new books to read my cunning plan was to construct a Book Snare so I could snare unwary books. This consisted of an empty shelf that, so my theory went, would tempt book leavers to put their books on, thus ensuring I could see, at a glance, any new donations. Then all I have to do is wander past the library once or twice a day and, voila, I get first dibs on new reading material.I have to say it worked a treat.

Weirdly the library also contains a shelf of vhs tapes.I have no idea what they are doing there, who are these people who bring video tapes on holiday, and why?

Every resort we have stayed in so far has been chock-full of Scandinavians escaping their long cold winter. Sweden must be empty; Denmark deserted.Of course they're all happy and hurdy-gurdying around flicking their blond hair over their bronzed shoulders. They don't know what it's like to suffer the deprivation and degradation of moving from 6 star to 4 star accommodation. Mind you, they don't have a smart little book trap either, so I suppose we're even.