We are back in Bangkok - just briefly, mind you - where we will attend to some mind-numbingly boring 'housekeeping tasks' before heading to Singapore, Indonesia and then China.

Amazing how when you ostensibly shed your 'house' for the year, you still end up with a whole host of mundane tasks that need to be done: just like at home. Call credit card provider ... do we have dental floss? ... post bulky items home ... must buy stamps ... oh my god - my 'good' pants have fallen apart (again!) ... check internet banking .... Lordy, the drama of it all!

Really, what I want to say is that I still have a fair few pent-up India posts that need writing, and I hope to have them up in the next day or two. It was such a mind-bending set of experiences, I know that I'll struggle to capture even a scrap of it.

Already, I'm daunted by the task, as India seems a world away from where we're at right now.

With just a day or two's absence, our time there has taken on the quality of one of those larger-than-life dreams that the anti-malarial Larium is reputed to provide - super-saturated in intensity, but bleeding problematically into one's waking hours. Ultimately, you can never quite be confident which part was the dream, which the waking.