Prof Barry Marshall had a simple problem when he travelled to Stockholm in 2005 to pick up his Nobel Prize for Medicine.

He'd managed to discover the bacterium responsible for peptic ulcers, but being in the limelight was a different kettle of bugs, and he was working on an ulcer of his own.

He was nervous that he might goof up while accepting the prestigious prize there onstage before a sizeable television audience. He had visions of himself blundering and then having to watch his blooper video over and over again on TV and the Web.

"If you do something wrong, everybody will see you, and it will be on the Internet," Marshall recalls himself thinking.

So he tried to stay calm. "I told myself, 'If someone has to make a mistake at an event attended by the Swedish royal family and the government, it must not be me!'"

Time for the big show, and he climbs into his tux. So far, so good, and then, he's putting on his spiffy shoes - and they're the wrong size! He tries walking in them, but there's no way it's going to work onstage, on camera, in front of crowned heads. Fortunately, the shoe shop was able to get a new pair to him in 10 minutes flat. In Sweden, the cobblers are fast.

Bangkok cobblers can be pretty swift, too, but the traffic here isn't, so if it had happened here, Marshall might well have become the first person to receive the Nobel Prize in his stocking feet.

Marshall's tale is a reassuring one for people who like to anticipate the worst. The bad news is that, these days if something does go wrong in public, you just know you're going to be a star on YouTube.

No wonder so many

Brits come here

Noppadon Pattama, who gives legal advice to Thaksin Shinawatra, could sympathise when he saw those pictures of the great man roaming the streets of London all on his lonesome.

He spent six years in England on a government scholarship, and he remembers how lonely it could get. He feared the football hooligans, and the other Brits weren't exactly going out of their way to be nice, so he spent his time among fellow Thais and some other Asian students.

"Can you believe that in all those years I never even went once to Wembley Stadium?" Noppadon says. "I ended up talking to lots of Chinese to make myself feel a bit at ease, and they were friendlier."

Any chance of romance was fleeting. "It was dull and quite depressing," he laments.

So he found himself a Thai girlfriend, another scholarship student.

"She wasn't gorgeous but, you know, I did finally fall in love thanks to the loneliness."

He married her in London and they had a daughter, but they divorced more than 20 years ago. Noppadon's been single ever since, but now he enjoys it. Maybe Thailand's a paradise for a bachelor.

At any rate, we have a clue why Thaksin's taken to globetrotting. Staying alone in London all the time was just too unbearable.

The ex-premier has buckets of money to spend in Britain, of course, but with his wife Khunying Pojaman unable to be with him all the time, he may have to find a special someone there too. If anyone's interested, he's usually hanging around the fruit stands and newspaper kiosks in Chelsea.

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