The Mushrooms Diana Was Growing,

are getting bigger by the day,

 so it was time to crop them,

 but that will be after our trip out,

 my motorbike needed a oil leak to be repaired and the oil topped up, so we left it with the repair shop near to TukCom and walked to the rear of the building going past a few restaurants,

 like Le Bordeaux,

 and on the opposite corner,

 the grottino gourmet bakery, at least that is what I think it is called,

 around the corner from that there is a hotel,

 with statues outside of each room, 

 facing the road,

some futuristic,

 and stylised like these,

 whilst others are more conventional,

 above the entrance,

 this one reminded me of the Rolls Royce Spirit of Ecstasy, on the radiators of their cars, 

 I have to confess, I do not know what this one is all about,

 we made our way inside, Diana had to register her mobile telephone, I just had a look around,

 we stopped for a coffee on I think the third floor,

 as we drank we noticed in the distance we were on television,

closed circuit television, CCTV, the camera was pointed at the tables in front of the coffee stall, it was a remarkably good clear picture, I found out the camera was as the salesman put it 4HD, I also found out if we wanted to upgrade our black and white CCTV system to this colour one about 30,000 baht would see the job installed with 4 of these cameras and recording box and our old system removed,

 back home it was fry-up time, 

mushrooms picked, 

 and served on toast,

a really tasty afternoon snack, after our evening meal we settled down to watch some cable television, Ade in Britain, what a great series that is, Twister, Celebratory Chase, though to be truthful we both did not recognise any of the 'celebraties' all I can say was there was a footballer, boxer, radio commentator and a person from a soap, Eastenders I think it was called, what ever that is, but good fun as they were all knocked out of the competition, I guess brain does not go with fame, we rounded off the evening with Gangs of New York, we watched it way back in February 2010, this is what I wrote about it then,

'surprisingly enough based almost more on fact than fiction, there really was a place called the Five Points, the names of the legendary Five Points gangs—the Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Short Tails, the Slaughter Houses, the Swamp Angels were all gangs that were there at the time that the film depicts,

Charles Dickens called the Five Points "a world of vice and misery." in 1842, the neighbourhood was on the edge of an explosion, spurred on by the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, waves of threadbare immigrants arrived in New York City with the wherewithal for only the most miserable lodgings—the drooping tenements of Five Points, for the next two decades, the Irish ruled Five Points, overcrowding a roughly five-square-block area centred on the intersection of Cross Street (today's Park Street), Anthony Street (today's Worth), and Orange Street (today's Baxter), moving on in to the 1890s crusading photographer Jacob Riis's unprecedented images of crowded tenements, child labourers, and places like Bandit's Roost (below), incited a public outcry that led the city to raze Mulberry Bend, Five Points' most notorious block,

it's heart cut out, the slum was overtaken by neighbourhoods to the north—Little Italy and Chinatown, courthouses and factories replaced its southern tenements, today the Five Points intersection is buried largely beneath Chinatown's Columbus Park and a federal courthouse', I think it is great when a film that I thought was pure fiction has a base in fact, a violent but watchable movie set in troubled times long gone, we both thoroughly enjoyed watching it again and then we were off to bed.